Friday, May 30, 2008

Only Universities have This Kind of Head Executive   [Travis Kavulla]

Can you be an obscure, self-indulged, theory-laden, post-modern scholar and manage to be an effective university president? 

University of Wisconsin at Madison is hoping “yes.” It has picked Biddy Martin, Cornell provost and women’s studies professor, as its new chancellor. Her best-known work is a little something called Femininity Played Straight, which features chapters entitled “Sexualities without Gender and Other Queer Utopias” and “Teaching Feminism.” The one review that Amazon.com has picked up on the book is truncated to a single sentence, though it pretty much sums up the obtuseness of Ms Martin’s field: “Martin's eccentric use of the body as drag... is wittily set against the queer privileging of transgender identification.”

She is also an editor of an anthology Do the Humanities Have to Be Useful? (pdf). In her essay, she positively raves about the state of progressive enlightenment she found as a college student: 

Something in my language and speech at the end of a year in college seemed to have changed me and make me [sic] an infidel [to my family]. The anti-intellectualism with which I was inundated as a child, adolescent, and young adult was aimed at ensuring loyalty to the forms of racist bigotry and social conformity that have long helped to cement familial and community bonds in that part of Virginia.

Ladies and Gentlmen, Biddy Martin: A creature of the university, for the university, who thinks that universities are ‘useful’ in the sense that they can flush students of the bigotry found in most of American society. Just charming.

05/30 05:36 PMShare