00;00;01;28 - 00;00;25;16
Michael Hagan
Hello and welcome to the Providence College Podcast. I'm Michael Hagan from the class of 2015, and I'm joined by producers Chris Judge from the class of 2005 and Ryan Reynolds from the class of 2023. Our guest today is Andrew Delbanco, keynote speaker at Academic Convocation on August 30th. Delbanco is a scholar of American studies and literature and one of the United States leading social critics.

00;00;25;18 - 00;00;58;14
Michael Hagan
He is the inaugural Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University and president of the Teagle Foundation, an organization supporting liberal arts education, which it describes as fundamental to meaningful work, effective citizenship, and a fulfilling life. Delbanco. His most recent book, The War Before the War Fugitive Slaves and the struggle for America's Soul, received numerous awards and distinctions, and Delbanco recently delivered the National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture, the highest honor the federal government bestows for achievement in the humanities.

00;00;58;16 - 00;01;15;16
Michael Hagan
He has written extensively about Herman Melville of Moby Dick fame, Puritan New England abolitionists and abolitionism, higher education, and other topics in American studies. There is so much more we could say about our remarkable guest, but let's go ahead and hear from him. Thank you, Doctor Delbanco, for joining us.

00;01;15;17 - 00;01;17;29
Andrew Delbanco
Thank you, Michael. Pleasure to be here.

00;01;18;02 - 00;01;34;29
Michael Hagan
So I just tried by way of introduction to do a little bit of justice to your life and career, but you're a figure that's kind of hard to sum up. You write for academic and popular audiences about a wide range of matters. You're both a critic and a historian. You're a scholar of the past and a thought leader in the present.

00;01;35;02 - 00;01;41;05
Michael Hagan
How would you describe your scholarship and work? And you know, what is the best way to introduce Andrew Delbanco?

00;01;41;08 - 00;02;11;15
Andrew Delbanco
Well, you're very kind, Michael. I guess one thing I would say is I, I try not to write about or for that matter, talk about a things that I don't know anything about. So, although it is true that I, I write fairly often and for a, a broader general audience than just an academic audience. I try to read a lot and think a lot before I start making commitments to what my might be, my opinions.

00;02;11;18 - 00;02;46;17
Andrew Delbanco
I guess one thing I would say, since you're asking about my work and how I think about it, I'm very fortunate in that I feel that what I do as a teacher, particularly of undergraduate students, that is college students, is not very different from what I do as a writer. you know, when you're speaking to graduate students, which I also do, you're speaking to people who have a professional commitment to the subject who, sort of have to be there, whether they like it or not.

00;02;46;19 - 00;03;10;21
Andrew Delbanco
and that's one kind of audience. But if you're speaking to college students, as I will be doing, a little while from now this afternoon, you're speaking to young people who have all kinds of different interests and career aspirations. Most of them don't have any interest in becoming professors or specialists in in your in your discipline. And they generally have the freedom to go take somebody else's class.

00;03;10;27 - 00;03;33;23
Andrew Delbanco
If they prefer. So they represent a challenging and exciting audience, which is to say you you have to find ways to make them interested in what interests you. And I don't always succeed in that, but that is my my goal when I teach, and it's very much the same goal I think I have in mind when I write.

00;03;33;23 - 00;03;49;00
Andrew Delbanco
That is to try to explain often complex topics to busy people who might be happy to read something else by somebody else. Oh, I don't know if that makes any sense, but it's a bit of a stab at it.

00;03;49;02 - 00;04;10;06
Michael Hagan
Great. Thank you. I was having a conversation with a professor the other day who said, about liberal arts education generally, that there are really only two confusing terms in the liberal arts, and they are liberal and arts. what do you think this means? And, why is it that even people who are in the thick of the liberal arts sometimes struggle to define them?

00;04;10;10 - 00;04;35;11
Andrew Delbanco
Well, you know, I'm not a classicist. let me put that on the table right away. But, my rudimentary understanding is that the word liberal in the term liberal arts derives from the Latin liberal for for free freedom. And the basic concept, as I understand it, is that a liberal education or liberal arts education, as it is sometimes called, is the education required for freedom.

