Reviews and News:
Climate change did not cause ancient civilizations to collapse.
Christine Rosen visits the Museum of the Bible in DC: “How do you engage the citizens of an increasingly secular country, whose founding was nevertheless indelibly marked by principles found in this book, with its history? How do you create a space that acknowledges the cultural primacy of the Bible while also respecting the heterodox religious past and present of the United States? How can an institution talk about one of the world’s most controversial texts without itself becoming a flashpoint for controversy? The short answer: It can’t.”
The New York Public Library releases a new plan for renovating its Stephen A. Schwarzman Building: “The plan, created by the Dutch firm Mecanoo with Beyer Blinder Belle, does not dictate any specific future for the most hotly disputed unused historic space in the building: its seven football-field-size floors of stacks, which have been largely empty since 2013. But in a move sure to set off chatter among dedicated library watchers, the library is announcing that the architects will undertake a broad study of ‘possibilities” for that 175,000-square-foot-space.’”
Hermione Hoby reviews Elizabeth Hardwick’s essays.
W. B. Yeats’s glasses sell for €10,000. (HT: Aaron Belz)
Essay of the Day:
The goal of the modern university is to create knowledge, one argument goes, which explains why there are so few conservative professors. They are, by definition, against new ideas. In Commentary, Warren Treadgold disagrees:
“[M]ost leftist professors expect most scholarship to show that the ideas of Shakespeare (or Freud, Nietzsche, the Greeks, or the Gnostics) either support current leftist dogmas about race, class, and gender and so should be praised and emulated, or contradict such dogmas and so should be condemned and avoided. Linker implies that he would be willing to consider the merits of a conservative scholar who wrote on, say, ‘Supply-Side Economics in Shakespeare,’ but alas, conservative scholars refuse even to do this. This is because conservative scholars are interested in Shakespeare for reasons unrelated to economics, are skeptical that Shakespeare himself was much interested in economics, and think that even if he did have a few ideas about economics, we can get more useful economic ideas from sources other than a playwright who lived in an age when the economy was very different from what it is now.
“Leftist professors have no such inhibitions. In their opinion, there can be no legitimate reason for scholarship except to pursue ‘the concerns of the present’ and conduct ‘a search for new meaning and a rigorous testing of old bromides.’ The works of Shakespeare or any other great men are of no use except to illustrate currently fashionable ideology. Moreover, since the only point of scholarship is to advance ideology, questions of accuracy are irrelevant. In combating racism, sexism, classism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, elitism, and other evils, the genuine study of literature, political science, philosophy, history, art, and religion is quite incidental. Scholarship done for nonideological purposes, perhaps especially if it faithfully represents the past in its own terms, can only serve to reinforce an unjust society and culture.”
* * *
“The truth is that non-leftists are discriminated against not so much because of their politics (which they can often hide) as because of their failure to do the kind of scholarship that hiring committees want. I went to an on-campus interview for a history position in 1988. A member of the department spoke to me at length about politics, and I tried neither to lie nor to reveal that I was a conservative. (It helped that my opinions are somewhat unconventional.) He figured it out, but with no clear evidence to cite, he failed to convince the rest of the department of something so improbable, and I got the job. (He and I later became friends.) In those days, my publications contained no explicit political content. My research on the Byzantine economy, however, soon clashed with established Marxist dogma, and my research on Byzantine historiography clashed with the postmodernist assumptions that all narratives are constructed and truth is irrelevant. The more I published, especially when I published detailed refutations of Marxist and postmodernist views, the less eligible I became as a candidate for other academic positions.”
Photo: Lej da Staz
Poem: Kathleen Peirce, “Vault 55”
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