Hard as it is to believe, given the passions it continues to arouse, 42 years have passed since critical theory started to infiltrate the humanities in the United States. That’s if we count the famous Hopkins conference of 1966 as its inaugural event. And almost as old as theory is its antagonist, anti-theory, which since the early-70s has charged it with a set of intellectual sins.

Anti-theorists claimed that theory denied stable meanings to texts, thus opening interpretation to gamesmanship, setting cleverness above scrupulousness. (Call this “semantic nihilism.”)

They claimed that theory introduced a circular skepticism into literary practice, whereby before one studied the classics one had to interrogate the notion “classic,” and before one could do that, one had to interrogate the terms with which one interrogated the notion “classic,” … (Call this “endless bracketing.”)...

Last week Paul Fain had an interesting piece on Michigan State University, which is under pressure to add more in-state students and to emphasize undergraduate instruction. MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon is quoted as saying that therefore “the university [must look] at the big picture before it considers any new program and balances societal needs with the institution’s strengths. . . . ‘You try to find areas where you can be one of the best, if not the best.’” The operational conclusion has been “the elimination of independent research centers, which have self-sustaining budgets and can create barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration.” The university, Simon says, is trying to “reduce the administrative tensions of working together,” and to create “nodes of excellence” in order to “avoid layering centers upon centers.”

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Ordinarily, I pay little attention to campaign ads during a presidential campaign. They’re all so embarrassing, what with the quick platitudes accompanied by sentimental music and the candidates smiling and shaking hands with workers at some fake steel plant or other. My mode of response is always, without exception, to switch channels as soon as they appear.

The uproar over John McCain’s most recent campaign ad, however, piqued my interest. Commentators of both parties were raising eyebrows, to say the least, many of them going further and chastising McCain for being “nasty.”

But what’s so nasty about it? The ad charges Barack Obama with being all surface and no substance. It’s a charge we’ve heard before. After all, Obama is young, he has little legislative record, and he’s had little “experience” in national politics or foreign affairs. The ad drives the point home by...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

The 17th Annual Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions begins today, and features appearances by major union figures, including my friend Barbara Bowen, who came to power in the CUNY union as part of an innovative coalition of tenure-stream faculty, graduate employees, and faculty serving contingently, with a small role played by yours truly in the CUNY Adjunct Project.

Eight years later, she’s facing some of the same demands and complaints from faculty serving contingently that she made in connection with the previous union leadership. (My own view is that this militance from the faculty serving contingently is a great thing. I’d very much welcome them mobilizing to reject this contract — ultimately it places the union leadership in a far stronger position to negotiate, having demonstrated militance.)

Next week, to mark the opening ...

It was 1997 when President Bill Clinton apologized to the eight remaining victims of “The Tuskegee Experiment.” Those eight survivors were non-consenting participants in a long-term medical study conducted during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s that denied black men available treatment for syphilis so that scientists could easily determine how the disease mutilated their bodies.

Earlier this month, the American Medical Association issued a formal apology for its organization’s past discrimination against black physicians, a form of purposeful racial exclusion that prompted black doctors to create their own parallel organization, the National Medical Association, at the end of the 19th century. (I didn’t even realize that the NMA still operates today.)

This week, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution apologizing to all African-Americans “on behalf of the people...

The phrase has entered our lexicon. Pose a challanging query to someone and you’ll get the response, “That is the $64,000 question!” It’s the big enchilada, something you probably don’t know the answer to and if it turns out you do know it, well then you’re perceived to be unusually smart. Back in the mid-1950s, however, the expression was a symbol of the magic of television, the merger of entertainment and education.

After all is said and done, it was a game show. Reality television may think of itself as “of the moment” but its origins are with the earlier days of television when live contestants — regular guys and gals looking very much like your next door neighbor — performed on game shows: The Price is Right, Name that Tune, What’s My Line? The $64,000 Question. These programs (or the incarnations that are on the air today) are a little bit of reality, a small dose of magic, ...

When the new school year starts, take stock of how many of your students are wearing watches. If your students are anything like mine, no more than three or four of them will sport watches on their wrists. A while back, an executive I met from a major watch company told me point-blank that watch companies know this, and are desperately scrambling to try to resuscitate the watch — jazz it up, or invent a smart, sassy, and irresistibly alluring advertising campaign that gets young people back onto the watch track.

For most of our students, cell phones have replaced watches. But more to the point, whether they use watches or cell phones, most of our students, most of the time, read time digitally.

“Reading time” is either a spatial or a numerical activity (in the case of the analog clock, both are required; in the case of the digital clock, all one needs is numbers). Although...

A good friend (not the one pursued by demons — I gotta lotta friends) is awaiting the fall publication of her first book. She’s remarkably intelligent, and unnervingly insightful, as well as hysterically funny, so I can’t imagine that the novel will be anything but fabulous.

Her anticipation doubles as the weeks close in on the pub date. She dreams, literally and figuratively, of seeing her work between hard covers, the whole thing bound for posterity.

Sounds good? She’s all sunny, cheery, light-hearted, worry-free?

HA!

She has no cuticles left. She’s chewing the edges of her pillowcase at night the same way she did when we were roommates and her boyfriend didn’t call. She swore up and down that if the book got accepted, she’d let it “go” at that and not torture herself anymore. She’d get on with her life, the rest of her work, and settle back down into what passes for...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Hey, I just got my invitation from the National Association of “Scholars” to join their Golden Snitch project — they called it the Argus project, but I didn’t get what that means, ‘cause I’m in English and that reference requires a course in Classics. Like most NAS invitees, I insist on coloring inside the lines.

My invite arrived by OWL post and invited me to inform on Dumbledore and Harry whenever they vary from the syllabus thoughtfully provided by the trustees and their pals over at 4-Profit Degrees, Inc (“our assessment instruments prove you get exactly the same learning outcomes as at Swarthmore!”)

Every time I catch someone who thinks we should all have health care, I get a prize, working all the way up to a flying broomstick!

They took a poll at some Completely Reliable Web site in order to sniff out “those attracted by...

Bill Halter is the latest in a line of Rhodes-Scholars-named-Bill-turned-talented-Arkansas-Democratic-politicians (think Clinton and Fulbright). Halter tried to run for governor in 2006, got nowhere, downshifted to run for lieutenant governor that year, won, and by all accounts is biding his time until the governorship opens up again. The issue Halter has been riding from the start — it’s on the ballot this November as a result of his efforts — is his proposal for a state lottery.

Less than 50 years ago, no state owned and operated a lottery; today, 43 states do. Not surprisingly, the South was the slowest region of the country to embrace lottery gambling, but eight of the 11 Southern states now have one. The winning formula for Southern lotteries was set by Zell Miller when he ran for governor of Georgia in 1990: promise to use the proceeds of the lottery to fund college...