ACTA's Must-Reads

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On the limits of classroom speech

When is a joke a threat? Who decides how a remark was intended, or what reactions to a remark are reasonable? Where does academic freedom end and unprotected expression begin? All these questions are on the table at Bowling Green State University, where an accounting professor was recently suspended without pay until January 1 after a joke fell flat with his students. Last February, frustrated when a student arrived late to his class, Norman Eckel made a comment about bringing a gun to class and shooting his students. The comment was made in the context of broad joking about student lateness, but Eckel's students did not take the comment itself as a joke. After several of them filed a complaint, the university investigated Eckel, concluding after a four-month-long inquiry that he had violated the university's Academic Charter by intimidating his students. A university spokesperson was unable to cite the exact policy Eckel allegedly violated. Eckel, who has been teaching at Bowling Green since 1979, must now submit to "professional development" education and "undergo peer reviews of his teaching each semester" as part of his punishment. He has sixty days to appeal. Eckel's case is being covered by Bowling Green's student paper. The article does not note whether he was accorded due process during his investigation.

Posted by acta online at 08:50 AM | Comments (0)

Political litmus tests in Oregon

University of Oregon administrators were surprised by the response they received from faculty and from the media after they revealed a draft of their new "Five-Year Diversity Plan." According to a highly critical staff editorial in the Democrat-Herald, the 22-page document would implement a plan to ensure that each department, faculty member, staff employee, and student demonstrates "cultural competency." "Cultural competency" is in turn revealed by the document to be a code phrase for conformity to a distinctly political agenda. Professors, for example, would be required to show "demonstrable commitment to cultural competency;" evaluation of professorial "cultural competency" would then be tied to raises and promotions. Likewise, students would have to demonstrate their cultural competency by satisfying a course requirement in gender and sexuality. "Classified staff" would be required to attend sensitivity training sessions. The university would seek to alter the ethnic composition of its student body and to hire more women and minority faculty members.

The Associated Press reports that the university plans to double the number of minority students attending the university over the next five years, largely by funding minority scholarships for graduate and undergraduate students. The drafters of the plan do not seem to recognize the legal problems with such scholarships, which have been clearly marked by the Office of Civil Rights as discriminatory. This lack of awareness is particularly striking given that the university is presently coming under fire for a similarly discriminatory course registration quota system.

The outcry over the plan was immediate and unequivocal. Chemistry professor Michael Kellman has called the plan "Orwellian" and "totalitarian," noting that "I wasn't hired to be evaluated and even interrogated about cultural competency, whatever that is." According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 professors wrote to university president David B. Frohnmayer to inform him that they found the plan "frightening and offensive." They also noted that the university does not have the money to implement the kinds of programs envisioned by the plan. According to Frohnmayer, Oregon's diversity architects "have taken a step back from the draft plan, given the extent of the response." Stressing that the plan was clearly marked as a draft, he is now uttering words of appeasement and inclusiveness even as he emphasizes Oregon's commitment to implementing what is quite clearly a partisan political agenda: "We're wedded to the objectives of the plan, but not to particular steps in any lockstep way," he told the Chronicle. "We're a community that lives to move with a greater sense of consensus."

Posted by acta online at 12:26 PM | Comments (0)

Money pits

Ten years ago, seventeen American colleges and universities boasted endowments of one billion dollars or more. Today, there are forty-seven such schools, thanks to smart investing, active fundraising, and friendly tax laws. Harvard is of course the richest school in the country, with an endowment of $22 billion; Yale follows at a distant second wtih $10 billion. Other schools on this elite list include Boston College ($1.15 billion), Wellesley College ($1.18 billion), and Purdue University ($1.21 billion). Together, the forty-seven richest schools in the country possess nearly two-thirds of all the endowed wealth in American higher education. Combined, they educate less than 4% of American undergraduates.

