The city and the country – 6 – July 14 2014

The city. New York City. The other half of my week. Reached by four hours (plus a little, usually) of bus and subway train into the ghetto at the end of the 2 line: Flatbush Avenue. A few steps and you’re in the midst of the most absurd academic elegance, on a campus that always wins the prize for most beautiful state university campus in America. Take a few steps back and you’re in the ghetto again – black youth unemployment 100%. Literally 100%. The two Americas. It keeps you sane and grounded. (At Princeton, for instance, where all our faculty yearn to be, you could imagine you’re in a kind of dream of Oxbridge.)

You’re in Brooklyn. Built in the ’30s with the help of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens (little trees now magnificent lindens and oaks), and tiny bricks to ape Harvard Yard, Brooklyn College did once host brilliant immigrant Jews and boasted a better Nobel prize rate than Harvard itself. Time moved on and demographics have changed, although brilliant Jews still abound. Among them, brilliant students from everywhere, China, Korea, Albania, India, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Morocco, the Caribbean and, of course, Russia. Couldn’t be a more delightful student body to teach. But step outside the gates and the real America resumes its reign.