00;04;35;13 - 00;05;11;21
Andrew Delbanco
It's the kind of education that helps an individual become a free person. Now, the roots of that go back to the ancient world where, of course, only a relatively small minority of the citizens of, an ancient Greece or ancient Rome were in fact free citizens. So the education they got was clearly distinguished from the practical training or what we would call today vocational skills training that was required by everybody else, not usually delivered through a formal institution.

00;05;11;23 - 00;05;43;17
Andrew Delbanco
but I think this concept of a liberal education is something that helps us be free, that is required. To be genuinely free is as urgently true today as it was in the ancient world. Now what does that mean? It means an education that enables you to think independently, to come to your own critical conclusion about propositions that are being advanced toward you, where some authority is telling you this is how it is, this is who you are.

00;05;43;18 - 00;06;13;09
Andrew Delbanco
This is what it means to be you and a liberal. Education empowers a person to question those propositions, to push back, to think about what kind of a person you want to be, on the premise that you actually have the freedom to shape your own life, which is a basic tenet of our United States of America, that this is a place where people can choose to be, whatever their talents and commitment will allow.

00;06;13;09 - 00;06;33;08
Michael Hagan
Them to be. The Teagle Foundation, of which you are president, believes that, the opportunity and oh, and I quote, the opportunity to experience liberal education is part of the promise of our democracy, and it must not be restricted to the privileged few. How does the Foundation work to broaden and deepen access to liberal education?

00;06;33;11 - 00;06;59;01
Andrew Delbanco
This is a complex and maybe even a deep historical question. That is the first part of what you said. I try to be brief about it, but I do think it is true that you can look at the history of education in the United States, and you can see an impulse to widen, as far as possible, the opportunity for a liberating education for all citizens.

00;06;59;04 - 00;07;22;09
Andrew Delbanco
We haven't delivered on that promise. we're still working on it, that's for sure. But the promise has been there. I would argue, even from the beginning, with the early New England, institutions, that are not so far away from where we are here at Providence College. the land grant universities, for instance, that came into existence in the post-Civil War period.

00;07;22;12 - 00;07;47;15
Andrew Delbanco
Yes. They were initially in some ways designed to provide practical and technical education in agriculture and and mechanics and, and and the like. But they always their leadership always insisted on the importance of, broader humane or liberal education for the students attending those institutions, not only for the sake of the students themselves, but for the sake of the democracy.

00;07;47;18 - 00;08;15;02
Andrew Delbanco
Mr. Jefferson said, you cannot have a democracy without an educated citizenry. I think that's true. Now, he had a very narrow sense of who qualified to be a citizen, right? Black people didn't qualify. Immigrants didn't qualify. Women didn't qualify. But the principle that we have to have an educated citizenry, which we have struggled to expand to include more and more Americans, remains as true now as it was then.

00;08;15;04 - 00;08;45;23
Andrew Delbanco
Now, how does our little foundation try to advance this? cause we can't change the world. Certainly not overnight, but we think we can make a difference. And the way in which we're trying to make a difference is to encourage and support faculty, in particular administrators who are supportive of faculty at a whole range of institutions who are committed to sustaining and growing, liberal education for all students.

00;08;45;25 - 00;09;26;11
Andrew Delbanco
That means, yes, we occasionally make grant to elite, well-funded institutions if we think they have a particularly exciting idea that might catch on. But mostly we focus on, less well-resourced private institutions, small colleges, historically black colleges and universities and also public institutions, regional, public and very importantly, community colleges where a very large percentage of undergraduates in our country begin college, and which are tremendously important institutions for, making good on the promise of our democracy.

00;09;26;13 - 00;09;46;15
Andrew Delbanco
So, we work with all kinds of institutions, and it's a great pleasure for me because in the course of our work, I meet a lot of really passionate and inspiring faculty who are working day and night to try to make make the opportunity for a fulfilled life available to more and more students.

00;09;46;18 - 00;10;05;00
Michael Hagan
so here we are at the beginning of the semester. you're speaking we're recording today on the day of academic convocation. You're going to be addressing the campus community and in about a couple of hours, and there's a line that you've written about from Moby Dick in which Ishmael says, A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

00;10;05;02 - 00;10;18;15
Michael Hagan
This line seems to it and do endorse a kind of school of hard knocks approach to learning. Saying that Ishmael's experience aboard a whale ship is instructive. So that might be what it says about life aboard a whale ship. But what does it say about college?