You might think that such enormous institutional wealth might translate into stable--even economical--tuition scales, that the colleges and universities with the most resources might work to ensure that their doors really are open to all, no matter what their financial situation. But you would be wrong. The money goes into building facilities, expanding bureaucracy (especially paying presidents, whose pay has gone up 79% over the last ten years), recruiting and retaining star faculty, and, of course, into acquiring more money. If, on average, the richest schools in the country have tripled their wealth over the last decade, they have also doubled their tuition. In 2004, the average cost of an education at a private billionaire school was $29,002; the average cost of an education at a public one $7,230 per year. These schools are pretty good about financial aid, meeting nearly 98% of "demonstrated need" through loans and grants, but students attending them graduate with a lot of debt--those who take out loans accumulate an average of $16,000 in debt.

These are just a few of the facts collected by the Associated Press, which set out to collect information about higher education finances in order to study the problem of why the richest schools cost so much to attend, even as they keep getting richer. Well worth a look.

Posted by acta online at 08:16 AM | Comments (0)

Ideology in the school of education

Last February, Le Moyne College made national news when it expelled Scott McConnell, a master's student in education, for writing a course essay in which he defended the use of corporal punishment in schools and outlined his objections to the concept of the multicultural classroom. McConnell, who is being defended by FIRE, has recently filed a $20 million lawsuit, and stands thereby to become one of this year's more sympathetic poster children for the perils of political correctness.

But McConnell is not the only ed student whose prospects hinge on his willingness to conform to his school's political agenda, and Le Moyne is not the only school whose ed program unabashedly imposes an ideological litmus test on its students. As Brooklyn College history professor KC Johnson notes in today's edition of InsideHigherEd.com, education programs openly advertise themselves as offering curricula centered on "social justice," with no apparent concern about how variable, idiosyncratic, and political the concept of social justice is.

Johnson cites, for example, SUNY Oneonta, where teachers-in-training must "provide evidence of their understanding of social justice in teaching activities, journals, and portfolios. . . and identify social action as the most advanced level;" the University of Kansas, where students' perspectives must be "more global than national and concerned with ideals such as world peace, social justice, respect for diversity and preservation of the environment;" the University of Vermont, which aims to produce teachers who will use their classrooms to create "a more humane and just society, free from oppression, that fosters respect for ethnic and cultural diversity;" Marquette University, where an institutional "commitment to social justice in schools and society" will create teachers who will use the classroom "to transcend the negative effects of the dominant culture;" and the University of Toledo, which proudly claims to be in the business of "preparing citizens to lead productive lives in a democratic society characterized by social justice."

Johnson notes that it is now officially more important in ed programs to demonstrate a certain political "disposition" than it is to demonstrate thorough knowledge of the subjects one plans to teach. He notes, too, that the ideological cast of education programs is far from accidental, and explains how, at his own Brooklyn College, the loaded rhetoric of social justice has been used to facilitate the screening of students who do not fit the desired political mold. Things have gotten so bad at Brooklyn College that students are filing complaints. But Brooklyn College's commitment to social justice does not extend, apparently, to its treatment of students. Those who have complained have not met with fair treatment, but have instead been punished for criticizing the school's effort to tell them what they must think, feel, and believe. The details are chilling and telling. Well worth a read.

Posted by acta online at 07:53 AM | Comments (0)

Free to be better trustees

ACTA joins InsideHigherEd.com, The Weekly Standard, and FIRE in announcing the historic election of Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki to Dartmouth College's Board of Trustees. "This election sends a message to every college and university across the country," said ACTA president Anne D. Neal. "Alumni will no longer put-up and shut up. They will no longer stand for the degradation of academic standards and stifling intellectual intolerance on their college campuses."

The election was an enormously contentious one: Whereas the four other candidates were placed on the ballot by the College, Robinson and Zywicki had to earn their spots the democratic way, by convincing fellow alumni to vote for them. Their platforms were consequently much more populist and outspoken than the Dartmouth administration liked; through websites, mailings, and petitions, Robinson and Zywicki ran as critics of the Dartmouth administration and champions of genuinely liberal education. They secured places on the ballot--and then they won the election itself.

