It's all well and good to call for an end to the "snark," but who is blameless in this regard? I can think of any number of posts on this blog that "play to the base."

I bring this up because I agree with Erin O'Connor's call for an end to culture wars and a new academic civility. The problem is that it's really, really hard to resist the snark. It's an instinctive reflex that we pick up in graduate school (as we try to prove just how clever we are). And so we continue to snark, and we snark about other other peoples' snarks (referring to the "snark as art form" is pretty snarky), and we snark about snarks about snarks (yours truly), and so on...

Peter -- I agree, the snark impulse is hard to resist. And there are indeed many posts on this blog, particularly from the early years, where I commit Acts of Snark. As Arlo Guthrie would say, "I'm not proud ... or tired." But my thinking about snark has evolved with the blog (now nearly seven years old), and as blogging in particular, and online communities in general, have over the years. Snark is an emotional shortcut that has acquired far too much play in allegedly intellectual debates. It arises from anger, it's not conducive to sincere inquiry or exchange, and when academics or others who make any sort of intellectual claim do it, it really serves them badly. These things I know in part from my own experience -- it's not a tone I wound up liking, and not one I cultivate any more, though of course one does from time to time lapse a bit. And of course, too, it's also the case that blogspace can be pretty tonedeaf (which may be in part why snark is such a popular register -- it's pretty obvious, pretty hard to miss). That said, I actually meant it as a compliment when I said that Berube has raised snark to an art form. He's really, really good at it -- as you must know if you read his blog. He manages to inject more acuity and cleverness into it than most do. Still, it's not an optimal mode if the goal is to enrich and encourage dialogue.

Berube's blog reads like an echo chamber, for the most part. I love the comment about how Harvard's physics department would benefit from a multicultural approach to superstring theory. We always have things we can do to make their departments better. But science has nothing to offer our disciplines, because it's just another discourse constructed by white males.

The humanities and the social sciences are, frankly, without much in the way of credibility, and I speak as a professor in the humanities.

Oddly enough, Kathleen Parker has a piece in the Washington Post today entitled "Importance of Being Earnest" about the "pending deaths of Cynicism and Snark": http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/15/AR2009011503248.html?hpid=opinionsbox1 . She describes herself as a member of CASA (Cynics and Snarks Anonymous).

Erin, I've been following your blog pretty much since the beginning and while you play to the base, I don't remember you ever being snarky in the sense of taking cheap shots. Even if snarkiness works only if one preaches to the choir, not all preaching to the choir is snarkiness.

Snarkiness is closely related to cynicism and sarcasm. Regarding the latter, Field Marshal Lord Wavell had some thoughts in his book Generals and Generalship:

"He (the general) should never indulge in sarcasm, which is being clever at someone else's expense, and always offends."

and

"Explosions of temper do not necessarily ruin a general's reputation or influence with his troops; it is almost expected of them ("the privileged irascibility of senior officers," someone has written), and it is not always resented, sometimes even admired, except by those immediately concerned. But sarcasm is always resented and seldom forgiven. In the Peninsula the bitter sarcastic tongue of Craufurd, the brilliant but erratic leader of the Light Division, was much more wounding and feared than the more violent outbursts of Picton, a rough, hot-tempered man."

Berube has almost singlehandedly refined academic snark to an art form

Really? I remember him showing up over at Protein Wisdom to snark at the backward wingnuts. He "softly and suddenly vanish[ed] away" in short order, as I recall.

The people over there have first-rate educations, immense vocabularies, and are orders of magnitude more snarky than Bérubé. You might even call them boojumy.

OK, snark bad, earnestness good. But of course earnestness can also be pretty insulting, and mean-spirited earnestness is far less likely to redeem itself with wit. I have in mind here not just earnestly mean-spirited titles like America's Most Dangerous College Classes and The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (or Profscam, or The Hollow Men, or The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changes America, or The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art, or Liberal Fascism....)--I also have in mind titles of works putatively more serious but still rather unfortunately titled, like Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans.

