Love 's
Labor's Lost
Scholarly opinion is
mixed on Shakespeare in Love . In a New York Times op-ed piece
earlier this month, Harvard Professor Stephen Greenblatt inveighed against the
film's historical infelicities, errors that he attributed to Hollywood's moral
cowardice. Where screenwriters Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard made Gwyneth
Paltrow the inspiration for the young poet's love-struck "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?" historians, Greenblatt
scolded, know that the sonnet, like 125 others, was in all likelihood written
to a young man. "How is it that a miserably undemocratic, unenlightened culture
400 years ago could be more tolerant of expressions of same-sex love, or the
appearance of it, than our own?" he wondered. Greenblatt isn't against all
forms of poetic license, though--just those that strike him as politically
incorrect. He writes that several years ago he tried to persuade Norman to
devise a screenplay about Shakespeare's relationship with the homosexual
playwright Christopher Marlowe, whose murder in a tavern in 1593 forms a
subplot to Shakespeare in Love . Other scholars are gentler on the film.
In Newsweek , the usually grumpy Harold Bloom called it "charming";
Clemson University's James Andreas enthused, "Shakespeare was a pop phenomenon
in his own age. Now, thanks to our modern media, he's becoming the real king of
pop he always was."
Mass
Appeal
According to recent
reports in the New York Times and the New Republic , a Vatican-led
crackdown on American Catholic colleges and universities is advancing. Among
the most controversial of a plate of new proposals from a committee of American
bishops: church approval of theology department hires, majority quotas of
"faithful Catholics" for faculties and trustee boards, and professions of faith
and fidelity to the church on the part of university presidents. The Vatican
has no formal means of enforcing the standards. According to the Times ,
schools such as New York City's nominally Catholic Fordham University--where Mass
is optional and the chair of the theology department isn't even Catholic--are
nonetheless concerned about the potential impact on their reputations. Members
of the Association of
Catholic Colleges and Universities are trying to satisfy the Vatican but
preserve academic freedom, student body diversity, and teaching quality.
Don't Look
Bakke
The anti-affirmative
action movement is urging students to sue their schools. Determined to abolish
race preferences in higher education, the Center for Individual
Rights of Washington, D.C., is funding a provocative ad campaign telling
students that academic affirmative action policies "violate the law." The
center successfully used this club against the University of Texas in 1996,
arguing that the school was misreading the U.S. Supreme Court's Bakke decision. The New York Times says the
center is currently going after the law schools of the University of Washington
and the University of Michigan.
Heinous!
So dismayed are
professors and administrators at the poor quality of their students' speech,
reports the Boston Globe , that a number of schools, from Smith College
to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are increasing classroom speaking
requirements and offering electives to help students lose speech tics such as
"whatever" and "you know." Says Smith President Ruth Simmons about the
prevalent patois: "It's minimalist, it's reductionist, it's repetitive, it's
imprecise, it's inarticulate, it's vernacular."
Raising the
Stakes
Yale law professor and
quirky constitutional historian Bruce Ackerman, testifying before the House of
Representatives in December, argued that a newly elected Congress has little
authority to try an official who was impeached by the previous one. Though
Ackerman's claims were dismissed by anti-impeachment scholars such as Lawrence
Tribe, they are not without their supporters, and he has now presented them in
a minibook, The Case Against Lameduck Impeachment . Another
project, written with Yale colleague Anne Alstott, is even more outré. In
The Stakeholder Society , the pair present a novel plan to
fight income inequality: Give all Americans a "capital stake" of $80,000 when
they reach adulthood to spend as they wish. The money would be raised via taxes
on the wealthiest 40 percent of the population and, eventually, the estates of
deceased beneficiaries. The plan has been touted in the New York Times
Magazine. Can a meeting with Al Gore (or at least Hillary Clinton) be far
behind?
How Green Was My
Cali
The critics are ganging
up on social critic Mike Davis, the MacArthur fellow and Marxist deflater of
Los Angeles' dreams and delusions. Local columnists have pointed out a number
of errors and unsubstantiated stories in Davis' two books about Los Angeles:
City of Quartz (1990) and Ecology of Fear (1998). The errors
range from the trivial (misspelling the name of former Gov. George Deukmejian)
to the significant (reporting that there are 2,000 gated communities in Los
Angeles when there are, in fact, 100). The spat has attracted attention in the
Los Angeles Times , the New York Times , and the Economist .
Davis-bashing social critic Joel Kotkin declared, "What bothers me even as a
person who was trained as a Marxist is that somebody would so bastardize
Marxist theory to the point of making things up." But in The Nation ,
University of California, Irvine historian Jon Wiener contends that Davis is
the victim of a campaign by city boosters to run their most persistent critic
out of town. Davis, ironically, has accepted a history appointment 3,000 miles
away--at Long Island's State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Intelligences
Report
Harvard education guru Howard Gardner
made a name for himself years ago with his theory of "multiple intelligences,"
which posited that many different kinds of intelligence--musical, spatial,
linguistic, interpersonal, etc.--balanced differently in different people. A
few months ago, James Traub, assessing the impact of Gardner's theory in the
New Republic , charged that the multiple-intelligence movement has dumbed
down the curriculum in many schools. But in the February Atlantic
Monthly , Gardner renews his call for cognitive pluralism: Not only is there
more than one kind of intelligence, but those intelligences, as he calls them,
are only part of the story. He writes, "We should recognize that intelligences,
creativity, and morality--to mention just three desiderata--are separate. Each
may require its own form of measurement or assessment, and some will prove far
easier to assess objectively than others."
