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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Like who, precisely? Henry Louis Gates is frequently mentioned as among the new public intellectual...
Gates is a pivotal figure, a very shrewd handler of people. He knew how to work college administrations to guilt-trip them for their exclusion of African-American studies and thereby to win a huge investment of money for the expansion of faculty and facilities. He put African-American programs on the map. But as a group they still do not have a high reputation because so many of them are rife with ideology. Beyond that, the problem is there are too few African-American scholars to go around -- everyone wants them. There are simply not enough who have entered the profession. Thus many schools have had to reach further and further down and hire people who are really marginal in scholarly terms.
Look at the Ward Churchill case, this guy who was the chairman of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder and who didn't even have a Ph.D. He had absolutely no scholarly training in anthropology or in anything in ethnic studies -- his M.A. was in communications. He had no business being rocketed to a tenured position literally overnight in the early '90s, when he had just been teaching adjunct courses as a staffer there. All of a sudden, he was earning $94,000 a year. There's something deeply corrupt in American academe that was rewarding, in this case, not the color of your skin but a claimed Indian heritage that Churchill can't prove -- and that one American Indian group long ago called fraudulent.
The whole American academic system -- which Europeans can't quite understand -- is shot through with this p.c. stuff that administrations are promoting. It's a marketing tool. "We are for affirmative action, we're for diversity, we give a rainbow education." And so there's been a slow decline in respect for genuine scholarship. Gates' department hasn't yet produced as much high-level work as it should have, but I'm confident that it will because it is grooming the next generation of young scholars. They will presumably fan out into the profession, and then we will see the true fruits of what Gates achieved.
Cornel West, an early Gates' recruit at Harvard who has now left, is someone mentioned with you as an academic interested in engaging in popular culture.
Well, Cornel West is definitely a major American public intellectual. He and I are certainly parallel phenomena. We emerged strongly in the '90s. We have a wide range of interests from popular culture to traditional scholarship and philosophy. We are entertaining presences on the lecture circuit; we are performers -- on TV as well. I myself have questions about Cornel West's work.
His rap album?
No, the rap album doesn't bother me in the slightest -- I like the idea. But I've sometimes noticed what I feel is too big a gap between the writing of his major books and writing I see him doing elsewhere. I sometimes wonder how much editing has been done of his best work -- even before it got to the publisher. I've occasionally seen in articles by him a kind of hasty, careless, demagogic, nearly ungrammatical use of language and a pretentious, jumbled jargon that I find peculiar compared to the lean, finely honed writing of his most acclaimed work.
My work is never edited in that sense. My excellent editor will make a suggestion or a request here and there, but there is never wholesale rewriting or reorganization of my prose or alteration of my voice. What you're getting from me is entirely my work.
Another thing that I object to, and the media seems to really ignore, is how many books by prominent academics have been supported by graduate assistants and research assistants, often paid for by the university itself. They're the ones doing all the book-running: checking quotes, accumulating examples, assembling the footnotes and bibliography.
As a scholar, I can see it in people's work from major universities. I can tell who are the professors who actually did the reading and gathered the quotes, as opposed to people who are so busy running this or that and exercising academic power that they have to have examples and evidence supplied to them. And what gets me is when a reviewer says in awe, "This is a very erudite person -- there are so many pages of footnotes!" I want to laugh! Well, pages and pages of footnotes in the back of a general interest humanities book usually indicates weakness. You don't need all that if your scholarship is solid. And the idea that the trendy professors of the elite schools have actually read all those books is usually false. Not only haven't they read them, they haven't even gone to the library to get them.
I have no research or clerical assistance whatever. I teach at a small college where I must do every single thing myself. But that is what, I believe, that sympathetic readers are sensing: quality control.
