ATTACK: Berube Takes Off The Gloves and Shows An Empty Hand
In a previous post on this blog I addressed the fact that Penn State University English professor Michael Berube had attacked my new book The Professors without having read it. I called him to account for this. Normally “liberals’ get outraged when others attempt to review books they haven’t read or films they haven’t seen. But in fact Professor Berube seems to have started a whole movement of outraged leftists who want to review my new book without having to read it. As my friend Jamie Glazov says, “Leftists want to review your books before you write them.” Of course.My favorite of these anti-reviews is one sent directly to me from “Catherine” who appears to be a university student or professor at Metro State College Denver (ckelle17@mscd.edu): “I am sure you think I should read your book, however I consider your book to be garbage.” Actually, that’s not a bad paraphrase of Berube’s comments in two posts so far.
Berube has responded to my original post with another attack based on a further non-reading of my text (I thought texts were the alpha and omega for post-modern sophisticates like you?) A good portion of this second attack is devoted to the same fund-raising letter Berube acknowledges I didn’t write. But why should that stop him? Here is what I actually said about Robert Reich – one of the subjects of the letter -- in the text of the book, which Berube hasn’t read and by his own admission doesn’t possess. (Like a typical leftist he no doubt doesn’t want to put money in my pocket by buying the book.) “Robert Reich, a former cabinet secretary in the Clinton Administration and now a Professor of Economics and Social Policy at Brandeis University is not a political radical. [Michael take note.] But in the present academic environment Reich is a member of the Faculty Committee of the ‘Social Justice and Policy Program’ in the undergraduate school. The Social Justice and Policy Program, as the name implies, is little more than a training course for students to become advocates for expanding the welfare state. In other words, it is a program of indoctrination in the strictest lexigraphical sense -- “to imbue with a partisan or ideological point of view” – and thus inappropriate for an academic curriculum. The proper setting for such a course would be a training institute maintained by the Democratic Party.”
Of course this is a real issue which Berube can’t be bothered to deal with since he’s too busy making fun of typos in my post like “prouncing,” (What’s a prounce David?) which was obviously intended to be the word “pronouncing” – something a smart aleck like Michael could easily figure out.
In any case, the professor has evidently learned nothing since from my response to his first post which reminded him that the bien-pensant among us, particularly professors of literature, generally read books before they review them. Here’s how Berube’s response to that idea begins: “Um, no, David, you poor thing. [Oh, did I mention that Michael imagines himself a humorist?] “That’s wasn’t a book review. This is a book review.” (Emphasis Michael’s.) But then he writes: “I got my impression of your ‘book’ … from hearing about my own entry in it.” From “hearing about” his own entry?
Michael quibbles with a bullet-point heading, a stylistic conceit of the book, which claims that Berube believes in teaching literature so as to bring about “economic transformations.” Michael protests that the sentence from which this phrase comes is lifted out of context. This is what the sentence says: “The important question for cultural critics, is also an old question – how to correlate developments in culture and the arts with large-scale economic transformations.” This appears to me like a classical Marxist notion. Michael doesn’t actually argue otherwise. In other words, despite the context Michael supplies, the statement stands.
Yet, on this basis (this and a similar paragraph constitute his “review”) Berube dismisses a 112,000 word text. And “dismisses” is the point, because the aim of all these non-reviews by antagonists who review conservative books before they’re even written is to avoid the difficulties of actually confronting the conservative case.
Ridicule is one favored weapon. Another is to repeat a false accusation made by another leftist as though it were a proven fact. When Berube’s true rage surfaces at the end of his post it comes out like this: “You lied about the student who was flunked for refusing to write an essay on how Bush is a war criminal.” In other words why believe anything I have to say, since I lied about this to prove that professors try to impose their ideological agendas on students?
In fact, I didn’t lie about the student who was flunked for refusing to write an essay on how Bush is a war criminal. Oh, of course, for people who think “Bush lied, people died” I probably did.
