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Thursday, February 17, 2005
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[Man oh man oh Manischewitz. In one of those exquisite Life Ironies, UD’s readership is exploding even as her tenacious flu is sapping her will to live, much less blog… but… without in any way seeking to solicit your pity, admiration, or awe, she will now write a lengthy, highly significant post.] CET OBSCUR OBJET DU DESIR UD’s most crowded comment thread followed various readers’ thoughts about what a university actually is, intellectually speaking. And this is as it should be. As Fenster Moop once pointed out, University Diaries, qua weblog, is very much about the question of the definition of a university, the way we go about distinguishing a university from a corporation, a summer camp, a vocational school, a sports stadium, a cult, a distillery. In that thread, a number of thoughtful undergraduates - many of them at UD’s institution, George Washington University - recorded their serious disappointment at the un-intellectual, un-reflective place their university turned out to be. Is the problem just GW, forcing ground of political operatives? No. Students at the Ivies are disappointed too. Look at the recent, much-discussed articles by Walter Kirn and Ross Douthat, Princeton and Harvard grads embittered in retrospect at the thin gruel their Ivy years turned out to be. Unless you attend Saint John’s College in Annapolis (which has a tight, chronological curriculum, and where every member of the faculty is able to teach every course in the curriculum), you’re not going to be able to count on much intellectual seriousness or coherence at your university. Pedagogically, you’re as likely to end up with Angry Turtleneck Ward Churchill as you are with Natty Suit Harvey Mansfield. Your Gertrude Stein class is as likely to be about lockstep Marxist discipline as about frivolous aesthetic play. ... […UD is fading… Let’s call this Part I, and allow UD to crawl into bed for a few hours with last Sunday's New York Times crossword puzzle…] |