The Review: Todd Gitlin, in Memoriam

A lion of the left and an all-purpose man of letters is gone. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. Todd Gitlin, the renowned activist, scholar, and novelist, died this month at the age of 79. Gitlin was a longtime friend of The Review, to which he [contributed]( scores of bylines over more than a quarter century — most recently in the summer of 2020, when he joined our forum on [reopening]( universities in pandemic conditions. Alex Kafka, a senior editor who was one of the first here to work with Gitlin, remembers him as “a down-to-earth, un-jargony, eloquent, and iconoclastic essayist of the first rank” — from whom he learned an important editor’s lesson: “When an author’s good, stay out of his way.” Kafka also recalls Gitlin’s “kindness to younger, wide-eyed colleagues.” Gitlin was, as Mitchell Cohen wrote in his [remembrance]( for Dissent, an “iconic figure of the American left.” His leftism was never doctrinaire. The Chronicle‘s managing editor, Evan Goldstein, puts it this way: “Gitlin was in some ways the embodiment of the tenured radical: 60s’ New Left activist finds refuge in the academy. Yet he was also one of the most perceptive critics of his cohort, especially how they confused academic politics with politics politics. Thus his famous quip: ‘While the right has been busy taking the White House, the left has been marching on the English department.’” That wiry evasion of ideological straitjackets is on display in the [last full-length essay]( he wrote for us, a reconsideration of Allan Bloom’s infamous The Closing of the American Mind on the occasion of its 30th anniversary. He doesn’t pull punches. Bloom “could not make a point without overkilling it"; he “was not a stickler for historical causation"; at his worst, he was “so wildly and promiscuously drawn to the thrill of apocalypse as to sound like the spiritual father of the reigning prince of nihilism, Steve Bannon.” Despite all this, Gitlin is unafraid of reassessing aspects of Bloom’s polemic that had come to seem to him, in the intervening years, rather more prophetic than paranoid: “When it comes to most of the campus left he was all too right, if not always for the right reasons. Today’s knee-jerk illiberalism exhibits many tendencies that Bloom sketched.” Karen Winkler, the retired Chronicle editor who first brought Gitlin into our pages, says he was “above all, a humanist.” That humanism entailed a respect for the canon and a suspicion toward new sensitivities around it. Writing, for instance, of the demand for trigger warnings over Ovid in the Columbia core, Gitlin [insisted]( that “Fright in the face of words needs to be tamped down, not encouraged.” But he was no naïve chauvinist for the virtues of tradition. I’ll give him the last word: Teaching the Great Tradition offers no guarantee of awakening reverence for reason, for what universities offer is not (or at least ought not to be) a curriculum in brainwashing. But it is an excellent start. SPONSOR CONTENT | kennesaw state university [Undergraduate research with relevance provides students a foundation for careers.]( ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? 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