Reviews and News:
With all the books and articles these days decrying the administrative take-over of the university, you might think that this is a new development about which something might be done, a battle that still might be won. But you’d be wrong: “The revolution is over and the administrators have won. But the persistence of traditional structures and language has led some to think that the fight over the institution is now just beginning. This is a mistake. As with most revolutions, open conflict occurs only after real power has already changed hands…So what’s to do? Keep fighting and risk being canned? Admit the world has changed and join them? Concede defeat and quit? These are all plausible responses, some uneasy mixture of which is likely what most of us use each day to survive.”
Since we’re talking about modern American universities, why do presidents so often cave to political pressure from progressive students? Is it because, as Mark Bauerlein argues, these students (and the progressive liberal arts departments in which they study) are such a small (and increasingly meaningless) part of university life? “Look at the problems through the eyes of a college president. Yes, he knows that some embarrassing things take place in Women’s Studies programs, and he certainly doesn’t want a radical feminist to represent the school to alumni and the government. We would like him to take action when these and other ‘Studies’ units abandon scholarly norms and become activist projects of the left. But, he thinks, is it worth the hassle? Fewer than one in a thousand undergraduates in the U.S. major in Women’s Studies, and the cost of those professors is insignificant in the overall financing of a school. When in 2016 someone wrote pro-Trump messages in chalk on Emory’s grounds, a few dozen students, appalled at what they believed to be Mr. Trump’s sexism and racism, complained to the leadership. The president sympathized with them, leading some commentators to wonder why he didn’t just tell them to grow up. Perhaps, though, he had a meeting with architects to review multimillion-dollar plans for a new research building.”
According to Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the cowardly longing for oblivion in a meaningless world is the mark of modern man: “We are in the midst of a cynical self-reckoning as the not-too-illustrious children of a not-too-illustrious epoch that will consider itself truly fulfilled only when every individual writhing in it — after languishing in one of the deepest shadows of human history — will finally attain the sad and temporarily self-evident goal: oblivion. This age wants to forget it has gambled away everything on its own, without outside help, and that it can’t blame alien powers, or fate, or some remote baleful influence; we did this ourselves: we have made away with gods and with ideals. We want to forget, for we cannot even muster the dignity to accept our bitter defeat.”
Turmoil at the Boston Athenaeum: “Current and former senior staff describe a ‘hostile’ and ‘ruthless’ administration that undermined their expertise. Beloved colleagues have been fired on the spot and marched out of the building. Others have retired in disgust, giving little or no notice. Meanwhile, major donors — upset with the library’s fractured morale, its changed mission statement, and fears that its special collections may move off-site — are withholding financial support to register their disapproval. One board member has resigned in protest, going so far as to rescind most of a promised endowment gift of $2 million.”
Claude Debussy was a difficult man. He made great music.
Recapturing the oddness of Isaac Newton: “Over the past fifteen years or so a series of private papers have emerged that reveal he invested enormous industry and rigour of thought in studying Christian origins. Iliffe’s salutary achievement is to show that the writings emerging from his investigation reveal a different Newton to the man we are familiar with from histories of science. Equal parts litigator, millenarian, numerologist, moralist and paranoid conspiracy theorist, Newton probed the foundations of orthodoxy and found them wanting.”
Today is the 10th anniversary of William F. Buckley Jr.’s death. Here he is talking about something he didn’t usually talk about—writing fiction. “I’m very easily bored, and therefore if I can keep myself awake from chapter to chapter, I assume I can keep other people awake. That is why I don’t reserve all the dynamite for the end. This may be the moment to say that in all of my novels—to the extent that I have a rule—my rule is to devote a very long chapter, close to the beginning, to the development of a single character. In book one it’s Blackford Oakes, which is natural. In book two, Stained Glass, it was Erika, a Soviet agent. I lifted her as though Vladimir Nabokov had a daughter, not his son, Dimitri. I confided my invention to Nabokov, which perhaps precipitated his death. He didn’t live to read the book, but he was very enthusiastic, as you remember, about the first book, and his widow liked Stained Glass. In any event, I’ve always felt that the extensive development of one character gives the book a kind of beef that it doesn’t otherwise have. That’s the only regimen to which I willingly subscribe and towards which I naturally drift.”
Essay of the Day:
The East German writer Christa Wolf kept a diary from 1960 until 2011. What does a life under surveillance—by others and oneself—look like? Becca Rothfeld in The Nation:
“Throughout, Wolf’s journals bear moving witness to the personal and political landmarks that constitute the bulk of her life: her struggle to come to terms with communism’s quick devolution; her despair over the gender inequalities that belied the GDR’s promise of egalitarianism; the marriages of her daughters, Annette and Katrin (‘Tinka’); her tenderness for her husband, Gerhard (‘Gerd’), who was her most devoted reader and so her harshest critic; and the shocking revelation, in 1993, that she’d served as an informant for the Stasi, the East German secret police, from 1959 to 1962—a collusion that she claimed she’d forgotten or suppressed.
“Long before the publication of One Day a Year’s first volume, Wolf predicted that her tendency toward self-observation would warp her private life. ‘This entire observed day falls under the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It is deformed by my constant viewing of it,’ she worried as early as the late 1970s. Even in her diaries, Wolf was induced to spy on herself.”
Photos: Underground Tunisia
Poem: Kevin Hart, “Darkness”
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