Right-wing brothers-in-arms at The Princeton Tory posted a report that Dean Nancy Weiss Malkiel had been fired from her position as Dean of Princeton College, which turned out not to be true. (Tough year for the Tory.)
Ivy Gate has responded by relaunching the canon wars:
Up with the canon! Down with free thought! says:
Yeah, I mean, I honestly don't know anything about this lady, but fuck her for not accepting the conservative strictures foisted upon us by the racist, misogynistic scholars of our past. If I wanted a woman or minority's opinion on something, I'd hire them to do some kind of menial labor for me.
Columbia 08 says:
Whatever one's opinion of the Western canon, one cannot dispute the fact that there is a clear and linear tradition of influential thought with respect to Western literature, philosophy, and art. In order to claim any sort of expertise in these fields, one needs to have knowledge of this tradition. To claim that there is no set of books that one must have read is, quite simply, not true. You cannot be an expert in Western Philosophy if you have not read Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, etc. You cannot be an expert in Western Art if you are unfamiliar with Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, etc. I suppose one can claim that I am biased because my school has a Core dedicated to this very end, but I think my position is relatively unassailable.
Penn '08 says:
Holy shit, man. Are we honestly still fighting the canon wars? I had no idea that the seemingly outlandish and conservative views of Allen/Harold Bloom continue to hold such weight among our generation's scholastic elite. If cultural indoctrination can be so easily swallowed by ostensibly critically-thinking Ivy Leaguers, I shudder at the thought of our nation's ability to elect a black man or woman to the office of the presidency.
@Penn '08 says:
You sir, are an idiot. Not only do you lump together the disparate opinions of Harold and Allen Bloom, but you also suggest that the Western Canon is based on something other than a merit-driven view of history. In other words, you're alleging that the Western Canon is bigoted. I'm not white. I'm supposed to like Alice Walker. I think Alice Walker is pure shit. Shakespeare will always be better than Alice Walker. Shakespeare will always be white.
...
FYI: Harold Bloom did include the Mahabharata, Ramayana, Koran, Borges, Neruda, Marquez, Achebe, Rushdie, and more on his supposedly bigoted list of the Western Canon.
Ralph says:
Aristotle will always be there. No-one has ever been prevented from reading him. Stop worrying about whether one and all are required to do so during their undergraduate careers.
The Malkiel quote to which they're responding:
I don’t believe in a canon, I don’t believe any of our departments believe in a canon. Due to the explosion of knowledge in all of these fields it is such that they no longer operate that way. You should have a familiarity with, if you are an English major, different periods, different genres. It’s the same if you’re a history major. But it has long since passed since a department was willing to say confidently: “Here are the big books and you must’ve read those books.” Knowledge is too diverse and complicated in most fields to be able to do that anymore. I think that the biggest challenge is getting students better distributed among the departments. We have different levels of quality in education that our students receive while here because of the imbalance.
I have no further comment, except to point out that neither of the people who invoked him could spell Allan Bloom's name correctly. There is more that unites us than divides us.
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