Here are the central facts: The exam was destroyed by the professor in violation of university regulations, so it’s his word against the student’s. The student went through a grievance procedure (something that no one disputes) so in my view her story is probably the correct one (Why subject yourself to this kind of ordeal, with possible retributions, if the stakes aren’t high?). To defend himself during this grievance process, the professor reconstructed the exam from memory. Yet, the answer he required came out substantially the same as the student had claimed (a claim which I repeated in her behalf): “Make the argument that the military action of the US attacking Iraq was criminal.”
Now Michael Berube would know this if -- as a preparation for his “review” of my book -- he had read my book. The essay topic as supplied by the professor is reprinted on p. 131 of The Professors.
But Professor Berube did not have to wait for my book. If he had cared at all about the facts in this matter, he could have gone to my website at http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/ where he would find a link called “Two Disputed Cases in Colorado.” There is a complete explanation of the facts there, including an explanation as to why they are not so simple as has been represented (or rather deliberately misrepresented) by numerous hatchets on the left. InsideHigherEd.com – Berube’s source -- refused to post my response to their erroneous claims, but I posted the same response on FrontPagemag.com where it is easy to find in my articles archive.
Another leftist canard, which InsideHigherEd.com also promoted, is Berube’s next stop in his little campaign to discredit a book he hasn’t read: “You lied about the biology professor who showed Farenheit 9/11 in his class.”
This does not even rise to the category of “lie” that refers to merely repeating mistaken information. The InsideHigherEd story behind Berube’s claim was about an alleged “retraction” I had made at the end of two days of hearings (literally in the last two minutes) on academic freedom at Temple University. After testifying for more than an hour, I was answering questions from a member of the Committee who was a leftwing Democrat and who had been the keynote speaker at an anti-Hearing rally organized by the faculty union before the hearings even started (detect a pattern here?). This Democrat asked me whether I could verify that a professor of biology at one of the state campuses had shown Farenheit 9/11 in a biology class. He said that it was central to the argument I was making.
I pointed out that I hadn’t mentioned this incident in an hour and a half of testimony and that no witness sympathetic to the case I had made had brought it up either. In short, despite his claim that it was “central” to the arguments of supporters of the Hearings, it was not in fact important to any of the case I or any of the supporters were actually making.
This did not satisfy the leftwing Democrat because he wasn’t really asking a question; he was laying down the markers for a case. Nonetheless, I responded truthfully (knowing that unscrupulous “reviewers” of my work like Berube would exploit any candor I displayed which revealed uncertainty on my part). I said that the charge had been made by a legislative staffer, but I had been unable to verify it. Because I could not verify it I had stopped mentioning it long before the hearings started.
This is the factual basis from which Berube has spun his malicious charge. There are more than a dozen campuses which constitute Penn State University and the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, probably all of which have biology classes. I have interviewed enough students to believe that Farenheit 9/11 was shown in many classes across the country, which were not about the war in Iraq. At Columbia University, for example, students told me it was shown in a civil engineering class on the eve of the election.
I have a small staff and am unable to check every claim that is brought to me (as a rule I post student claims and invite professors to respond). Nonetheless, when this claim was challenged by a biology professor at one of the dozen or more campuses, I made an effort to see if the claim was true and when I was unable to do so I stopped using it, long in advance of the academic freedom hearings. Berube may not be satisfied with this answer but it shows a higher standard of honesty than observed by people who charge others with lying, without any attempt to check the facts.
Do I consider such accusations malicious attempts by the left to embargo a serious discussion of my work? Of course I do. “You need to stop fantasizing that ‘leftwing fascists’ are attacking you,” says the very professor who calls me a liar without checking the facts.
Is the perception of widespread attacks a fantasy of mine? I am the author of an Academic Bill of Rights which is strictly viewpoint neutral and protects all professors of all views from being fired or hired on the basis of their political views. I have never called for the firing of a professor for his or her political views; I have defended leftist professors who were denied tenure, and leftist students abused by conservatives; my book – which Berube has yet to read – clearly states that it “is not intended as a text about leftwing bias in the university and does not propose that a leftwing perspective on academic faculties is a problem in itself.”
