I can’t believe Doctorate Discourse has lasted a week. Here’s the deal: WSJ op ed & subsequent attacks are motivated by hatred of Joe Biden, with Jill Biden being used as a surrogate target. They should be dismissed as nasty & sexist, without arguments dignified as serious.

Jeet Heer’s tweet goes to why my Joseph Epstein commentary began with his unabashed praise of Sarah Palin [scroll down] during that election cycle. A hyper-scrupulous aesthete/critic who above all admires the writing of Henry James, Epstein claimed to find Sarah Palin more than intellectually and morally astute enough to assume the presidency.

Heet is correct that Epstein is best seen as a political hack, doing what hacks do — in his praise of Palin, a woman who embodies everything for which he actually has contempt, and in his attack on Jill Biden.

‘Secret Service May Recruit Ivanka to

Help Remove Trump from White House,

According to Expert‘

… that for decades every December UD has grabbed a Quiet Car at Union Station and taken the long scenic ride to Boston for a Polish Christmas. This year she’s home in ‘thesda with a small celebratory crew; and as is typical of ol’ UD, she’s happy with this, as she was happy with Boston. There’s an interest in ordering a small same day delivery treeish plant that sits on the dining table surrounded by gifts. The topiary bulls grazing outside in pachysandra (they honor Munro Leaf — author of Ferdinand — the last owner of our house) sport silver lights. The clear night skies have been blasting out, again and again, with meteor showers and conjunctions; yesterday’s sunny morning featured multiple contrails in formation. She prefers all of this to Boston’s blizzards.

A ce moment la (9:30 AM Dec. 24), nature has boiled up a wet and moody brew, and UD is happy with this. Why not. You want something expressive with your Christmas Eve dinner, and in a few hours smoky logs will heighten the gloom … Of course UD – knowing the forecast – should have gathered logs yesterday and kept them under cover blah blah blah, but UD is way non-Girl Scout. She will do her best with her Duraflame firestarter and other random kindling.

In two days Les UDs drive to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware – the summer White House – for their annual Atlantic New Year. As ever, blogging will continue.

… is one of many lucky people to have been sprung from jail by The Genius of the Carpathians. A lifelong thug, Esformes committed the largest Medicare fraud in American history.

And here’s the best news: He’s only 52! Decades of thuggery and thievery lie ahead of him, thank God.

Thank God, for the crime-ridden Esformes family (Esformes’ crooked father established the Esformes health care fraud business) also presents itself as way way way godly.

Not that certain branches of Orthodox Judaism (the religion in this case) need any more bad publicity, what with their anti-vax, anti-mask, pro-large-gathering, pro-welfare-fraud thing; but the newly-sprung Esformes will significantly add to the enlightened, law-abiding profile of this group.

My posts about Esformes can be found here.

… a scientist at NIH, gets her covid vaccination with other front line workers. With Fauci attending.

That will teach our mad bad king: Never appoint to your court anyone with a shred of independence.

This sentence, in an article about a speech Don Jr gave to a Trumpian youth group, is itself problematic. It fails to clarify that Don Jr did not intend to be ironic; the irony derives from the weirdness of a speaker who is himself semi-literate attacking another speaker for being semi-literate.

As to what Trump’s lad could have meant by “conform a sentence” — Let Scathing Online Schoolmarm start with this: Poetry is always an option. Poetry can always be deployed politically if people would like to do that, if people think it might be effective. Look at the way Anthony Hecht used not “conform,” but “inform” in this excerpt from a poem about his wife’s miscarriage:

[C]ould it be
That Jewish diligence and Irish jest
The consent of flesh and a midwinter storm
Had reconciled,
Was yet too bold a mixture to inform
A simple child?

If Hecht can twist that word cleverly, can play with connotation and pun (why were we unable to form within her a child; to in-form; to transmit our genetic information…), Don Jr can certainly poeticize “conform” … although SOS is having trouble detecting the connotation/pun/whatever that makes the phrase “conform a sentence” poetically suggestive…

The lad simply means “form,” doesn’t he? What has led him astray is too strong a love for the art of the con.

No. That’s not the reason NU’s English department (where UD was a student, and where she knew Epstein) quite consciously deleted Epstein’s name.

Turnabout is fair play. If Epstein is going to erase Jill Biden (not just her Dr. title, but anything other than the humiliating “First Lady,” for which he counsels her to settle), NU can do the same thing to Epstein. It’s all about (to use Jill Biden’s term for what Epstein tried to do) “diminishing.” You flatten another human being to nothingness; we’ll do the same to you. How does it feel to be diminished to some temporary nameless long-forgotten adjunct?

