A pretty vicious intellectual spat is erupting around the legacy of one of Fair Alma’s all-time all-stars: literary critic and arch-New York intellectual Lionel Trilling. The casus belli is this essay in the New Yorker, in which Harvard critic Louis Menand embarks on a grueling journey of contextualization: Trilling not only has to be understood through his borderline-crippling sense of self-doubt, Menand argues, but as a thinker inhabiting a certain cultural role that simply doesn’t exist today: that of the “heroic critic,” or the public intellectual willing to do his culture’s heavy lifting, so to speak. Reasonable enough argument, especially since the essay gave some fascinating background on the city’s intellectual climate in the ’40s and ’50s and some relatively shocking details about Columbia’s Butler-era office politics.

But there were passages like these that certainly raised an eyebrow:

And that is what he did. He became an apostle of acquiescence, of what he called “the refusal to be great.” It was a position that had always appealed to him; it’s one of the things he admired about Forster. But now he seemed convinced that every social and personal pathology, from revolutionary violence to narcissism, comes from the refusal to accept that life is conditioned—by the capacities we inherit, by the circumstances we are born into, by the people whose desires conflict with ours, by death. 

Really, now? My expose to Trilling is limited, but the idea that he was hounded into intellectual submission by the spectre of postmodernism (”life is conditioned,” after all) struck me as a little off. And it struck New Republic literary editor Leon Weisletier—who, like Menand, actually took classes with Trilling while studying for a graduate English degree at Columbia—as downright insulting.

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One of the friendlier comments on my Spec piece from last Friday berated this paper’s reporters for failing to delve into Massad’s written material. This isn’t really their job, obviously—even a news analysis piece pegged to Massad’s scholarship would need comment from activists and academics in order to be something other than a veiled airing of grievances. As I mentioned in my article, those activists and academics don’t seem to have much to say about the Massad case. But a glance at this page—which I didn’t even know existed until a commenter linked to it—sure does make you want to lash out at someone. Anyone. Even me:

And why _isn’t_ this stuff—this voluminous evidence of Massad’s hackery—being put out there, in full public view, by the industrious reporters of this venerated university newspaper? Are you listening, Armin Rosen? All we get in articles are a few snippets here and there. It’s the staggering scope of it all—the sheer enormity of it—that makes the case that, if justice prevailed, Massad would now be fighting for a position at a third rate college somewhere and not being considered for a permanent post at one of the greatest universities on Earth.

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I think this raises a couple very serious questions about Columbia’s academic review process, and Columbia’s intellectual environment in general. The broader and less answerable question is that of how enough right-thinking, PhD-holding individuals could possibly convince themselves that a purveyor of bigotry that’s as barely-veiled as Massad’s is even entitled to a second round of tenure review. But there’s a more ominous query attached to this one, and it’s one that doesn’t require quite as much speculation. If there really was a bloc of professors who were vocally displeased with Provost Alan Brinkley’s original decision, how did they manage to co-opt him?

Let’s put our conspiracy theory thinking caps on, shall we?

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In today’s Times, essential reading for those of you tracking the ravages of American cultural imperialism. Comp Lit and Society-types are more than welcome to add “worldwide Ivy League hysteria” to western culture’s rap sheet, which Akeel Bilgrami more or less did at yesterday’s Ethics and Protest panel. He argued that the ‘68 uprising was an attempt to bridge a centuries-old “cognitive gap” between the powerful and powerless, one that had emerged after the Enlightenment’s reconciliation with religion in the late 17th century (since religion and the Enlightenment were finally able to reinforce one another, which in turn reinforced an entrenched power structure. Or so his logic went.). Bilgrami was arguing for a socio-historical connection between knowledge and power–to him, knowledge had been “accruing” around power for the better part of 400 years, even to the point where the supposed intellectual freedom of the modern university could be stifled by arcane power dynamics.

For reasons I’ll explain in my 1968 reunion wrap-up, I don’t accept such a conveniently Marxist read on intellectual history. But one needn’t look any further than the aforementioned Times article to see how America’s Ivy League fetish–itself a product of some pretty outmoded ideas about knowledge and power–is recapitulated as a kind of blind faith in traditional (but waning), American notions of success. See, for example, the article’s scant explanation as to why Korean students are so Ivy League-crazy:

“Going to U.S. universities has become like a huge fad in Korean society, and the Ivy Leaguenames — Harvard, Yale, Princeton — have really struck a nerve,” said Victoria Kim, who attended Daewon and graduated from Harvard last June.

Sound justification if you’re making a Delbanco-style argument on education and inequality, one concerned with the near-metaphysical heft of the Brand Name. Terrible justification for a 15-hour school day.

Today marks a special day. Not because the weather is amazing or because despite the amazing weather the steps and lawns are left eerily vacant. Nor is it because students have only just realized that they have a bucket-load of work due on Monday.

No, today a small group of Columbians gathered around at the ungodly hour of 10am to commemorate the 96th anniversary of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s visit to Columbia University in which He addressed students, faculty, and the community at a speech given in the Auditorium of Earl Hall on April 19, 1912.

But wait up… ‘Abdu’l-who?

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It’s hard to read this glowing profile of American Studies prof Roosevelt Montas without being convinced that the school’s new point-man on Core reform is literally the future of American higher education. Montas has his work cut out for him, but if successful there’s a good chance he’ll go down as the man who saved the Core Curriculum in an age of hunger strikes and rampant cultural relativism:

The university announced it would spend $50 million on a project to enhance the core curriculum’s multicultural offerings last fall, shortly after students conducted a week-long hunger strike to protest the weakness of the classes. Now Columbia is assigning a young professor of Western civilization, Roosevelt Montas, 34, to direct the effort.

