“This is the final lesson of the late bloomer; his or her success is highly contingent on the effort of others.” Malcolm Gladwell defends this idea, in his essay “Late Bloomers” (The New Yorker, October 20, 2008), by delving into the life of the award-winning American writer Ben Fountain; Fountain was financially supported for over a decade by his wife Sharie, who “believed in her husband’s art or perhaps, more simply, she believed in her husband ….” Gladwell explores, too, the career of the French painter Paul Cézanne, who was bankrolled by his well-to-do (banker) father, and

   One of my (guilty?) pleasures is to pause from time to time outside our classrooms, and listen to the lectures going on within. What I hear is so intriguing across the spectrum of our College’s disciplines, that the devaluation and, alongside it, the threat of defunding the Arts and Humanities seem ever out-of-step with the core and reach of human achievement.