Dear late-model academics:
Your final paragraph “In Support of Affirmative Action” (Argus, Nov. 12) contains your high-minded refusal to engage in debate with “race-baiting” scapegoaters. (Where is your high-minded refusal to engage in name-calling?)
Perish the thought that you fellows were aiming to throttle debate and intimidate two student whistle-blowers. However, if THEY can’t perish the thought, with 489 courses to choose from, would choosing to boycott yours be one of their options? I think it likely. They could begin with the English Department’s. Ariel Levy ’96, in “Female Chauvinist Pigs,” recalls it:
“I remember a meeting we once had, as members of the English majors committee, with the department faculty: We were there to tell them about a survey we’d given out to English majors, the majority of whom said they wanted at least one classics course to be offered at our college. We all bought the party line that such a class should never be REQUIRED because that would suggest that Dead White Men were more important than female and nonwhite writers. But we figured it couldn’t do any harm for them to OFFER one canonical literature course for those of us who wanted to grasp the references in the contemporary Latin American poetry we were reading in every other class. It seemed like a pretty reasonable request to me. After I made my pitch for it, the woman who was head of the department at that time looked at me icily and said, ‘I would never TEACH at a school that offered a course like that.’”
The English Department’s present head, Joel Pfister, clearly isn’t on the best of terms with the English language. He recently authored (Argus, Dec. 10): “This literary knowledge production process is instructive. American literature’s multivalent and indeterminate qualities add to, rather than diminish or compromise, literature’s usefulness as a generative cognitive and critical resource.”
His pidgin, he tells us, soils an adjoining field (“American Studies has excelled at ‘historicizing’ American literature and reading American literature as ideological symptoms complicit with the reproduction of social contradictions”), but not my field of dreams. In one I’m lost among the runes of Ilion. In another, I’m lost inshore among the rocks until I emerge from the surfeit gasping.
What rocks? Les Trois Sauvages. I fear that Professor Pfister’s dictation-takers will not be hearing the Norwester’s howl, the seagull’s wail, the whistle of the heaving groaner, the growl and crack of the thunder, and the prayer of the bone on the beach; or combing, coming upon the shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar, the gear of foreign dead men; or even hailing the fishermen weary from hauling. Clangs the bell. The end of another hour of pedagogue Pfister teaching the three D’s: crafty Dissection, English Decomposition, and cursive Desecration–i.e., the processes the good professor rhapsodically calls “demystifying” and “historicizing.” I daresay the bakers would grade those ingredients– weighed on an honest pair of scales–a recipe for failure.
The recipe is a corrosive foreign lesion, but I’ll not individually finger the tangle of coffee house philosophes contained in a can of worms dug up on the Left Bank and swallowed, hook, line, and sinker, by fools and careerists alike–the latter enlisting the foreign lesion to serve in the culture wars. Those of you whose critical studies of cultural icons have made or advanced your careers, should teach a course on the culture wars’ profiteers.
Was Sonya Cancino (let’s call her) one of the minuscule morsels of fodder chewed up in those wars? To her advisor, advising Spanish-speaking Sonya to major in Spanish was a no-brainer. I’d failed to persuade her to major in something (anything!) other than subject matter she already knew; to my mind, THAT was a no-brainer. Had she majored, say, in Mandarin, the world would have been trilingual Sonya’s Mandarin-, Spanish-, and English-speaking oyster. A week before she graduated I asked her what she intended to do. “Oh!” she exclaimed, “I’m moving to San Francisco!” I tried again: “What will you DO there?” Her answer: a wide-eyed “I don’t know…live!” We parted, yours truly no less wide-eyed.
On the plus side, she’d gotten straight A’s in Social Life and learned some facts undoubtedly worth their weight in gold these days: exactly how many Aztecs Cortez had killed, and how many kilos of Montezuma’s (exacted) gold the men of Spain had stolen.
Ah, but here’s the rub: Were it not for the Sonyas, who pony up to feed on your pop sophia (i.e., your nettles), it might be YOU who’d be heading West and learning to “live” in a two-room apartment with two other “livers,” and clocking in to a Left Coast Klekolo or Neon Deli, or punching in to San Fran Nanny’s tony tuna, non-union cannery in Samoa, a far remove from the faculty lounge on High.
“A consummation devoutly to be wished!” Would that be the summary wintry goodbye of your colleagues, the ninety per cent who did NOT sign your fool’s cap? (Translation of fool’s cap: unswervingly self-serving sally.)
Martin Benjamin is a member of the class of 1957