Who's the implied audience of a book with such a title? Seems to me that a serious attempt to deal with a problem would not want to start off by so viciously insulting the very people whose attitudes and habits one hopes to change. (Or, if one's target is the parents who are somehow to override the attractions of digital culture, maybe one should not begin by appealing quite so blatantly to their fears and prejudices.) Which of course suggests that maybe works with such titles are not all that serious (or not all that serious about things other than grinding axes and making money).

Berube at least understands that language use is highly contextual, and while he is certainly snarky on his blog he is much less so elsewhere--e.g., think of the nicely matched titles and contents of Rhetorical Occasions and What's Liberal about the Liberal Arts. When Berube wants to persuade, rather than just vent or have fun, he rather sensibly refrains from insulting his interlocutors. Bauerlein could take a hint.

Or maybe Berube should take a hint. I'll bet The Dumbest Generation outsells Berube's entire output 20-1. Bauerlein's book is right now ranked at 4,225 on Amazon, and I could be wrong but I doubt any of Berube's books have risen anywhere near that high. I notice that the politely titled Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, a book with a thesis much like Bauerlein's that was published just a couple weeks later--and a book by a much better-known author (Bill McKibben)--but without a youth-bashing title, is only ranked much lower, at 42,191.

Maybe elevated discourse just doesn't sell anymore. Well, two cheers for capitalism, as conservatives used to say back when academia took them more seriously.

David,
Does it matter that "The Dumbest Generation" is a quote from Philip Roth's Human Stain? And does that make Roth just as bad in your book? For what it's worth, Bauerlein's book is extremely temperate and well-argued. Also, you make my point about Berube in reverse. He certainly can avoid the snark when he wants to. And while you observe that when Berube wants to "persuade, rather than just vent or have fun, he rather sensibly refrains from insulting his interlocutors," I would counter that his interlocutors know very well how he talks about them in other settings. The upshot is not that he avoids offending his interlocutors, but rather that he insults them in one setting and expects not to be held to account for that in others. It doesn't wash.

Though I haven't yet heard the exchange between Michael Berube and Anne Neal, his blog entry linked above is thick with the sarcasm and condescension for which he's notorious. Peter Shoemaker's quite on the mark about Berube's playing to the base here (his blog devotees, or echo chamber, as John Drake has it) and perhaps offering compromise there (Erin O'Connor's description of his discussion with ACTA's Neal). In teaching and conducting his classes, is he there, or here? We know from his book "What's Liberal about the Liberal Arts?" that he thinks the liberal arts are inextricably bound up with liberal or left political opinions. Again, is he there, here, or in both places at once, making it all the trickier for students to sort if their ideological views don't accord with their "liberal" professor's?

Of the many half-truths in Berube's blog entry, an often reiterated one is that of conservatives or traditionalists voluntarily opting out of humanities teaching and scholarship as careers. This is true to an extent, but Berube makes no mention of common faculty selection processes for literature positions, in which I've many times seen candidates disqualified on ideological grounds and often because they failed to meet expected liberal-left political or ethnic tests. Such tests are often applied under the thin guise of potential "collegiality."

Erin's right to apply a mild corrective to Eveningsun's example of judging books by their covers (though this technique does make for rapid reading!). If I were to play the same game, I'd probably opt for "Stultifies" to replace "Stupefies" in Mark Bauerlein's title. But what I've read of Bauerlein on education has been pretty temperate. It probably matters where one is located on an ideological spectrum. That's not to say we can't be fairer to our ideological adversaries and above all to our students. I remember David Horowitz's and Jonah Goldberg's books caused an epidemic of hyperbolic snarkery in lib-left circles when they were released. I haven't read Kimball's latest book yet, but I've profited much from reading his other books and articles.

Bill McKibben? Haven't read the former New Yorker writer and global warming activist for years. Thanks to Eveningsun for reminding me of him. I expect Bill is keeping pretty close to his stove on his mountaintop haunt in Vermont just now.

Does it matter that "The Dumbest Generation" is a quote from Philip Roth's Human Stain? I don't think so, because the allusion most readers will see is to The Greatest Generation. Tom Brokaw has more sales-power than Philip Roth. And I'm sure the publishers were not thinking that the best way to sell a book was to allude to a line in an academic novel rather than a famous celebrity. No, the comparison of today's generation with the WWII generation--the familiar appeal to a golden age, with the words "dumbest" and "stupefies" thrown in--is what they were counting on to sell the book.

