White Is
a Color Too
A
front-page article in the Wall Street Journal last month certified that
"whiteness studies" has arrived. The burgeoning academic field--informed by
both thoughtful race theory and liberal Caucasian guilt--has already spawned
hundreds of acolytes; more than 70 books (according to the Center for the Study
of White American Culture Inc.'s Web site); subspecialties such as white trash, suburban
resentment, and mall ethnography; and a national conference, held at the
University of California at Berkeley this April. Among the field's primary
objectives is exposing the privileges that come with being white in order to
make them go away. The minnesota review 's current issue is titled "White
Issue." This fall, Transition , a Harvard-based journal of global
culture, will publish its own white issue, in which nonwhite scholars will
weigh in on whiteness.
Science
Wars, the Sequel
For the
second time in six years, the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton has vetoed the appointment of a professor of science studies with,
apparently, impeccable credentials. Despite the unanimous support of the
institute's tiny School of Social Science and a search committee's favorable
vote, the institute's director ruled against the appointment of Princeton
University Professor M. Norton Wise, co-author of a prize-winning book on
19 th century thermodynamics expert Lord Kelvin. Institute defenders
say that Wise's scholarship was not up to snuff. Others (including
anthropologist Clifford Geertz and historian Joan Scott) accuse their
colleagues in chemistry and physics of harboring a bias against anyone who
questions science's claims to truth. In 1990, the institute closed its doors to
a French sociologist, Bruno Latour, who made declarations such as the
following: "To call a claim 'absurd' or knowledge 'accurate' has no more
meaning than to call a smuggler trail 'illogical' and a freeway 'logical.' "
Wise, unlike Latour, has a Ph.D. in physics, and was perceived as a moderate in
the bitter debates that ensued after the Alan Sokal affair last summer.
However, he may have damaged his cause when he criticized Sokal defender Steven
Weinberg in a letter to the New York Review of Books .
This
Side Up
Astronomers have long assumed that the universe is directionally
indiscriminate--that is, that it has no top, bottom, up, or down. But in a
paper published in April in Physical Review Letters (click here for an
abstract) and immediately picked up by the New York Times , two American
physicists reported that polarized light moves through space according to a
predictable but previously undetected corkscrew pattern. This means, they
inferred, that light flows through the universe in one direction, along an
identifiable axis of orientation. (Which end we want to call "up" is up to us.)
Dr. John Ralston of the University of Kansas and Dr.
Borge Nodland of the University of Rochester made this discovery by
analyzing radio waves from 160 faraway galaxies. Critics are combing through
the data for errors. The findings could have more than just topographical
implications. Questions they raise include: Was the Big Bang not a uniform
explosion after all? Is the speed of light not always constant?
Still
Empty
Harvard
remains unable to choose a senior scholar to fill a new chair in Holocaust
studies, and has deferred a decision until the fall of 1998. The chair was
foisted on reluctant faculty by administrators eager to please wealthy donor
Kenneth Lipper (a former deputy mayor of New York and, more recently, a
co-writer of the screenplay of City Hall ). It took the historians and
Jewish-studies professors on the search committee a year and a half to come up
with a job description. When the university proposed a temporary
solution--hiring UCLA's Saul Friedlander, a distinguished elder statesman in
the field--Lipper said no. Of the five top candidates, two are publicly
feuding: Christopher Browning and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, scholars whose work
has focused on perpetrators and not victims. Goldhagen is a junior professor at
Harvard and, reportedly, Lipper's choice for the chair. However, Goldhagen's
book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, which imputes homicidal
anti-Semitic impulses to most of Germany's World War II population, has earned
him notoriety and worldwide speaking engagements but not, as yet, tenure.
Penrose
Pattern
British mathematician Sir
Roger Penrose, best known for his contributions to the theory of consciousness,
has turned his attention to toilet paper. A year ago, the wife of the Oxford
don noticed that the pattern on Kleenex quilted tissue uncannily resembled the
Penrose Arrowed Rhombi tilings pattern, which Sir Roger had invented--and
copyrighted--in 1974. Penrose licensed the pattern to Pentaplex Ltd., which
manufactures puzzles and games, and now both parties are suing Kimberly-Clark,
the original makers of Kleenex, for copyright infringement. The plaintiffs
claim Penrose's design is distinguished by its aperiodicity (the pattern almost
but never quite repeats itself) and its five-fold symmetry (a trait that at the
time was thought not to exist in nature but has since been identified in
certain crystal formations). As the London
Independent put it,
"This non-repeating aperiodic pattern was no trivial solution to relieving the
boredom of tiling the bathroom floor, nor some mathematical doodle. It was a
mind-boggling, preconception-shattering illustration of five-fold symmetry,
'non-computability' and, quite possibly, the meaning of life."
--Compiled by the editors of Lingua Franca , the review of academic
life. Click here to
visit their site or to subscribe.
