My father’s mother could read a bit but could not write, I’ve heard. What can it mean to read and not to write? I have taken as my title “At Both Ends Of the Spectrum.” All the colours of the spectrum work together to annul difference and make the equality of the selfsame light appear. All our concepts and metaphors of the coming into appearance of the phenomenal world, of the sensible world of space and time, relate to light. Yet we do not all have an equal right to dispose of the phenomenal world. From my own experience over the last thirteen years, teaching the children of the poorest of the poor, and training their teachers, I would say that it is not access to the phenomenal world that we are talking about. It is of the right to dispose of the phenomenal world that we speak. I must think of our everyday light as divided into the ghostliness of the spectrum. The spectrum, and this is its primary meaning, is the ghost of light that we want to deny. In a little, I will show you a bit of writing from the other end of the spectrum from this well-lit place. I have learnt that it is there that the philosophical questions have the greatest purchase and there is no one there to tell me that I cannot be understood.

Let me begin, however, at this end, in New York City, where I also teach. There, too, the ghost of light appears and is denied. I am a university teacher there. I am going to talk about CUNY, the public, urban university, and Columbia, a more elite, private university. And this difference is felt in the division of the City into uptown, downtown, and midtown. From 1990 to 2000 a commission appointed by Rudolf Giuliani investigated the City University of New York (CUNY) and criticized the system because 87% of its incoming graduate class was in remedial English. The mayor’s report separated the old minorities from the new and went on to say, “during the 1990s the white population of New York City declined by 19.3% while the black, Hispanic and Asian populations have risen by 5.2%, 19.3% and 53.5%.” This mayor’s report makes for very interesting reading.