Oct. 1, 2000

A WRY OBSERVER OF THE IVORY TOWER

I'd like to wish a happy 10th birthday to one of my favorite magazines, Lingua Franca.

This gossipy, irreverent journal of academic foibles is a rich source of columns, whether it's wonderful stories about quirky professors and their fads and feuds or an ever-lengthening list of titles of books I really must read.

I wouldn't want to say that professors are more peculiar, on average, than people in any other occupation. But the nature of their work does give them a little more latitude to explore their eccentricities than people who fly airplanes or drive forklifts typically enjoy.

For instance, Lingua Franca wrote about feminist theorist Jane Gallop, who says at a conference that her sexual preference was "graduate students."

A joke? Maybe, but not very long thereafter she's accused of "violating her university's policy against consensual amorous relationships between teachers and students."

The magazine's 10-year time line of notable events in and around the ivory tower includes the publication of the report that Lynne Cheney, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, submitted to Congress in 1992.

Universities and faculty members, she said, put politics above scholarship.

Well, a lot of them do, as reporters find out when they check the political affiliations of faculty members. In the humanities and the social sciences, Democrats outnumber Republicans by derisory margins; the quest for diversity in higher education does not extend to diversity of opinion.

Now that Cheney is once more in the news because her husband Dick is the Republican candidate for vice president, Lingua Franca looked back at Lynne Cheney's other writings. As a graduate student in English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, she wrote her 1970 Ph.D. dissertation on Matthew Arnold, a Victorian literary figure, and observed "his certainty of human inability to know absolutely."

That's a central tenet of the postmodern sentiment now regnant in most graduate English departments, and something that Cheney decries. But she wrote it, it's a fair catch; and I am delighted that someone took the trouble to read a 30-year-old thesis to find it, because I wouldn't have the time.

Cheney also published three novels. "The Body Politic," written with Victor Gold and published in 1988, is about a woman "whose political career begins with a campaign to put Ayn Rand on a postage stamp," says the article's author, John Plotz.

"She marries a man who is elected vice president, and after he dies in the carnal embrace of

Washington's sexiest reporter, she herself becomes vice president." Ayn Rand has been on a postage stamp. About the rest of it, we'll have to wait and see.

The main article in the anniversary issue is on race and the criminal justice system. It contrasts the views of David Cole and Randall Kennedy. Cole, author of No Equal Justice, argues that the justice system is deeply unfair "and indeed depends on being unfair."

The expansion of police powers in recent years has been accepted only because the burdens fall mostly on poor and minority communities. It would never have been tolerated, Cole says, if it were administered evenly.

Kennedy, author of Race, Crime and the Law, believes that the focus should be on black victims of crime.

"When we talk about inequality in the administration of criminal justice, many people think immediately -- and often exclusively -- of the black suspect, the black defendant, the black convict," Kennedy said when the two debated in 1999. "Protecting minority communities from crime may mean putting more minority criminals in jail."

With racial profiling prominent in the news, the debate is timely, and I'm impressed by the quality of the discussion and the civility of the participants (who have known each other since they were classmates at Yale Law School in the early '80s). I put both those books on my list.

Lingua Franca was the place where physicist Alan Sokal revealed his successful hoax on the editors of the trendy postmodern journal Social Text.

He cobbled together pages and pages of silly quotations about science from leading literary lights strung together with deliberately opaque jargon -- and Social Text published it. "Does it matter," Sokal asked LF readers, "that the author does not believe his own arguments?"

The issue containing Sokal's description of the hoax was handed out at a scholarly conference, as it happened, before it was mailed to subscribers. And so I was the first journalist to call him about it, which pleased both of us.

Happy birthday, Lingua Franca.

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