Yet if you Google the words “McCarthy +David Horowitz” you will find over 400,000 references. Not to belabor the point but the most recent issue of the The Chronicle of Higher Education, the principal journal of academic administration, carries as its lead feature, a piece by leftist Ellen Schrecker called “Worse Than McCarthy.” The article purports to be about me and people like me. (A version of it was read at the Temple Hearings.) It’s Berube who is the fantasist if he really believes I am not under attack.
To return to the original theme of this response, the purpose of these attacks is to avoid the difficult task of responding to what I have actually written, as opposed to what ideologically motivated liars have written about me. This relates directly to the least attractive part of your attack:
“Now, it’s true that I have not yet received my copy of your book. And here I need to explain to my readers that over the past couple of years, David has sent me my very own personal copy of Uncivil Wars, his book on reparations [actually it is a book also about the lack of academic freedom on college campuses, which is why I sent it to him]; Left Illusions, one of his six or eight or fifteen memoirs about his intellectual odyssey from far-left firebrand to wing-nut crank [two memoirs; no more left than Berube today; no more wing-nut politically than say JFK]; and two copies of Unholy Alliance, the book in which everyone from Noam Chomsky to Todd Gitlin is cast as a friend of Osama.”
In fact Unholy Alliance does no such thing (which Berube would know if he had read it). The book: “As a ‘democratic socialist,’ Gitlin dissents from the most extreme views articulated by Chomsky, Zinn and others.” Both Unholy Alliance and my new book The Professors describe Gitlin as a “social democrat” who has condemned the pro-Saddam (and/or pro-Osama) left. What Unholy Alliance says is that Gitlin “nonetheless shares [with Chomsky et al] a disturbingly negative perspective on America’s history and world role.” The book then quotes Gitlin: “Read history with open eyes and it is hard to overlook the American empire. … You need not subscribe to the Left’s grandest claims that America from its birth is essentially genocidal and indebted to slavery for much of its prosperity to acknowledge that white colonists took the land, traded in slaves, and profited immensely thereby; or that the United States later lorded it over Latin America (and other occasional properties, like the Philippines) to guarantee cheap resources and otherwise line American pockets; or that American-led corporations (among others) and financial agencies today systematically overlook or, worse, damage the freedom of others.”
My conclusion is that this nihilistic attitude towards America shared across the American left has inspired it to become a de facto ally of America’s enemies. It is the post-modern version of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in whose name American anti-fascists served the Nazi cause. Berube may not like this analysis (assuming first that he has read and then understood it) but there is no excuse for misrepresenting it as badly as this.
Ironically, I sent the books to Berube, in the (obviously futile) hope of engaging someone like him in an intellectual dialogue about these issues. I was wrong. Michael Berube has shown himself to be incapable of meeting the intellectual challenge of a conservative argument. I was wrong too in composing the inscription designed to encourage a dialogue. Michael Berube is not a “worthy opponent” and I was foolish to have thought he would be.
Sunday
Berube has now posted another attack on me without a addressing a single substantive issue between us. Typical. Just more rehashing of lies about me already told and already refuted, including the Isserman canard. Yes, I did not recognize the stylistic pecularity of Berube's links, which are merely bold not underlined. Big deal.
In one case, Berube reiterates his slander calling my reference to the showing of Farentheit 9/11 a lie because I couldn't confirm it (and therefore stopped referring to it). Can Berube confirm that it wasn't shown? Of course not. Can any of the critics of Bush prove there were no WMDs? Of course not. This makes every critic of Bush a liar by the Berube's abysmal standard.
Elsewhere, Berube claims he "hyperlinked to facts" in defending his libels. He did not hyperlink to facts. He hyperlinked to an attack on me on a leftwing site InsideHigherEd, whose editor is sometimes more responsible than he was in this particular case. I hyperlinked to the facts. Readers who go to Two Disputed Cases in Colorado will see what hyperlinking to the facts means But readers don't have to work that hard. They can just read the paragraph I wrote above and note that Berube doesn't begin to deal with it. The text of Exam is printed in my new book and confirms the truth of what I said. Berube is a liar and a brazen one at that. He can count on his fans not to look into the facts and on the core belief of progressives that if you repeat a slander enough times it becomes a fact, at least for other progressives.
