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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Stan Katz

June 30, 2009

Democratic Elitism

On June 26, Paul Basken reported in the Chronicle that Bob Berdahl, the president of the Association of American Universities, had recommended to Senator Lamar Alexander that the United States might not be able to afford our current number of research universities. Berdahl’s position is that a “fewer but better” policy would be worth considering, and his input is apparently behind the request of Alexander (and three other lawmakers) to the National Academies to “Study and report on the ‘top 10 actions’ that the government and research universities could take to maintain the quality of the universities and ensure the nation’s economic growth.” Berdahl, whose AAU represents the self-selected leading research universities in the country, admitted to Basken that “the decentralization of the American system of higher education could make it hard to plan a reduction in the number of research universities.”

“Impossible” seems to me a better word than “hard.” I cannot imagine a process (similar to those in Germany and the United Kingdom) to seriously evaluate and compare research programs across American universities. Start with the AAU, which prides itself on selectivity in membership – would it be capable of reducing its membership by 50 percent? Are all 60 AAU member institutions remotely equal to one another? Are we dealing with a “last man in” problem? I don’t see any way to imposed quality control (which is really what Berdahl is suggesting) in this country, given the lack of federal (that is, central) control over higher education. Our only existing mechanism for achieving some modicum of national control is through funding decisions, but even these are in the end subject to political constraints. What would happen if the NSF and NIH decided to restrict their funding to the top 10 institutions in each of the fields they funded? Does anyone think their budgets would pass in Congress the next year?

As Berdahl recognizes, the split between public and privately-funded research universities also makes uniform national policies a very difficult goal. But even within the so-called “public” sphere, state government has less control than one would think — the states now contribute, on average, such a small percentage of the annual operating budgets of public universities that their leverage has dramatically declined. Berdahl recognizes this, and suggests that in California, at least, the answer might be in “opening enrollment to larger numbers of out-of-state students,” since they can be assessed much higher tuition fees. Many state universities are considering just such a move — which will of course make them less accessible for state residents. Such moves are likely to make an already perilous situation for public education much worse.

We seem, once again, to be impaled upon a conflict between elitism and democracy. I think that is a false dichotomy. If I am correct, the leaders of the research universities will have to become more adept in making the case for democratic elitism. If their rationale rests entirely upon higher education’s importance for the “economic growth,” I think the sector is headed for even deeper trouble than it is now in.

Comment [13]

June 28, 2009

NEH in Obamaland

Sam Tanenhaus has a very odd piece in this morning’s New York Times. Tanenhaus is an historian who edits the paper’s weekly book review and who occasionally writes think pieces for the Sunday “Week in Review” section of the paper. He is a very smart and well-informed person on cultural matters, but this week I don’t think he gets it right.

“Sound of Silence: The Culture Wars Take a Break” is an apparently favorable comment on President Obama’s decision to appoint former Iowa Congressman Jim Leach as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Tanenhaus sees the appointment as part of “an emerging politics of accommodation,” since Leach was a Republican during his 30 years in the Congress. That may be right, but as Sam notes, Leach was also one of the founders of the Humanities Caucus on the Hill and a firm supporter of funding for the national cultural agencies at a time when conservative advocated defunding them entirely. Leach was also the head of Republicans for Obama, so his appointment is really not much of a surprise. Leach was from the start widely considered one of the leading candidates for the NEH job.

Tanenhaus interprets the appointment as a postpartisan move “as the second phase of the culture war nears its endgame.” Let’s examine that contention. The first culture war, in his view, was that launched by Lynne Cheney and Bill Bennett (another former NEH head) and aimed at alleged leftists (my characterization) in the colleges and universities — and at the admirable NEH chairman, Sheldon Hackney (hardly a leftist). This culture war coincided with the vigorous opposition of Newt Gingrich to funding for NEA and NEH. But the principal target of conservative attacks was the National Endowment for the Arts, not NEH. Tanenhaus (appropriately) mentions the conflict over the National History Standards, instigated by Cheney, but in fact despite her best efforts, the most damaging battles in the culture war involved attacks on the NEA-funded artists Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. The Gingrich assault was quite effective in reducing funding for both agencies, which have still not fully recovered their pre-1994 levels. But in my view the culture wars were effectively over by the second term of the Clinton presidency.

