The Review

Nikole Hannah-Jones, in the statement she released July 6 explaining her rejection of UNC’s long-delayed offer of tenure (she’ll be taking a position at Howard instead), referred to the university’s “vacuum of leadership.” The phrase is apt. Confronted by a politicized governing board conspiring to subvert faculty autonomy and a meddling donor thumbing the scales, UNC’s leaders saw not an existential threat to the university’s principles but a problem to be managed by avoidance and silence. “Why would I want to teach at a university,” Hannah-Jones asked, “whose top leadership chose to remain silent, to refuse transparency, to fail to publicly advocate that I be treated like every other Knight chair before me?” (Our Jack Stripling has the whole story.)

Hannah-Jones will be fine, of course. But if even a celebrity hire with an international profile and a massive platform cannot compel university leadership to articulate basic principles — of faculty governance, of political noninterference, and so on — then what hope does anyone else have?

You Can’t Say That

Last month, the New York Post reported that Brandeis University’s Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource Center had published an “Oppressive Language List,” enumerating terms that one should strive to avoid. The list is real, and many of the suggestions seem quite reasonable, if rather obvious (ethnic slurs and so on). But others raised eyebrows. For instance, is the word “picnic” really associated with lynching? (No, as Reuters explains, and the word was eventually removed from the list.)

And what about phrases like “take a stab at,” “killing it,” and “take a shot at” — all rejected as “Violent Language” by Brandeis? Such prohibitions might seem to have less to do with ethics than with the metaphysical dream of a language free of all figuration. “Truth,” Nietzsche wrote, is a “mobile army of metaphors.” But “mobile army” sounds awfully violent. I suggest instead: “Truth is a roving ad hoc committee of administrators.”

Recommended:

• “I’m almost 60, and in these many decades I’ve seen people — some of them good friends — taken down by all kinds of things. Alcohol and drugs, mostly … You know what finally took me down? F—ing Twitter.” In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan on trying to shake an addiction. For more Twitter-skepticism, check out two Review articles: Justin E.H. Smith’s “How Social Media Imperils Scholarship” and Gordon Fraser’s “The Twitterization of the Academic Mind.”

• At Critical Inquiry, Frances Ferguson reviews The Teaching Archive, by Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan: “It is a history of literary study pitched against the accounts of literary professionalism that have given us the sense that we should guide our thinking about literature by doctrinal statements.” In the Review, Buurma and Heffernan previewed a portion of their argument.
  

• At the London Review of Books, Ange Mlinko writes, not entirely admiringly, about the poet Adrienne Rich: “You have to be accustomed to winning prizes, and quite certain of your place in the pecking order, to grandstand like this … One doesn’t read Rich for la comédie humaine, stylistic sprezzatura, or pleasure of any sort — unless one takes pleasure in moral indignation, which Lionel Trilling once claimed was a distinct feature of the American middle-class liberal.”

Write to me at: opinion@chronicle.com or len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,
Len Gutkin