January 3, 2012, 10:01 AM ET

Oral-Historian Privilege, Part 2

Well, it looks like the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has decided to issue a stay of the lower court's order for Boston College to turn over its interviews with former Irish Republican Army members to U.S. prosecutors and the British government. (See my post on this subject yesterday here.) BC was willing to turn over the records, claiming that this was a better outcome than taking the risk that the government would force them to turn over everything from the project, rather than just certain interviews. But individual historians on the so-called Belfast Project appealed the lower court's decision last week and were rewarded with this stay. The battle cry of "academic freedom" has been raised again. And this time it's supposed to trump investigations into criminal or terrorist activities. Another win for the ivory tower! Read More

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January 3, 2012, 09:06 AM ET

Iowa, Land of the PAC

Yesterday at the gym, I climbed onto my treadmill only to discover that my iPod, which I ordinarily listen to while working out, had drained to zero. Mostly, I get my news from radio and reading. But with my iPod on strike, I plugged my earphones into the gizmo that lets me hear the bank of TV stations in front of the treadmill machines and watched the reporting on the Iowa Republican caucus race on a variety of channels—among them, Fox, MSNBC, ABC, and CBS. This is the first time I got to see firsthand some clips of ads showing the results of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United. Lets face it. This ruling has reduced matters of free speech to matters of hidden money, resulting in a politically grotesque parody of the democracy of yore, where at least we had a shot at knowing who was behind what. Now we have negative attack ads appearing right and left, without the... Read More

January 2, 2012, 10:47 PM ET

On Not Going to the MLA

It’s not only the long flight, with its warning that when reaching the ground, I must move away as quickly as possible, But the fear that when a former colleague appears at the end of a hotel corridor or waiting for the elevator that never comes, I will be desperate to do the same: Leave my belongings behind and bolt. Because they contain intimacies as complex as love or anger, I no longer want to attend panels of people I knew in grad school; either they will have surpassed me, leaving me with a lap full of resentment, as uncontrollable as teething baby ferrets Or they will be resentful, smoke curling around their graying heads from the bridges they’ve burned and I will be embarrassed because we once cheered each other on with coffees and cheap wine which would now wreck our sleep and give us bad dreams. No longer will I fidget to elaborately ... Read More

January 2, 2012, 05:16 PM ET

Prediction for 2012: Continued U.S. Decline in Education

About this time a year ago, Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, lamented the nation’s lackluster performance results in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study. Every three years, PISA measures reading, math, and scientific literacy among 15-year-old students around the world. According to Duncan, PISA “is fast becoming the measuring rod by which countries track trends in national performance and assess college and career-readiness of students as they near the end of their compulsory education and prepare to participate in the global economy.” Duncan eagerly awaited the results, but was sorely disappointed when they came in. It turns out that the U.S. is not among any of the top performing countries in any subject areas tested by PISA. U.S. students lag behind kids in Canada, Finland, South Korea, Estonia, Japan, Australia, Singapore, the Netherlands,... Read More

January 2, 2012, 04:33 PM ET

Novels of Ideas?

I’ve just finished reading T. Coraghessan Boyle’s When the Killing is Done, as well as Ian McEwan’s Solar, and found them both particularly engaging, whereupon I suddenly realized why: They’re not only “good reads” but each is also a Novel Of Ideas, henceforth, NoI. Something there is in me that loves such novels, and that misses them. Or at least, I prefer them to others that simply involve a story—however well told—for its own sake. Being “of ideas” doesn’t make something an altogether novel novel, but it feels to me like it partakes of an especially interesting genre, and one for which I’d like to invite nominations. My questions to y’all are the following: (1) Is “NoI” a meaningful and legitimate term? And if so, then (2) What are some good examples? To my mind, to qualify as a NoI, a book has to offer more than good writing as such. It must broach one ... Read More

January 2, 2012, 03:31 PM ET

The War to End all Wars

It is 50 years ago this year that I immigrated to Canada. I cannot say the move, what in respects has proved to be the most important (non-family) event in my life, was very much planned. One day I was hanging around Bristol with a mediocre degree not quite knowing what I was going to do next. The next day I was on the Empress of England steaming out of Liverpool, bound for Quebec City. All thanks to a completely unexpected and undeserved offer to do a graduate degree at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. To say that I had a lot to learn about my new homeland is hardly to start on my ignorance. But one thing that very quickly did come apparent and that has stayed with me ever since is the extent to which Canada as a nation was defined by the First World War. The Second World War was obviously much more in people’s memories, especially back in 1962, but it was the Great... Read More

January 2, 2012, 09:11 AM ET

Faculty Productivity in Literary Studies

A GUEST POST BY DANIEL DECKNER [Daniel Deckner is a German graduate student of literature at the Philipps-Universität Marburg and is currently enrolled as a visiting student at the University of Alberta.] Mark Bauerlein’s essay “The Research Bust” poses questions about productivity policies in literary studies at research universities, but before we revise policies, we need to ask a fundamental question about the purpose and focus of literary research. How are we supposed to select worthwhile subjects for our research if we haven’t determined the role that literature plays in people's lives? I believe that the lack of such knowledge is one of the main reasons for the meager impact of literary scholarship. The real problem with this scholarship is not that its reception is meager within its own field, but that its reception anywhere else is virtually nonexistent. Scholars... Read More

January 1, 2012, 09:55 PM ET

Oral-Historian Privilege?

So it looks like Boston College will have to give to federal prosecutors the tapes of interviews that researchers and journalists there conducted with at least one member of the Irish Republican Army. As part of this "oral history project," BC promised interviewees that their stories would be kept under wraps until after their deaths. But on behalf of British authorities, federal prosecutors here "demanded anything in the college archive related to the 1972 abduction and murder of Belfast mother-of-10 Jean McConville, who the IRA admitted to killing and secretly burying, claiming she was an informer," according to the BBC. According to The New York Times, "The subpoenas summoned interviews from two members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes, a commander who died in 2008. They accused Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, of running a... Read More

January 1, 2012, 12:46 PM ET

BLACKWELL ON WRITING: The Long and the Very Short of It

By Elise Blackwell While the fortunes of full-length short-story collections have fallen (again), the short story itself thrives, particularly online, where shorter is better and even shorter is often even better. When I was finishing graduate school, a common route to a fiction writing career was to work on 15- to-20-page short stories during the M.F.A. years, place a few in good journals, and then sell the collection as part of a two-book deal with the promise that the second book would be a novel that was already underway. Across the intervening years, short story collections have ebbed and thrived, with death and rebirth declared in turn—and with novels almost always an easier sell. This is largely perception, of course, and career storyists such as Alice Munro, Stuart Dybek, and Lydia Davis have published across market ups and downs. Yet perception is often reality for the... Read More

December 31, 2011, 07:01 PM ET

Happy New Year for All, Even in Silwan

When I visited Israel and the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem a year ago October, I had the benefit of a guided tour with the Israeli who knows more about the settlements in East Jerusalem than any other, Hagit Ofran. She runs the Settlement Watch project of Peace Now, and blogs at Eyes On The Ground in East Jerusalem. This month, she's posted twice on deeply disturbing developments there, and I'm choosing to round out my year of blogging (interrupted by work on a book about the Occupy movement) by paying some attention. The story of Israeli settlement—the wrong flavor of Occupation—ought to be wrenching to any human being and is certainly wrenching to a Jew like myself who is possessed of the nagging idea that being Jewish has something to do with the love of justice. One of Hagit's posts includes a YouTube video that gives a reasonable introduction to the process of... Read More