“Boomers” and “stickers”

During the course of his 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, Wendell Berry explained how his family, a century ago, suffered economic hardship caused by John B. Duke and the American Tobacco Company.

He then invokes a pair of terms he learned from Wallace Stegner to make sense of the differences between Duke and his grandparents:

He thought rightly that we Americans, by inclination at least, have been divided into two kinds: “boomers” and “stickers.” Boomers, he said, are “those who pillage and run,” who want “to make a killing and end up on Easy Street,” whereas stickers are “those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.”“Boomer” names a kind of person and a kind of ambition that is the major theme, so far, of the history of the European races in our country. “Sticker” names a kind of person and also a desire that is, so far, a minor theme of that history, but a theme persistent enough to remain significant and to offer, still, a significant hope.

The boomer is motivated by greed, the desire for money, property, and therefore power. James B. Duke was a boomer, if we can extend the definition to include pillage in absentia. He went, or sent, wherever the getting was good, and he got as much as he could take.

Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it. Of my grandfather I need to say only that he shared in the virtues and the faults of his kind and time, one of his virtues being that he was a sticker. He belonged to a family who had come to Kentucky from Virginia, and who intended to go no farther. He was the third in his paternal line to live in the neighborhood of our little town of Port Royal, and he was the second to own the farm where he was born in 1864 and where he died in 1946.

A century later—in rural areas, small towns, and large cities, on farms and in factories and offices across the country—the “boomers” are once again subjecting the “stickers” to economic hardship.

UK, Berry, and King Coal

Wendell Berry has decided to pull many of his personal papers from the University of Kentucky’s archives.

Berry is protesting [ht: lm] the decision to name a new dorm for UK basketball players the Wildcat Coal Lodge.

Berry, 75, said UK’s push to become a “Top 20″ research university has caused it to stray from its land-grant university obligation to address Kentucky’s problems.

“The coal business came up, and that for me was just the last straw,” Berry said Tuesday. “I don’t think the University of Kentucky can be so ostentatiously friendly to the coal industry. . .and still be a friend to me and the interests for which I have stood for the last 45 years. . .If they love the coal industry that much, I have to cancel my friendship.”

Berry, among the most revered of Kentucky writers and a former recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, received bachelor’s and master’s degrees at UK and later returned to the university for two separate stints of teaching.

Here’s an excerpt from his essay, “The Loss of the University” (which is included in Home Economics [NY: North Point Press, 1987]):

If for the sake of its own health, a university must be interested in the question of the truth of what it teaches, then, for the sake of the world’s health, it must be interested in the fate of that truth and the uses made of it in the world. It must want to know where its graduates live, where they work, and what they do. Do they return home with their knowledge to enhance and protect the life of their neighborhoods? Do they join the “upwardly mobile” professional force now exploiting and destroying local communities, both human and natural, all over the country? Has the work of the university, over the last generation, increased or decreased literacy and knowledge of the classics? Has it increased or decreased the general understanding of the sciences? Has it increased or decreased pollution and soil erosion? Has it increased or decreased the ability and the willingness of public servants to tell the truth? Such questions are not, of course, precisely answerable. Questions of influence never are. But they are askable, and the asking, should we choose to ask, would be a unifying and a shaping force.

That’s precisely the set of questions the new corporate university refuses to ask.