The upshot is not that he avoids offending his interlocutors, but rather that he insults them in one setting and expects not to be held to account for that in others. I take your point. But is that such an unusual thing, or even such a bad thing? Just maybe, to post an insult on a certain kind of blog is to signal to your victim that the insult should not be taken as seriously as it would be were it offered up in some other context. (How does one know one's dealing with that kind of blog? By observing the type of insults it contains.) I'm suggesting that there exists a variety of contexts that we should keep in mind here. Consider the way insults proffered at a celebrity roast are not to be taken seriously at all, or the way criticisms made of a rival during a political primary campaign are to be instantly forgiven once a nominee has emerged. There's a spectrum of contexts, from the celebrity roast or Marx Brothers film, at one extreme, to, let's say, a formal courtroom trial at the other, in which differing degrees of latitude exist, in which we are expected to take utterances with differing degrees of seriousness and offense. Where does a blog like Berube's fall on that spectrum? (Or The Corner, or the commentary threads of DailyKos or Newsmax?) Maybe we should think of blogs like Berube's as places where academics go to play the dozens or engage in flyting, and maybe we should think of the insults found there as something like "Yo' mama" jokes--as things to be judged not on the basis of their politeness but on the basis of their wit and ingenuity. We should at least consider the possibility that maybe instead of eradicating the insults we should adjust the way we perceive them. Of course, even among people used to playing the dozens, things can get out of hand. There are still rules to the game which can be broken. But we should be careful to first understand what those rules are. The point is that there already exist lots of accepted (even highly valued) domains in which one insults one's opponents "and expects not to be held to account for that in others." Are personal blogs one of those domains in which it's just silly to take offense? Are middlebrow partisan political books like Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot?

I suppose maybe now I'm trying not to think about this stuff too prescriptively. I'm wondering if there isn't even some value to the emergence of these new realms of discourse, with their new and as yet unsettled rules, that we're missing and might not want to foreclose on just yet. Maybe it's good that there's a new space where academics can find out what they "really think" about each other. Maybe the insult conveys a valuable nugget of honesty that compensates for a bit of hurt feelings. And maybe it's good for intellectual debate to get spiced up, as it were, for public consumption. Maybe the result will be for people to consume more of it, and become a little smarter even as their skin grows a little thicker. As I said elsewhere, Horowitz's rhetorical habits are lamentable in many ways, but they've at least had the effect of drawing lots of new people into a debate that without him would still be largely ignored. Excessive politesse is not always a good thing. And I would note that Horowitz himself is a lot rougher in some contexts than others. He fully expects people whom he's insulted in one discursive domain to take him seriously and engage him civilly in other domains. Maybe we all should first try harder to understand the new domains we see being created. Horowitz seems to, even if only intuitively. Berube seems to as well.

None of this is to say that we shouldn't engage in judgment about the social effects of our discursive habits--merely that, to revert to my "dozens" analogy, our judgment should not be as hasty as that of a Lady Bracknell dropped suddenly onto a Harlem playground.

To write off biting wit or sarcasm or snark is to ignore thousands of years of rhetorical history. So let's not begin to make simplistic oppositions between earnest as effective and snark as ineffective.

Berube uses snark to define his audience. The people he calls wingnuts are not the people he seeks to convince. Likewise, Bauerlein's book is not addressed, at all, to the dumbest generation itself, but rather to its parents, teachers, leaders, bosses, elders, etc.

Snark is a rhetorical strategy like any other, and its effectiveness is not governed by its nature as snark. Berube isn't unthinkingly alienating some part of his audience; he has decided (after years of trying otherwise) that some groups are not worth engaging in reasonable debate.

Similarly, Bauerlein has decided that the under-30 crowd cannot be persuaded; instead, they must be forced, from the top down, to change their ways. (Interesting philosophy for a conservative.) Plus, the elders buy more books (I mean, that's one of the topics of the book), so it makes a sort of sense to appeal to them in book-form. I actually think MB makes excellent points, but I don't think he's likely to persuade young adults to change (and I don't think he even tries).

