The Ford Foundation is, apparently, impressed by what it sees as a declining climate of tolerance on American campuses. In the spirit of revitalizing a flagging spirit of free inquiry, it has announced a two million dollar grant program dedicated to supporting academic freedom:

Difficult Dialogues is a new, national competitive grants initiative in undergraduate education. The initiative will support the development of rigorous academic programs that engage students in constructive dialogue around difficult political, religious, racial and cultural issues. The goal is to help institutions create a campus environment where sensitive subjects can be discussed in a spirit of open scholarly inquiry and intellectual rigor and with respect for different viewpoints.

The initiative is part of a broader, $6.7 million effort by the Foundation to understand and combat anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of bigotry in the United States and Europe . Difficult Dialogues builds on the Foundation's history of supporting efforts by colleges and universities to foster more inclusive campus environments and to engage effectively with the growing racial and ethnic diversity of their student bodies.

Think they will stick up for the right of Columbia students to support Israel without intimidation?

I'm not holding my breath....

This sounds very nice, but the Orwellian language in which these discussions are conducted makes it difficult to tell if things like "a spirit of open scholarly inquiry and intellectual rigor" refer to the normal meaning of those words or to the opposite of them, particularly when "open scholarly inquiry" conflicts with someone's notion of "respect for different viewpoints".

The fact that the stated goal of this endeavor is to "combat" certain ideas leaves me mostly skeptical.

As soon as I got to the statement

"The goal is to help institutions create a campus environment where sensitive subjects can be discussed in a spirit of open scholarly inquiry and intellectual rigor and with respect for different viewpoints."

I saw the same old, same old coming into play. As soon as they talk about sensitive subject ... in open scholarly inquiry ... respect for different viewpoints, I thought of the female professor at the Larry Summers talk. Who determines what is sensitive and what is open inquire and what is intellectual rigor and what is respect for different viewpoints also determines whether this is in reality to be a free and open discussion from different viewpoints. I don't see this happening when funded by Ford Foundation and based on descriptions like the one mentioned.

The knee-jerk anti-academic attitude -- aka paranoia -- is just sooo tiresome. For all of the Right's digging around, for all of David Horowitz's idiotic caricatures, what's surprising isn't that there are so many lunatic fringe-folk in the academy, but that there are really so few.

That is to say: it seems there are far fewer brainwashing Ahabs in the academy than there are, say, in various businesses and corporations and bureaucratic offices and political seats. The vast majority of professors can't be bothered to brainwash their students or to stifle conversation. They're trying too hard as it is to get our American youth to say *anything* in class, to generate *any* type of meaningful discussion or debate.

Then again, I've yet to hear what so-called "conservative" research in various fields would even look like. What *is* conservative literary criticism? If no one practices it in the academy (of course because of all the brainwashing), why isn't it to be found among poets, novelists, etc.? Is it Camile Paglia, with her new book of undergrad-style close readings that are ridiculous compared to the criticism of Marjorie Perloff or Helen Vendler? Is it James Woods, with his sophomoric "how can we write ironic novels after 9/11" swooning? God forbid that all lit crit starts to look like that.

{First, I'm assuming that Luther is on the Arts/Hum side of campus like Erin, apologies if I am wrong}

Screedy Goodness Begins...

“Conservative” Lit Crit? How about “Liberal” Lit Crit? Let’s talk about “Gender Symbolism and Food” (a real thesis about why the author didn’t want to eat certain foods out of moral superiority which came out when my science one did – and hers was LONGER!). Or would you prefer the rigor that went into the peer review of Alan Sokal's notorious Gravity as Social construct Social Text paper? Or the host of postmodernist drivel out there? Somehow, I don't think those scholars voted for Reagan or Bush I or Bush II (Heck, Sokal’s incompetent and dishonest critics slammed him for being a conservative long after he came out as an open Sandinista supporter). How is the public and those of us on the otherside of campus supposed to evaluate you guys over there.

