More on Korean Prep Schools: An Interview with Joe Foster ‘94
What proportion of Williams students should come from abroad? The debate on the relative merits of international candidates is an Ephblog staple, and last week, the topic re-emerged following the publication of a New York Times article on elite Korean prep schools. The piece detailed the intense academic environment at the Daewon Foreign Language High School in Seoul, which students attend with the goal of eventually gaining acceptance to a prestigious American university.
We, however, have a man on the scene. Williams graduate Joe Foster teaches at the Daewon School and was quoted in the Times article, testifying to the dedication of his students. He was kind enough to discuss, via e-mail, his experience at an education institution very different from those we are accustomed to.
Ephblog: How did you wind up at the Daewon School?
Foster: Well, my parents are both teachers and I was raised at a boarding school in California, where my father was a dean, so I’ve been around education all my life. Maybe for that reason I always harbored some resistance to both school and teaching. After the dot-com crash, though, I was ready for a change and some travel, so I came to Seoul. I didn’t have much of a long-term plan, but I got a job teaching SAT prep and really took to it — in fact, I completely fell in love with teaching. I stayed at that job for four and a half years, and the first time I looked for something else I stumbled across the Daewon position. I’ve been at Daewon for just over a year.
Zuckerman ‘93 Interview
A dated but fascinating interview with Eph blogger Ethan Zuckerman ‘93.
It’s pretty hard to expect technology to turn non-democracies into democracies. Where I think technology can make a huge difference is where you have a young and fragile democracy. In those cases, I think what helps is finding ways to empower individuals.
Empowering individuals, for example, to avoid systematic corruption –that’s the kind of project which has leverage. Put the customs service online. Customs is a place where there’s an enormous amount of corruption, where goods come in the door and lots of money changes hands under the table. If you can put that system online, it becomes much harder to subvert. When the whole thing is on paper, it’s easy for a corrupt official to charge you money for the stamp or refuse to process your invoice unless they get a bribe. When it’s all online, it’s much easier to say, here’s my money, here’s my form, where’s my shipment?
Interesting stuff. This is strangely enough not unconnected to what I try to do here with respect to Williams. Although Williams is infinitely less corrupt than the sort of places that Zuckerman worries about, there are plenty of issues that should be more widely known/considered/debated. Prior to the web, it was very hard for a non-wealthly alum to have any meaningful knowledge or input into how the College does things. Alas, it is still fair to say that EphBlog’s influence is minimal, but at least it is greater than zero.
In terms of specific examples, I am most proud of our work in Nigaleian. It is not clear to me that the College ever would have fessed up were it not for EphBlog. See also my concerns with conflicts of interests in charitable contributions and with Morty’s salary.
Again, I would never charge Williams with being corrupt. I do believe, however, more scrutiny leads to different and, generally, better behavior.
Fisketjon ‘76 Interview
An interview with editor Gary Fisketjon ‘76.
Slushpile: Knopf, like most of the major publishers, no longer accepts unsolicited, un-agented submissions. Do you ever fear that you might be missing some great new writer with this policy?
Fisketjon: Not true. We get scores, possibly hundreds, of them every week and log countless hours considering them - not, perhaps, to the satisfaction of those submitting them, but surely to my satisfaction, and surely more than any baseball-minded fool would get if he were to walk up to Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park and demand a try-out. Aspiring writers always tell me that agents are less accommodating in this respect, but about that you’d have to ask an agent.
Who needs an agent when you can blog? More on Fisketjon here:
“Who says there are no great editors anymore,” asks Peter Carey in the acknowledgments to his new novel, a reference to Gary Fisketjon. Novelists Kent Haruf and Joy Williams, also guests at this year’s conference call Gary ‘editor,’ as have Raymond Carver, Jay McInerny, Bill Morrissey, and Tobias Wolff from previous UND conferences.
And here:
And now we come to the club master, Gary Fisketjon, who knew and encouraged them all, this band of renegade writers who, one after another, found fellowships, publishers, and universities that welcomed them.
I know little about him accept he chain-smokes unfiltered Camels and is a vital and welcoming editor to the talented. He is about fifty and has been described as a cross between Maxwell Perkins and Steve McQueen.
Why not Fisketjon as Commencement speaker this coming fall, in connection with his 30th anniversary? He seems as accomplished as an editor as past Commencement speakers have been in their more visible fields.
Vincent ‘60 Interview
Great interview with former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent ‘60. Best part:
Q: President Bush was one of your main supporters when the owners forced you out. What do you recall from that time, and would he make a good baseball commissioner?
A: He was interested in being commissioner at one point.
I lived in his house one summer when I was a kid, working for his father in the oil business. I knew George President 43 when he was nine years old.
I wrote about his being very supportive of me in a book I published. He read the book and called me and said ‘it was a very nice chapter I did on him.’ He said, ‘but you weren’t even in the room. The things they called you, the names they used about you.’ He said ‘Fay, I could write the chapter better than you did because I was there.’ I said, ‘I have a feeling you’ll do a book someday Mr. President, and you can straighten it out.’
I think loyalty is a great asset. He was enormously loyal to me and I’m loyal to him. He was a very good owner, he cared a lot about the game. I told someone a great story about him and Palmeiro. One day I was in Texas with George Bush watching the game. We were seated in a box next to the dugout, Palmeiro was a big star for Texas in those days — they had (Ruben) Sierra, they had a bunch of Hispanic players, Juan Samuel, they could all hit. The game went into extra innings, it was about 120 degrees, it was just brutal. In the 12th, Palmeiro was coming up, and George said to him ‘Raffy, the commissioner is tired, he wants to go home. Let’s get this game over. Why don’t you hit one out and we’ll all go to bed.’ Raffy goes out and, don’t you know, he hits a home run. He comes around and comes by the dugout and the now-president says ‘Good job, we’re all out of here.’
Baseball fans should read the whole thing.
Drezner ‘90 Interview
Here is a fun interview of the premier blogging Eph, Dan Drezner ‘90. (Hat tip: Instapundit)
Who are your intellectual heroes? Adam Smith, Albert Hirschman, Thomas Schelling, Friedrich von Hayek, and Samuel Huntington.
Who are your cultural heroes? Joss Whedon, Whit Stillman, Frank Miller and Alan Moore.
I share Dan’s intellectual heroes (although Hirschman is overrated), but have never heard of any of his cultural heroes. Not that that’s a bad thing . . .