Robinson and Zywicki's victory is a victory not only for democratic process in the selection of trustees, but also for student life at Dartmouth. As a column in The Dartmouth expresses it,

In Robinson and Zywicki, we will have two responsive trustees. Both have proposed closer relationships with the student body. Both have extolled the virtues of student websites, with Robinson saying, "I learned far more about what is actually taking place in Hanover, N.H., from blogs, for the most part run by undergraduates and recent graduates ... than I did in the last 25 years reading the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine."

And we will have two academics on our Board of Trustees. Currently, the seventeen members are COOs, CEOs, presidents, directors, attorneys and even an urban planner and a doctor. But now we've two academics: a professor of law at George Mason/Georgetown and a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. That is a victory for students. It is true: Dartmouth has been able to raise a lot of money -- some might say not enough -- but a lot. And that is what should be expected from a group of extremely smart, extremely talented executives. But what seems to have been missing was a clear vision for the intellectual life of the College. Both Robinson and Zywicki made that challenge an integral part of their respective campaigns. To light a clear, unmistakable path from the present to a smarter -- not just richer -- Dartmouth down the road.

Rather than the perennial bureaucratic hodgepodge, the path is now laid for fewer deans, and for more professors. For freer speech, and for greater tolerance. For fiscal transparency and financial responsibility. For diversity of thought -- not merely of skin -- that we may be wiser. And for support of athletics, that we may be prouder.

The four other candidates did not really lose. We appreciate their efforts to better Dartmouth and their continuing love for it: neither will end with this election. But the advocates of great centralized power have lost. Anyone who sought to limit speech in the interest of feelings lost. Anyone who dismissed crowded classrooms and scant housing as attendant to Dartmouth becoming a large and impersonal research university: they lost today. Those who allowed the office of speech to die lost today. Anyone whose confident embrace of academic freedom quails at the border of political correctness suffered a grave defeat indeed.

With this election, a shot across the bow of academic autocracy will be heard far and wide. A vicious cycle will be broken. This billion-dollar company we call Dartmouth, good as it already is, will actually have to turn an ear towards the vox clamantis of its customers, present and past.

Dartlog has a roundup of media coverage.

Posted by acta online at 05:04 AM | Comments (0)

Oregon quotas

At the University of Oregon, the Office of Multicultural Academic Support has instituted a quota system for three lower-level math classes and three lower-level English classes. OMAS finances and manages the courses, which are much smaller and therefore much more personalized than their non-OMAS counterpart courses; restricting enrollment to eighteen students, OMAS courses reserve the first ten spots for documented minorities. To enroll in one of those first ten spots, a student must declare him- or herself to be African-American, Asian-American/Pacific Islander, Chicano/Latino, Native American or multiracial; OMAS then checks this information with the Office of the Registrar.

Oregon administrators endorse OMAS courses as important "gateway courses" for minority students. The courses are aimed at making minorities feel comfortable and supported (and as such, they assume and assert that minorities are neither comfortable nor supported in the university's regular courses). As one instructor told the Oregon Daily Emerald, the OMAS courses exist "so that they don't feel afraid to raise their hand and ask something." Greg Vincent, Oregon's vice provost for institutional equity and diversity, declares that the OMAS courses are perfectly acceptable alternatives to traditional ones because white people are allowed to register for the courses after minorities do: "I think it's ethical. I think it is legal. I think it is effective," he told the Emerald.

This is not a legal practice, despite what Oregon administrators may think. It's a quota system based on race, and as such it is discriminatory. The student journalists who write for the Emerald know that, and they've consulted with the experts:

But Edward Blum -- senior fellow at the conservative Virginia-based Center for Equal Opportunity, which monitors education policy and has filed complaints with the federal government about race-exclusive programs at universities across the nation -- said the policy is illegal.

