Academia

For those disappointed by the humorless and deeply earnest treatment of the contemporary campus experience in the 2020 TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, the new Netflix series The Chair will be a welcome tonic. Over its punchy six half-hour episodes, the show, co-created by the actress Amanda Peet and produced by her husband David Benioff, deals with the iniquities of contemporary university life. Its setting is Pembroke, a fictitious minor Ivy League campus somewhere in New England. The action is mainly seen from the perspective of the English department chair Ji-Yoon Kim, a Korean-American academic who fears that her promotion has been brought about through ‘diversity issues’, rather than merit.

One of the great successes of modern feminism is the public awareness campaigns to recognize sexual harassment in the workplace. Universities have encouraged whistleblowing and anonymous complaints procedures so that women can safely report such targeting. But when women in academia are subject to vile slurs such as ‘TERF’, all bets are off; it is considered reasonable to publicly hound and humiliate those women. Interestingly, the vicious, censorious mob tend not to target the handful of male academics who speak out against the sort of extreme transgender ideology that results in the removal of women’s hard-won sex-based rights. Holly Lawford-Smith is associate professor in Political Philosophy at the University of Melbourne (UM), Australia.

It’s cultural Marxism week at Spectator USA. The dialectic of Enlightenment, prodded by the Angel of History, has forced us to confront the false consciousness of late capitalism and to choose between Eros and Civilization, socialism and fascism. Yay! If that sounds like drivel, it’s because it is. The meaningless bits in the previous paragraph are meaningful phrases in the mad Marxist dreamland of laugh-a-minute lefties Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Theodore Adorno, and that other one that Adorno wrote The Dialectic of Enlightenment with.

Of all the slightly dubious documents Michael Cohen supplied with his opening statement today, one stood out to Cockburn: the threatening letters the lawyer had sent to Trump’s old schools and colleges. Cohen sent legal missives to Fordham University and the University of Pennsylvania, warning there would be dire consequences if they were to release Trump’s academic records. ‘The release or disclosure [of academic records] in any form...is expressly prohibited by law, with any violation thereof exposing the subject educational institution to both criminal and civil liability...The criminality will result in jail time,’ the lawyer wrote to Fordham. Cockburn couldn’t help but wonder: why bother?

‘There is a place in academe for scholarship that responsibly weighs the benefits and costs to children of sex with adults,’ says Lisa Ruddick, professor of English at the University of Chicago. Yes, you did read that right. A professor at one of the US’s top universities identifies ‘benefits’ for children in having sex with adults. She also thinks that ‘academe’, which is French for people like her, is the place to do it. Ruddick was prompted to these lofty reflections by a 2005 article in the journal ELH: English Literary History by Kevin Ohi. Kevin Ohi is now a professor at Boston College, specializing in ‘queer theory, aestheticism and decadence.

‘Don’t quote me on this,’ the professor says. ‘Let’s just say Kavanaugh is not going to be the last professor who’s not going to be teaching at Harvard. And several of them are tenured, and they’re going to have to leave.’ The professor teaches at a top university in the Northeast. We’re talking hours after Brett Kavanaugh’s withdrawal from teaching a course on the history of the Supreme Court at Harvard next January. That would have been the tenth time that Kavanaugh had taught that course. Now, however, he has become part of the Supreme Court’s history, and not in the way that he wanted.