To be honest, The Scrapbook is nowhere near as exercised as it might be about the removal, by a gaggle of undergraduates, of William Shakespeare’s portrait from its prominent position on the wall of an English department staircase at the University of Pennsylvania. The department had already decided to remove and replace the portrait, in the words of one account, “in order to represent a more diverse range of writers.” Mission accomplished.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise: Shakespeare, by common consent, is the greatest writer in the English language, and his canonical status is as great a liability as any writer can suffer in the modern academy. His replacement on the wall by a photograph of Audre Lorde (1934-1992)—self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”—approaches comedy. Audre Lorde wrote more agit-prop than poetry, as far as The Scrapbook is aware; and until the events of this past week at Penn, her name had never appeared in a sentence alongside William Shakespeare’s.
Two things, however, did disturb The Scrapbook. First, in the wake of this student iconoclasm, the department chairman, Professor Jed Esty, issued a statement of such supreme fatuousness as to approach self-parody: “Some students,” he declared, “removed the Shakespeare portrait and delivered it to my office as a way of affirming their commitment to a more inclusive mission for the English department.”
No doubt, Chairman Esty would have described the destruction of statuary and stained glass in Shakespeare’s England as “a way of affirming the vandals’ commitment to a more inclusive mission for the church”—or some such nonsense. These are exactly the kind of politicized weasel words that pass for academic discourse these days. No wonder Jed Esty has risen to such heights in an otherwise undistinguished English department.
The other point, which troubles The Scrapbook beyond this episode at Penn, is the rise of fascism on America’s campuses. One of Chairman Esty’s English majors, Mike Benz, was quoted in another account as exulting in the plunder of the Shakespeare portrait: “It is a cool example of culture jamming,” he said. It may well be that. It is also a specimen of the violence, verbal and physical, that is now being wielded by undergraduates—with the tacit blessings of the Jed Estys alongside them—against perceived villains, or worse, scholars and students who don’t happen to share their authoritarian views.
Kimberly Peirce, the gay filmmaker who directed Boys Don’t Cry (1999), a pioneering account of the life and violent death of a transgender male, recently spoke at Reed College, where she was greeted by campus progressives with obscene placards, was shouted down as she attempted to speak, and was physically threatened (“F— you, scared bitch”). The spectacle prompted a Reed assistant professor of English, Lucia Martinez, to make this comment:
The Scrapbook, long departed from college, has no advice for Professor Martinez. But we wouldn’t recommend that she look for guidance from anyone in the English -department at Penn.