Significantly, Paul DiMaggio, Morris Fiorina, and other scholars have shown that the public was never radically divided on cultural questions throughout the alleged culture wars, a fact that seems to have escaped Tanenhaus. His point seems to be that the second culture war was about the conservative social agenda (family values and all that), but my view is that those issues are part of a much longer-term conservative political strategy going back to the presidency of Richard Nixon — see Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland for a good account. Tanenhaus also mentions the nomination of Sonia Sotamayor as evidence of Obama’s accomodationism, but I don’t see much to compare in Sotomayor and Leach, other than they are both Princetonians. He seems a bit disappointed that the Leach appointment has only evoked silence from conservatives, and sees this is evidence that “the volume of debate has been lowered.” He concludes that “in this post-culture war world, the National Endowment for the Humanities may be a less exciting place than it once was — no longer a battlefield, just another federal agency.” That’s fine, of course, but NEH has seldom actually been a battlefield, except in subtle ways (interference in peer review) that the press has never noted. I think that Jim Leach is just the person to get the agency back on track. If there is one thing NEH does not need, it is excitement.

Comment [34]

June 25, 2009

Resizing and Reshaping

A couple of days ago, President Drew Faust sent an e-mail to “Members of the Harvard Community” commenting on the events of the past year for her university. She acknowledged the serious economic problems that have confronted Harvard this year, but was upbeat: “Our focus belongs not on what we have lost, but on what we have.” She urged Harvardians “not for a moment to forget the immense contributions that our community continues to make to the advancement of knowledge.” Like the president of Princeton, speaking at our commencement, she also stressed that “the learning that happens here can help us improvise through times of uncertainty and come out stronger and wiser, more resilient, more adaptable, and better prepared to lead fulfilling lives.” But careful readers of Faust’s message will have noticed Faust’s acknowledgment en passant that Harvard must “resize and reshape aspects of our enterprise.” We may be living in an age in which resizing and reshaping will replace sifting and winnowing.

This morning the Princeton administration held the second in what is beginning to look like a series of town meetings on the financial problems of the university. The event was held in one of our largest lecture rooms, but the crowd overflowed the space — to the extent that an announcement was made that another meeting would be held in a couple of weeks to accommodate those who could not find a seat today. I would guess that there were six or seven hundred in attendance, mostly members of the professional staff — I could identify only a few other faculty members.

The provost led off, summarizing the financial situation — a 30-percent decline in the endowment, a $170-million budget gap over the next two years, and an administrative budget decline of about 7.5 percent per annum. These figures were just about identical to the numbers announced at the first town meeting last April. What was new was the emphasis on a projected 13-percent decline in FTE/compensation portion of the budget for the next two years, to be accomplished by the elimination of visiting faculty positions, a slowdown in the replacement of departing faculty and possible changes in the compensation mix (more junior faculty?). We were told that we need to reduce staff positions by 100 to 150 by July 2010 (we are halfway to that goal), and warned that there may be layoffs in the fall. We were also shown a long list of possible changes to reduce university costs — new ideas will be welcome at savings@princeton.edu. But the big news was the recently announced VIRP program — Voluntary Incentivized Retirement Program — through which the university hopes to induce some of a pool of 459 fairly senior employees (staff and faculty) to retire. It became clear when the VP for HR rose to speak about “the VIRP” that most of the audience had come to hear about this program.

We heard a great deal about Princeton’s need to “resize” this morning. On the other hand, our staff and faculty did not hear anything about “reshaping.” The question I was left with was whether we can actually resize without reshaping? I am inclined to doubt it.

Comment [2]

June 22, 2009

Academic Publishing in the Humanities

Jennifer Howard’s article in today’s Chronicle reports on this weekend’s meeting of the Association of American University Presses. Her account is upbeat, noting that the meeting “was more a study in resilience and adaptiveness than it was a death watch.” There are encouraging signs for university presses, she says, among them the inclination of academic presses to produce and distribute e-books. The Mellon Foundation has apparently just funded a project to survey librarians to determine what they are looking for in the way of e-books, and this will be quite useful. Howard also notes that the library community turned out for the university press bash, and the two groups made nice over one another.

