There is much talk among the literary Darwinists and their allies about not wanting to go back to the days of “old-boy humanism,” with its “impressionistic” reading and “belletristic” writing. (Only in English departments could good writing be considered a bad thing.) But no matter the age or gender of the practitioner, any really worthwhile criticism will share the expressive qualities of literature itself. It will be personal, because art is personal. It will not be definitive; it will not be universally valid. It will be a product of its times, though it will see beyond those times. It will not satisfy the dean’s desire for accumulable knowledge, the parent’s desire for a marketable skill or the Congressman’s desire for a generation of technologists. All it will do is help us understand who we are, where we came from and where we’re going. Until the literary academy is willing to stand up in public and defend that mission without apology, it will never find its way out of the maze.
Gail Collins: David, can we talk hot-button social issues for a second? I know this is not really an area where you fly the conservative colors, but you’re the go-to guy on how America lives, and I’d like to hear your thoughts even if we can’t work up a fight.
This just makes me want to lie down on top of the Applebee’s salad bar and never get up again.
So I’m back from the AAUP national meeting, and I’ve decided that I’m a bad person for not blogging about Garcetti v. Ceballos or Hong v. Grant (.pdf) until now. (Marc Bousquet was all over it more than a year ago.) The Hong case is just one example of what I call the Children of Garcetti, and if you teach at a public university in the United States (or if you know someone who does), you should know about Garcetti.
Here’s the Oyezsummary of the case. Since Garcetti involves the fate of a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles who was whistleblowing with regard to what appeared to be a fraudulent affidavit, most people didn’t realize that it might have implications for academic freedom. Ah, but not the AAUP’s legal staff! They were on the case, so to speak, from the start (here’s a .pdf of the brief). Which is yet another reason you all (if you’re college professors) should have joined the AAUP by now, because (a) the AAUP sees these things coming when most of the rest of us don’t and (b) helps to fight ‘em in court. Indeed, the AAUP/ Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression brief seems to have caught the attention of David Souter, who, bless his retiring heart, wrote in dissent:
This ostensible domain beyond the pale of the First Amendment is spacious enough to include even the teaching of a public university professor, and I have to hope that today’s majority does not mean to imperil First Amendment protection of academic freedom in public colleges and universities, whose teachers necessarily speak and write “pursuant to official duties.”
In response, Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, citing Bugs Bunny, replied, “ehhhhhh … could be!” Though the actual language was this:
There is some argument that expression related to academic scholarship or classroom instruction implicates additional constitutional interests that are not fully accounted for by this Court’s customary employee-speech jurisprudence. We need not, and for that reason do not, decide whether the analysis we conduct today would apply in the same manner to a case involving speech related to scholarship or teaching.
In other words, we’re leaving that door open, thanks—if any lower courts want to walk through it, just make sure they wipe their feet on the 1940 Statement of Principles of Academic Freedom.
In January 1995 I published a little essay that almost nobody liked. Eh, that happens sometimes. It was a review essay on the then-recently-published work of a couple of African-American public intellectuals, and I wrote it quite simply because the New Yorker asked me to. I was a newly-tenured associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I was surprised by the request; to this day it’s the only time I’ve written for the New Yorker. And then, within about three months of the thing’s appearance, a whole mess of people decided to weigh in on the work of a couple of African-American public intellectuals. Many of those people came to the conclusion that I had done a pretty piss-poor job of writing about the recently-published work of a couple of African-American public intellectuals; the general verdict was that I had basically written a press release, a puff piece on a bunch of lightweights and/or sellouts. But some of those people weren’t responding to me at all; they had much more important figures to go after, like Cornel West. And it wasn’t just my little essay they were responding to; my essay was bad enough, sure, but it was compounded by the appearance, in the March 1995 Atlantic, of a much longer essay by Robert Boynton. That essay was about the work of a couple of other African-American intellectuals, and, like my essay, it drew a loose analogy between contemporary African-American intellectuals and the New York intellectuals of yesteryear, so clearly there was some kind of conspiracy afoot.