The Isserman canard I answered at http://www.hnn.us/. I am weary of dealing with leftwing slanders like these because I know that I am talking to a wall. The Colorado exam is a perfect example. No honest person examing the facts could write and then repeat what Berube has. This is by way of explanation as to why I am not going to look for the specific link on HNN. I'm sure that anyone who cares to will be able to find it.
Berube began this exchange (which has now degenerated to the point where I am going to take a shower) by attacking a book he hasn't read, then instead of admitting his fault repeating slanders he hasn't bothered to examine (I'm giving him an enormous benefit of the doubt in this) and then when they have been refued repeating them again along with rehashed others. All this, it should be remembered, is to avoid engaging an intellectual argument about the state of our universities which he knows he can't defend.
Berube has responded to my original post with another attack based on a further non-reading of my text (I thought texts were the alpha and omega for post-modern sophisticates like you?) A good portion of this second attack is devoted to the same fund-raising letter Berube acknowledges I didn’t write. But why should that stop him? Here is what I actually said about Robert Reich – one of the subjects of the letter -- in the text of the book, which Berube hasn’t read and by his own admission doesn’t possess. (Like a typical leftist he no doubt doesn’t want to put money in my pocket by buying the book.) “Robert Reich, a former cabinet secretary in the Clinton Administration and now a Professor of Economics and Social Policy at Brandeis University is not a political radical. [Michael take note.] But in the present academic environment Reich is a member of the Faculty Committee of the ‘Social Justice and Policy Program’ in the undergraduate school. The Social Justice and Policy Program, as the name implies, is little more than a training course for students to become advocates for expanding the welfare state. In other words, it is a program of indoctrination in the strictest lexigraphical sense -- “to imbue with a partisan or ideological point of view” – and thus inappropriate for an academic curriculum. The proper setting for such a course would be a training institute maintained by the Democratic Party.”
Of course this is a real issue which Berube can’t be bothered to deal with since he’s too busy making fun of typos in my post like “prouncing,” (What’s a prounce David?) which was obviously intended to be the word “pronouncing” – something a smart aleck like Michael could easily figure out.
In any case, the professor has evidently learned nothing since from my response to his first post which reminded him that the bien-pensant among us, particularly professors of literature, generally read books before they review them. Here’s how Berube’s response to that idea begins: “Um, no, David, you poor thing. [Oh, did I mention that Michael imagines himself a humorist?] “That’s wasn’t a book review. This is a book review.” (Emphasis Michael’s.) But then he writes: “I got my impression of your ‘book’ … from hearing about my own entry in it.” From “hearing about” his own entry?
Michael quibbles with a bullet-point heading, a stylistic conceit of the book, which claims that Berube believes in teaching literature so as to bring about “economic transformations.” Michael protests that the sentence from which this phrase comes is lifted out of context. This is what the sentence says: “The important question for cultural critics, is also an old question – how to correlate developments in culture and the arts with large-scale economic transformations.” This appears to me like a classical Marxist notion. Michael doesn’t actually argue otherwise. In other words, despite the context Michael supplies, the statement stands.
Yet, on this basis (this and a similar paragraph constitute his “review”) Berube dismisses a 112,000 word text. And “dismisses” is the point, because the aim of all these non-reviews by antagonists who review conservative books before they’re even written is to avoid the difficulties of actually confronting the conservative case.
Ridicule is one favored weapon. Another is to repeat a false accusation made by another leftist as though it were a proven fact. When Berube’s true rage surfaces at the end of his post it comes out like this: “You lied about the student who was flunked for refusing to write an essay on how Bush is a war criminal.” In other words why believe anything I have to say, since I lied about this to prove that professors try to impose their ideological agendas on students?
In fact, I didn’t lie about the student who was flunked for refusing to write an essay on how Bush is a war criminal. Oh, of course, for people who think “Bush lied, people died” I probably did.
