An Oval Office in the White House [by D.L.]

Not every building on the Cornell University campus is as handsome as the A. D. White House on East Avenue. It is the headquarters of the Society for the Humanities, home to a select group of post-doctoral fellows, each chosen for a fellowship year with nice perquisites. Back in the 1970s Archie Ammons was a senior fellow while he was writing Shere (I think I have that right). He was much honored nationally and revered locally, and it was through his influence mainly that I got to spend a year as a junior fellow at the Sock of the Hum, as my friend and fellow fellow Bob Harbison called it. This was back in 1980. Because I didn't mind climbing steps, I was given an office on the top floor -- oval shaped,  gloriously spacious, with plenty of book shelves and surfaces for manuscripts in motion. It's a great house, one that has (as Archie liked to say) "some diversity to go with its unity," unlike many of its neighbors. Of more recent vintage is the sign identifying the building's inhabitants for the benefit of walkers or drivers below the slope. That a part of the sign says "one way" and features the image of an arrow, and that this forlorn part has become detached from the rest and is pointing down at the snowy ground, says more about the state of higher education than the article in the current London Review of Books that begins "We are all deeply anxious about the future of British universities." We are all. Deeply. -- DL