But I think the underlying problem was identified by the Director of Scholarly Publishing at the University of Michigan Library, which is now the host of the University of Michigan Press, a newly all-digital operation. “Moving into the library will mean adapting to the library’s culture. . . . This is perhaps less dangerous but also less free” as a way for the press to operate. It really is not clear what this means, but the theme of the AAUP meeting seems to have been that presses and libraries have to “find common ground.” For Michael Jensen of the National Academies Press, that ground was obvious: “50 percent digital sales, 25 percent print-on-demand books, and 25 percent institutionally funded open-access publishing;” “Open access in exchange for institutional support is a business model for survival.” I doubt it, simply because these general formulations are content-free. There is not a single university press content problem, but rather a separate problem for each area of academic content. Open access is one thing for the sciences, another for the humanities. My concern, as always, is with the content in the humanities and social sciences.

I have no doubt that we are rapidly moving into an environment of tiny initial print runs (if there is any print run at all) followed by print-on-demand, combined with some form of electronic delivery. For most books in the humanities and social sciences, I think that will work well — at least until disciplinary departments come to their senses and ask whether the “book” ought to continue as the standard criterion for scholarly evaluation. We now have the technology to produce scholarship in these new formats, although there are still serious questions about how to deliver it to the user. I am going to teach one of my fall courses using the new Kindle DX, and I’ll report later on how that goes. But the real question at the moment is what business model there is to sustain university presses in this new environment? I don’t think the answer is clear.

I was impressed by Peter J. Dougherty’s “manifesto” on scholarly publishing that appeared in the June 12 Chronicle Review. Peter, the director of the Princeton University Press, doesn’t address the business problem, but he makes a forceful case for the importance of book publishing: “Books remain the most effective technology for organizing and presenting sustained arguments at a relatively general level of discourse and in familiar rhetorical forms . . . thereby helping to enrich and unify otherwise disparate intellectual conversations.” At best, this is surely true of books, but Peter then goes on to promote the publication of professional books, advanced textbooks, and books for “worldwide readerships.” He is careful to say that he is not advocating the abandonment of “our commitment to traditional humanities fields,” and I believe him — but I think the logic of his argument is to the contrary. My question remains: Can we (and should we) sustain academic book publishing in the humanities and social sciences?

Postscript: I want to draw attention to Ms. Bauerle’s helpful comment (#7) below, pointing out that I misunderstood the news report on the transfer of the U. of Michigan Press to the library. Michigan will continue letterpress publication, and will not become all-digital. I regret the error. But readers may want to look at the Web site of the revived Rice University Press (on whose board I serve) to see what an all-digital academic press looks like. SNK

Comment [15]

June 19, 2009

The New Reality and the New Normal



Tamar Lewin today reports in this morning’s New York Times that colleges and universities are making small spending cuts that add up to big savings for the institutions: “While colleges and universities slashed their spending this year with wrenching layoffs, hiring freezes and halts in construction projects, they whittled away at costs with smaller, quirkier economies, too.” She cites decisions to do away with telephone landlines, holding “virtual” athletic contests, cutbacks on window washing and trash collection, as well as to rebuild computers instead of buying new ones. Everyone who works in higher education has experienced such budgetary trims.

But I wonder whether these cuts are not mostly cosmetic? My university has just publicized another public meeting (“a town hall meeting”) on our budget. The announcement says that staff and faculty will hear about “cost-savings initiatives,” a new early retirement program and “how current economic conditions are affecting the university’s budget.” If we cannot attend, we have been asked to “share [our] cost-savings ideas” by sending an e-mail to a university new “savings” e-mail address. If this sounds like what Procter and Gamble used to do in tough economic times, well . . . it is. But if we are really aiming for a “new normal,” living with dirty windows is not going to be enough.

This is made quite clear in Tracy Jan’s story in The Boston Globe a couple of days ago. Jan reports that “It’s not just the hot breakfasts and shuttle bus service that have been targeted by Harvard University administrators in the age of the shrinking endowment. Once untouchable classrooms and laboratories are about to be hit — cuts that some on campus worry will diminish Harvard’s academic ambitions.” Jan describes this as “the new reality,” and reports that the severity of the Harvard budgetary crisis (especially in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences) may produce declines in faculty size, increases in undergraduate class size, reduction in the number of course offerings — and possibly declines in faculty attention to and demands of undergraduate education. Jan quotes “a longtime professor” as saying that “one of the ways to teach the same number of students with less staff is to demand less of them.” Such changes will affect the educational mission of a great university in ways that eliminating landlines will not.