So while snark is a pathetic appeal, it is not a simply emotional reaction. It is a logically employed appeal to the feelings of a crowd. (15 extra points for the first person using the words "fascism" or "Nazi" to criticize my defense of emotional appeals.)

How about if I just criticize you for being ideologically incapable of being able to critique either yourself or your comrades, Luther?

John, all snark aside, you are simply incorrect. There's plenty of evidence throughout the comment sections on this one site to demonstrate my ability to criticize (btw, that's the verb, and critique is a noun) myself. I've actually been convinced by a good deal of what O'Connor, Bauerlein, and other intellectual conservatives have to say about education, free speech, etc.

As to my comrades, I certainly make no claims of criticizing them, for I have no idea who they would be. I used to challenge Berube's positions all the time on his old blog, but he doesn't know me from Cain, and we're not in the same profession ('tho we have some mutual friends), so I don't think he's a comrade of mine.

But oh, that's right, your use of "comrades" is simply some sad piece of past-sell-by-date red-baiting. Which I think passes as snark, but I know you'd never be snarky.

Are you not an academic (well, former academic) of the left, Luther?

Did you not, as a graduate student, hound and harass a professor who was not of the left?

Comrade wasn't meant as snark. It was meant as a word that most accurately portrays your ideological position and the actions you have taken based on that position. Berube seems to have a similar disdain for those who tilt rightwards, so he is, in fact, your comrade, whether you and he are friends or not.

And I have never seen you take sides with Erin here, unless it was on a subject that was barely tinged with ideology, one on which Erin was taking a moderate position, or something dealing with a pedagogical issue that was pretty cut and dried.

And critique is also a verb. Pick up a dictionary and look it up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

". . . mean-spirited titles like America's Most Dangerous College Classes and The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (or Profscam, or The Hollow Men, or The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changes America, or The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art, or Liberal Fascism.."

Mean spirited? None of these are mean-spirited, although a few, but not all, are judgmental. Liberal Fascism for example precisely reflects what the author tried to convey.

John, I have never been an academic.

John, I have never "hound[ed] or harass[ed] a professor not of the left." As a graduate student, I questioned a professor's on-line mocking of that professor's students, but at the time I had no knowledge of the professor's politics -- and this professor had written a fairly lefty, theoretical book, so in my mind it had to do with basic decency. But I don't think *any* of the parties -- grad students, professors, administrators -- behaved well in that situation. This is the benefit of hindsight.

And I have taken sides with Erin on topics such as: (1) the need for stronger curricular requirements for undergraduates; (2) the need for professors to teach their subjects, without indoctrination; (3) the need for administrators to put an end to many res-life programs; (4) the need for more canonical literature to be emphasized in lit studies.

But no, Snr. Drake, I don't agree with everything Erin (or most anyone) says on these issues. I don't think college should be high school part two just because students forget basic facts. I don't think professors should neglect important issues, such as race, class, and gender, just because some people think that's indoctrination. I don't think Tunnels of Oppression are the only waste of money in res life, nor do I think PC is a causal force in res life problems (it's clearly an excuse, not a cause. People with jobs and budgets *always* want to increase their power and budgets.) Finally, I think canonical literature is important, but great literature is more important. (Wilson Harris is a better writer than John Updike or Philip Roth, but he's not canonical. *Deadwood* or Marianne Faithfull's *Broken English* is better art than Billy Collins' or Robert Lowell's poetry.)

Apparently, John Drake believes that a blog should be an echo-chamber. Even when I agree at some level with Erin here or Scott Kaufman or Joe Kugelmass or Sean McCann at The Valve or Ron Silliman or Michael Berube or Mark Bauerlein, I think it's the role of any serious reader to play Devil's Advocate. But notice, Sir John, I hound and harass *more* lefties than righties.

Speaking of comrades, I wonder when was the last time you disagreed with Erin at a radical level.

