Wednesday, March 22, 2006
This is excellent. A review of David Horowitz's new book, The Professors, along with some reminiscences of one pofessor's experience with Columbia's MEALAC. Very good read. (via Martin Kramer)
The Harvard Salient: Notes of a Rebel Professor
In March 2003, I gave a lecture in the Department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) at Columbia University. It was a job talk: my partner of a quarter century lives in New York, my home town, and I figured I might as well apply for the long-vacant chair in Armenian Studies that was once more being advertised. My lecture presented a small philological discovery—that a pig-herder and rapist named Argawan who debuted in an Armenian epic poem dating to the time of Christ reappeared in a much later Ossetic epic, Nartae. An interesting, if not earth-shattering, study— but I was not prepared for the passions of a few members of the audience. One professor declared that such scholarship, with its implication that one culture might influence another, was a deplorable relic of imperialism, hegemonistic in essence. I replied that the comparative method, though susceptible to misuse, is indispensable to philology and is not intrinsically conspiratorial. As we were leaving, another professor came up to ask me whether I was a Dumezilian—that is, a follower of Georges Dumezil, who thought there was broad continuity in social structures between Indo-European cultures— and expressed her relief at my assurance that I was not. ("Senator, I am not, nor have I ever been, a Dumezilian.") For that would be, she said, hegemonistic. Now, how many times, gentle reader, do you hear the word "hegemonistic" in a day? I'd just heard it twice in an hour...
I was very pleasantly surprised by this essay. Though I agree in general with David Horowitz's critique of academic radicalism--and, as a former career grad student, am intimately familair with the anti-Americanism and flagrant anti-Semitism at Columbia and CUNY, both of which I've attended--I find his shrillness and rage quite off-putting. In fact, I've tended to ignore his work altogether, even as I've handpicked a few writers at Front Page worth reading on a regular basis.
Professor Russell--a gay, liberalish, level-headed scholar in the old-fashioned sense--offers a different, more easily digestible voice. He's not engaged in polemics; he's genuinely troubled by the politicization and moral corruption that has taken hold of the academy. He's not trying to raise hell or enforce his own vision on The American University; rather, he's offering a clear-eyed, insider's assessment of what's gone so horribly wrong. I have to say it was a relief to read something by a highly regarded, Harvard-employed writer who eschewed the hysterical posturing of both the Horowitz crowd and his radicalized arch-rivals in academe.
It seems to me that Russell's reasonable but urgent dispatch is exactly what the doctor ordered in this overly divisive, polarized debate. Good on Front Page for publishing it.
The man footnotes his own ignorance in support of his ignorance?
A purer metaphor for the sad attempts to provide an intellectual basis for conservatism will never be found.
A compelling review, well reasoned. His concluding sentence is telling in a broader, societal vein, beyond academe: "But what disturbed me most, and what convinced me New York was no longer my home, was not the derision within the gates of Columbia University, but the banality of indifference outside."