David and I both went to this Ivy League thing at Breakside Brewery, which, amazingly, I'd never been to. It's in the Pearl, NW Portland. Or is this newly developed area rebranding as Slabtown (a moniker for Portland)?
When we first got to the neighborhood, we verified where the Ivy League thing was happening, making name tags, but then left, as the first order of business was to find a nearby pizza place participating in Mercury's Pizza Week, meaning a $4 special slice is offered, along with a $25 whole pie.
However, Ruse Crust Collective Slabtown had a sign on the door saying they weren't doing individual Pizza Week slices, only whole pizzas -- we considered that breaking the rules and thought writing to Mercury might be in order. We went to New Seasons instead, where I ended up spending more on a single salad than I would have on a whole pie.
We returned to Breakside Brewery and joined the 2nd floor throng (I exaggerate -- a small gathering). We both got non-alcoholic beers for $6 each. The topic of conversation, in the clutch we joined (hi Peter), was somewhat predictably the USG's wish to police Harvard's course materials, as a condition for receiving federal funding.
I'm thinking weaning universities off any federal funding might be a good idea given the bankruptcy of the latter (most would say "impending" -- always putting off the day of reckoning). The university, as an institution, predates the modern nation-state, and it may have outlasted said old world order. The "global university" is taking over, as the more dominant Spaceship Earth metaphor (indivisible, still striving for liberty and justice for all).
I find myself imagining an alternative reality in which the USG is explicitly withholding funds from universities that fail to effectively share contemporary American history, by withholding all the memes my Quakerly subculture is trafficking in, namely the Bucky stuff. How are those graduating from these institutions supposed to navigate successfully, if deprived of any reliable compass?
Bucky's Medal of Freedom was famously awarded for Synergetics, by then president Reagan, and yet Harvard, home of American Transcendentalism in Margaret Fuller's day (Bucky's great aunt) is paradigmatic in how little it shares of our paradigm. No wonder the USG is pulling the plug, right? Funny to think in that way, if only for my private entertainment. And besides, Princeton has been doing some stuff around the Geoscope recently. Not every Ivy League school is as slow as Harvard.