Epstein was strategic in his non-personing of Jill Biden; Northwestern will be equally strategic. Bruce Bawer unsurprisingly takes note of the diminishment. But he misreads its motive. Mentioning Epstein’s name would not be offensive; it would be unjust.

But I swear to God I committed actual atrocities!

Epstein indeed has a long list of complaints about the falling off of moral and intellectual seriousness among university presidents. To which UD once again has to say: What a bald-faced hypocrite.

The university president who conferred Epstein’s one honorary degree – his crony, Peter Diamandopoulos of Adelphi University – was little more than a thief, who was made to reimburse the university for at least some of the money and perks to which he helped himself.

The sole university president in the country who considered Joseph Epstein worthy of an honorary degree was so corrupt that his tenure at Adelphi has a whole book about corruption devoted to it: SUNY Buffalo sociologist Lionel Lewis wrote, a few years after the ignominious fall of this greedy, amoral man, When Power Corrupts: Academic Governing Boards in the Shadow of the Adelphi Case.

If Epstein had a bit of decency, he’d return – or at least repudiate – this heavily soiled honor.

So by all means let us be lectured on university ethics by Diamandopoulos’s boy!

Well, if you ever listened to ol’ UD, you wouldn’t be astonished at all. How often has she tried to tell you that the best cover for major drug operations is a colonial home full of clean-cut studious fraternity brothers? Really, who would have thought that the earnest young strivers at San Diego State’s fraternities harbored major weaponry, tons of coke, and all the rest of the tools of the trade in their quaintly Greek-lettered domiciles? But no – even after SDSU, you’re still shocked, shocked, to find that a massive drug conspiracy rages in three North Carolina universities. Silly boy!

UD‘s old acquaintance, (see this post) Joseph Epstein, Man of the Hour, has endured insults from all over the world in the aftermath of his … ill-considered column about Jill Biden. But knowing Epstein (whose real name is Myron, as I recall), UD figures this well-meaning piece by a couple of Northwestern University law professors has got to be the worst of the worst. The authors argue that while Epstein’s column stank six ways from Sunday, NU acted badly in response by scrubbing him from its website. It’s a free speech issue, after all.

They’re probably right. But in characterizing Epstein’s status at NU, they (inadvertently?) say things guaranteed to wound him.

Epstein, in UD‘s day as an NU undergrad, taught writing and literature at the university (I never took any of his courses) even though his highest degree was only a BA. I guess the idea was that Epstein was a well-known, well-connected author (books of popular interest, essays, fiction) who lived in Chicago (grew up there), had things to say about art, wanted to teach, and could benefit NU students both intellectually and practically. He was, if you like, our Saul Bellow (U Chicago got the real Bellow) – both men were writers and intellectuals who only had BAs (Bellow did a little grad work at the U of Wisconsin), but both were worth having on your faculty (Ravelstein describes classes Allan Bloom and Bellow taught together at the U of C) because they were noted figures. Somewhat noted, and mainly in conservative circles, in the case of Epstein. (FWIW: A mutual friend of Bellow and Epstein, Edward Shills, also had only a BA. By the time Bellow wrote Ravelstein, he and Shills were enemies, and Shills got one of Bellow’s patented fatal character sketches in that novel.)

Although in strict hierarchical terms Epstein was rather a nobody at NU, he thought of himself, from my observation of him, as superior to what he regarded as cookie cutter politically correct tenured English PhDs. They were timid, dry as dust scholars; he was a red-blooded freelancer who launched himself into the real world and came back and wrote about it and got reviewed in the New York Times, etc. etc. They produced the constipated prose of pretentious ideologues; he wrote clear, strong, true, and real words.

He couldn’t stand the department; he looked down on it. (The department, from what I recall, couldn’t stand him back.) All through those years, as he edited The American Scholar and sat on NEH review committees (Republican administrations were heady days for Epstein), he thought of himself, I’m pretty sure, as simply dropping in on NU a few days a week, when he wasn’t hobnobbing in Washington, to share his thoughts about literature with a small, carefully selected group of English majors. (The money can’t have been much, but for a freelancer I suppose it was a welcome little stipend.)

Despite his lofty sense of himself, however, in the clear light of university hierarchy he was merely an adjunct lecturer, subject to review and renewal every year. Far from bothering Epstein, I’m guessing he read this status as his preference, a way of avoiding faculty meetings and administrative chores, and a way of maintaining personal freedom.

