Composing a Further Life

sons of engineers and doctors. A lot of them are preppies. Remember the effort way back in the sixties? But again, it’s not always a question of money. There may be social factors which stop a blue-collar kid from Detroit going to our elite eastern schools.”
    Ted has been an education watcher but not an educator. He is now a life trustee of Amherst College. “I can go to any board meeting, but I prefer not to,” he told me. “They don’t want old fogies up there, sounding off and asking questions. I always want to talk about the GI Bill and how that transformed Amherst. The GI funding of higher education created a nation where fifteen percent of the kids went to college instead of six percent before the war. What a legacy for the nation! When I went to Amherst, there were freshman kids with four or five sport coats, expensive furniture, everything but slaves. The GI Bill brought in all these wonderful blue-collar kids from working-class families in Lawrence, Lowell, Springfield. They had never considered Amherst before. Thanks to the GI Bill, Amherst was free. These kids, they came to Amherst and radically altered the demographics of the campus.
    “Amherst today has the highest percentage of blacks of the most prestigious colleges and universities in the country. And Amherst is working hard on the low-income thing. President Tony Marx has adopted a no-loan policy, with no tuition for kids under fifty thousand dollars parental income. But think of a bright kid from Detroit, where his father works on an assembly line. You post this huge tuition or sticker fee and you send an elitist message to these kids. They don’t want to go to school with kids whose fathers are earning half a million or a million a year.
    “My kids know how I value opportunity, equality, equal treatment, decency, and civility, but sometimes I think the only thing I passed on is that they’ll say, ‘Daddy saved our ass during the war, when he was in the Pacific fighting the battle there for two years.’ I can take credit for that legacy. It’s an important thing I did. Your life was at risk for two years in a war that’s probably the only war we’ve fought recently that one could justify. So I passed that on to them. They’re still alive, not living under a Nazi or Communist regime, so that was a legacy. But also, I passed on the values that they know I believe in because of the work I do with the journal and with blacks. But what I give isn’t specific, I’m not transmitting a skill like an electrician might transmit a trade to a child. That’s not going to happen, nor would I expect it.
    “Businesspeople do often want to transmit a position. They want to bring up their kid to eventually head the corporation. You know, IBM, McGraw-Hill; there are thousands of corporations where the objective of the CEO is to transmit the job to his son, and maybe today to his daughter.”
    Ted paused. “There’s something more called for. At some point you introspectively look at your life and say, What has it meant? And think about the thoughts, not just think but think about your thoughts.”
    That phrase, “think about your thoughts,” struck me—the need for self-observation and the need not only to look at particular thoughts or actions but to place them in a larger ethical frame of reference. In anthropology we emphasize participant observation, but in recent years we have been increasingly careful to include, as part of that, reflexivity or self-observation. “Do you think if you knew why you were doing what you do, it would be easier to pass on? If you had a rationale for it?” I asked.
    “No, no, no. I don’t think so. No, I think you pass on a legacy by example.”
    “One of the things that I’ve been interested in,” I said, “is that I know a lot of people who were raised in religious households and don’t go to church anymore, but some of the things that they grew up with, including the notion that you help the poor and the unfortunate or you work for change, get carried on, maybe by starting nonprofits that are doing real service. Religious values get passed on without the beliefs, and it’s not clear to me how many generations you can do that for.”
    “Well, a lot of Christian values are pretty bad, too,” Ted said. Actually, the issue is not so much whether the values passed on are religious or not but the level of abstraction, because the specifics change. It is one thing for members of a family to see Dad