(Finally, "critique" is a verb like "quote" is a noun. Or like "prioritize" is a verb. Or "value added" is a compound noun, as in the recent groupthink of business types, "Thinking outside the box is my value-added." If people use it, it's that. That's how language works. But it doesn't mean it's not annoying.)

No, Luther, I don't think a blog should be an echo chamber, as my comments above already indicate. I do think that you are a troll. I think you started as a real life troll, and now you are on online troll.

I also think that you are a die-hard lefty, who cannot admit that your tireless championing of race, class, and gender is a political position, because the assumptions on which current race, class, and gender theories are based are not only left, they are Marxist.

But what mainly troubles me is that you're not a devil's advocate. You are a troll. Your representation of what you did as a graduate student does not square with accounts I have heard elsewhere. Your continued pursuit of this professor was politically motivated, and you are being dishonest in claiming it was not.

Finally, critique has been used as a verb since the 18th century, so go be pedantic with someone else. If I had wanted to use the word "criticize," which has accrued connotations of *only* negative analysis and comment, that I would have chosen to use that word.

John, there's probably no point in continuing this conversation, but I'm bored, so why not?

First off, using the term "troll" is a cop-out. There's no shared meaning for it. It's a word of vituperation, not a classificatory term that invites argumentation.

Second, I'd call myself a liberal and not a lefty. My dissertation (along with many of my public positions on blogs) is, in part, a critique of identity politics. (It deals with four black writers but so rarely uses the word "race" that I had to justify that at my defense. It concerns tensions between democracy and pluralism in American historical fiction.) So I'd love to see evidence of my "tireless championing of race, class, and gender." As a claim, it makes no sense. Like Walter Benn Michaels, I think race, like culture, is a mistake. Race is like angels: the belief my have effects even if the terms themselves have no real referents. I don't "champion" the term. But I do think that it's a huge historical mistake that has clear effects on the history of modern literatures. Same with gender and class. I just finished teaching *Antigone* and *Les Miserables* to my sophomores. I cannot imagine how one could make sense of *Antigone* without some idea of the male/female split along the lines of oikos and nomos, or how *Les Miserables* could be taught without addressing Hugo's vision of class bias and resentment.

You also might actually research contemporary Marxism to see the extreme tensions between the politics of class and those of race or gender. The introduction of the categories of race and gender was often a challenge to academic Marxists. But one need not be a Marxist (or feminist or racist) to believe that race, class, and gender can be fruitful terms of literary analysis. Anything that sheds light on the human ability to use language artfully should be admitted to the study of literature. And I'd point to Kenneth Burke and Fredric Jameson as critics who who class fruitfully; and Henry Louis Gates and Werner Sollors as critics who use race fruitfully; and Jane Thompkins and Nancy Armstrong as critics who use gender fruitfully. We can all find critics who use these terms to abuse literature, but I can also find critics who use New Criticism or classical rhetorical analysis to abuse literature.

Finally, John, now that it's clear that your take on my interactions with Prof. O'Connor as a grad student are based solely on hearsay, I'd think you'd back down. Instead, you're *proud* to stick by your hearsay. I'll just say this. Until Erin started working for ACTA, I assumed she was a left-libertarian, and I still disagreed with her. She and I worked together (with others) on strengthening the core curriculum for graduate studies at Penn. I once asked her to observe my teaching and give me feedback, which she generously did. Our disagreements had nothing to do with politics; they had to do with some tense interactions between her and the students of one of her graduate classes (of which I was not a member). I took the side of the grad students on issues that were largely pedagogical: must a course stick to its description? Can a professor switch from live to electronic teaching in mid-semester? Can a professor publicly criticize her students on a website?

And while I disagreed with Erin, I stuck around her websites because I always respected her as a teacher. (She was one of the few professors at Penn who ever gave me constructive feedback on my own teaching. And her graduate students were upset with her precisely *because* Erin had a reputation as a great teacher.) I'd like to think that Erin and her former students could agree that the entire situation was mishandled on all sides.