Here are the central facts: The exam was destroyed by the professor in violation of university regulations, so it’s his word against the student’s. The student went through a grievance procedure (something that no one disputes) so in my view her story is probably the correct one (Why subject yourself to this kind of ordeal, with possible retributions, if the stakes aren’t high?). To defend himself during this grievance process, the professor reconstructed the exam from memory. Yet, the answer he required came out substantially the same as the student had claimed (a claim which I repeated in her behalf): “Make the argument that the military action of the US attacking Iraq was criminal.”
Now Michael Berube would know this if -- as a preparation for his “review” of my book -- he had read my book. The essay topic as supplied by the professor is reprinted on p. 131 of The Professors.
But Professor Berube did not have to wait for my book. If he had cared at all about the facts in this matter, he could have gone to my website at http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/ where he would find a link called “Two Disputed Cases in Colorado.” There is a complete explanation of the facts there, including an explanation as to why they are not so simple as has been represented (or rather deliberately misrepresented) by numerous hatchets on the left. InsideHigherEd.com – Berube’s source -- refused to post my response to their erroneous claims, but I posted the same response on FrontPagemag.com where it is easy to find in my articles archive.
Another leftist canard, which InsideHigherEd.com also promoted, is Berube’s next stop in his little campaign to discredit a book he hasn’t read: “You lied about the biology professor who showed Farenheit 9/11 in his class.”
This does not even rise to the category of “lie” that refers to merely repeating mistaken information. The InsideHigherEd story behind Berube’s claim was about an alleged “retraction” I had made at the end of two days of hearings (literally in the last two minutes) on academic freedom at Temple University. After testifying for more than an hour, I was answering questions from a member of the Committee who was a leftwing Democrat and who had been the keynote speaker at an anti-Hearing rally organized by the faculty union before the hearings even started (detect a pattern here?). This Democrat asked me whether I could verify that a professor of biology at one of the state campuses had shown Farenheit 9/11 in a biology class. He said that it was central to the argument I was making.
I pointed out that I hadn’t mentioned this incident in an hour and a half of testimony and that no witness sympathetic to the case I had made had brought it up either. In short, despite his claim that it was “central” to the arguments of supporters of the Hearings, it was not in fact important to any of the case I or any of the supporters were actually making.
This did not satisfy the leftwing Democrat because he wasn’t really asking a question; he was laying down the markers for a case. Nonetheless, I responded truthfully (knowing that unscrupulous “reviewers” of my work like Berube would exploit any candor I displayed which revealed uncertainty on my part). I said that the charge had been made by a legislative staffer, but I had been unable to verify it. Because I could not verify it I had stopped mentioning it long before the hearings started.
This is the factual basis from which Berube has spun his malicious charge. There are more than a dozen campuses which constitute Penn State University and the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, probably all of which have biology classes. I have interviewed enough students to believe that Farenheit 9/11 was shown in many classes across the country, which were not about the war in Iraq. At Columbia University, for example, students told me it was shown in a civil engineering class on the eve of the election.
I have a small staff and am unable to check every claim that is brought to me (as a rule I post student claims and invite professors to respond). Nonetheless, when this claim was challenged by a biology professor at one of the dozen or more campuses, I made an effort to see if the claim was true and when I was unable to do so I stopped using it, long in advance of the academic freedom hearings. Berube may not be satisfied with this answer but it shows a higher standard of honesty than observed by people who charge others with lying, without any attempt to check the facts.
Do I consider such accusations malicious attempts by the left to embargo a serious discussion of my work? Of course I do. “You need to stop fantasizing that ‘leftwing fascists’ are attacking you,” says the very professor who calls me a liar without checking the facts.
Is the perception of widespread attacks a fantasy of mine? I am the author of an Academic Bill of Rights which is strictly viewpoint neutral and protects all professors of all views from being fired or hired on the basis of their political views. I have never called for the firing of a professor for his or her political views; I have defended leftist professors who were denied tenure, and leftist students abused by conservatives; my book – which Berube has yet to read – clearly states that it “is not intended as a text about leftwing bias in the university and does not propose that a leftwing perspective on academic faculties is a problem in itself.”
