Composing a Further Life

tremendous amount of work. And looking back on my life, except for my years in the Navy, this is probably the most important thing that I’ve done. I’m now eighty-three. I do a tremendous amount of work on it every day. One choice would be to take it to Harvard. I guess I could place it at Princeton. But the journal is highly political, comparing and publicizing the successes and failures of major colleges and universities. This will never happen if the dead hand of academia sets the policy.”
    “One more boring journal of academic papers,” I said.
    “Let’s say that the important news is that Yale has a very poor record on minority issues, which is in fact true. This story would never get reported if the journal were published by a university. And we’re getting into a big situation with the superiority of black women. That is such an incredibly important subject. There is a collapse of black men. Have you seen the figures on college graduations of black men? The women are racing ahead, doing better than white women. Can academic people be counted on to publish something that is so politically incorrect? Harvard Law School has far more black women being admitted than black men. How things have changed. Nobody likes to tell the truth about the very serious decline of black men in higher education. If this trend continues, there will be no more black men in college. It used to be that very few black women held Ph.D.s or did graduate work. It was black men. Now it’s completely reversed. It’s all black women. You know the statistics that we report; there’re now a million black people in four-year colleges. Incredible, what has happened over the last fifteen years. It’s really shot up. But it’s all women. And that’s the story that has to be told. If the journal was in academic hands, it would not happen. I don’t know what to do about it.”
    Ted went on to speculate on the origin of his interest in racial justice. “My grandmother always said the reason for my interest was I was born on Lincoln’s birthday. You’d have to go to a shrink for maybe five years to find out what really was going on. The standard stamp in those days was a three-cent Lincoln stamp, and my grandmother used to send me thousands of canceled Lincoln stamps. She always said—I think Mother said, too—that maybe there was a reason why I was born on Lincoln’s birthday. Maybe I thought of myself as an emancipator. You know, a twentieth-century emancipator. Who knows what lies within if you delve down deep enough?”
    I laughed. “When I was a child, the Roosevelt dime came out. I had ten cents a week allowance and this card that had a place for putting Roosevelt dimes in that you could save up until you had five dollars’ worth and could open a first savings account. In 2004, Gerry Ferraro and I both gave talks at Hyde Park, which is set up now as a Roosevelt memorial, as part of our Granny Voter project, and I realized that my whole feeling about Roosevelt had been carried by dealing with these dimes and by the tone in people’s voices when they talked about FDR. Roosevelt’s death is one of my earliest memories. Lincoln was obviously further in the past but is a very important symbolic figure.”
    “People still send me information about Lincoln. What a man he was!” Ted exclaimed. “But a very racist man. As human beings, he believed blacks deserved equal treatment, but nevertheless he had a distinct feeling they belonged to a subhuman species with inferior intelligence. He was going to ship ’em off to Africa. It’s amazing. His position on slaves seems to be in large part driven by a desire to hold the Union together. Who knows, really, what is the real story? But there are plenty of examples showing that he held racist views. Everybody did. At that time almost all whites were racist.”
    Ted went on to talk about other kinds of succession. “I think most chiefs, whether it be college presidents or corporate CEOs, want to have qualified successors. But you often get a cynical thing in the corporate world, where people want a weak person to succeed them, to emphasize their own strengths. To have a strong person follow them demeans their accomplishments.”
    “And the new person has to prove that he’s better than his predecessor, so he starts tinkering instead of waiting and learning,” I said. Increasingly the corporate world is concerned about the loss of knowledge as a result of retirements, creating a