Heck, given such idiocy from an self-described ideologically "self-selected community," I'd welcome conservative lit crit! It can’t get any worse. Look at us. We don’t have Gender Identity in Concrete Design, The Queer Theory in Fluid Mechanics.... Storm Tracks of Coastal Storms as a tool of Hegemonic Oppression of The Other… Newton’s Law of Inertia in Class Warfare… Torque Stresses and Melting on Aluminum Alloys and Your Vagina. And also notice that the only time *we* get laughed at is when we do Concrete Canoe Races – and they still float – at which point they stop laughing and actually look at the multidisciplinary team building from diverse groups of professional interests that are required to make them float – and win. Face it, the Humanities have a public respect deficit, the Science and Engineering disciplines have the surplus, and there is a very good reason for it. Frankly, we’re too busy trying to understand the world, make neat things work and satisfying professional certifications that we don’t have time or interest in posing and primping and p!ssing off Bill O’Reily. Am I exagerating your image to the public? "Just a touch." But I've seen enough vita and publication lists from the other side of the academy to know that these things go on and happily so, and THEY are what the public sees, even if you are also bringing Shakespeare to construction workers, teaching ESL classes (a definite challenge) and bringing art to Inner City Kids. Rotten apples and the barrel.

To be sure, our demographics are still mostly liberal or libertarian (like me), but we are more willing to have, want and respect conservative deans and chairs (not to mention faculty). I have and have both and have been grateful for the perspective it gives local "management." Indeed, that “bottom line, get to business” attitude, often nastily attributed to nasty republicans, may sometimes help us be more competitive (or own department is happily “12-month soft money”). Not being professionally bigoted towards republicans, as Luther is looking at his comments, isn’t the primary reason to our success, but it doesn’t get in the way of it. More importantly, our lack of public bigotry doesn’t block us from getting Street Cred from the general public.

I sympathize with your challenge of getting public respect and actually having my students “engage” you more. It is however, YOUR challenge, I can't help you much there. But perhaps being more “relevant” & less insular, not to mention being more respectful to the honest differences that exist in the world (remember your Kipling - you may be wrong after all...) may help you get not only public credibility & respect but also the attention of your (and our) students. And in these times thanks to Ward Churchill et al., and the brushup by Horowitz and Pals, academics in general need all the respect we can get.

OK my screed is done.

To return (after the screed/counter-screeds from Luther and Bill) to the Ford Foundation and this new grant program....

I agree eith you, Erin that is could (and should) be administered in a non-partisan fashion. I suspect, however, that partisanship will come into play. The Foundation's past giving patterns point thataways, as does this telling line from the official press release: "It [the "Difficult Dialogues" program] builds on the foundation’s history of supporting efforts by colleges and universities to foster more inclusive campus environments and to engage effectively with the growing racial and ethnic diversity of their student bodies."

Like Dick said: the same old same old...

I tend to be fairly suspicious of the Ford Foundation's intentions: see my post "Foundations of Bigotry."
http://photoncourier.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_photoncourier_archive.html#107247525292731976

I think it is time to revisit the public policy providing for perpetual tax exemption for foundations. Otherwise, laws of compound interest suggest that the wealth and influence of these organizations will increase without limit.

it seems to me that if the Ford Foundation wanted to promote these objectives they would do well to defund the diversity projects they already fund. They give staggering amounts for that sort of thing.

Luther, I don't know how we got on the subject of conservative lit crit, and I really don't know what conservative lit crit might be. If you mean non-Marxist, non-feminist, non-Freudian lit crit, I suppose Samuel Johnson might be a reasonable place to start. If not him, well there's always Dale Peck.

Yes, Bill, the Sokal hoax was embarrassing. Well, it was embarrassing for one journal in one instance. Again, what's surprising isn't that one "fake" article was published, but that that's the only real hoax publication in the humanities (or at least the only one that critics ever remember or mention). It seems rather boorish to return to an event from nine years ago to "prove" the lack of intellectual rigor in the humanities.

Note, for instance, a recent article from Slate entitled, "Quality Control: The Case Against Peer Review" (http://www.slate.com/id/2116244/). Seems that the *Journal of Reproductive Medicine* published a totally dubious study of the positive effect of prayer on conception. So -- that's one to one, a tied score in the humanities vs. sciences gullibility face-off. Only, at least *Social Text* was conned by a real intellectual; the JPR apparently was conned by, well, a convicted conman.

