Letter from Ted

Part of a letter from Ted Hughes to Derwent May in April of 1992:

When you hear the English Faculty and these Guardians of the Humanities praised remember this: for the last thirty years, each year I’ve seen the work [in a national poetry contest] of selected geniuses among 10 to 17 ten year olds from the whole UK—in fact I’ve helped select it.  More natural talent than you could believe could exist in one country. Every year I watch the march past of these little stars, all bursting with hope—hurrying excitedly off to read English according to their natural bent and their utter ignorance of what is waiting for them in those abattoirs. . . . In 30 years not a single one has survived to reappear the other side of University as something unusual. . . . The whole lot are annihilated. . . . I know how it happens because I know what I went through scrambling through the barbed wire and the camp searchlights.  Regularly I receive letters from students in their second or third year—in absolute despair, sending me their poems, begging for some direction. . . .  Brian Cox, at Manchester, a few years ago, said he couldn’t bear to go on doing it.  Every year they come rushing over no-man’s-land towards us (these are his words) faces shining with youth—and we just mow them down.

From Letters of Ted Hughes, by Ted Hughes, edited by Christopher Reid

Professor Obama

Barack Obama was a lecturer at University of Chicago and not really a legal academic:

The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count. At a school where economic analysis was all the rage, he taught rights, race and gender. Other faculty members dreamed of tenured positions; he turned them down. While most colleagues published by the pound, he never completed a single work of legal scholarship.

[…]

“I don’t think anything that went on in these chambers affected him,” said Richard Epstein, a libertarian colleague who says he longed for Mr. Obama to venture beyond his ideological and topical comfort zones. “His entire life, as best I can tell, is one in which he’s always been a thoughtful listener and questioner, but he’s never stepped up to the plate and taken full swings.”

Mr. Obama had other business on his mind, embarking on five political races during his 12 years at the school. Teaching gave him satisfaction, along with a perch and a paycheck, but he was impatient with academic debates over “whether to drop a footnote or not drop a footnote,” said Abner J. Mikva, a mentor whose own career has spanned Congress, the federal bench and the same law school.

[…]

Mr. Obama arrived at the law school in 1991 thanks to Michael W. McConnell, a conservative scholar who is now a federal appellate judge. As president of The Harvard Law Review, Mr. Obama had impressed Mr. McConnell with editing suggestions on an article; on little more than that, the law school gave him a fellowship, which amounted to an office and a computer, which he used to write his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.”

A person who is busy outside the law school running for high public office, working as a lawyer in a law firm and writing a memoir is not an academic, but a person who taught some courses, using practice as his main source of information rather than deep research.  There is a tension in most law schools between the teaching of law as professional practice and law as a form of academic inquiry.  It’s clear what side of that fence Obama was on.

He used the academy and gave back to it in a somewhat limited form.  It seems clear that some people resent that.  Not all.  I don’t critisize Obama for his ambition – it’s apparent that he had it aplenty and no one who has risen to the political heights could possibly be without it.  I say only, Obama was not a legal academic in the true sense and his commitment to the academy is questionable.

The Academy

Joe Palmer on the modern academy:

Until universities were divided into schools and specialized divisions, there was no such thing as an English or a Physics department. Today, now that there is more to learning than the law and the Bible, the managers have militarized the academy, making it an Abu Ghraib of the mind, and the narrow minded have penalized knowledge, a Guantánamo of scholarship, confining it in special cells where its secrets are learned and no one escapes. Our discreet packaging of knowledge is not just our way of managing and securing our rice bowls, it is also a method of satisfying the powers that be, the boards of directors, the suits who love to see order and decorum, and the professors who like to get paid for pursuing their hobbies.

nth position

Feminism, Socialism, and What’s “Left”

I think there were some fantastic moments when feminists wrote about how to reconstruct the welfare state. But I think much about class and gender has been falsely separated. For myself, I do not think that I could do feminism without socialism; it is in my blood almost. How could you analyze anything without analyzing capital when it structures everything, even us being here now? I could not imagine class, gender and race being separate in that way. I sometimes think it is sad that feminists went off and created their own spaces in academia – fantastic spaces that were needed, politically, for a time but they became very separate. I went into those spaces and fought quite a lonely battle to put class on the agenda. If I had taken a non-feminist route and stayed in sociology it would have been much easier. I think it was historically necessary but those spaces easily get cramped and have now started to close down. That does not mean that feminism is not there, but rather we see feminists going back to the more traditional disciplines that are also being reshaped. So for me, when going back to sociology, I thought that finally I would not have to fight about class any longer. But I found myself starting to fight about gender and sexuality! It is all because of this weird academic organization premised on interest.  Eurozine

On the economy of moralism and working class properness by Beverley Skeggs

via wood s lot