Via a number of sources: “Cracks in the Ivory Towers,” bu Polly Curtis and John Crace, in the Guardian.
Although the article is about a report on academic life in the UK, it presents much to think about concerning what’s going on in America, too.
Erin O’Connor points to a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual,” by Mark Bauerlein, who writes
The public has now picked up the message that “campuses are havens for left-leaning activists,” according to a Chronicle poll of 1,000 adult Americans this year. Half of those surveyed — 68 percent who call themselves “conservative” and even 30 percent who say they are “liberal” — agreed that colleges improperly introduce a liberal bias into what they teach. The matter, however, is clearly not just one of perception. Indeed, in another recent survey, this one conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute of the University of California at Los Angeles, faculty members themselves chose as their commitment “far left” or “liberal” more than two and a half times as often as “far right” or “conservative.” As a Chronicle article last month put it: “On left-leaning campuses around the country, professors on the right feel disenfranchised.”
Meanwhile, Daniel Davies of Crooked Timber takes note of all the commentary on what’s wrong with the Left in America, given their dismal performance at putting candidates in office last week:
The idea is that, it seems, you can connect almost anything to the phrase ìthis is a serious problem for The Leftî in much less than six steps of argument. So the name of the game is to start with a googlewhack from the site and end via a chain of fairly close reasoning with an argument that the Democrats need to consider your googlewhack in depth.
Can you see where I’m going with this? If there aren’t enough conservatives on college campuses, it’s the fault of the liberals. If there are too many conservatives in government, it’s the fault of the liberals. Do you think if we switched things around, the argument would still work? There are too many conservatives on college campuses, and it’s the fault of the liberals. There are too many liberals in government, and it’s the fault of the liberals. Yup, it works that way, too. It’s the universal causality argument!
I think there’s a lesson here for the Democratic party: observe how those on the Right react when they are under-represented. They do not wring their hands and worry about what they’re doing wrong. They do not sit and listen patiently while those from the other side point out their failings. They simply express indignation that they have not been given their fair share. They say, in effect, “We’re right. You’re wrong. Back off and give us some space.”
I’ll be heading back east to visit family and friends in December. And yes, I’ll be in Philadelphia for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association at the same time as many of the folks who read this blog. I’d be happy to meet as many of you as want to get together at this annual shin-dig. Last year, I met up with Chuck and Kathleen in the hotel bar (and I met Steven Shaviro briefly).
This year there seem to be many more likely-to-attend-MLA bloggers who are aware of each other. With that in mind, I’ve taken the liberty of creating MLA Bloggers. If you’d like to contribute, send me an email.
Also, let’s all write to the organizers of the MLA to ask them to put the entire conference program online, so that misrepresentations of the work we do will not be quite so easy to get away with. What the heck, let’s all write MLA President Robert Scholes.
Bonus Links: “
The Academic Job Interview Revisited,” by Mary Dillon Johnson (via Prof Grrrrl).
I am generally disappointed with what’s been written on the occasion of philosopher Jacques Derrida’s death because so much of appears to be just plain wrong or poorly informed. I’m not just talking about people who refer to his writing as “drivel” or “nonsense.” Those people are either stupid or intellectually lazy, and I’ve never been very interested in interacting with people who display those qualities. My mama didn’t raise me that way.
I would never take a strong, public stand for or against some intellectual movement about which I am not very knowledgeable. If I don’t understand something, my strategy is to defer extensive or ostensibly definitive commentary. This is what scholars are supposed to do. If you are irritated with Derrida because you read an essay or two in grad school that rubbed you the wrong way, or because someone told you what he stands for and you don’t like the sound of it, then you are not qualified to pass judgment upon his work or its influence. I am as impatient as the next person with Derrida’s often-opaque writing style, but comprehension is as much a function of the abilities of the reader as of the clarity of the writer.
If a student were to ask me to define deconstruction, the movement that Derrida is credited with founding, I would say something like this, “All seemingly coherent and self-contained systems actually contain within themselves the seeds of their own undoing. Something that seems to be one thing could actually be said to be its exact opposite.” However, I would also acknowledge that this two-sentence description is probably violently reductive, and smart people have written reams on the subject. I would then help that student find some of that writing.
Here’s something I did like, something that provides as accurate (to me) a summation of Derrida’s intellectual project as we might ask for. Scott McLemee links to a 2003 piece by Terry Eagleton, who writes:
[Derrida] did indeed comment that “there is nothing outside the text”, but he did not mean by this that Mme Derrida or the Arc de Triomphe were just thinly disguised pieces of writing. He meant that there is nothing in the world that is not “textual”, in the sense of being made up of a complex weave of elements which prevents it from being cleanly demarcated from something else. “Textual” means that nothing stands gloriously alone. He has never argued that anything can mean anything, rather that meaning is never final or stable. No system of meaning can ever be unshakeably founded. “Decentring” human beings does not mean abolishing them, but denying that they can ever be independent of the forces that went into their making. To deconstruct does not mean to destroy, but to show that terms which seem to be opposites (say, “man” and “woman”) violently suppress the ways in which they are secretly in collusion. Or, more generally, to show how every coherent system is forced at certain key points to violate its own logic. It is, Derrida has insisted, a form of political critique, not just a literary method. Indeed, he has recently described deconstruction as a kind of radicalised Marxism – a claim which is hardly likely to endear him to the killjoys of King’s Parade, but which is scarcely consistent with claiming that he believes in nothing but writing.
What a week! Two very smart people appear in high profile news outlets. First, Chuck, whom I’ve been friends with for over a decade, is one of the bloggers mentioned in a Guardian article on academic blogging. Then Seth Silberman, with whom I went to grad school, is quoted in a CNN story. I have a feeling the academic conference on Michael Jackson is going to attract criticism from the usual reactionary quarters (haven’t looked yet). Seth is no stranger to controversy: when he taught a course on sexuality at the University of Maryland, there were those who were up in arms over the use of the film Showgirls in the classroom.