To the Editor:
If President Lee C. Bollinger wants to be recognized as a champion of free speech (“A Free Press for a Global Society,” The Chronicle Review, February 26), he should have Columbia University officially acknowledge that it harmed Robert Burke and Jerome Klein, permanently destroying their academic careers because they had the courage to protest the Columbia administration’s forging of friendly ties with Nazi Germany.
Bollinger has been unwilling even to consider their cases, despite appeals to do so. The Columbia administration expelled Burke because he led a student picket line at President Nicholas Murray Butler’s mansion in 1936 to protest the university’s sending a delegate to Heidelberg University’s 550th anniversary celebration, a carefully orchestrated Nazi propaganda festival where Joseph Goebbels gave a welcoming address. Columbia terminated the appointment of Klein, a talented fine-arts instructor, because it believed he had initiated a petition protesting its warm welcome to Nazi Germany’s ambassador to the United States, Hans Luther, in December 1933. President Butler praised Luther as “intelligent, honest, and well-mannered,” a “gentleman” entitled to “the greatest courtesy and respect.”
I analyzed the Burke and Klein cases in my recent book The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (Cambridge University Press, 2009), which was reviewed in The Chronicle Review by Carlin Romano (“The Shame of Academe and Fascism, Then and Now,” August 10, 2009).
As reported in The Jerusalem Post on April 3, 2008, the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies invited President Bollinger to comment on my paper on Columbia’s response to Nazism, which I presented at the Organization of American Historians convention in New York in March 2008. Although the institute’s director, Dr. Rafael Medoff, invited Bollinger to participate on the panel more than a month in advance, by mail, e-mail, and fax, Bollinger did not attend and later claimed not to have received the invitation until the day before the session.
It is time for Columbia to recognize that it committed injustices against Burke and Klein, victims of the university’s contempt for freedom of speech. At the very least, Columbia should award both men, now dead, honorary degrees for taking a stand against Nazism at enormous cost when it mattered.
Stephen H. Norwood
Professor of History
University of Oklahoma
Norman, Okla.
The following comments from Chronicle.com are about the article “The Death of Film Criticism” (The Chronicle Review, March 5).
The problem with much of this discussion is that it fails to consider the digital world in which we live. Criticism lives! But it is no longer in the control of centralized systems of validation and approval. And this is the case not only for criticism of film, but also for criticism of literature, theater, fine art, and so on. My own thesis is clear: Commodification of cultural criticism has shifted (from what was, essentially, a 18th-century commodity culture to a 21st-century postcommodity address); definitions of professional criticism have thus also shifted. Too little has been written about this, and too little work is being done to consider it, generally. It is time to begin more actively addressing the digital world in which we live, and the ways in which this world truly works, and can be developed.
—graemeharper
What the Internet doesn’t do is quickly and obviously contextualize opinion or demarcate between preestablished source hierarchies. Historically, the vast majority of film criticism (i.e., film reviewers in newspapers or magazines) has been bad. This was as true before the Internet as it is today. However, it was once easier to identify the best film critics because they would usually be writing for The New Yorker (though not always, as the pre-Kael era shows us) or another eminent publication. Conversely, you could usually ignore whoever was writing for—say—The Des Moines Register (no offense to that fine city). Today, you can’t rely on such conventional hierarchies (or the market) to demarcate between the good and the bad.
Fortunately, serious cinephiles are typically equipped with mammalian brains and good taste, both of which aid in the search for and discovery of worthwhile critics. Sorry that the Internet destroyed your newspapers. But the kid in small-town Alaska who just discovered Kiarostami and Kael is glad that it exists.
—saintfrank
Doherty’s wider assumption appears to be that “serious” film scholarship and academic film study are virtually the same, but within my experience, only a few of the best film scholars are employed by universities. And the fact that Doherty doesn’t even bother to mention the most sophisticated online blogs and sites devoted to film (e.g., Dave Kehr’s and Girish Shambu’s blogs, or Rouge) apart from Bordwell’s, which he jokingly slights because it doesn’t have the industry clout of Ebert and Siskekl’s TV show, is not exactly encouraging. Personally, I don’t read Harry Knowles, but even on the few occasions when I have, I don’t find the slangy, with-it, would-be populist tone there all that different from the tone of Doherty’s piece. The root of assumption of both is that quantity seems to equal quality, whereas the best film criticism, online and offline, on paper and on the Internet, should be judged by the quality and seriousness of the readership, not by the number of hits or readers.
—JROSENBAUM2002
Thomas Doherty responds:
My own thumbs are not all the way down on what the Internet hath wrought for film criticism—the digits are actually more like needles quivering somewhere in the midrange. I had hoped to avoid coming off as a doddering print-based bastard wagging an ink-stained finger at the young Web-slingers, wary of playing the 21st-century version of a medieval monk who cut his teeth on illuminated manuscripts grousing about the decadent media world wrought by that punk Gutenberg. Still, as I read the literary lights collected in Lopate’s American Movie Critics and surveyed the prose on the current film sites, I couldn’t help but lament the passing of the old guard. Like Gerald Peary in For the Love of Movies, seeing beloved bylines (and knowing some of the faces behind them) fired and forced to adapt made for a poignant montage. I know that film critics should be no more immune from the march of technology and bottom-line layoffs than any other profession, but it’s a melancholy passing nonetheless. ...
Obviously, the virtues apply whatever the communication platform—newspapers, blogs, chatting over coffee—but here’s what I look for:
1. Expertise. Do they know what they’re talking about? ...
2) Chops. Can they write well? ...
3) Taste. Do your two cinematic hearts beat as one?
