Late May is that time of year when graduation fever is in the air. Caps, gowns, pomp, circuitous routes to a bachelor’s degree are all on the minds of parents and students alike. Having been a student until well into my mid-thirties, I can understand at least one side of this. More recently, I have become acquainted with the matter of financing education. Teaching at a community college, I have, on more than one occasion, had a student explain that their recent spate of absences was due to being homeless. And each semester I encourage students who are looking for a cause to take up the issue of textbook prices, because, make no mistake, it’s a racket. On the national level, the subject of college expensiveness has become a talking point for some. And on the very local level, for the fourth year, a Bon Mot Morris Knudsen Memorial Scholarship has been awarded.
Tulare Union High School sets aside an evening for the purpose of announcing and presenting the scholarships that have been awarded to students. Some students hear their name called many times, others a few, and some just once. Having your name called just once can be a good thing, as it means you’ve secured a full-ride scholarship with six digits. There were three of those this year, the largest being from the United States Air Force Academy. The Academy values its four-year education at over $500,000.
There is a definite bias as to where the money comes from and goes. Tulare remains a place where agriculture is the main economic driver, and the sources of scholarships reflected this. Companies with an interest in agriculture provide scholarships to students who have expressed a desire to study agriculture. This is a proper relationship, but I would hope that as career prospects evolve it will change. The list of scholarships for the Tulare Union event numbers in the dozens, but of that number only a handful are specifically geared toward students interested in pursuing an education in the arts. This income inequality may be contributing to the larger issue of income inequality. A quick glance at the box office for the preceding week showed an opening weekend haul of $125 million for Deadpool 2. One-hundred twenty-five million dollars for a sequel. Could not that be divided into two chunks of $62.5 million, with one of the movies not being based on a comic book and not a sequel? Might the presence of a movie that targets a completely different audience produce even more cinema attendance? Can you really have too much art? Answers to these and other questions will have to come from someone else, because I'm neither an economist nor a sociologist. And they won’t come from the winners of this year’s Bon Mot Scholarship, because neither of them is planning to study sociology or economics. Adolfo Gomez Mora and Sophie Miller will be putting their $500 scholarships to use in the study of language and theatre. I suppose they could still make speeches about the benefits of agriculture.
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| This year’s Bon Mot recipients, Sophie Miller & Adolfo Gomez Mora, avec moi |
On a lighter note, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Ralph Earle's May 21 contribution to Moristotle & Co., “Sweater Weather,” but my first viewing of the email notification, with its subject line “Sweater Weather,” put my mind in a completely different frame. It caused me to think, for the first time, about weather well suited to accomplished “sweaters.” I don't know how one qualifies as a champion sweater. I gave a particularly good account of myself in the June heat and humidity of Thailand one year, but I don’t consider that to be sweater weather because given the extreme humidity, sweating doesn’t seem to provide much cooling. I would nominate the crackling dry heat of Palm Springs as prime sweater weather.
Slipper weather arrives with the holidays. For those of you who don’t know what a “slipper” is, allow me to explain. A quarter of a century ago, while working as a mechanic, I had a co-worker named “Jeff” who was known to his friends as “Slipper.” Jeff had a habit of slipping off of his twelve-step program. The holidays, with their intoxicating combination of stress, siblings, and spiked eggnog, are the ideal time for many slippers to take a step or twelve back from their sobriety.
| Copyright © 2018 by James Knudsen |
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