"some tenure evaluations are conducted by counting 'hits'" Holy shit. Is this true? Anyone in academe out there heard of/seen such a thing? Lepore throws it out in a parenthetical statement (well, between two em-dashes) as if it shouldn't surprise anybody. Well, maybe it shouldn't, but my first reaction on reading this was, "That's bullshit." Does anyone know more?
On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 3:30 AM, Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote: > I don't care much for Jill Lepore, a historian who trashed Howard Zinn > shortly after his death in the New Yorker, but this is interesting. > > > http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Economy-of-Letters/141291/ > > A quarter century has passed since Russell Jacoby coined the term > "public intellectuals" in a book meant to mark their extinction. In The > Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, published in > 1987, Jacoby defined public intellectuals as "writers and thinkers who > address a general and educated audience." The term was new, he > explained, but there had been public intellectuals for centuries: "The > greatest minds from Galileo to Freud have not been content with private > discoveries; they sought, and found, a public." Since the 1960s, their > numbers, never high, had been plummeting. Lewis Mumford and Edmund > Wilson were born in 1895, Walter Lippmann in 1889. By 1987, Wilson and > Lippmann were dead and Mumford was in decline. Where, Jacoby wanted to > know, were the young Mumfords and Lippmanns and Wilsons? There were none. > > In 1987, Jacoby, then 42, reported that, in his view, no serious > American thinker under the age of 45 was writing for anyone other than > academics, or able to. ("Intellectuals who write with vigor and clarity > may be as scarce as low rents in New York.") For this, Jacoby blamed > higher education. The growth of the modern research university in the > decades following the Second World War nursed a generation of > intellectuals who had hardly ever lived off campus; they barely knew > anyone who hadn't earned a Ph.D. These people couldn't hold a decent > dinner conversation with an ordinary reader, much less write for one. > > When Jacoby claimed that there were no public intellectuals in America > under the age of 45, he admitted that what he really meant was only that > none of them were left of center. Conservative intellectuals had never > retreated into the academy and had never abandoned the public. Also, > Jacoby's favorite public intellectuals weren't professors; they were > journalists. He also missed the flourishing of an entire generation of > black intellectuals in the very years when he was writing his book. And > he had taken almost no notice of intellectuals who were female. Except > for Mary McCarthy, who happens to have been married to Edmund Wilson, > the public intellectuals in Jacoby's pantheon were nearly all men, and > their writing shares a certain toughness, the kind of thing vaguely and > invariably euphemized by characterizing a writer as having "muscular > prose." Suffice to say, if you're looking for Norman Mailer, you won't > stumble across Willa Cather. > > (clip) > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l >
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