In comments to a post over at my newly-renamed Other Place, a person by the handle of FrogProf directed me to this discussion of Mark Taylor’s recent (and very strange) New York Times op-ed. Taylor’s essay is modestly titled “End the University as We Know It,” and the response, from (as it says on the blog banner) a veteran of cultural studies seminars in the 1990’s who has since moved into academic administration, takes apart Taylor’s proposal for replacing departments with temporary topic-clusters with seven-year sunset clauses:
I’m at a loss to explain where all these interdisciplinary experts will get their disciplinary expertise. Yes, a significant part of grad school involves exploring new questions. But another significant part—the part he skips—involves getting grounding in the history of a given line of inquiry. Call it a canon or a discipline or a tradition, but it’s part of the toolkit scholars bring to bear on new questions. Abandoning the toolkit in favor of, well, ad hoc autodidacticism doesn’t really solve the problem. If anything, it makes existing grads even less employable than they already are. I need to hire someone to teach Intro to Sociology. Is a graduate of a program in “Body” or “Water” capable? How the hell do I know? (And even if I think I do, can I convince an accrediting agency?) Am I taking the chance? In this market? Uh, that would be ‘no.’
I agree that Taylor’s proposal is unworkable, but I have a tangential-but-related point. Challenging the departmental structure of universities (whatever you might think of that project) isn’t the same thing as doing away with disciplines.
Last Thursday I took part in a plenary session of the US Cultural Studies Association. The session was called “the university after cultural studies,” and the participants were (besides myself) Marc Bousquet, Michele Janette, Cary Nelson, Sangeeta Ray, and Jeff Williams. We were each given eight minutes to speak, and we were admirably (I might say anomalously) disciplined, coming in at 50 minutes altogether. For those who might be interested, I’ll post my remarks below, with this brief explanation/ introduction: my talk assumes that everybody in the ballroom, at a cultural studies conference, can speak to the impact of cultural studies on their own research and/or teaching and/or program and/or department, so that somebody has to get up and say that whole entire huge sectors of the university are not “after” cultural studies at all: they didn’t have any cultural studies to begin with, so they’re not “after” cultural studies in a temporal sense, and they’re not interested in doing any now, so they’re not “after” cultural studies in that sense either.
Yes, hogging time is here again! I never did finish hockey blogging for the 2006-07 season, and completely blew off blogging about the 2007-08 season, so let me start off in 2009 by predicting that the Anaheim Mighty Merely Ducks will overpower the Ottawa Senators in 2007 and that in 2008 the Detroit Red Wings and Pittsburgh Penguins will finally deliver us from the bizarre string of Stanley Cup finals involving Obscure Canadian Cities* v. Sweltering Towns in the Southern US That Weren’t Aware They Had Hockey Teams (Calgary v. Tampa Bay, Edmonton v. Carolina, Ottawa v. Anaheim). For obvious reasons, those Finals were ratings dynamite—or would have been, if they had been televised. No, wait, they were televised! Apparently you can watch National Hockey League games in the US by tuning to a channel called “Against,” which is available on cable channel 488356 (if you get the special ultra supreme X-treme package) and which features, along with hockey, an unbeatable combination of bull riding, cage fighting, riding-mower racing, and competitive flogging. So that’s positive.
Just as in 2007, veteran Calgary Flames fan Scott Lemieux will offer his take on the playoffs over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, and I’ll do the honors here, where rumor has it that people have been clamoring for hockey blogging with a mighty clamor. Though I’ll put most of this under the fold, so that the three or four clamorers and I won’t disturb all the rest of you. [click to continue…]
Inviting one and all to the April 15 Tin Foil Hat Parades Tea Parties to protest Obama’s gay Islamic socialism and the Obama Depression it has brought upon us all. And also to protest fraud in government, a subject about which Newt is an acknowledged expert.
Please join Newt and the “big ideas” people of the new GOP —Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, and J. T. Plumber—as they issue their bold new Declaration of Independence from Economic Reality one week from today.
While I was at LSU talking about disability and stuff, a graduate student asked me about Obama’s “Special Olympics” gaffe on The Tonight Show. I said more or less what you’d expect: that it was a stunningly foolish and thoughtless remark, and something of a bitter irony that the United States’ first African-American president had become the first president to use “Special Olympics” as a laugh line. Guess we didn’t see that coming!
Now, of course I know the joke was supposed to be self-deprecating. But there are much better ways to be self-deprecating! Obama could have mocked his bowling skills by saying “I brought my Z game,” which would have been Very Funny because it would have been a play on the sports-cliché of bringing one’s A game, you see, and it would not have offended any Z-Americans, since they have notoriously generous senses of humor.