The recession has hit all institutions. The University of California is about to cut faculty compensation by 8 percent. All institutions are scrambling to reduce costs in order to conform to the new reality. But my own take on the situation is that short-term cost reduction and one-time savings will not succeed in producing the New Normal. I believe that what we need is for each institution to reconsider its mission in order to determine what fundamental organizational changes can be made in order to produce permanent savings while retaining the quality of education. We have been doing too much because a glut of revenue led us to believe that we did not have to make hard choices. But those days are gone forever — or for a very long time. Are we up to the new challenge?

(Brainstorm illustration incorporating photos by Flickr users Abulic Monkey and dawnzy58)

Comment [38]

June 17, 2009

Phil Curtin, RIP


(Photo of Philip Curtin from The New York Times)


My friend Phil Curtin died a couple of weeks ago. William Grimes published one of his characteristically nicely researched and written obits in The New York Times yesterday, accompanied by a nice photograph that was probably taken by his wife, Anne. Phil was 87 at the time of his death, and his health had been quite poor for the last couple of years. Still, it is hard to lose Phil.

Adria and I have been close to Phil and Anne since those years in the 1960s when we all lived in Madison, where Phil and I taught in the history department of the University of Wisconsin. I was then an altogether obscure assistant professor of early American history, but Phil was already a genuine titan. He was, above all, one of the pioneers of serious African history — one of those who studied Africa in context rather than as an emanation of European imperialism. He collaborated with Jan Vansina in those years to produce an entirely new school of African history, the most important in the world.

But Phil was also one of the pioneers of comparative history. He began a program in comparative tropical history built on the premise that climate was a significant factor in social development. I was a very minor player in the program through my interest in the Carribean, but the program (in a large and diverse department) managed to draw in historians concerned with the entire equatorial world. For me, comparative tropical history was both an intellectual jolt and a passport to fields of scholarship that had not even been dreamt of at Harvard, where I had been trained. Wisconsin was an enormously exciting place to be in those days — sometimes too exciting. But one of the things that drew Adria and me to Madison was the friendship of the Curtins, and especially the wonderful outdoors weekends we spent with them at their country house.

Phil left Madison for Johns Hopkins University (just as so many of us left UW for other apparently greener pastures in the 1970s). He kept up his pathbreaking scholarship, continuing to explore new fields, especially the relationship between biology and history. Later he and Anne retired to the Philadelphia area, which gave Adria and me the chance to reconnect with them, mainly at the twice-yearly American Philosophical Society meetings, where we always had dinner at a great restaurant (Fork, at 306 Market St. in Philadelphia) partly owned by the son of our UW colleague, Domenico Sella. Small world! For me, remembering Phil is remembering Phil and Anne, and recalling countless evenings of friendship and wonderful conversation. Phil was the historian’s historian, and I am deeply grateful to him for what he taught me. And for his friendship.

Comment [10]

June 13, 2009

Traditional History Courses

Are traditional history courses vanishing? That is the question Patti Cohen asked in last Thursday’s New York Times.

The hook for her story was a discussion at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations on whether the title of their journal, Diplomatic History, should be changed to something with broader appeal. Cohen reported that diplomatic historians feared that their field was no longer of interest to history departments. She cites figures provided by the ever-reliable Rob Townsend of the American Historical Association showing that, indeed, there has been a substantial decrease in the number of diplomatic historians over the past 30 years — and that the same is true of specialists in military and economic history.

On the whole, this is correct, and Cohen is on target when she suggests that the growth in history jobs has been in social and cultural fields, including women’s history and Afro-American history. My own take would be that the loss of diplomatic and military history jobs is indeed evidence of the overt lack of interest on the part of history departments.

