File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9801, message 226


Date: Wed, 14 Jan 1998 14:19:56 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: The Syracuse group's new journal


A new electronic journal called "Cultural Logic" can be viewed at
"eng.hss.cmu.edu/clogic".

It is top-heavy with Radical Oranges, including Teresa Ebert who has a
really batty article about English Department wars that she puts on the
same scale as the Zimmerwald Conference or the Hitler-Stalin Treaty.

Here is a short passage, which should give you some insight into the rabid,
paranoid style of her acolytes who appeared here some months ago. In the
revolving door of lunatic fringe cults who show up on Spoons, they have yet
to be topped.

Louis proyect

************

36. Being "important citizens of the campus" is what provides "power" for
faculty and not their intellectual work, their publications and research,
or their pedagogy. In fact, in one committee meeting when I argued for the
intellectual rigor and excellence of the Ph.D. program, one colleague (part
of the Group) told me that he was sick and tired of hearing me use these
words. "Intellectual" and "rigor," in short, are taboo words: they are
associated with ivory tower "idealism" and impracticality and treated as
terms of derogation and sites of bad jokes. An anonymous text, "Boundaries
of the Gnoses or noses, or sneezes heard recently on the third floor of the
Humanities Building" (one of the anyonymous texts that, from time to time,
circulate in the Department to mock "intellectuals" and the philosophical
and theoretical issues they raise in their texts and their classes), is
exemplary of this anti-intellectualism which, when faced with sustained
argument, takes refuge in nervous laughter. However, when "jokes" have
failed to silence the intellectuals, other means are deployed to block,
delay and finally suppress efforts for reform and change in the
Department's practices and programs in support of more intellectual rigor,
research and new knowledges in teaching and scholarship. These include
resorting to procedural mechanisms--such as invoking "Robert's Rules of
Order" to suppress debate; walking out of committees to prevent a
quorum--and behind-closed-doors deals. But, the tactics deployed to defend
the status quo are not limited to these. As an advocate of institutional
reform and curriculum change, I myself have received (as recorded in the
police files) anonymous telephone calls and graffiti attacks--on the wall
outside my office--aimed at intimidating and silencing me.





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