00;10;18;20 - 00;10;44;29
Andrew Delbanco
Well, a couple things. First, go back to where you started. I think it's really valuable for students at the outset of college to spend some time reflecting on this question, and I hope be nice if I provoke a few thoughts today with my remarks. But much more important than that is to try to create opportunities for students in a sustained way, especially in that early phase of college, to actually ask themselves some questions about why they're here.

00;10;45;02 - 00;11;10;17
Andrew Delbanco
there are all kinds of reasons why college students show up, right? Parents want them to. They have been told, quite correctly, that their opportunity in the working world is greater if they come out of college with a degree. All kinds of reasons. But the most important reason is to enlarge yourself, to discover more completely who you are and who you want to be, and what might take you there.

00;11;10;19 - 00;11;31;00
Andrew Delbanco
Now, when I invoke Ishmael's comment about the whale ship, as is Yale College on his Harvard, it's quite true, as you suggest, it's it wasn't exactly a formal institution for instruction with, whalemen sitting at desks and taking notes as Captain Ahab told them what they ought to, what they ought to know. he had another approach to that whole deal.

00;11;31;02 - 00;12;12;03
Andrew Delbanco
But I think what Melville meant was, look, this was where I learned, first of all, I learned skills that I never imagined I could acquire and the satisfaction of being able to do things well and thereby earn the respect of my peers. I also discovered I'm speaking out with quotation marks on behalf of Melville's Ishmael. I also discovered that the world of human beings is a much larger and more diverse one than I had encountered in my, my father's Boston or or my mother's New York.

00;12;12;05 - 00;12;43;00
Andrew Delbanco
Actually, it was a little mixture of father and mother, New York and Boston. But, you know, the social circle that that he would have lived his life in if he had not gone to sea, was a relatively narrow one in terms of class, race, religion and general viewpoint on the world, on a whale ship, all of a sudden he was thrown into an environment where he meets people from the other side of the world who believe other things, who speak other languages.

00;12;43;03 - 00;13;03;08
Andrew Delbanco
whose assumptions about why you get up in the morning are totally different from his own. So he had an education in what we would today call diversity. And I think that was very I don't you know, I'm not making that up. It's all over Moby Dick. so I think that was a very important a part of his, his experience at sea.

00;13;03;10 - 00;13;34;03
Andrew Delbanco
But another part of it was it gave him a chance to reflect on the big questions of life. Much of that book soars into poetry when it tackles existential questions and existential questions, or perhaps more likely to come to mind when you're on a ship on a tiny piece of wood stuck together with a few nails bouncing around in the middle of a storm in the in the Atlantic.

00;13;34;05 - 00;14;01;14
Andrew Delbanco
your sense of isolation and insignificance and the power of nature, is pretty vivid, and it forced him to think about the world. Why is it put together the way it is? What are the opportunities it affords to human beings as puny and impotent as they may be in the face of nature? And how can you make your life a meaningful one?

00;14;01;16 - 00;14;32;22
Andrew Delbanco
Those are questions that maybe most of the time we would prefer to evade, because there are hard and scary questions, but they're the kinds of questions that you encounter in in a good philosophy class or a good literature class, or a good science class for that matter. So I think when Ishmael says, this was my college, it really points to the opportunities that students in a, in what we think of as a college should take advantage of to the present day.

00;14;32;24 - 00;14;55;06
Michael Hagan
What does with a figure like Melville, who spanned, you know, his life spans so much history and the world is so different when he comes, when he leaves the sea and then when he comes on it. what are the strengths of and advantages of biography of somebody like Melville as an approach to understanding history and to understanding a culture?

00;14;55;14 - 00;14;59;06
Andrew Delbanco
A lot of good questions there rolled into his side 1 or 2.

00;14;59;09 - 00;15;00;05
Michael Hagan
That was off the cuff.

00;15;00;06 - 00;15;22;18
Andrew Delbanco
Let me start with the biography. Let me start with the biography part at the end. For quite a long time in, in, a higher reaches of literary study in our prestigious universities. Literary biography has been somewhat dismissed or shunted aside as a kind of form of gossip or something like that, you know. Let's look at the text.

00;15;22;18 - 00;15;43;05
Andrew Delbanco
Let's understand what's going on in the text and its relation with other texts. And, and, and I have some sympathy for that viewpoint. But when people ask me, so why did you bother with biography and I should say quickly, parenthetically, my book is not really a biography. It's really a study of the work illuminated to the extent I can.