The case of economic history is different. It has indeed almost disappeared from history departments, but that is because the field has been taken over by economics departments. More strikingly, though Cohen misses the point, political history has suffered a severe decline. She attributes some of this change to the decline in the history of particular nations, and there is some truth to that. But national history is far from dead. Rather, it is taught differently these days. I was trained to teach American and British history quite generally, though I focused on the first couple of centuries of American history and on 17th and 18th century British history. But, for more than a generation, younger historians have been trained much more narrowly. The other great change in interest and training (again, one ignored by Cohen) is in geography. My generation was interested in the history of the West, with some concern for East Asia, not more. Today, historians have truly global concerns, and there are courses on Africa, South Asia, and virtually all other areas of the globe. History departments have not gotten larger, and as specialists in non-Western history have been added, of course there have been declines in the traditional Western fields. In addition, as Cohen suggests, historians are concerns about recently perceived global problems such as global warming and disease pandemics.

I don’t think we should be concerned about the loss of traditional historical categories or courses. We are on the whole much better off for the much richer array of subject matter now offered by history departments. What is wrong is the overly technical orientation of our undergraduate courses. We should be very worried about both the hyperspecialization of both historians and their courses, which are increasingly based on narrow research interests and decreasingly based upon either student interest or need. It would be a good time for history departments to reconsider how their courses contribute to the liberal education of undergraduates rather than to the research needs of their faculty. And of course if we rethought our courses, we might select faculty in a very different manner.

Comment [19]

June 11, 2009

Commencement and Promotion

Early June is commencement season. The Princeton University exercises took place last Tuesday, June 2. They claim around here that “God is a Princetonian.” I don’t know about that, but we seem to have extraordinary good fortune in the weather for our out-of-doors ceremony. The setting, on the well-shaded lawn in front of historic Nassau Hall, is gorgeous. A decent number of faculty turn up to march and are seated on the platform, along with the prize winners — honorary-degree recipients, four outstanding New Jersey school teachers, and four notable faculty teachers. There are only three brief speeches — two by students, a Latin oration by the Salutatorian and an English oration by the Valedictorian, and one (of about 10 minutes) by Shirley Tilghman, our admirable president. It is all very civilized, and the whole ceremony clocks in at a little over an hour. I usually watch the streaming video while working in my office, but this year I marched, and was reminded of how moving an occasion a well-run commencement is.

For the most part, the honorary-degree recipients were pretty traditional: Ruby Dee Davis and Meryl Streep (two notably intelligent and interesting actresses), Alice Waters (the chef and sustainable-food advocate), an emeritus faculty member (as is our habit). But for me the high point was the degree awarded to Ernesto Cortes, the superb community organizer from San Antonio, whose career I hold up for admiration each fall to the students in my course on Civil Society and Public Policy. I always love the awards to the school teachers — I serve on the committee that selects them. And of course I enjoy seeing some of my favorite colleagues recognized for their commitment to teaching. This year both of the student orations were pretty bland, I thought, though the Valedictorian is one of the best undergraduate pianists I have ever heard perform — perhaps they should have provided a piano for him. President Tilgman gave a graceful talk whose theme was the need for our graduates to seize a Rahm Emmanuel moment and make an opportunity out of a crisis: “The skills and traits that we strived to instill in you — critical thinking and writing, a finely tuned moral compass, a disciplined work ethic, a commitment to excellence in whatever you choose to do, compassion for those less privileged and a devotion to service — will serve you well whatever comes next.” I doubt we have instilled all of those admirable qualities in our students, but it was a suitably upbeat statement.

The next day my wife and I flew to Santa Barbara, California for the middle school “promotion” exercises for our grandson Sam Katz (who would like to see his name in print). There were 500 8th graders on the lawn at La Collina School, with parents (and grandparents) on folding chairs brought from home. There were two or three nice student speeches (gratitude to teachers and staff at La Collina) and a quite nice talk by the principal (go forth and do good). Everyone seemed happy and devoted to community service, despite their terror of high school next year. At least the 8th graders did not have to worry about finding jobs this summer. Hope springs eternal in June. And a good thing, too.

Comment

June 10, 2009

Jim Leach at NEH

I think that President Obama has made a great choice for the Chairmanship of NEH in Jim Leach. Admission: He is a close friend and Princeton University colleague.