Yet if you Google the words “McCarthy +David Horowitz” you will find over 400,000 references. Not to belabor the point but the most recent issue of the The Chronicle of Higher Education, the principal journal of academic administration, carries as its lead feature, a piece by leftist Ellen Schrecker called “Worse Than McCarthy.” The article purports to be about me and people like me. (A version of it was read at the Temple Hearings.) It’s Berube who is the fantasist if he really believes I am not under attack.
To return to the original theme of this response, the purpose of these attacks is to avoid the difficult task of responding to what I have actually written, as opposed to what ideologically motivated liars have written about me. This relates directly to the least attractive part of your attack:
“Now, it’s true that I have not yet received my copy of your book. And here I need to explain to my readers that over the past couple of years, David has sent me my very own personal copy of Uncivil Wars, his book on reparations [actually it is a book also about the lack of academic freedom on college campuses, which is why I sent it to him]; Left Illusions, one of his six or eight or fifteen memoirs about his intellectual odyssey from far-left firebrand to wing-nut crank [two memoirs; no more left than Berube today; no more wing-nut politically than say JFK]; and two copies of Unholy Alliance, the book in which everyone from Noam Chomsky to Todd Gitlin is cast as a friend of Osama.”
In fact Unholy Alliance does no such thing (which Berube would know if he had read it). The book: “As a ‘democratic socialist,’ Gitlin dissents from the most extreme views articulated by Chomsky, Zinn and others.” Both Unholy Alliance and my new book The Professors describe Gitlin as a “social democrat” who has condemned the pro-Saddam (and/or pro-Osama) left. What Unholy Alliance says is that Gitlin “nonetheless shares [with Chomsky et al] a disturbingly negative perspective on America’s history and world role.” The book then quotes Gitlin: “Read history with open eyes and it is hard to overlook the American empire. … You need not subscribe to the Left’s grandest claims that America from its birth is essentially genocidal and indebted to slavery for much of its prosperity to acknowledge that white colonists took the land, traded in slaves, and profited immensely thereby; or that the United States later lorded it over Latin America (and other occasional properties, like the Philippines) to guarantee cheap resources and otherwise line American pockets; or that American-led corporations (among others) and financial agencies today systematically overlook or, worse, damage the freedom of others.”
My conclusion is that this nihilistic attitude towards America shared across the American left has inspired it to become a de facto ally of America’s enemies. It is the post-modern version of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in whose name American anti-fascists served the Nazi cause. Berube may not like this analysis (assuming first that he has read and then understood it) but there is no excuse for misrepresenting it as badly as this.
Ironically, I sent the books to Berube, in the (obviously futile) hope of engaging someone like him in an intellectual dialogue about these issues. I was wrong. Michael Berube has shown himself to be incapable of meeting the intellectual challenge of a conservative argument. I was wrong too in composing the inscription designed to encourage a dialogue. Michael Berube is not a “worthy opponent” and I was foolish to have thought he would be.
Sunday
Berube has now posted another attack on me without a addressing a single substantive issue between us. Typical. Just more rehashing of lies about me already told and already refuted, including the Isserman canard. Yes, I did not recognize the stylistic pecularity of Berube's links, which are merely bold not underlined. Big deal.
In one case, Berube reiterates his slander calling my reference to the showing of Farentheit 9/11 a lie because I couldn't confirm it (and therefore stopped referring to it). Can Berube confirm that it wasn't shown? Of course not. Can any of the critics of Bush prove there were no WMDs? Of course not. This makes every critic of Bush a liar by the Berube's abysmal standard.