So John, wrong on all counts. If it helps you to sleep at night knowing that I'm some unthinking Marxist, go ahead. But I'm proud that I've only read about 80 pages of Marx, and those only because an older, conservative professor at Penn recommended that I put them on my oral reading list next to *Alice in Wonderland* to give my list more "seriousness." (I'm prouder that I read *Alice in Wonderland* about once a year, just so you know where my allegiances lie.) My political views are probably closer to Christ's (take care of others, sacrifice yourself, try to sanctify God in everything you do) than to Obama's.

Matt, I'm posting your comment because on balance it would probably be worse not to. But I'd like to say that I don't think my blog is the right place for you to discuss my history at Penn, or for you to represent your role in events that you have yourself described elsewhere as a political vendetta that far exceeded a local spat about pedagogy. I am the first to admit that if I had the spring of 2001 to do over again, I would have done things differently. I made mistakes then, I have paid dearly for the lessons I learned from them, and I am grateful for the perspective the whole experience--which for me lasted years, and which is in some ways still ongoing--has given me.

That said, your recollections of that time strike me as rather airbrushed. I don't want to get into an argument with you--but I will say that my recollections of that period, as well as of the years since then, have added up to a decidedly different set of impressions. There's quite a discourse emerging about the phenomenon of academic mobbing. And there is no question that this is what happened to me beginning in 2001 and continuing, in various forms and guises, until I quit my job at Penn in the summer of 2008. I won't argue with you when you describe the contents of your conscience--which I take to be what you've done in your previous comment. But I will assert that you do not know--are in no position to know--what my professional life was like at Penn from 2001 onward, except insofar as you participated in and/or passively condoned the mobbing behavior that began that year. And regardless of what your conscience tells you, you were neither so innocent, nor so moderate, nor so focussed on pure issues of pedagogy, as your post suggests.

(slighly off-topic) Luther, I doubt that many people object to the use of race/class/gender in analyzing literature or history--I think what's being objected to is excessive focus on these things at the expense of other human attributes.

Consider the difference between the internal world of an extreme introvert and an extreme extrovert--or a person who is primarily visually-focused versus one who is more auditory in their orientation. Or the difference between an individual who is devoutly religious and one who is not. In literature especially, I would think factors like these would be at least as important in motivation & plot as race/class gender.

You mentioned the importance of gender in the study of "Antigone"...isn't it pretty clear, though, that only 1 woman in 100 (or more) would have taken the stand that she did? Her female identity may be a necessary condition of her role in the play, but is not a sufficient one.

Erin, I agree with you about not airing out those events here. Drake brought it up, and I gave my perspective. But just to be clear: I'm not proud of those events, and it was the entire meltdown on all sides that in part inspired me to pursue a career outside of the academy. From day one of graduate school, I was horrified by much that went on among professors and graduate students and between them. I won't deny that I participated in some of it.

David, plenty of critics have identified race/class/gender analysis as ipso facto indoctrination. I agree that those terms do not encompass all of reality -- but they certainly do not mark the first time scholars have come up with what Wilson Harris calls "terminal creeds," or concepts that attempt to give a single and total explanation of the world. The problem isn't with the concepts themselves, then, but the way they become fixed and "totalizing," to use an ugly word. But that's not the perspective of many conservative critics of the academy, who would like to see issues of race, class, and/or gender returned to the silence from which they came.

(And David, I agree with you about *Antigone*. Antigone is clearly a very special woman, but the role she plays is very much defined by her gender. Sophocles shows Kreon becoming increasingly unhinged throughout the play not only by her insubordination, but by the fact that a *woman* would dare challenge him. Sophocles also makes sure that we have a spectrum of female characters: Ismene, who is in modern parlance traumatized and indecisive, and Eurydice, who keeps to the house until the very end, ignorant of all the insanity going on in the public stage. Sophocles is not, of course, portraying the "tragedy of womanhood," but womanhood is a huge factor in Antigone's status as hero and tragic figure. I've never met an academic critic who would say that gender is a sufficient condition for most female characters' situations -- which would seem to say that all women in all times are exactly the same. Of course, that was part of the point of bringing class and race into the equation: to remind us that's there's not one unchanging manifestation of womanhood in the world.)

