Dear Michael,
I recently made an effort to acquaint you with some facts about Barack Obama, but what are facts? There are none, declared your Princeton mentor Richard Rorty. That said, his declaration is no fact, and leaves you chasing your tail. Any sane man would give up the chase, but you proceeded to build “The Ironist’s Cage,” then brilliantly locked yourself inside.
Your mentor, the man you dubbed “a great American pragmatist,” confided to a colleague: “I honestly think that we—the parasitic priestly class which confers sacraments like BAs and PhDs—are the best agency for social change on the scene…. This … requires the continuation of the same claptrap about contemplation we’ve always handed out, because without this mystique the society won’t let us get away with corrupting the youth anymore.”
A pragmatist indeed. I gather you took good notes. In a recent blog post, you spoke of your plan to have Wes provide “the very best progressive liberal arts education in the world” (“Making Ideals Effective,” Roth on Wesleyan, Sept. 29, 2008) “Progressive?” There was a time when “liberal arts education” would have said it all, but that was pre-Rorty, back in the day when Wes-men embraced the idea that “progressive” meant incremental improvement, the better tomorrow to which they still write their checks when you put the arm on them.
Now, however, thanks to the word’s corrupters, “progressive” embraces everything from “transnational progressivism,” (the notion that the nation state is an idea whose time has gone) to Roth’s “progressive change,” (from his May 2008 Commencement address) which has the look of the lipstick on the pig of creeping socialism.
Left-minded high school seniors will answer his signal call for their applications. Their apolitical classmates, who’d like to be served a liberal arts education (“Hold the progressive!”), will seek that serving elsewhere, and Admissions will be denied the applications of some promising scholars and scientists, athletes, artists and writers, future captains of industry and maybe a genius or two.
Gradually draining the pool of some possibly outstanding applicants is a heck of a way to halt the slide in Wes’s scholastic and financial fortunes. If present trends continue, once the Old Grads, who give and give, are gone, old privately-funded Wes will cease to exist. In her place you’d have a publicly-funded ward of the state: the Middletown campus of UConn.
Would you care? You seem to care about enjoying what you construe to be your perks of office: the right to tilt the playing field (Andrus) in favor of your candidate’s presence on Commencement Day; and the right to promote the narratives you are invested in (e.g., the sci-fi thriller “Global Warming”).
You’re also privileged to teach a film studies course of your devising. It’s only the latest example of a course created to satisfy the needs of the teacher instead of the student: the only group to have reaped a gain from the Cult of the Victim dogmatically taught in the Church of the Holy Trinity of Race, Class, and Gender has been the Cult’s increasingly rich array of comfortably-situated teachers.
Meanwhile, the students are victims of curricular neglect: a dearth of survey courses and the absence of a course in Western Civilization (“That old bag? Fuhgeddaboudit!”). Dozens of writing courses are offered; they focus on everything from “the inescapable thereness of the natural world” to “the supernatural, the impossible, and the absurd.” But where is the course that’s focused on the nuts and bolts of writing a properly punctuated sentence that’s more grammatically than politically correct? A student’s open letter to President Bennet contains this heavy string of pearls: “Many, if not all of the (Wesleyan Service Career) fellows, are focused on issues aimed at actively uprooting/confronting severe inequalities in society, such as education reform, prison reform, housing discrimination, women’s rights, queer issues, and combating institutionalized racism” (“Bennet flaunted privilege at recent service center dinner,” Nov. 3, 2006, Volume CXLII, Number 15). The author of that Jargonese must think that syntax is a government levy on recreation.
All-about-recreation Wes deserves a novel acronym: ADU (Arrested Development U). Here’s a far-from-isolated case of AD from the Argus humor (sic) page: “How was my summer? How do you think it was? It was awesome! I’m fucking Michael Roth! And every hot summer night that I spend listening to Neil Diamond records and staring into the mirror while masturbating I am literally fucking Michael Roth” (“Roth on Roth on Roth’s Summer,” Sept. 9, 2008, Volume CXLIV, Number 3).
Those are the thanks you get for trying to bond with the students in your demotic way: “Wesleyan, you are very cool!” began your commencement address, just days after seniors partying in a public artery thumbed their noses at Public Safety, dissed the gendarmes and got themselves arrested. A duo aroused by the jackbooted injustice of it roused you in the wee hours. You could have booted them out and gone back to bed, but, well, next time.
Old Wes had been a rigorous preparation for life; its latter-day incarnation, this boiler-plated bubble, has been a four-year furlough from it. “Furlough’s over!” would be a very cool goodbye to all that.
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