Elsewhere, Berube claims he "hyperlinked to facts" in defending his libels. He did not hyperlink to facts. He hyperlinked to an attack on me on a leftwing site InsideHigherEd, whose editor is sometimes more responsible than he was in this particular case. I hyperlinked to the facts. Readers who go to Two Disputed Cases in Colorado will see what hyperlinking to the facts means But readers don't have to work that hard. They can just read the paragraph I wrote above and note that Berube doesn't begin to deal with it. The text of Exam is printed in my new book and confirms the truth of what I said. Berube is a liar and a brazen one at that. He can count on his fans not to look into the facts and on the core belief of progressives that if you repeat a slander enough times it becomes a fact, at least for other progressives.
The Isserman canard I answered at http://www.hnn.us/. I am weary of dealing with leftwing slanders like these because I know that I am talking to a wall. The Colorado exam is a perfect example. No honest person examing the facts could write and then repeat what Berube has. This is by way of explanation as to why I am not going to look for the specific link on HNN. I'm sure that anyone who cares to will be able to find it.
Berube began this exchange (which has now degenerated to the point where I am going to take a shower) by attacking a book he hasn't read, then instead of admitting his fault repeating slanders he hasn't bothered to examine (I'm giving him an enormous benefit of the doubt in this) and then when they have been refued repeating them again along with rehashed others. All this, it should be remembered, is to avoid engaging an intellectual argument about the state of our universities which he knows he can't defend.
2 Comments:
You may be interested in Robert Reich's new personal blog: www.robertreich.blogspot.com.
I know that this post is rather old by this point, but I just stumbled upon Mr. Horowitz's argument and felt the need to respond.
Mr. Horowitz, referring to Berube's review of his book, writes:
Michael quibbles with a bullet-point heading, a stylistic conceit of the book, which claims that Berube believes in teaching literature so as to bring about “economic transformations.”
Michael protests that the sentence from which this phrase comes is lifted out of context. This is what the sentence says: “The important question for cultural critics, is also an old question – how to correlate developments in culture and the arts with large-scale economic transformations.” This appears to me like a classical Marxist notion. Michael doesn’t actually argue otherwise. In other words, despite the context Michael supplies, the statement stands.
This paragraph by Mr. Horowitz reveals at least one major interpretive error. Allow me to clarify.
First, Horowitz writes that his book claims that "Berube believes in teaching literature so as to bring about 'economic transformations'". This sentence asserts that Berube see the goal of his teaching about literature to be a social one, that of transforming the economy.
Berube takes exception to this characterization of his teaching and argues that Horowitz's sentence is a distortion of a sentence from one of Berube's book that Horowitz has taken out of context. Taking up Berube's implicit challenge to look again at the original context and sentence, Horowitz supplies the quote from Berube's work which reads "The important question for cultural critics, is also an old question – how to correlate developments in culture and the arts with large-scale economic transformations."
Now, where Horowitz goes wildly wrong is not in his assessment that this is a Marxist understanding of literary production but in his understanding of what the sentence means. Horowitz [wrongly] understands the sentence to be a confession of Berube's pedagogical aims in teaching literature. In other words, he [wrongly] understands the sentence to mean something like "the important question for cultural critics is how to teach literature so as to bring about large-scale economic transformations."
But that isn't what the sentence means at all! In fact, what Horowitz takes to be a statement of the pedagogical aims of cultural criticism and the teaching of cultural studies is in fact nothing more than a statement about literary and cultural production.
In other words, the meaning of the sentence is "the challenge for cultural critics is how to understand the relationship that changes in the literary/cultural sphere have to changes in the economic sphere." This is simply the old base/superstructure problem. Another way of formulating it would be, "Do literary and cultural changes (the superstructure) occur as a result of changes within the economy (the base)?"
While that position is indeed one that owes its original insights to Marxist cultural theorists, it is nothing like advocacy for the idea that the teaching of literature ought to be undertaken in order to effect changes in the economy. It is a statement about how to understand changes within the literary and cultural sphere. "What accounts for these changes--changes within the economy of a particular period?" it asks.
Horowitz shows himself to be a remarkably poor reader here. While I doubt that on the basis of this one mistake he'll offer Berube an apology for his mischaracterization of Berube's position, such an apology is surely merited given the evidence of Horowitz's egregious misreading.
Eric Johnson-DeBaufre
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