00;15;43;11 - 00;15;48;15
Andrew Delbanco
I was able to do it by the life. The works are at the center of the book, more than the life.

00;15;48;17 - 00;15;50;29
Michael Hagan
Not least because he's a he's an elusive character.

00;15;50;29 - 00;16;13;03
Andrew Delbanco
He's very elusive. Exactly, and left behind very few letters compared to people like Henry James, who left thousands and thousands. And he left, maybe 25 substantive letters and another 65, you know, thank you for delivering the dry cleaning type letters. but so why but why try for biography at all? Why be interested in the life at all?

00;16;13;05 - 00;16;34;27
Andrew Delbanco
And I have a simple answer to that. You know what I am, and I'll give it in the form of an example. There's a great chapter in Moby Dick called Nantucket, the very short chapter where he lets his imagination go wild, imagining Nantucket. Well, it helps to know when you read that chapter in that book that he had never been to Nantucket.

00;16;34;29 - 00;17;00;16
Andrew Delbanco
Right. That he he only went to Nantucket later on in the company of his father in law. It helps to know that because it gives you a greater sense of what he's actually up to as a literary artist. And so that's a little reductive, perhaps, but I simply think that understanding something about the life helps to illuminate the work.

00;17;00;18 - 00;17;19;10
Andrew Delbanco
Now, the the the miracle of, of a of Melville and of other writers like him. And there are not very many other writers like I'm certainly not in our literature, is that he was able to take this experience that lots of other people were having to. I mean, there were a lot of other young men who went to see.

00;17;19;10 - 00;17;47;14
Andrew Delbanco
There were a lot of other people who lived for 70 or 80 years across the the scope of the 19th century. but he is able to deliver insights into what is happening to the culture and how people are experiencing life to with an intensity and vividness that virtually nobody else in his lifetime was able to do. How do we explain that?

00;17;47;14 - 00;18;06;28
Andrew Delbanco
Some people. Well, sometimes they ask me, well, how do you explain Melville? And my answer to that one is you can't you can try it a word like genius, but you can't explain it according to where he went to school. You didn't go to much of a school. You can't explain it. By his family, I mean he had an older brother.

00;18;06;28 - 00;18;36;13
Andrew Delbanco
It was a respectable New York lawyer. So that came out of the same environment. What? You're what you're grappling with in the case of a figure like Melville, is a mystery. And I might even go so far as to say a miracle. Somebody whose artistic imagination is so powerful and overwhelming that, 100 and what the. But 130 some years after he died, we're still reading him with excitement.

00;18;36;15 - 00;19;00;20
Michael Hagan
In writing about Melville and other historical figures and literary luminaries in American history. You've you've talked about how, you want to stir in readers what Nathaniel Hawthorne called a home feeling in the past. you want your you want your readers to be able to experience the past sort of through the eyes and experiences of of the people that you're writing about.

00;19;00;22 - 00;19;06;03
Michael Hagan
so what must an author do to create that home feeling? and why is it so important?

00;19;06;04 - 00;19;35;28
Andrew Delbanco
That's a great question. look, there's a very good book by, the late, I guess, considered called a sociologist, but he was much more than that. Daniel Bell, who wrote a book about general education about 60 years ago. And he says in that book, again, I'm paraphrasing, not directly quoting historical consciousness is the foundation of all education.

00;19;36;00 - 00;20;10;17
Andrew Delbanco
Having that is to developing the awareness that the world has not always been the way it is now. You know, there's a cliche. You hear it often. The the past is a foreign country. None of us has ever traveled there. But by studying the texts and not not just literary text, but artifact documents, of the past, we can begin to develop something of what Walton called a home feeling.

00;20;10;17 - 00;20;45;04
Andrew Delbanco
We'll never get there entirely. It's impossible to think ourselves out of our subjectivity and of our present moment, but the effort is worthwhile. Just in the same way, I think that the effort is worthwhile to understand the perspective of other people in the present. So historical consciousness develops a kind of sometimes it's called historical imagination, sympathy, the ability to travel out of yourself and imagine a world that is apprehended differently by by other people.

00;20;45;04 - 00;20;51;21
Andrew Delbanco
And it also, I mean, it's very tricky to travel in this way into the past because.

