Robert Adam | The Valley Village View

My only picture of Old College, as it was in 1985. I used to slap my palm to my forehead and curse the dunderheid who turned it into a parking lot. Oh well, there’s lots of pretty glamour shots of Old College online; now here’s one that’s a record of the automotive age, when shortening the walk to the parking spaces by a few yards was worth wrecking the ambiance and artistry and collegiality of open space. Thank G-d they fixed that.

JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT.

https://news.yahoo.com/u-colleges-scramble-trump-order-234319314.html

What is college for?

Re-Viewing my year as a foreign student in Edinburgh began as an escape from current events, improving the time while kept “Safer At Home.” But you can’t escape current events. I recently caught up on the phone with one of my best friends (from college). He is a medical doctor in charge of Student Health at one of our hilly campuses. He told me is up to his eyeballs at work, trying to sort out the medical and administrative details necessary to get students back on campus this fall. He is brilliant, and working very hard, and the Regents and the administration will be wise to take his cautions and concerns into account as they make their decision on whether or how to re-open. But it is not cynical to admit that administrations have other concerns besides student safety, or that universities, public or private, are corporations. They are vulnerable to politics and shifting revenue streams, and to mission creep and institutional capture. As bureaucracies, they are notorious. When colleges have done best, when they support and amplify their students and their whole society, they often will be found to have real visionaries, big-picture systemic thinkers, inspiring figures, as leaders. Colleges seem to need vision more than most corporations: educators at the top, who keep in mind the greater social purpose of the institution, rather than constantly reacting to whatever the immediate financial situation is, which is anyway almost always dire.

In February 1567, Lord Darnley, the husband of Mary Queen of Scots, was murdered at the site of the old Kirk o’ Fields, just outside the walls of Edinburgh. Darnley had taken up temporary residence in the half-ruined church complex as a quarantine measure. It seems the King Consort didn’t want to bring his possible plague exposure home to Holyroodhouse, *a short walk away*, where the Queen and their infant son, the future James VI and I, remained. Nevertheless, Mary visited him the evening of the 9th, proceeded alone to the big “event” of the day, a Court Masque at the Canongate theatre. About 2 am on the morning of the tenth, the Queen and Palace and town were roused by a mighty KABOOM!! The King’s lodging at the Kirk o’ Fields had been blown to smithereens, not “ane stane upon another.” Darnley and his valet had apparently barely escaped seconds before the charge went off, but their bodies were found mutilated in the churchyard orchard. Whoever planted the bomb and stabbed the King, wanted Darnley dead at any cost. A few years later, in 1583, the rubble of the Kirk O’ Fields was raked over, and the stanes frugally reused to reclaim what was left for the first buildings of the new University.

What is college for?

Many of the latest plans across the country call for the students to head back to dorms, paying full fees, but never really leaving their rooms. No roommates; and they’d be getting all their instruction on screens, in Zoom lectures, etc. Most colleges around the country seem to be dangling this shoe-leather as bait, hoping students and their bewildered parents will take it for shad roe. Especially, they hope it’s snapped at by the thousands of foreign students, who have traditionally paid full freight and then some, for the privilege of an American education.

What is college for?

Anyway, now Pres. Trump plans to kick all the foreign students out if they’re not getting face-to-face instruction. (Why? Salt, wounds…mischievous malicious misgovernance…) Losing the foreign students could cause budgetary collapse at many public colleges. And anyway, why would they come here? America is the world’s hot-bed of coronavirus, and will be for a long, long time. Chinese have been coming to California to get an education since before the days of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, but the recent deranged China-bashing and restrictions have already slowed applications to a trickle. Foreign students have apparently already made up their minds, to make them up elsewhere.

“The University of Edinburgh was founded in the year 1582. The ground on which its buildings have been erected belonged to the Collegiate Church of St. Mary in the Fields. It contained the houses of the Provost and the Canons of that church, and a house pertaining to the family of the Marquis of Hamilton, which, falling the crown, was granted to the University. The Royal sanction was given in a charter of King James IV… These buildings, poor in themselves, seem not to a have been carried on according to any regular plan, such as takes place in other Academical Structures which have been erected on more opulent foundations; and hence the whole fabric has a mean, irregular, and contemptible appearance… the buildings are so far inferior to all other structures of the same kind, that they can not fail to prejudice every stranger against Scotland, its education, and its manners. A stranger, when conducted to view the University of Edinburgh, might naturally imagine them to be alms-houses for the reception of the poor; but would never imagine that he was entering within the precincts of a noted and flourishing seat of learning….The great improvements which have lately been made, large buildings arising suddenly on all hands, a magnificent bridge, and new streets and squares begun, carry all the marks of a country growing in arts and industry. The University-fabric alone remains in such a neglected state, as to be generally accounted a dishonor to the city of Edinburgh, and to this part of the kingdom.”
— Memorial Relating to the University of Edinburgh, 1768, by William Robertson, the University’s most famous principal. Robertson’s reasoned appeal for the funds to build a new, modern college campus would not bear fruit for another twenty years. Art is long, and time is short.