"I can say it 10 different ways, but it's illegal, and the Department of Education will shut this down if it's brought to their attention," Blum said.

Blum said the policy amounts to a "very fast, hard quota system that will never stand up in court" and is similar to the University of Michigan undergraduate racial quota system struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003

[...]

Roger Clegg, general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, said in the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision, the Supreme Court "made it clear setting aside slots on the basis of race is illegal."

"The legality aside, it's just wrong," Clegg said. "It's divisive to tell students you're not going to be considered because of your skin color ... I hope that the University will look at the law and will reconsider the policy."

The Center for Equal Opportunity has made a name for itself in higher education in recent years by bringing just such discriminatory practices to the attention of the Office of Civil Rights. If any organization knows what kind of program isn't going to pass legal muster, it's this one.

Posted by acta online at 05:26 PM | Comments (0)

Bean counters

What happens when you change the requirements for tenure--and apply the new standards to untenured faculty who have been operating for years according to a different standard? At Loyola College in Maryland, the adoption of a firm rule stating that assistant professors must have three scholarly publications in order to be eligible for tenure has been retroactively applied to junior faculty hired when the college's requirements were far more flexible. The result, not surprisingly, is that the college has been denying tenure to young academics on whom the rules were summarily changed---and that in the process, the college has abandoned careful individual assessment of a faculty member's unique combination of qualifications in favor of a bureaucratic absolutism that is as inhumane an indicator of performance as it is an ultimately inaccurate one.

Tenure is a far from perfect system, not least because it increasingly seems to involve--even to encourage--the arbitrary and capricious application of both overly rigid numerical criteria and overly subjective personal judgements. The myth of tenure, that it exists to encourage and protect free inquiry in both research and teaching, is too often very far from the reality. If tenure review can consist of the sorts of degrading impersonal bean counting described above (or of the sorts of equally degrading personal and political attacks famously documented in the case of KC Johnson), post-tenure review can be just as bad.

At Virginia State University, for example, post-tenure review has lately resulted in dismissals of tenured faculty that seem to be alternately arbitrary and ideological. Post-tenure review at VSU has also involved violations of due process disturbing enough to cause the AAUP to censure the school. It remains to be seen whether those violations will interest lawyers as much as they have the AAUP.

Posted by acta online at 05:19 AM | Comments (0)

On FIRE

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has chalked up three victories in three days. On Monday, FIRE announced that it has convinced Dartmouth College to rescind its speech code; on Tuesday, FIRE announced that SUNY Brockport has decided to rescind its speech code after FIRE's legal network attorneys sued the school for maintaining policies that were inconsistent with the university's obligation to uphold the First Amendment. And today, FIRE announced that it has convinced Princeton University not only to recognize a Christian student group that has arbitrarily been denied recognition, but to review policies that unfairly discriminate against religiously-oriented student organizations.

These are the sorts of cases that constitute FIRE's bread and butter. FIRE has devised airtight arguments against speech codes and for freedom of religious association on campus--so much so that it can convince private schools such as Dartmouth and Princeton to obey the sorts of rules they would have to follow if they were, like SUNY Brockport, public institutions. That FIRE is able now to use moral suasion as effectively with private schools as it has used legal leverage with public ones speaks not only to FIRE's power as an organization dedicated to individual rights on campus, but also to the clearsightedness and decency of administrators at both Dartmouth and Princeton.

FIRE's success is part of a larger, growing movement to ensure academic freedom and individual rights on campus. In particular, ACTA has fought steadily and successfully for academic freedom since the day it was founded, most recently defending University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill's right to make incendiary statements about the events of 9/11. It is the steady, reasoned, cooperative chorus of groups such as FIRE and ACTA that is ultimately responsible for the slow but definite shift toward freedom that we are beginning to see on certain key college and university campuses.