And later:

What will change is the offerings on the list of major cultures classes that can count toward Core credits. Mr. Montas’s job will be to work with faculty and administrators to create a set of more rigorous, seminar-style classes for that requirement, he said.

No sense here of what will really “change,” especially since expanding the Major Cultures lists is too superficial to even count as “reform.” Although we don’t get a sense of Montas’s more ambitious, long-term plans, the article reaches a troubling conclusion as to what saving the Core Curriculum actually means–indeed, more cynical readers of this article will note that Montas-style intellectual pluralism is being equated with indoctrination into white-bred western modes of though.

Now I’m sure that’s notwhat Mantas has in mind. From the looks of it, he’s all abou confrontation: smashing the universality of the western cannon straight into the socio-cultural complexities of the multi-cultural modern world, following a tack that denies Plato cliched ”dead white man” status without resorting to mindless worship of “the cannon.” Or mindless worship of Foucault or Gayatri Spivak, for that matter.

Montas’s job is to translate that into a curriculum that will satisfy pro-Core partisans without totally alienating their umm, more self-depriving classmates. Let’s see what he can do.

It’s no secret that CC Alum and Illinois Senator Barack Obama isn’t too eager to show his face at 116th and Broadway. Far be it for Fair Alma to stand for such disloyalty. Her revenge this weekend was as swift as it was quietly spectacular–literary even, based as it is on the ironic fact that the farther Obama gets from Morningside Heights, the closer it seems to get to him.

This weekend’s news cycle was marked by two interrelated setbacks for the Obama campaign, one brought on by an overzealous newsmedia, the other by the candidate’s astounding lack of common sense. The first was the LA Times’ irresponsible piece on the Obamas’ “connection” to pro-Palestinian academics and activists, an article based more on a vulturous (and not to mention culturally and politically insensitive) concept of guilt-by-association than on the candidate’s actual policy positions or personal beliefs. The second was Obama’s pop-psychoanalysis of small-town America, an unfathomably insulting statement on par with Howard Dean’s infamous “Confederate flag” gaffe back in 2003.

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What’s this??!?!? An article in next week’s New Yorker that isn’t online yet, yet is still hosted on the Spec server for some reason? What mischief is this! The Commentariat isn’t saying, although we advise Fair Alma’s Middle East ideologists to start sharpening their respective oyster knives. Because this spring’s Columbia-related New York media expose is even more of a barnburner than last year’s.

Oy vey! Not to be a shmendrik or anything, but could Columbia’s latest wonder boy be hastening the irrelevence of his own field? That’s what a few rather esteemed Yiddish scholars seem to think. They believe that newly-minted Yiddish professor Jeremy Dauber takes too “scientific” an approach to the Jewish people’s former lingua franca, which has been on life support in the non-academic “real world” ever since Hitler and Stalin’s all too successful extermination of Eastern European Jewery. The “controversy,” in sum:

To put the issue simply, explained Paul Glasser, the associate dean of YIVO’s Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies, “there are those academics who make a point of speaking Yiddish at home and those who don’t.” Those in the former camp, often identified as “Yiddishists,” tend to see Yiddish departments not just as academic spaces but as opportunities to keep Yiddish alive outside of ultra-Orthodox enclaves. By their criteria, a Yiddish professor’s role extends beyond research and teaching to encompass involvement in Yiddish cultural life. That often means, for example, passing the language on to his or her children.

“Dauber is more of the scientific school, shall we say,” said Shane Baker, the director of a Yiddish organization called the Congress for Jewish Culture. “He likes the insect pinned to the tray to analyze. He’s not active in the Yiddish world. I’ve never seen him at a Yiddish event.”

This tension isn’t exclusive to Yiddish studies–in fact, it’s common to any field of cultural studies that’s dominated by people who feel like they have some kind of personal, extra-academic stake in that culture. For Yiddish, the fact that the culture is on its last gasps (or was on its last gasps 50 years ago, depending on who you ask) turns this tension into a sublimated fight for survival. By the “Yiddishist” view, someone who is neutral on the issue of cultural continuity shouldn’t be in a field that exists for the sake of cultural continuity. By the opposite view, Yiddish scholarship is at the very least a means of studying stuff that’s that’s worth studying, as well as memorializing something buried in the historical past–or rather, something murdered in the gas chambers and gulags of the 40s and 50s.

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I’ve spent the past year or so crafting a beautiful memoir: a story of the challenges I had to overcome growing up in post-apartheid South Africa, my hard core elocution training after my emigration to the US, and how I worked my way through a top university to my current job working in the Spitzer administration (whoops! Not so glamorous anymore!) But I’ve been having second thoughts about signing that contract pledging that everything I wrote is the unadulterated truth, in wake of the latest revelations of fabricated details published in memoirs. Yeah, it’s probably not a super great idea to legally verify as true something that is as false as Elizabeth Taylor’s eyelashes.

For those of you who need a brush-up on the literary scandals of the past few weeks and years, the New York Times has a nice summary. James Frey is arguably the most infamous, after his Oprah publicly scolded him when it was revealed that large portions of his “memoir”, A Million Little Pieces, were fabricated.

The falsified memoir saga continued last week with Margaret “Jones” (actual name Margaret Seltzer), the author of Love and Consequences. Her “memoir” tells the story of her hard childhood and adolescence in gang-ridden Los Angeles as a half Native-American, half white girl raised by a foster family, overcoming all her hardship to write about it. But when Ms. Jones nee Seltzer’s sister saw her picture in the New York Times, she told the truth about all the hardship that family had to overcome in their upper-middle class Los Angeles home.
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