The Review: Expertise; the Multiversity; Hysteria

All I know is that I don't know nothing. ADVERTISEMENT [Academe Today Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. Recently, on Twitter, a little allegory about expertise played out. It began when the journalist Caitlin Flanagan, who is a charter member of the widely derided [University of Austin]( rather grandiosely endorsed the project: “When all seems lost, you have to protect the light. Cicero protected it and John Adams found it … Once again the light is sputtering out. Join us. Freedom won’t die on our watch.” She went on to explain that Cicero wrote On the Republic “when Rome was dying. It became one of Adams’s favorite books and essential in the creation of this country!” A tenured classics professor swiftly corrected her: “Thx, Cicero wrote De Re Publica in the 50s BCE; I don’t think he knew then ‘Rome was dying,’ whatever that means. The major part of the text, as we now have it, wasn’t discovered and published until 1822, well after Adams’s presidency. G’luck with your new academic venture!” His correction was liked over four thousand times and retweeted 198. A win for expertise, right? Except it turns out — as a number of Twitter commentators quickly observed — that significant fragments of De Re Publica were known to Adams, who quoted from them; and that, while On the Republic might not have been his favorite book, Cicero was indeed his favorite author. One could argue that Flanagan was substantively correct, and that her errors were venial. The Twitter account Free Black Thought [made]( a thread: Adams quoted frags of Cic. Rep. in his “Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America” (1787–1788). He quotes extensively from De republica there. […] Caitlin is right about Cicero’s aims & concerns in the De republica. And Caitlin is right that Adams was inspired by Cicero & by this particular text: He quotes its Latin at length. Plenty of scholarship on this by Meyer Reinhold and others. (The reference is to Reinhold’s 1991 Ciceroniana essay “The Influence of Cicero on John Adams,” which you can read [here]( Beware, David Bromwich says, of the expert’s “insistence on his posture as an expert,” especially when such insistence is “convenient for their party position.” That’s from the lead essay in the Review’s new forum, “[The Future of Expertise]( Read Bromwich’s essay, and then read the rest of the package, which features essential contributions on the ideology of expertise from scholars and writers across disciplines: Nicolas Guilhot, Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Linda Martín Alcoff, Quassim Cassam, Zeynep Pamuk, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Mark Dery, and Moira Weigel. Write to me, at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin SPONSOR CONTENT | new york university [Learn how engineering has evolved and the impact it has on society today.]( The ‘Multiversity’ — Who Said It First? A few weeks ago, in a newsletter [post]( promoting Ethan Schrum’s recent article “[The Prophet of Academic Doom]( I wrote that the word “multiversity” was a neologism coined by the influential University of California president Clark Kerr. That’s wrong. Schrum, who is researching the history of the word “multiversity,” talked with me by Zoom about what he’s finding. Here’s some of that conversation: When I was promoting your recent article, I said what I thought was true — that the term “multiversity” had been coined by Kerr. I found that in my files I had saved something from last spring where you had also said that Kerr coined “multiversity,” but I didn’t follow up on it at the time. I’ve been perpetrating this untruth all over the place! So “multiversity” was used for at least a quarter-century before Clark Kerr’s famous formulation. The term might have been coined by a student at the University of Geneva, in Switzerland. This is the earliest use I have found — in a 1938 article by someone named Alfred Werner. It’s in a publication called The Student World, in a special issue called “The University — Unity or Disunity?” This movement was launching a critique of the university and its overspecialization. A lot of the commentary was along the lines of “The student is looking for the meaning of life, and in the multiversity it’s impossible for the student to find it.” The Geneva student was writing in English? He was writing in English, although I’m certainly wondering whether the term might have been around in French. The first period of the use of the term appears to go from 1938 up until the early 1950s, and then it gets a much more prominent American articulation from 1952 up until the time of Kerr’s lectures, in 1963. Two U.S. university presidents pick it up: Harold Dodds of Princeton and Gordon Chalmers of Kenyon College. Dodds becomes the most important user of the concept: In October of 1952, Dodds gave a speech to the Association of American Universities, the elite group of research universities. “The golden thread of liberal learning,” he says, “prevents a true university from decomposing into a multiversity.” He repeated these lines at some major speeches at Columbia, at Michigan, and most notably at Berkeley, where Kerr was sitting on the platform when Dodds was the Charter Day speaker. Every use I’ve found before Kerr is pejorative. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW [The Future of Expertise]( [STORY IMAGE]( How will the pandemic alter intellectual authority? Nine scholars weigh in. ADVERTISEMENT ADVICE [Tenured, Trapped, and Miserable in the Humanities]( By William Pannapacker [STORY IMAGE]( Why are so many tenured professors unhappy with their jobs yet unable to change careers? THE REVIEW [College Finances Are Being Eaten From the Inside]( By Erik Gilbert [STORY IMAGE]( How online-course contractors exploit vulnerable institutions. THE REVIEW [Why the ‘Academic Social Contract’ Is Breaking]( By Len Gutkin [STORY IMAGE]( The origin of academic freedom is a clue to its current unraveling. THE REVIEW [The College Degree Is in Shambles]( By Kevin Carey [STORY IMAGE]( It shouldn’t be up to students to search for evidence they might get ripped off. Recommended: - “We don’t need the experts to haggle with fate. Risk is a story that we tell ourselves about the future.” At Psyche, [Karla Mallette on how the concept]( of “risk” — the word is derived from Quranic Arabic — emerged among sailors and merchants engaged in trans-Mediterranean trade in the late Middle Ages. - “There’s a big difference between how you feel and how you ought to feel.” The philosopher Jennifer Frey on what psychologists don’t understand about “happiness,” [in conversation with Russ Roberts at EconTalk](. The conversation was occasioned in part by Frey’s August 15 essay in The Point, “[The Universe and the University]( - “In the end, I think my attitude to Douthat’s illness is the same as my attitude to a painting of his God on the cross. I find the suffering deeply moving, and I think it’s been powerfully and beautifully represented. But there are things Douthat believes about what this all means, and I simply do not share his faith.” At First Things, [Sam Kriss argues for the usefulness of the concept]( of “hysteria” by way of a review of new books by Tao Lin and Ross Douthat. SPONSOR CONTENT | university of richmond [Strengthening Emotional Resilience]( In efforts to more effectively treat mental illnesses, recent research has shown that stress-reducing tasks can build resilience against the onset of mental disorders. 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. [Order your copy today.]( JOB OPPORTUNITIES Apply for the top jobs in higher education and [search all our open positions](. NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK What did you think of today’s newsletter? 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