Exclusive to Crooked Timber but also cross-posted here.
My extensive online research has uncovered the existence of a secret Internet cabal of reporters, journalists, bloggers, writers, and reporters. Apparently, their self-assigned mission is to ignore major news stories, pass silently over rampant corruption in American government and business, and ridicule wonks and elected officials who take “issues” seriously. Instead, they seek—often by fawningly citing each other’s work—to inundate American media with inane, trivial bullshit and deliberate stupidity.
The group is called “Twit,” and it is allegedly responsible for innumerable stories and op-eds about Michelle Obama’s biceps, Hillary Clinton’s cleavage, Al Gore’s wardrobe, and Barack Obama’s flag pin.
Shorter Mark Bauerlein: When David Horowitz is right, he’s right. And he’s right to be outraged that the web site of the Women’s Studies program at Penn State proclaims that “as a field of study, Women’s Studies analyzes the unequal distribution of power and resources by gender.”
My reply: I used to be on the left. But when I heard that the web site of the Women’s Studies program at Penn State proclaims that “as a field of study, Women’s Studies analyzes the unequal distribution of power and resources by gender,” I got really outraged by Mary Daly.
ShorterVerbatim Mark Bauerlein: “what if biased attitudes prevail only in a half-dozen departments? If academics accept those levels, then they exercise a lower standard of accountability than any other profession.”
My reply: My studies show that Women’s Studies is responsible for tainted peanut butter, Rod Blagojevich, juvenile court payoffs, and especially, especially AIG. Which makes academe the most corrupt profession ever, times infinity.
Rev. of Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here: The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time. Forthcoming from Dutton (Penguin), 2009.
Time just isn’t what it used to be. And space has gotten to be a bit of a problem, as well. When I was a lad, physicists told me that they had these things pretty well figured out: they had discovered material evidence of the Big Bang, they had adjusted their conception of the age and evolution of the universe accordingly, and, having recalculated the universe’s rate of expansion (after Hubble’s disastrous miscalculations threw the field into disarray), they were working on the problem of trying to figure out whether the whole thing would keep expanding forever or would eventually slow down and snap back in a Big Crunch. The key, they said, lay in finding all the “missing mass” that would enable a Big Crunch to occur, because at the time it looked as if we only had two or three percent of the stuff it would take to bring it all back home. When I asked them why a Big Crunch, and a cyclical universe, should be preferable to a universe that just keeps going and going, they told me that the idea of a cyclical eternity was more pleasing and comfortable than the idea of a one-off event; and when I asked them what came before the Big Bang, they patted my head and told me that because the Big Bang initiated all space and time, there was no such thing as “before the Big Bang.”
Back when I was the director of the humanities program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, we had our conferences and our lecture series and such things. For obvious reasons, it is much more difficult to host such things than to be a guest at them, and the experience taught me not only what it’s like to have Host Anxiety Dreams but also—I hope!—how to be a Good Guest. What’s it like to deal with the Guest From Hell? Well, one year, at the urging of a colleague, I booked a speaker who wound up changing his flight arrangements at the last moment, at a stunning cost of $1000, and then cancelled on us anyway. When he eventually arrived, the next semester, he gave a mildly interesting if off-the-cuff talk, went home, and then sent me an outraged email when his honorarium arrived, for, although it was in the amount we’d stipulated, it was not in the amount to which he had (quite quickly!) become accustomed. When I pointed this out to him, things quickly escalated to the point at which he threatened to tell my dean on me, to which I replied, please do, by all means, and I will be happy to copy your department chair and dean on all our correspondence, going back to your initial change of travel plans and subsequent cancellation. That ended that little exchange, and I don’t believe we’ve kept in touch since.
Anyway, having encountered a few Guests From Hell, I’ve sometimes wondered what it would be like to host an entire Speakers’ Series From Hell. And now I know!
On the bus home from Philadelphia a few weeks ago, I had an Important Insight. It was an insight borne of decades of driving and my last couple of academic gigs, which (because of their locations far from airports) have entailed traveling in shuttles and buses and vans and town cars and rickshaws. And I’ve decided to share it with you, just because (and just below the fold).