Luther, you are under the misapprehension that my knowledge of what occurred at Penn has not been acquired from those involved, rather than something that has come down to me third-hand. I am well-aware of the discrepancies between what you admit to doing here, in this forum, and what you have been accused of doing. Even if the truth lies somewhere in between, it still reveals you as an individual whose left politics (and I call them left, because your actions are those of a liberal thinker) determined your reaction to a right-leaning professor.

As such, I see you as being a very large part of the problem that plagues campuses today, and as one of those who has served to fuel the very culture wars Erin frequently addresses here.

As for your "nuanced" reading of the differences between the race, class, and gender movements, you seem to be missing the point. When boiled down to their bare essences, these three movements are not so very different from one another. The antagonism that exists between them is more attributable to the spoils system than it is to any real philosophical disagreement. Each simply wishes to place a different group into the role of chief victim, and thus chief recipient of the university's (and society's) largess.

And each of these movements demands leftist methods of redress, as well as stringent critiques (there, I used it as a noun--happy?) of the right, of their adherents.

And, as David so rightfully points out, each is extremely reductive, bracketing off most of the human equation in favor of talking about only one very small part. You might read some more recent phenomenological work to see what sorts of critiques are being offered against the narrow-mindedness of the race/class/gender bunch.

As for your defense of Jameson, to pick one critic amongst those you've chosen to bring to bear in your argument, I can only say, give me a break. Jameson is a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist, whose ideological blinders make it impossible for him to see the world as anything but a mass of evidence supporting his own brand of Marxist analysis. And yes, I've read Jameson. And yes, he's wrong about any number of things. And no, he's not able to see that he's wrong, because like any true believer, he is incapable of calling into question his basic premises.

You do not really reveal yourself to be all that different from Jameson, Luther. The only times you make a sincere effort to be reasonable is when someone takes the time to call you on your words, or, in this case, on your actions.

And given that you've lied about what happened at Penn, I see no reason not to think that your "reasonable" disguise is anything more than that: a disguise.

John, I haven't lied, and you're still airing out hearsay. What went down in the Spring of 2001 was not, for me, a political conflict. I don't even claim to know the ins and outs of it, being one among many graduate students, professors, and administrators who got sucked into that vortex. Professor O'Connor has already asked that we not discuss those events here. If you have a problem with me over them, feel free to email me at Luther_Blissett7@hotmail.com.

John, you also seem to suggest that a liberal is somehow not allowed to disagree with a conservative. God forbid one's reaction to a conservative idea is determined by one's disagreement with it as a liberal! But notice how, right before calling race/class/gender reductive qualities, you make right/left completely reductive, determining all behavior. Heckuva job.

John, there's no point in continuing this because, speaking of blinders, you're simply going to grunts the same grunts without fail. Your comments on Jameson are stunningly wrong. (And I don't even agree with the guy's Marxism.) Your comments on race/class/gender state the obvious: there is more to a person than his race and class and gender. Thanks! And there's no point trying to show you that race, class, and gender are categories for the analysis of literature and so cannot simply garner spoils from a government or university. (I mean, no one gave me money when I was writing about African-American literature. Let me know who I should have talked to, cuz now I feel ripped off.) Your ignorance of the distinction between sociology and reparations movements is quite entertaining. It's like, is the cat going to run into the glass door *again*?!

Are you sure that Mr. Berube wasn't referring to Wingnuts in the context of fans of the Detroit Red Wings? I know he's a big hockey fan and I also know that this term can refer to people who are fans of that team.

Also I'd like to point out that wingnuts hold a lot of things together that otherwise might fall apart. So I don't think we should just get rid of the word just because some people don't like it very much.

I know exactly what happened at Penn.

Matt, you are lying.

Erin, you are taking undeserved responsibility for what happened on your own shoulders. You were innocent in that disgusting affair, and the vendetta that was launched against you was absolutely and unequivocally unconscionable.

In my view, it was the intellectual version of gang-rape, and Matt was not an innocent bystander who knew nothing.

Folks, this is turning into a shitstorm. Matt, I'm not posting your comment. Besides being inaccurate at several points, it draws in others who should be left alone. It serves no one to go down this road. To all, enough--and, to paraphrase Blake--too much.