Posted by acta online at 09:27 AM | Comments (0)

Rethinking the humanities

Last weekend, the American Council of Learned Societies held its annual meeting in Philadelphia. Of particular interest was a panel entitled "The Humanities and Its Publics"; organized by ACLS president Pauline Yu, the panel attempted to address what is increasingly understood to be the question facing the humanities today: Do the academic humanities even have a public? Or are humanists engaged in the ultimately unfulfilling and discipline-defeating work of only engaging with one another?

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education's coverage, panelists took as a given that there is a "misalignment"--to use one panelist's word--between the humanities and the broader public, one that cannot be easily dismissed as a symptom of American anti-intellectualism or the result of culture-wide lack of interest in history and literature. Panelists discussed a number of issues that have contributed to this "misalignment": the humanities' distrust of belief in an age of widespread faith, the humanities' misguided notion that what the public wants from it is "critique" rather than thoughtful and active engagement with the public, and the humanities' resolute refusal to participate meaningfully in a booming popular culture.

The Chronicle's recounting of the discussion period is especially encouraging:

The discussion period following the presentations teased out some of the fault lines of the humanities' relationship with the public. One questioner wondered if the "idea that things are complex" was being lost in the rush to clarify and amplify the voice of the humanities in public debate. Ms. Elshtain acknowledged that much of the "moral nature of art" resided in "moral dilemmas" that "are not solved at all."

But Mr. Banac cautioned that "there are certain terribly important controversies that cannot be left to ambiguity." Citing the Armenian genocide of the early 20th century as an example, Mr. Banac noted that "we have to be able to say that certain things happened, and assign a certain responsibility."

The capacity of the humanities to reach out to diverse audiences was raised by another questioner, who argued that the disciplines were not attractive to minority groups, and were far from doing the necessary self-examination to become more compelling to minorities. Mr. Weisbuch agreed that this was a "strong point," but he also cited an urgency to press forward with the discussion about the role of the humanities in public discourse as such soul-searching was in progress.

"If we wait for the perfect self-awareness," Mr. Weisbuch said, "we won't accomplish anything."

What is remarkable here is the willingness of panelists who are themselves active academic humanists to acknowledge that they have collectively made many of their own problems by embracing a moral relativism that precludes both the kinds of engaged actions and firm judgements--aesthetic and ethical--that are central to meaningful humanist thought. More such discussion is deeply needed. May it happen, again, and again, and again.

Posted by acta online at 01:46 PM | Comments (0)

What's in a name?

At Vanderbilt University, the dorm that bears the name "Confederate Memorial Hall" has an unusual and controversial history. Built nearly seventy years ago, it was originally part of the George Peabody College of Teachers, which merged with Vanderbilt in 1979. One third of the building's $150,000 price tag was raised over a period of years by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which required that it be given the name "Confederate Memorial Hall"; the purpose of the building was to provide housing for young women descendants of the former confederacy so that they might attend college.

The building's history--and Vanderbilt's inherited contractual obligation to the UDC--was nearly lost recently in Vanderbilt's scramble to prove that it is a racially aware institution. After Vanderbilt renovated the building in 1988, it became the subject of racial controversy on campus; some black students felt so strongly about Confederate Memorial Hall's tainted historical associations that they refused to set foot in it. In 2002, after more than a decade of tension, Vanderbilt caved in to pressure from campus interest groups claiming the university was showing gross insensitivity to minority students by allowing the dorm to retain a name that associated it with the South's painful racial history. In a poorly conceived gesture of appeasement, administrators agreed to take the "confederate" out of Confederate Memorial Hall, and to rename the building Memorial Hall. And then they were sued. As Vanderbilt administrators contemplated how best to remove the offensive word carved into the hall's stone face, the United Daughters of the Confederacy asked the court to block Vanderbilt from doing anything of the kind.