It is hard to think of a public official in recent years who has shown greater support for and understanding of the humanities than Jim Leach. He was, of course, one of the founders of the Congressional Humanities Caucus, and he was the deserving recipient of the National Humanities Alliance’s Sidney R. Yates Award for Distinguished Public Service to the Humanities. For the 30 years he was on the Hill, his support was crucial to the creation of a favorable climate for all aspects of the humanities. He was, especially during his last years in Washington, our go-to guy.

By now everyone has read a lot about Jim. Younger humanists will probably not know that there used to be such a thing as liberal internationalist Republicans — Jim is one of the last of the species. He also models integrity in public life in a way that seems striking in these dark times — he won the Wayne Morse “Integrity in Politics” Award several years ago. Earlier, he was educated in political science (we call it “Politics” here at Princeton), where he graduated in 1964, and he later did graduate work in international relations both at Johns Hopkins and at LSE. He worked on the Hill right after his college graduation, and later became a Foreign Service Officer, resigning from government service in protest of the Saturday Night Massacre in 1973. He has all the right moves and all the right stuff.

It is also important to say that Jim is actually and spiritually an Iowan. I am also a Midwesterner, but Jim is really a Midwesterner. He is a soft-spoken, thoughtful, unassuming, deliberate, and considerate person — he has all of the Middle American virtues. But he is also an expert in finance (he chaired the House Banking Committee) and Asian affairs (he chaired the Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs). He and his accomplished art historian wife Deba are art collectors. He is, in short, a really interesting guy, and he is as nice as anyone I know.

Jim is of course not a professional humanist, but we have learned the hard way that a Ph.D. is neither necessary nor sufficient to qualify someone as a successful NEH chair. Indeed, since the Endowment was founded in 1965 there have not been many truly distinguished chairs (don’t ask, and I won’t tell). I think, however, that Jim has the instincts and the background to be superb in the job. I am especially confident that he comprehends the breadth and complexity of the stakeholders in the national humanities community, and he also understands that the humanities do not stop at the water’s edge. I can’t wait to see what Jim Leach will do in the Old Post Office Building.

Comment [17]

June 1, 2009

Tiananmen Square -- 1989 and 2009

Yesterday’s New York Times evoked a very painful memory of China for me. I usually read The Week in Review section first, and this week I found that the entire op-ed page was devoted to memories of June, 1989 in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. When I then turned to the front section, however, I was confronted with a long article on the emergence of Shanghai as one of the world’s most prosperous and glamorous cities. The conjunction of the two articles was only in my mind, of course, since the newspaper editors clearly did not see any connection. Let me tell you why I was upset.

When I worked for the American Council of Learned Societies, one of my responsibilities was to sit on the board of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China, the organization that organized most graduate student and faculty exchanges between the U.S. and the P.R.C. The CSCPRC maintained an office in the Friendship Hotel in Beijing, and from 1988 for many years I visited China once or twice a year. Like most American visitors in those days, I fell in love with the country and its people, and I looked for occasions to visit.

Such an opportunity arose in the spring of 1989, when I was asked to review American-studies programs in China. I planned a visit for late May, but when the democracy protestors took over Tiananmen Square, my wife became concerned that there might be violence and urged me to cancel the trip. We agreed that I should consult Fred Wakeman, who was both the president of SSRC and one of the greatest experts on China, before going ahead with the trip. But Fred assured us that nothing dramatic was going to happen, and I flew to Shanghai (via Tokyo) at the very end of May. Well, Fred (like me) was an historian, and everyone knows that historians cannot even predict the past, much less the future — and he could not have been more wrong.

I was on the campus of Fudan University in Shanghai on the Saturday in early June when the army moved into the Square in Beijing, and on the next morning I gave a lecture on “constitutionalism and individual rights” at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences — the President of the Academy insisted that I go through with the lecture despite the ongoing violence in Beijing. I never made it to Beijing, and indeed could not depart China until June 8. When our plane bound for Hong Kong left the runway in Shanghai, half the passengers were crying and half were applauding. I was crying.

And now it is 20 years later. China is a creditor nation and the United States is a debtor nation. The Chinese seem to agree with Mao that “getting rich is glorious,” and parts of China are as richly developed as any places in the world. The 2008 Olympics were a sort of coming-out party for the new, market socialist nation, in which perestroika has triumphed over glasnost. Some people are applauding and some are crying. I am crying.

Comment [8]

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