I got a lot of great correspondence this week, some of which I excerpt below. But first, check out John Leo's current U.S. News & World Report article about the blogging revolution. Leo is especially good on the blog's relationship to mainstream journalism, which it simultaneously complements, critiques, challenges, outpaces, and occasionally replaces.

A reader from Oregon has this to say in response to my May 3 blog about Harvard law students who have decided that theirs is a racially insensitive environment:

Don't you get the feeling that this victim hypersensitivity (and reparations) are the inevitable result of only wanting to work the victim position and not having anything more worthwhile to whine about? What a social success to be out of real issues! How did all these wimps get into law school? Did they earn their way in or get a gift? If they earned their way, they are convincing evidence that they have overcome these hurtful little slings and arrows. If they got in on affirmative action, then they got their 'gift' from society and should shut up and prove they deserve to stay. Can someone who just can't stand any discomfort without wilting in a flood of tears really expect to hold a job? These hypersensitive people are the emotional equivalents of the princess and the pea.

There is definitely much to be said about the peculiar pettiness of much of what passes for activism and consciousness raising on the multicultural campus. Student protests against A&F t-shirts, for example, reek of ignorance, hypocrisy, and opportunism.

Ignorance: the T-shirts depend for their humor on our collective recognition that the stereotypes they depict are definitively past; they literally cut those stereotypes down to size. Far from perpetuating negative stereotypes of Asians, the t-shirts announce that the negative images they depict no longer have currency except as kitsch.

Which brings me to point two: hypocrisy. It's fine when Asian-run companies like www.chinkdesign.com capitalize on outmoded Asian stereotypes. It's not fine when A&F does it (even though their t-shirts were created by an Asian designer). In other words, the protests aren't about the images at all. The protests are about who wields the images. Which makes no sense at all in a mass cultural environment where images are always detached from their makers, and where there is no such thing as intent, only impact. Unless, of course, you look at the situation through the lens of opportunism.

Which brings me to point three: the A&F protests were not about an issue so much as they were about an opportunity to create an issue. This is a crucial point. It's hard not to see students selectively protesting a particular fashion as making a strong fashion statement themselves: the A&F protests are a classic example of how fashionable campus activism has become. In their hysterical hatred of a certain fashion line, we can see students turning protest itself into popular culture, into a style, a trend, a cool thing to consume. This is campus activism in the age of spectacle. Protest no longer expresses outrage; it performs it. And like all popular performances, people will pay to support it. In demanding money from A&F, this is what student protesters are counting on.

But I digress. Here's another letter. In response to my May 2 blog about why I keep a blog, a reader from Australia writes this eloquent riff on academic conformity; the rote, destructive character of institutionalized academic dissent (especially as it manifests itself in grad student unions); and the singular importance of realizing, cherishing, and preserving the pleasure and privilege of scholarly work:

The combination of the daily confessional of blogging and academia is welcome, because in critiquing some of the more sordid and dubious practices currently taking place in the Academy, it inevitably helps to affirm the importance of disputation and debate in academic work. The impetus to confront, to unsettle, to challenge, is a longstanding intellectual tradition which, in the contemporary climate of America -- where, I think, professionalization has always been valued and emphasized more strongly than it has been elsewhere -- has curiously been institutionalized. It's been absorbed into organizations. It's been co-opted into efforts to unionize en masse, and has helped to shape endeavours to create a consensus which is paradoxically based on the belief that there must and always will be a fundamental tension, an unresolvable difference of opinion between students and the administration.

What is missing in this formulation is the very thing which is crucial to academic work: pleasure. In Australia, less than 10 hires were made by English departments last year. The vast majority of graduates are consequently obliged to take up 'post-doctoral fellowships', which in practice are the equivalent of enrolling in another PhD and biding one's time before an opportunity for employment emerges. Increasingly, those working in the Humanities are beginning to see academic work as a temporary engagement, and are having to seek other means of employment once they have completed two or three fellowships. Education is not a game, and love of learning is not a trivial by-product of what Borges called the "romantic seriousness" of childhood. Yet research is a stimulus for delight and creativity. Employed staff and enrolled students alike shouldn't forget the extraordinary opportunity they have been given to pursue their own creative interests.

Go readers! Keep the comments coming. That's what blogs are all about.