Quote of the Day (Mary McCarthy, on Academe’s ‘Factional Disputes and Ideological Scandals’)

“These continuous factional disputes and ideological scandals were a form of spiritual luxury that satisfied the higher cravings for polemic, gossip, and backbiting without taking the baser shape, so noticeable in the larger universities, of personal competition and envy. Here, living was cheap and the salary range was not great. The headships of departments were nominal, falling, by common consent, to the member with the greatest taste for paperwork. Such competition as there was centered around vying for the better students.”—American novelist, essayist, and memoirist Mary McCarthy (1913-1989), The Groves of Academe (1952)

It's been more than 70 years since Mary McCarthy’s satire on higher education appeared, and the issues embroiling these schools—divestment in Israel, DEI, to name a few—would have been utterly foreign to the novelist who viewed with such a jaundiced eye life among students (her bestseller The Group) and faculty members (The Groves of Academe).

But academic politics remains as powerful a force as ever—perhaps even more so than it was in her time, consumed by the 24/7 news cycle in a way it never had been when she wrote.

In retrospect, the Fifties looks like a golden age of fictional treatment of college and university life. Over in England, just after publication of The Groves of Academe, Kingsley Amis reaped comic material from a hapless lecturer in medieval literature in Lucky Jim.

But it’s a novel that came out at the start of the decade, C.P. Snow’s The Masters, that may have the most resonance in the current American academic environment, with a plot that centers on the scheming and plotting in selecting a new head of an imaginary college (clearly inspired by Snow’s time at Cambridge).

Especially after last year, it might be said that “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown” for anyone hoping to fill a similar role at any American college or university.

Quote of the Day (Hanna Holborn Gray, on Free Speech on Campus)

“Education should not be intended to make people comfortable, it is meant to make them think. Universities should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom." — Hanna Holborn Gray, former president of the University of Chicago, quoted in Geoffrey R. Stone, “Free Speech on Campus: A Report from the University Faculty Committee,” Huffington Post, Jan. 6, 2015

(The photo of Ms. Gray accompanying this post, taken in 1989, comes from the University of Chicago.)

Quote of the Day (Mary McCarthy, on a Man With a ‘Gift for Being His Own Sympathizer’)

“Hen has a remarkable gift, a gift for being his own sympathizer. It’s a rare asset; it could be useful to him in politics or religion….He's capable of commanding great loyalty, because he's unswervingly loyal to himself. I'm not being sarcastic. Very few of us have that. It’s a species of self-alienation. He’s loyal to himself, objectively, as if he were another person, with that feeling of sacrifice and blind obedience that we give to a leader or a cause.” —American novelist, critic, and political activist Mary McCarthy (1912-1989), The Groves of Academe (1952)

Quote of the Day (Robertson Davies, on Academic ‘Symbol Simons’)

“I wonder what your professor means when she speaks of ‘symbolic references’ contained in the names of characters in Fifth Business. When a writer chooses the names for a character in a book he is anxious to get them into the same key—to use a musical expression…The names in Fifth Business, which are given to the Canadian characters, and particularly to those in the village of Deptford, are all quite familiar in Canadian ears and there are lots of Papples and Hornicks to be found in any large Canadian telephone directory. It is a wise rule never to assume the existence of a symbol where a meaning is apparent without it. People who disregard this rule are sometimes called ‘Symbol Simons.’”—Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies (1913-1995), expressing annoyance in a letter to Canadian undergraduate Theresa Riordan, December 6, 1978, regarding the first novel in his "Deptford Trilogy," in For Your Eye Alone: The Letters of Robertson Davies, edited by Judith Shelton Grant (1999)