Two and a half years later, the verdict is in, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy have won. A Tennessee appeals court has overturned an initial ruling granting Vanderbilt the right to remove the word "confederate" from the building; the appellate court found that Vanderbilt has a contractual obligation to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and that the university can only consider changing the building's name if it pays UDC the contemporary equivalent of the $50,000 gift the organization originally contributed to its cost.

Vanderbilt's argument--that the university's right to change the building's name is guaranteed by the principle of academic freedom--was rejected out of hand by the court, as was Vanderbilt's related argument that it had an institutional obligation to demonstrate sensitivity to minority students. The ruling is explicitly instructive regarding both the limits of academic freedom and the ethics of university fund-raising:

We fail to see how the adoption of a rule allowing universities to avoid their contractual and other voluntarily assumed legal obligations whenever, in the university’s opinion, those obligations have begun to impede their academic mission would advance principles of academic freedom. ... To the contrary, allowing Vanderbilt and other academic institutions to jettison their contractual and other legal obligations so casually would seriously impair their ability to raise money in the future by entering into gift agreements such as the ones at issue here. ... It is not within the purview of this court to resolve the larger cultural and social conflicts regarding whether and how those who fought for the Confederacy should be honored or remembered.

The poor historiography underwriting Vanderbilt's defense was also addressed by Judge William Cain, who wrote that "A great majority of those who fought in the Confederate armies owned no slaves. Their homeland was invaded, and they rose up in defense of their homes and their farms. They fought the unequal struggle until nearly half their enlisted strength was crippled or beneath the sod. This dormitory is a memorial to them."

Vanderbilt originally agreed to remove the word "confederate" from the building as a quick and easy concession; it was a way of appeasing growing anger and tension on campus for what appeared at the time to be the minor inconvenience of sandblasting away an offending word. That concession has proved to be neither cheap nor easy, however. The courts have put a price tag on it--and Vanderbilt will almost certainly have trouble on its hands it it does not agree to pay it.

Posted by acta online at 05:39 AM | Comments (0)

It's a mad, mad campus

Campus life is nothing if not colorful. It's also often crazy.

Sometimes, the madness centers on race. At the University of Oklahoma, for example, baseball coach Larry Cochell has resigned after an interview with ESPN in which he praised a freshman player for having "no nigger in him." Racism runs both ways in intercollegiate sports, however. A California jury has just awarded $540,000 to Mike Terpstra, former basketball coach at Cal State Stanislaus, to compensate him for the damage done when the university let him go in order to hire a black coach.

Sometimes, the madness centers on sex. An eighty-two-year-old English professor at SUNY New Paltz has resigned after being accused of sexually assaulting a student; the professor maintains that the encounter--which involved striking the student with a blunt object--was consensual. Wade Thompson is charged with one count of second-degree assault and one count of third-degree sexual abuse. Students who know him are expressing disbelief: "He's a professor that takes an hour to walk through Humanities; he's not a fast-moving guy," said one junior English major; "He can barely walk," said another. "I can't see him being forceful to the point that a person couldn't get him off of him or her."

And sometimes, the madness seems to emerge naturally from the inherent craziness of the academic system itself. For example, an assistant professor publicly suffered a nervous breakdown last week after being denied tenure. According to InsideHigherEd.com, the individual "started shouting expletives about the university administration (some versions of the story have this taking place in a class; others do not). He then moved into a hallway, continuing to shout and removing his clothes, taking leaflets off the walls. At some point, he was subdued by campus security officers." InsideHigherEd.com is withholding the professor's name and institution to protect his privacy, noting that "the story was a useful reminder of how traumatizing the tenure review process can be."

Though it goes without saying, perhaps it goes better with saying: You can't make this stuff up.