Yes, there are tedious and silly articles written in the humanities. But what about science studies that prove brilliant things like rats enjoy being tickled? (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=626264&page=1) Before you start mocking, say, the sexual and gender perspectives toward literature, let's remember that literature is filled with perverse and wacky sexuality, from Shakespeare and the Dark Lady and the young man in the sonnets, to Swift's island of La Puta, to Smollett's constant talk of scatophilia and buggery, to Ruskin's inability to deal with pubic hair, to Melville's sailors joyously plunging their arms into a vat of, uh, sperm. Silly is still silly, and I won't defend everything published in the humanities. But if the crazy article on food and gender has even one interesting insight, that's all we can hope for (and what's so ridiculous about studying the gendering of food? Chekhov doesn't have the protagonist of “The Lady with the Pet Dog” ram his fist into a watermelon after bedding a married woman for nothing . . . and religious law is full of rules governing food preparation, cleanliness, and women . . . and anthropologists have always looked at who cooks and eats what in a society . . . and folklore is all about witches eating children, and men chopping up and cooking witches . . . and when Betty Crocker realized that housewives would buy easy-to-make boxed food if they still had to add an egg, the company was keying into a very gendered aspect of American domesticity).

There’s nothing necessarily “liberal” about a gendered perspective on literature. Even Christine Hoff Sommers acknowledges that the world was once sexist (even if she believes that having female suffrage somehow automatically ends sexism – “You can vote not to be raised to be demure! You can vote not to be beaten up by a frat boy!”). Some of the first English novels are about men stalking and preying on women: gotta love that Richardson. And Leslie Fiedler makes a great case that the American novel is very much defined by the Richardson seduction plot line (from The Scarlet Letter to Native Son to Portnoy’s Complaint, the way into America’s bosom is through the womb of a lovely white girl). Likewise, there’s nothing inherently lefty about acknowledging the presence of race as an important aspect of literature. What worries me is that so-called conservative critics believe that ignoring these details is fine, is, actually, the “true” way to appreciate a novel’s beauty or significance – as if any real aesthetic critique could emerge from ignoring concrete details: “You must overlook Henry James’s overt loathing of immigrants in The American Scene in order to truly appreciate the Master’s prose.” Try telling that conservative to overlook Ward Churchill’s Little Eichman line and simply appreciate the classical jeremiad form and rhythm of Churchill’s prose!

Bill, you ask a great question: “How is the public and those of us on the other side of campus supposed to evaluate you guys over there?” Evaluate us by the huge enrollments of English departments, the immense interest in studying literature at the undergraduate and graduate levels despite a shrinking tenure-track field. Evaluate us by the programs created by English departments to foster an environment of creative literacy outside the academy – Buffalo’s electronic poetry archive, Champaign-Urbana’s Humanities Center, U of P’s Writers House, U of Virginia’s amazing early American literature electronic archive, etc. Evaluate us by the sheer amount of original and provocative criticism that doesn’t get much popular notice because it doesn’t talk about pee-pees or Little Eichmans (W. T. Lhamon’s Raising Cain; Michael Berube (ed), The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies; Dana Phillips’ The Truth of Ecology; Nathaniel Mackey’s Discrepant Engagements; Cyrus Patell’s Negative Liberties; Frank Ankersmit’s Sublime Historical Experience; just to mention some humanities research I’ve recently read and enjoyed). The only time an English professor makes the news is when she dresses up in battle gear, when he makes moronic statements about terrorists, or when he criticizes the Pope in The Guardian. Maybe if Faux News ran stories about novels, poems, plays, and criticism, the public wouldn’t be so quick to believe trogs like Horowitz.

You’re right, Bill, English departments make nothing that floats, flies, blows up, or makes my erection stronger. We only study one of the most perverse and universally treasured human behaviors: the way we make stories, the way we make words live.

This language:

to understand and combat anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of bigotry in the United States and Europe is a rather large red flag to me.

'Understand' sounds a lot like 'why do they hate us?'

Luther,

My problem with the liberal lit crit is that they always assume that there is a psychological or social problem at the basis of the novel or poem. Is it possible that the writer just enjoyed the beauty of the day or must the professor always deconstruct the statement about the day in June being because the writer finally got out from under his evil capitalist overlord and got a day off to comtemplate socialism in all its glory. I was an English major (don't blame my writing - I ended up as a computer programmer for 40 years) and I can tell you that every single professor I had in the humanities and political sciences based the entire course on the failure of capitalism and the concommitant beauty of the socialist ideal. Everything was deconstructed on the basis of the social class war.