But there’s no controlling the way other people describe his situation at NU. Here are the two law professors:

Epstein never held a professorial rank at Northwestern, but academic freedom equally protects lecturers, adjuncts, and other faculty members. A sad fact about modern higher education is the very large population of professional scholars without tenure, many of whom, like Epstein, teach for decades with lower pay and less job security. In a different economic environment, many of them would be tenure-track professors. Their precarious status is a reason for insisting even more strongly on that protection.

Of course they are quite right about the economic insecurity of adjuncts; but Epstein never thought of himself as a professional scholar seeking tenure, etc. The idea in fact repelled him. His ego rested on an entirely other self-perception, one that entailed a transcendence of the whole pathetic academic game. How horrible, in his latter days, to be made a poster boy for adjuncts!

You can cut the condescension. I’m not going anywhere near Mar-A-Lago. I’m moving to Molena, Georgia, a convenient drive away from Jimmy Carter, with whom I plan to build Habitat for Humanity houses; and the location of Sahaj Marg Ashram, where I will live.

Meditation, Cleaning (“imagining the day’s accumulated impressions [going] out one’s back and being replaced with divine light”), and Prayer will occupy my days when I am not working with Jimmy.

A writer in The Forward isolates a major motive behind Joseph Epstein’s notorious WSJ essay : Keeping certain categories of people out of the senior common room.

But when UD considers Epstein’s own number one intellectual exemplar, the room looks a bit dull-witted. The critic Hilton Kramer, for instance, “argued that Mikhail Gorbachev was a far bigger threat to the free world than Joseph Stalin had ever been,” notes Jeet Heer.

Kramer

stood in steadfast opposition to the idea that gays should be open and equal citizens in a democratic polity. He did this moreover not by making any rational arguments against gay equality but by constantly and snidely assuming that the very practice of gay sex was naturally repugnant to all right-thinking people.

Queers and women seemed to rub him the wrong way.

About one of America’s most prominent female intellectuals Kramer wrote, “In the end, Mary McCarthy’s politics were like her sex life—promiscuous and unprincipled, more a question of opportunity than of commitment or belief.” When writing about sexually active heterosexual male intellectuals (notably McCarthy’s ex-husband Edmund Wilson) Kramer somehow avoided the word promiscuous. Like a school yard bully, Kramer knew that slut-shaming is reserved for girls.

When you add to the common room the whole guy gang Epstein hung out with in those heady intellectual days, the place looks positively scummy. Kramer was a trustee at Adelphi University, an institution being run into the ground by Kramer’s buddy, the scandalous Peter Diamandopoulos. It took years of litigation for Adelphi to get rid of Diamandopoulos, who basically spent every moment of his presidency taking as much money as he could out of the school.

While president of Adelphi, Diamandopoulous arranged an honorary degree for Joseph Epstein. Given the vileness of this university-dismantler, it is in fact a dishonorary degree, and Epstein should have repudiated it.

A few scenes starring these stewards of the university:

[Diamandopoulos] entertaining his old friend on the board, John Silber, over dinner and drinks ended up costing Adelphi $546. Dr. Silber was president and is now chancellor of Boston University.

The next day, food and drinks with another trustee, Hilton Kramer, and a second guest cost the university $707. Mr. Kramer is The New York Observer’s art critic and a media critic for The New York Post.

The meal charges were actually modest; it was the bar tab that drove up the grand total. The bill was $454 for the 1982 Brion wine and Martell 100 cognac that Dr. Silber and Dr. Diamandopoulos drank. And the 1983 Chaval and Martell that he and Mr. Kramer sipped cost $552.

Promiscuous and unprincipled at the expense of the students for whom he was supposed to be acting as a trustee, Kramer seems a strange moral or intellectual exemplar for anyone – except, I guess, for Epstein.

So far there’s little information, but what we have is intriguing. At around seven this morning, an FBI agent shot another person multiple times on a train at the Medical Center station (this is basically the highly sensitive location of the National Institutes of Health).

Les UDs are of course speculating as to the details.

I’m gonna guess, said UD, that this has nothing to do with his (let’s assume his) being an FBI agent, except for the fact that it means he was carrying a gun (who isn’t?). I’m gonna guess it was domestic – a fight with another guy over a woman?

It’s always possible he was threatened by a crazy fellow passenger, and instead of changing cars as the rest of us would do he decided to unload on him. Or he saw someone threatening someone else… But anyway, I’m going to go with something in his private life.