00;20;51;23 - 00;21;29;29
Andrew Delbanco
We are we, all of us, make judgments all the time. We hold people accountable. Usually people other than ourselves accountable for what we deem to be their failures, their transgressions, or to use the the theological language, their their sins. And it is certainly true that the record of human history is chock full of transgressions and sins against any kind of, articulated morality that I know anything about.

00;21;30;02 - 00;21;52;11
Andrew Delbanco
and we shouldn't suspend our judgment when we travel into the past, but we should also be aware of as we're passing judgment on people in the past. The people in the future are going to pass judgment on us. And we are as much groping around in the darkness trying to figure out the right way forward as our predecessors were.

00;21;52;13 - 00;22;34;00
Andrew Delbanco
So I think the study of history, I you know, I'm reluctant to say, okay, this is why you should study history or that's why you should study history. But I do think the study of history, if it's conducted seriously, does tend to encourage a certain kind of humility, for one thing. And when I wrote this book, you mentioned at the outset about the fugitive slave crisis and the coming of the Civil War, the thing that came home to me most strongly in preparing to write that book and then writing that book, is that nobody in the past had any idea of what was going to happen.

00;22;34;02 - 00;23;14;06
Andrew Delbanco
We look at the Civil War and we say, oh, it was inevitable. It was inexorable. Or we look at certain pieces of legislation, like notoriously the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. And we say clearly the consequences of that were X, Y, and z. But the trick is to put yourself in the position of looking ahead into the indecipherable or inscrutable future, and trying to imagine what it was like for people to live in the 1840s or 1850s, struggling with the question of how to grapple with the terrible institution of slavery that casts such a shadow over our country.

00;23;14;08 - 00;23;38;15
Andrew Delbanco
We're in a similar position, aren't we? I mean, we're trying to figure out what's happening in the next decade, or the next year, or the next next week, and all we can do is make our best guess and try to make decisions that we think are more likely to yield positive consequences than other decisions. It's not easy. It's never been easy, and studying history helps to remind us of that fact.

00;23;38;17 - 00;24;04;16
Michael Hagan
In your 2012 book, College What it was, is, and should be. you argue that at its heart, college should be about truth seeking providence College describes itself as a place where people seek truth. and as a Roman Catholic college, Providence College makes a particular claim about what and even who that truth is. how would you define or describe, or at least begin to point at truth?

00;24;04;16 - 00;24;11;23
Michael Hagan
You know what? how how would you how would you how would you define or otherwise get at the term?

00;24;11;25 - 00;25;13;11
Andrew Delbanco
Thanks for the easy question. Right. Look, my sense of the meaning of the word truth is, as you would probably suspect, a little more, malleable or mobile than it might be understood in some traditions. I, I'm not sure that I'm right about this, because I'm not deeply learned in Rome, in Roman Catholic theology. But my sense I'm a little I'm a little closer to the pragmatist conception of truth, that is that human beings bring to the world perception and we may look at the same physical object as the next person, or as people who lived before us or at the same phenomenon, the same movement or the same historical event.

00;25;13;13 - 00;25;47;00
Andrew Delbanco
And we will see something different according to who we are, what our prior experience has been, what our expectations are. And we, by interpreting this fixed reality that surrounds us, we actually create new truths, at least new truths within the sphere of human interaction. I don't know that we project new truths into the natural world. In the same way I.

00;25;47;00 - 00;26;26;19
Andrew Delbanco
I'm a little more comfortable with the discovering truth paradigm when it comes to natural science. When it comes to humans society, I'm a little more leaning toward the creating truth paradigm. So it's an uneasy balance for me. but I do think, you know, the effort to find it, that is I mean, on a very rudimentary level, if you're having a debate in a literature class or in a history class or anything about any other class that has to do with human human production, and you make a claim about something and you say, this is true.

00;26;26;21 - 00;27;16;01
Andrew Delbanco
You, I think, incur a responsibility to persuade your interlocutors that it's true, that is, to provide evidence to show the process by which your own, thinking has led you to that conclusion. And that process in and of itself, which in my view, will never reach a perfect grasp of the truth. But the process of seeking it, the process of arguing for it, the process of taking into account contradictory perspectives that may come from other writers or from your peers, or from your teachers, is in and of itself, this intrinsically valuable process that we all ought to be engaged in.

