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A Sense of Education

And then there are others who had a sense of education, before access to universities was handed out like confetti, sugar-coated candies not torn-up paper, at an Italian wedding.

There is wonderful Jacques Barzun, a true scholar and a true teacher, author of, among many works, still more important, The House of Intellect. There are many retired and semi-retired professors, at last able to set down their qualms about, for example, the New Departments of English, and their Faculty, and Their Courses. There was Richard Hoggart. There was “The Human World” which came out of Swansea, genius domus of that short-lived, worthy enterprise being the unstoppable Ian Robinson, who has just published on important book on modern, belief-killing translations of “The Bible” (for the King James version could command belief even from non-believers, and it provided the indispensable literary, or cultural continuity that no later translation offers).

— Hugh Fitzgerald, Vocational Training, and Education, The Iconoclast, 19 August 2007

Barzun, France

The racist critic might like to find an explanation of this skeptical stand [against race-thinking] in a book by Francisque Michel, the friend of Mérimée, on The Accursed Races in France and Spain (Paris, 1847). The work describes the inferior position of certain presumed Goths, light-haired and blue-eyed, in Southwestern France, the home of my remote ancestors. On p. 107 of Vol. I, it is said that in the town of Barzun, there were only two inhabitants belonging to this cast. . . . They have left only one daughter who, though afflicted with goiter, enjoys as great respect and consideration as the other inhabitants. Although I have never set foot in the town of Barzun and my traceable forebears left it well over a hundred years ago, it must be clear to any racist that the spirit of tolerance for other races, so unusual in that part of France, has been transmitted in the blood.
— Jacques Barzun, Race: A Study in Superstition (1937), revised ed, 1965, 199n.

 

Dr. Ira Williams

A Tribute to Jacques Barzun

“The Professions Under Siege,” (Harper’s, October 1978) was Jacques Barzun’s response to the initial wave of the medical malpractice tsunami which has continued to plague our nation for four decades. . . .

Compare: Regaining Trust, by Don Kirk
 

Andy Rooney as Jacques Barzun

Back cover of Andrew A. Rooney, Years of Minutes, 2003

See also Andy Rooney on Jacques Barzun.
 

Gossip

See The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman, New York, 2007, entry for August 11, 1980.
 

The Purpose of a School

Tracy Lee Simmons quotes Barzun at 31m28s of his lecture on Climbing Parnassus. I could not hear Simmon’s next sentence, which has a word that sounds like surgery.