The Review: Dogma and Critique; Quit Lit for Senior Scholars

Professors say goodbye to all that. ADVERTISEMENT [Academe Today Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. “Quit lit” began as a genre by scholars at the institutional margins — graduate students suffering from endlessly protracted job searches, adjuncts wondering how much longer they could scrape together poorly paid teaching gigs. But the genre has recently attracted voices from the center. In The Chronicle, William Pannapacker’s “[On Why I’m Leaving Academe]( dwells primarily on worsening labor conditions: “Higher education has stopped being an attractive place to work — if it ever was, for most — and its prospects for improvement were bleak even before the pandemic.” But there are other, more abstract concerns, too: the sense that the intellectual calling has become degraded, untenable under current conditions. As the University of London musicologist J.P.E. Harper-Scott put it in a recent blog post called “[Why I]( “I wrongly supposed that universities would be critical places, but they are becoming increasingly dogmatic. … In recent years the dogmatic mode of thinking, in which uncritical commitments are enforced by mechanisms involving public humiliation, no-platforming, and attempts to have scholars fired, has become to seem … endemic.” The dogmas Harper-Scott has in mind are political, but “dogmatism” refers not to political content but to a style of argument and to a set of enforcement mechanisms — and, by implication, the sort of personality attracted to such mechanisms. Harper-Scott contrasts this disposition with that of the “critic,” for whom the “ideas of a particular time and place are subjected to remorseless critical interrogation,” including what he sees as the politically fashionable commitments of the dogmatists. On this view, the university has come either to attract or to give rise to the wrong kind of disposition: zealous, censorious, bullying, intolerant of dissent. SPONSOR CONTENT | SALESFORCE.ORG [Learn how a free tuition plan is soaring degree completion rates and enrollment numbers.]( The dogmatic personality type was described in psychopathological terms by the Polish American psychologist Milton Rokeach in an influential 1954 Psychological Review essay called “[The Nature and Meaning of Dogmatism]( Rokeach is primarily concerned with the cognitive structure of dogmatism, but he mentions in passing its communication style: “Dogmatism has a further reference to the authoritarian and intolerant manner in which ideas and beliefs are communicated to others.” Dogmatism, then, is not just a cognitive distortion but a (dangerous and damaging) social manner. Midcentury sociology and psychology were obsessed with such types. Theodor Adorno wrote about “the authoritarian personality” and developed a putatively scientific “F-scale,” meant to quantify a person’s inclination toward fascism. (Indeed, Rokeach presents his 1954 paper as in part extending and qualifying work on the F-scale.) Robert Lindner wrote about the juvenile psychopath — then a topic of much concern — in his 1944 psychological case study Rebel Without a Cause, whose title was later lifted for the James Dean film. These were all conceptual products of a Cold War frame concerned with the threats of totalitarianism on the one hand and the disordered desires of the liberal consumer society on the other. But Rokeach felt that his own chosen subject had a special application to academic life, which comes up several times in his essay. “It is conceivable,” he writes, “that a person, especially one in academic circles, can be dogmatic in his own idiosyncratic way, evolving a unique rather than institutionalized integration of ideas and beliefs about reality.” Rokeach’s essay is almost 70 years old. It’s a little musty. But when 21st-century academe gets its major sociologist — its Simmel or its Weber — Rokeach will surely deserve a footnote. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW [The Data Is In — Trigger Warnings Don’t Work]( By Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder [STORY IMAGE]( A decade ago, there was little research on their effectiveness. Now we know. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW [How Can We Trust Administrators?]( By Joseph M. Pierce [STORY IMAGE]( They assure us it’s safe to return to the classroom — but there are good reasons not to believe them. THE REVIEW [Is It Ever OK to Enunciate a Slur in the Classroom?]( By Randall Kennedy [STORY IMAGE]( A string of professors have been condemned, disciplined, even fired for saying the N-word in full. Recommended: - “After House Made of Dawn won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, the Native American Renaissance began, in part because Momaday’s syncretistic method — using English-language literary conventions to represent distinct and sovereign peoples — showed readers the vastness and complexity of the Native world.” At The Paris Review, Chelsea T. Hicks [on the first two novels of N. Scott Momaday]( recipient of this year’s Hadada Award. - “Calasso thought that literature was meant to serve a different god. What this god was is hard to tell, maybe the invisible itself, the hollowness we come from.” At Sidecar, Francesco Pacifico on [the career of Roberto Calasso]( who died this summer. Pacifico’s essay focuses not just on Calasso’s literary achievements but on the politics of the postwar Italian publishing world. - In Our Times’s “sketches don’t end up forming a landscape of war. They are more like items in an unseemly scrapbook, a collection of disparate scenes of violence and death whose variety becomes unsettling. There is, I think, the barest suggestion of a mismatch between the narrator’s affect and the violence described, the barest suggestion of an inappropriate enthusiasm for the details. It’s a weirder expression of shell shock than the pained reserve Hemingway’s characters are famous for, and these tonalities disappear from his work as he becomes the novelist of stylish understatement and biblical cadences.” Elaine Blair’s recent New York Review of Books [essay on Hemingway]( is a wonderful reading of Hemingway.. SPONSOR CONTENT | SOUTHEASTERN CONFERENCE [SEC Uses Athletics Platform to Celebrate, Support Conference Member Faculty]( Recognizing the exceptional teaching accomplishments of its outstanding faculty, learn who the 2021 SEC Faculty Achievement Award winners are as well as the impacts they are making. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [Today's Mission Critical Campus Jobs]( Explore how key campus positions are growing in strategic importance compared to how they have traditionally functioned, why they've recently grown more essential, and how they're continuing to evolve. 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