00;27;16;04 - 00;27;40;15
Michael Hagan
so some of your recent writing and speaking has been focused on the question of reparations for the crime of slavery. That was, a topic of your, your Jefferson lecture. and in a recent article, you are actually I'm not sure how recent it was, I apologize, I don't have my citation here. but, you know, recent enough article, you cited a black writer and abolitionist, Martin Delaney.

00;27;40;17 - 00;28;05;18
Michael Hagan
Martin's call, Martin Delaney's call from before the Civil War for a national indemnity, for unparalleled wrongdoings, for a national indemnity, for unparalleled wrongs, for undisguised and positions, and for unmitigated oppression. so how can and should voices from the past, like Martin Delaney's inform our perspectives on a complicated issue like reparation?

00;28;05;20 - 00;28;45;23
Andrew Delbanco
Well, look, alas, I think it's fair to say that we're still working on acknowledging. What American history has meant for black America. I mean, back to my other book for a moment on The Fugitive Slave crisis. If there was if there was another lesson I drew from that in a way that I think I had not understood even remotely before I undertook that book, it's that American history is a totally different thing for black Americans than it is for white American.

00;28;45;26 - 00;29;00;26
Andrew Delbanco
It's just totally different. it's so you quoted Delaney with those words like, unparalleled. And I can't remember all the other uns in the in the paragraph, but.

00;29;00;26 - 00;29;02;14
Michael Hagan
They're undisguised, unmitigated.

00;29;02;14 - 00;29;37;04
Andrew Delbanco
Unmitigated, undisguised, unparalleled. African-Americans have a pretty good case to make that their experience has been unparalleled and unmitigated. I mean, I, I quote in that essay, Leon Wieseltier, I heard, I don't know, 40 years ago. Say something. Let's like, get into comparative climatology. Black people are not the only people who have suffered grievously at the hands of white, the dominant force in the society in which they found themselves, that's for sure.

00;29;37;04 - 00;30;21;06
Andrew Delbanco
I mean, we Native Americans have a case to make, Catholic Americans had a case to make for a long time. Jewish Americans have a case to make. Gay Americans have a case to make. Women have a case to make about long, long experience of injustice. But the systematic sort of, and enthusiastically endorsed suppression and oppression of black people almost from day one in our society is is pretty overwhelming when you start to understand how long it's been and how hard it's been, not just in the South, not, but everywhere in the United States.

00;30;21;09 - 00;31;01;08
Andrew Delbanco
So so the starting point of any discussion about reparations has to be sort of where where Delaney started, which is let's acknowledge what this history has been for black Americans. And now once we've acknowledged it. And that's not easy to do. And as I say, I think we still have a distance to go. I mean, for example, some politicians, when the reparations conversation began to take off in the last decade or so, we'd say things like, well, you know, I don't think it is a good idea to talk about what we should do to make up for crimes that, the Civil War settled.

00;31;01;10 - 00;31;26;07
Andrew Delbanco
You know, that was a long time ago. Nothing to do with me, nothing to do with my direct ancestors. We were slave owners, etcetera. So let's move on. That's not an adequate response for various reasons, including the fact that black people, were, ingeniously suppressed in new ways after the end of slavery for a very long time.

00;31;26;07 - 00;31;48;22
Andrew Delbanco
And some of the things I talk about that essay are by now well known, the way in which black people were excluded from the benefits of the New Deal, the GI Bill, all kinds of other worthy movements in our political history that found ways to carve out exceptions for black people. So that's not an adequate response.

00;31;48;24 - 00;32;22;08
Andrew Delbanco
It is also, however, I think, not an adequate response, certainly not an a politically actionable response, in my view, to say, okay, let's figure out genealogical by DNA testing or some other means, all Americans who are descended from people who were once enslaved should get a check. In X amount. And there are some serious people who argue for that point of view about reparations.

00;32;22;11 - 00;32;53;09
Andrew Delbanco
I don't think, first of all, I think it's a nonstarter because I think as a political matter, it would be very difficult to develop a consensus over a program like that. And also, you know, raises the question of whether that's really the best response to centuries of injustice. no. Would we do means testing? Would we write checks for people who become very successful and very wealthy, who may have had an enslaved ancestor at one time or another?

