Free Exchange on Campus - Professor Michael Berube

Professor Michael Berube

Written by Adam
Tuesday, 11 April 2006
*Mr. Horowitz claims that Professor Berube believes that “religious people were to be regarded simply as irrational.” (72)* The only evidence Mr. Horowitz cites to back up this claim is this quote from Professor Berube: “In [my] class…we talk about what it means to be an anti-foundationalist—that is, one of those sane, secular people who believe that it’s best to operate as if our moral and epistemological principles derive not from divine will or uniform moral law, but from ordinary social practices.” (72) As Professor Berube points out, “the fact that most secularists are sane does not mean that people of faith are not.” Mr. Horowitz states that “Professor Berube described the university as ‘the final resting place of the New Left,’ and the ‘progressives’ only bulwark against the New Right.’” (73) These quotes come from an essay in which Professor Berube reviews four different books. In the sentence where the quotes appear, Professor Berube is explaining the multiple ways that the four books describe higher education, and he cites 11 different ways to describe the modern university. Out of these 11, Mr. Horowitz selects two descriptions and omits the other nine—including Berube’s description of the modern university as “the research wing of the corporate economy” and “the conservatives’ strongest bastion of antifeminist education.” Here is the full quote, from the introduction to Professor Berube’s essay, “The Abuses of the University,” which appeared in the journal American Literary History: “Four new books on the state of the academy, and not one of them elaborates a line of argument that bisects any of the others. One gets the eerie feeling that this kind of intellectual noncoincidence is no coincidence, that one could review twenty new books on the state of the academy (if one could take the necessary time away from one’s ‘normal’ academic work) and discover the same result: The contemporary university is so amorphous that it can be described as the research wing of the corporate economy, the final resting place of the New Left, the last best hope for critical thinking, the engine room of global technological advance, the agent of secularization and the advance of reason, the training ground for the labor force, the conservatives’ strongest bastion of antifeminist education, the progressives’ only bulwark against the New Right, the natural home of intellectual isolates, the natural home of goosestepping groupthinkers, and the locus of postmodern skepticism and fragmentation.” Mr. Horowitz goes on to claim that Professor Berube believes “Critics of this definition—in particular those who failed to regard ‘feminist or queer theory as a legitimate area of scholarship’—were only perpetuating ‘ignorance and injustice.’” (73) The two quotes above appear in separate paragraphs; Mr. Horowitz splices them together. In the first quote, Professor Berube is reviewing a book of essays and summarizing the work of other authors, not describing his own views. Here is the full context: “The picture is complicated still further by Greta Gaard’s account of antilesbian intellectual harassment, Mary Wilson Carpenter’s essay on ageism and antifeminism, and Elaine Ginsberg and Sara Lennox’s analysis of antifeminism in scholarship and publishing. For one thing, the perpetrators of antifeminist intellectual harassment in each of these contexts can be women: whether it's a senior female administrator who refuses to regard feminist or queer theory as a legitimate area of scholarship, or the Sommers-Paglia-Roiphe crew dismissing nearly every kind of feminism since 1848.” The second quote (“ignorance and injustice”) comes from the paragraph preceding the one above: “‘What I truly believe,’ Shaw said in 1994, ‘is that second-rate traditionalist scholarship is ultimately more valuable to the country than first-rate feminist works’ (5). Now, does this qualify as behavior that creates an environment in which feminist work is devalued? Absolutely. Is there anything we can do about it except to protest its ignorance and injustice? In a free society, absolutely not.” Mr. Horowitz claims that “As Professor Berube himself acknowledges, his literature classes often have little to do with literature. For instance, a class he has taught for years, ‘Postmodernism and American Fiction,’ is merely a forum for the professor to dilate on the ‘anti-foundationalist philosophy’ of radical philosopher Richard Rorty.” (72) First, Mr. Horowitz has never sat in on Professor Berube’s class, nor does not he cite any evidence from anyone who has to back up his claim. Second, Professor Berube has not acknowledged that “his literature classes often have little to do with literature,” as Mr. Horowitz claims. The only evidence Mr. Horowitz cites to back up his claim is an essay by Professor Berube that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Contrary to Mr. Horowitz’s claim, in the third sentence of this essay, Professor Berube states, “I usually assign a range of contemporary novelists, from well-known figures like Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, and Toni Morrison to relatively unsung writers like Richard Grossman (author of The Alphabet Man and The Book of Lazarus) and Randall Kenan (A Visitation of Spirits). I also assign a packet or two of contemporary critical theorists—the authors of postmodernism's greatest hits (Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard), as well as some of its more trenchant critics (Nancy Fraser, Andreas Huyssen).”[1] *A few closing thoughts from Professor Berube…* “[Mr. Horowitz] knows nothing about my classroom demeanor or my record as a faculty member; he simply cherry-picked a few phrases from a couple of my essays, and did it incompetently…. If he were a college student and tried to get away with this garbage, he would indeed be flunked—not for his conservatism, but for his mendacity.” [1] Michael Berube, “Teaching Postmodern Fiction Without Being Sure the Genre Exists,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 5/19/00. Tags:
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