Posted by acta online at 07:29 AM | Comments (0)

The faulty tower

Writing for The Weekly Standard, Joseph Epstein uses the publication of Princeton English emerita Elaine Showalter's new book, Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, as the occasion for reflecting on why it is that so many academics are so very unhappy in their work. Epstein concentrates on academic humanists, whose collective unhappiness is palpably greater than that of their scientific counterparts, and concludes with a series of observations as unspeakable in academic circles as they are undeniably true:

Universities attract people who are good at school. Being good at school takes a real enough but very small talent. As the philosopher Robert Nozick once pointed out, all those A's earned through their young lives encourage such people to persist in school: to stick around, get more A's and more degrees, sign on for teaching jobs. When young, the life ahead seems glorious. They imagine themselves inspiring the young, writing important books, living out their days in cultivated leisure.

But something, inevitably, goes awry, something disagreeable turns up in the punch bowl. Usually by the time they turn 40, they discover the students aren't sufficiently appreciative; the books don't get written; the teaching begins to feel repetitive; the collegiality is seldom anywhere near what one hoped for it; there isn't any good use for the leisure. Meanwhile, people who got lots of B's in school seem to be driving around in Mercedes, buying million-dollar apartments, enjoying freedom and prosperity in a manner that strikes the former good students, now professors, as not only unseemly but of a kind a just society surely would never permit.

Now that politics has trumped literature in English departments the situation is even worse. Beset by political correctness, self-imposed diversity, without leadership from above, university teachers, at least on the humanities and social-science sides, knowing the work they produce couldn't be of the least possible interest to anyone but the hacks of the MLA and similar academic organizations, have more reason than ever to be unhappy.

And so let us leave them, overpaid and underworked, surly with alienation and unable to find any way out of the sweet racket into which they once so ardently longed to get.

Followers of the culture wars will recognize both Epstein's argument and his tone as typical of a certain disaffected strain of criticism; English departments in particular have long been subject to the sort of damning--and damningly brusque--analysis he offers here, and they have increasingly come to stand, metonymically, for all the procedural and philosophical ills besetting both the academic humanities and social sciences. Epstein's long tour of duty in Northwestern's English department between 1974 and 2002 explains his own penchant for generalizing outward from English; his equally long extra-academic career as an editor and writer account for his willingness to regard more insular academic malcontents as the victims of their own chronic failures of imagination and effort.

Epstein finds support for his theory in the evolving genre of academic fiction, which he reads quite differently from Showalter. Where Showalter sees the genre declining from the humorous heyday of Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim (1954) into a squalid and undistinguished contemporary cattiness, Epstein reads the academic novels of the moment as anthropological documents, meditative records of how the profession of English--and, by symbolic extension, academe itself--has lost its dignity in a welter of self-aggrandizing strain:

By the time that the 1990s rolled around, all that was really left to the academic novel was to mock the mission of the university. With the onset of so-called theory in English and foreign-language departments, this became easier and easier to do. Professor Showalter does not approve of these goings-on: "The tone of ['90s academic novels]," she writes, "is much more vituperative, vengeful, and cruel than in earlier decades."

The crueler the blows are required, I should say, the better to capture the general atmosphere of goofiness, which has become pervasive. Theory and the hodgepodge of feminism, Marxism, and queer theory that resides comfortably alongside it, has now been in the saddle for roughly a quarter-century in American English and Romance-language departments, while also making incursions into history, philosophy, and other once-humanistic subjects. There has been very little to show for it--no great books, no splendid articles or essays, no towering figures who signify outside the academy itself--except declining enrollments in English and other department courses featuring such fare.

All that is left to such university teachers is the notion that they are, in a much-strained academic sense, avant-garde, which means that they continue to dig deeper and deeper for lower and lower forms of popular culture--graffiti on Elizabethan chamber pots--and human oddity. The best standard in the old days would have university scholars in literature and history departments publish books that could also be read with enjoyment and intellectual profit by nonscholars. Nothing of this kind is being produced today.

All this is to say that Epstein's review appears to make for better reading than the book that occasions it--he is every bit as conversant with the genre of academic fiction as Showalter is, but his take on that genre is less self-serving and, as a result, far more historically provocative.

Posted by acta online at 04:58 AM | Comments (0)