00;32;53;11 - 00;33;30;21
Andrew Delbanco
yeah, that seems to me leading toward, morass that we better to stay out of. Which leaves us with the problem of so what? What should we mean by the idea of reparations, which is implies the effort to repair injustices? We can't undo them. We can't go back in time and liberate people who were in chains. But we can think seriously together about how to acknowledge what our history really has been, and how to move forward to a better place.

00;33;30;24 - 00;34;01;14
Andrew Delbanco
And that's why I, was very much, drawn to the work of a young scholar, Olufemi Taiwo, I think I've got his name right. Who says that reparations should be a future oriented idea? That is, we should look at our society and look at the ways in which it perpetuates these injustices. Look at, differential outcomes in health care, look at differential opportunities in education.

00;34;01;16 - 00;34;33;29
Andrew Delbanco
Look at differential opportunities in home ownership, and get to work to fix those problems. It it boils down, I suppose many people would say to us, sort of use that word unmitigated, sort of unmitigated, social democratic, liberal agenda that would have a universal aspiration, but that would, as a matter of fact, disproportionately benefit people who have been dispossessed in our history.

00;34;34;02 - 00;34;58;27
Andrew Delbanco
But I think something like that, which is my understanding of what Doctor King had in mind when he talked sketchily about the idea of reparations toward the end of his short life. Something like that is the better way to go. It's a real reparations movement has to be a multiracial movement, just as the abolitionist movement was multiracial, just as a civil rights movement was multiracial.

00;34;59;00 - 00;35;09;19
Andrew Delbanco
Reparations has to be multiracial two, which is not to gloss over the fact that black people are at the center of the story.

00;35;09;21 - 00;35;32;24
Michael Hagan
All right. Well, Doctor Delbanco, I've really enjoyed this conversation. I feel like I've learned quite a bit. but, I will say, I mean, our conversation today hasn't been nearly the roller coaster that your, 2015 interview with Stephen Colbert was. for those listening, who may be unfamiliar, tell us a little bit about your appearance on The Late Show.

00;35;32;27 - 00;35;51;11
Andrew Delbanco
Well, I got a call from one of Colbert's producers saying that he was he was. I think he was trying to, you know, put some energy into his show, which was lagging a little bit in the in that early period. And he came up with the idea of doing a series called eggheads on a, on a roller coaster.

00;35;51;13 - 00;36;11;25
Andrew Delbanco
And the idea was to invite people who seemed to claim to know a lot about one thing or another, put them on a roller coaster, and not just any roller coaster. Okay, the Nitro Coaster at Six Flags Adventure Park, which I think was the second highest in the world at that time, and I've gone have I asked them to give a lecture on a given subject?

00;36;11;25 - 00;36;29;19
Andrew Delbanco
So I listened to this. I said, you know, forget this. I asked them, how about the the kiddy coaster? Could we do it on the kiddy coaster? No, no, that's not going to work. So my kids said to me, listen, it's very simple. If you don't do this, we're done with you. You know you can't not do this.

00;36;29;22 - 00;36;50;10
Andrew Delbanco
So, I took some sedation. I think that morning I got up pretty early. They drove me through the darkness to new Jersey, and, I got out of the car and looked up at this thing, and it was a scary sight, believe me. And, I went up there and they strapped me in, and I was completely terrified.

00;36;50;10 - 00;37;11;28
Andrew Delbanco
But by concentrating on Moby Dick, I was able to get through it. And thank goodness, the first take was apparently good enough so I didn't have to do it again. So that's the story of the coaster ride. And, it was certainly, the peak of my career. I don't expect to do that. And I don't want to do that ever again.

00;37;12;01 - 00;37;20;08
Michael Hagan
Well, that's, you know, you hear people talk a lot about books that help them get through things. You know, about Moby Dick helped you get through? I was at the Nitro was.

00;37;20;11 - 00;37;27;21
Andrew Delbanco
That's right. And poor Mr. Colbert was on that thing over and over again with other people talking about all the other topics.

00;37;27;24 - 00;37;34;18
Michael Hagan
All right. Well, Doctor Delbanco, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for sitting down with us. And I look forward to your talk this afternoon.

00;37;34;19 - 00;37;36;18
Andrew Delbanco
Thank you very much.

00;37;36;21 - 00;37;51;05
Michael Hagan
Subscribe to the Providence College Podcast and all the usual places including iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Google Play and Spotify, as well as your smart speaker. If you like what you hear, please review and share with others. Thanks for listening and go Friars!