“The period at which this University was founded, was indeed peculiarly unfavorable…The Kingdom was just beginning to recover tranquility after great convulsions both in its religious and its civil constitution. The Church was newly stripped of that wealth which had contributed so much in former times to Academical Structures; while industry, trade and manufacturing had scarcely begun… As more enlarged views of Science and Literature have gradually opened, the number of Professors has been greatly increased; new branches of Science have been cultivated. The University has arisen to a high degree of reputation. The complete course of Medical education it affords, more complete than is to be found in any University in Europe, aided too by a great Infirmary just adjacent to it, is one cause of the concourse of so many students from all the parts of Great Britain, from Ireland, America, the West Indies, and even from distant parts of Europe, to this seat of learning.”
— William Robertson

William Robertson, minister of the kirk and historian of Scotland, became a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment as Edinburgh’s visionary Principal from 1762 to 1793.

What is college for?

My nephews, both in college, seem to be going with the flow, doing their homework, tele-commuting/Zooming all their classes, and dealing, like any of us, with the galling social restrictions as well as they can. And It is moot to question “what kind” of education students can get under these circumstances — most will obviously make the best they can, out of whatever chance they’re given. But frankly, if remote learning works at all, it seems silly, a tragic game of Russian roulette, to push students on-campus this year. It only will make them sitting ducks for outbreaks and vectors for infection when they return home.

Columns cut from single beds of Craigleith Sandstone.

Lordy, with no campus life, no Nietzsche over pitchers of Rolling Rock, no Mask and Wig, no theatre, no mid-night Bunuel festival at the Film Society, no discovery of that cheap off-campus Ethiopian restaurant, no packed Academy of Music as the sweat flies off Riccardo Muti’s hair — and none of the youthful erotic interchange of ideas and cultures and customs and intellectual systems. In Scotland I got my smug Yankee ass kicked more than once in class by fellow students who didn’t have blind spots about American history. Once I remember getting far out of my depth on the Spanish American War, with all eyes on me as the American to answer the questions of another student. Of course everything I said was stupid and canned, and I riled the whole class into laughing at my simplicity. All I could do was dig myself deeper, wagging my jaw like Bill Buckley, and sputtering slogans like “Remember the Maine.” The tutor caught my pleading eye, and saved me from drowning, with the devastatingly barbed reassurance that “All right, we mustn’t expect Andrew to bring the defense for the entire Spanish-American War.” Thanks, Perfessor.

I made a quantum leap in understanding that day. The Brits had no lump in their throats about Teddy Roosevelt, and they refused to let me skate by on a patriotic whitewash that would easily go down in the States. The academic ribbing I got was not mean, it was teaching. And I don’t think anything like it would ever happen on Zoom.

What is college for?

HAPPY PRIDE DEPT.

The View needed cheering up. Why pink? Pink = sublime. Plus it’s got Bazzazz!

Your Gay Pride Pink-apalooza issue features an erudite essay about interior decorating from our gayest reporter. Then, ‘Pop That Pessimism!’ as our special update of “The Makeover of Lopez Canyon” pulls you into a meadow full of pretty pink flowers. But first, Kay Thompson:

THE ADAM FAMILY IN THE PINK

I noticed in the prints of my Scotland pictures that everything in the Lowlands has a nimbus of pink about it. I thought it was cheap film that had degraded, so I had them digitized. The images returned and look beautiful, much clearer than the prints; but, pink. I think that’s just how Scotland looks. It’s WAY far North, and gets the sun’s long rays, for its many short days. Add a humid, temperate, mist-bound climate, and it’s a recipe for plenty of pink sky in the mornings and afternoons. [Scotland also has plenty of industry producing what we would call smog; and it has, since at least 1750.] Whatever the cause, I realized it’s part of what gives the place a rosy glow in my mind’s eye.

Pink is one of the signature colors of Venice, another place where the sun often rouges the misty air’s cheek. In the Neo-classical heyday of the 18th century, Venetians made an art out of bringing their beautiful pink light indoors:

It was during the Grand Tour, when Scotland’s artists and aristocrats toured Italy and brought back treasures, that the pink light and pink rooms inspired tastemakers. They tried to achieve a similar sublime effect in the satin skyglow of hame, and succeeded nobly. The great Adam family of architects and designers, whose influence is unrivaled in Britain and America, led the way in making pink — the pale pink of misty clouds on a gentle afternoon — the most elegant Neo-classical color of them all. Note how swank the green accents are.

The Edinburgh version of Neo-classical style was wildly popular. Pink works better in Scotland, in fact, than Venice: not only is the sky pink, but the native plants and heather are pink, too (or were); and the very rocks in the rills are pink! And, there are green forests and grasses to complement it perfectly (which there isn’t much of in Venice.) Thus, the gentle, soothing pink and green of the outdoors, was brought indoors, in the heyday of Scottish design.

It’s easy to see where America’s golfing set acquired the taste for pink and green:
from Scotland, of course! It looks like hame.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF LOPEZ CANYON, Pt. 6

This June brought my first sighting up there of Island pink yarrow. Tiny, exquisite against the June gloom skies, they are so perfectly pink. I hope to see many more next year.

Achillea millefolia, Island pink yarrow. But look over there…!

https://www.ediblewildfood.com/fireweed.aspx

What becomes a June meadow more than a pink petticoat of fireweed?

They looked like lupines from the road; and I clocked them in Lopez Canyon last year, June 2019, where they — blush — stood out. This year I learned they aren’t lupines, they’re fireweed! A welcome and needful pioneer species for meadows and watercourses recovering from fire. They grow worldwide, but these are our locally adapted variety. A year ago there were only two or three: