About Alice Read Online Free Page A

by
Dear Bruno,
a book based on a letter she had sent to Victor and Annie Navasky’s son, then twelve, after it was discovered that he had a malignant tumor in his chest. You could say, I suppose, that she was in the English-language business, and I was her sideline—the pro-bono case being handled by a high-powered corporate lawyer. That sort of help wasn’t easy to turn down.
    She actually did translate words like “heuristics” for me. Usually, though, what I was asking was more on the level of what some foreign-language movie we’d seen was about. “I don’t get it,” I’d say. “Was that a swimming movie?”
    â€œIt was not a swimming movie.”
    â€œWell, they seemed to be in the water most of the time.”
    Around the time Alice and I met, the coverage of American racism finally burst out of its regional boundaries; Northern universities were beginning to look into what they were doing to educate minority students who were, by conventional measurements, not qualified for admission. Alice got involved in a small program of that sort at Hofstra, and in 1967 she moved to City College to teach in a program called SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge), which employed remedial courses and tutoring and counseling and stipends as a way to integrate underprepared students. A friend of hers at Hofstra, Mina Shaughnessy, went to City with her, and for the next dozen years they were allies in the intense struggle over the role that a place like the City University of New York should play in what was sometimes known as remedial education.
    From the start, some senior professors had been muttering about the decline of standards. As academic jobs began to dry up, some younger faculty members—people who had looked forward to a life of dropping graceful aperçus about “The Waste Land” to enthralled students on ivy-covered campuses—were dispirited or even enraged at finding themselves instead in gritty urban universities, correcting seemingly endless errors in grammar and syntax. Alice and Mina, who were there because they wanted to be, had a completely different response. It was encapsulated in the title of a speech with which Mina, by then a star in a field that hadn’t been expected to produce any stars, electrified an annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, in 1975: “Diving In.” Instead of throwing up her hands in despair at all the errors her students made, Mina had analyzed four thousand essays, found patterns of errors that could be addressed, and explained all this, in a tone of optimism and commitment and absolute confidence, in a book called
Errors and Expectations.
In later years, when Alice was producing programs for educational television, she’d occasionally take an unusual teaching job—at Phoenix House, the drug-treatment program, for a while, and for one semester at Sing Sing—and she always took it for granted that people who wanted to learn could be taught, no matter what their background.
    Mina was fourteen years older than Alice—in a way a mentor and in another way a big sister. She had no children, and for our girls she became something like a fairy godmother; she once convinced Abigail that the necklace she was about to hand over had been given to her on the subway by a princess who was changing professions—getting out of the princess game—and therefore no longer had need of it. Mina was marvelous looking—the actress Maggie Smith was usually mentioned by those describing her—and she wore marvelous clothes. If Alice had ever been in danger of accepting the notion that doing good works carried a requirement for dowdiness, Mina’s example would have been enough to convince her otherwise. A biography of Mina by Jane Maher includes an anecdote told often by the scholar and critic Irving Howe, who had become one of Mina’s great admirers at CUNY: When she met him