 I'm Betsy Peckler and Dean of University Libraries and I'd like to welcome you all to our final Talking in the Library event for the fall semester. All of our Talking in the Library events are generously supported by an alumna of the University, Mary Tuft-White, and she also donated funds to redo this space that we're sitting in with breakout walls for a crowd such as this, so thank you all for coming. We're so fortunate to have Robert Boyers here this evening, whom Adam Braver, our library program director and creative writing professor will introduce in a moment. Adam and Bob have known one another for many years through a well-known Writers Institute at Skidmore College where Bob is taught as a member of the faculty, the English faculty, my major for many years. I just wanted to briefly mention the spring semester Talking in the Library events. In February we will host English literary critic James Wood. In April our student writing fellowship, the Vermont Fellowship for Fiction or Nonfiction will be taught by Sigrid Nunes who just won the National Book Award for her novel The Friend. She will be teaching a masterclass to students who are selected for that fellowship and it will end with a reading at Rogers Free Library in Bristol, so I hope you'll all come to those. And later in April in celebration of National Poetry Month we'll host Robert Pinsky, a very well-known poet. Quite a great lineup for the spring thanks to Adam Braver, so I hope you will all join us. And now I'd like to ask Adam to come up and introduce our speaker. All right, well thank you all for coming out. There are plenty of seats up front too for anybody who might have trouble hearing. What's going on? I just want to be closer. I also want to just give the general reminder about silencing cell phones during the talk. There will be some time for question and answer after the main points. And also just outside the door, the bookstore is selling copies of Robert Poyer's new book. I believe it is $22.50 with tax outside the door. When it comes to what we discuss and how we can discuss it, here is the question at its most basic. What are the lines and who gets to define them? In authoritarian regimes we know that answer and we know the equation is simple. Create black and white rationals, pit one perspective against the other, and set up a construct in which one side is clearly right and the other clearly is wrong. But here in the academy, in the university space, we are supposed to eschew the simplistic, jingoistic, and jargon-based perspectives. We are obliged to value debate, discussion, evidence, and reason. We understand that issues are blurry, messy, complicated, and nuanced. It is our role and purpose as people in higher education, be it student or faculty, to wade through the muddy waters of ideas, to acknowledge the contradictions, and to search out the higher truths through the lens of reason. That very role, so important, has been essential to progressing thought, from the critical understandings in the humanities, to the theories of the social sciences, to the life-changing discoveries in the sciences. And if you still remain suspicious about my argument, you can ask why students, scholars, and universities right now are under threat from authoritarians around the world based on what we would call free expression or academic freedom. Be it through intimidation, surveillance, dismissal or expulsion, travel restrictions, imprisonment, threats to institutional autonomy, and in countries such as Turkey, shutting down universities altogether. The very idea of the role of the academy, the very notion of the complexity of ideas, and the need for that to prosper is at the heart of Robert Boyer's new book, The Tyranny of Virtue. Part memoir, part criticism, and part plea, Boyer's, who for most of his professional life has been identified as a, quote, east coast liberal academic and writer, asks if that role of the academy hasn't been replaced by prescribed perspectives, not meant to ask hard questions, and at times suffer through the rigor of contradictions and evidence that sometimes add up to a kind of perfect imperfection, but rather, as his book title implies, with an intent to confirm a kind of virtue inherent in its own biases. For a little background, which you've just heard a bit from Betsy, Robert Boyer's is a professor of English at Skidmore College, where he's taught for over 50 years. A highly regarded literary and cultural critic, Boyer's also founded and continues to publish Salma Gundy, a journal of writing and ideas that for over five decades, regularly has showcased the greatest minds of our time, from Susan Sontag, to Saul Bellow, to Milan Cundero, to Frank Bedard, to Jamaica Concade, Marilyn Robbins, and Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Lopate, Rick Moody, and on, and on, and on, and on. And if I sound a tad bit familiar with him, as Betsy said, it's because I've worked for Bob for almost 16 years at the New York State Summer Writers Institute, which he directs, and I count myself fortunate to have been able to be among many of the people I just mentioned and to hear those great minds at work and at play. So I invite you to listen to Professor Boyer's, and when his presentation is completed, to engage with him, to ask questions, to work toward finding a truth. Isn't it better if we participate in defining the lines that can or cannot be crossed, rather than having them defined for us? Robert Boyer's. Thank you so much. Thank you, Adam, and thanks for being here. I'm going to talk a little bit about how I came to write this kind of book. So a little bit of this will sound like a, like a sort of a craft talk, and a bit of a memoir. I will read just a couple of pages from the book itself just to give you a feeling for what it sounds like and a couple of different points. And then, most especially, I look forward to taking questions, right? So I, when I was young, I always heard from people in my family that I was a good arguer. I like to argue. We often had ferocious political arguments at our kitchen table. We didn't have a dining room, but we had a kitchen table, and we conducted our arguments there. And the arguments, you know, had to do with all sorts of things, but principally politics. My family was working class, uneducated, and so we didn't talk about literature. We didn't have any books in my house. We didn't have a bookcase. We had a newspaper each day, and I was encouraged to read it and to think about some of the issues that were raised in that newspaper, which is called, by the way, The New York Post. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, a very long time ago. And as I got older, I began, when I went to college and graduate school, I became invested in political issues and joined political organizations. And I always thought of myself as someone who was an activist. I was a war resistor in the 1960s, refusing to go and fight in the war in Vietnam. That was part of my conviction and my commitment at the time. And at that very time, in the mid-1960s, I founded a magazine called Selma County Quarterly Magazine, which I set up with a few of my friends. And it was a magazine committed to literature, the arts, and politics. And one of the things I most enjoy doing in connection with that magazine was organizing conferences, meetings, symposia, where I would get to invite very interesting people to sit around a table for three days, discussing and debating a topic. The topic ranged all the way from the clash of civilizations to lying and liars, to psychological man, to race and racism in America. And one of the principal features of those meetings that I organized was that it consisted of people who clearly disagreed with one another and to a very considerable degree, in some cases, actually even disapproved of one another. Of course, they had to sit there together at the table over three days. We generally would run those conferences for 15 hours. If you haven't ever done that, think about it. It's challenging. It's hard to sit at a table with people who are just as smart as you are, just as smart as you are, who come prepared, just in the way that you've prepared, and to know that whatever you say, you will be challenged. Whatever you don't have evidence to support, someone will ask you to provide it, right? And that you are, of course, in the same way required to come back at them with the same kinds of challenges and demands. No escape, no place to hide. When we would run these meetings, which were tremendously stirring, stimulating, when they were over, they would all be taped, and our student assistants would transcribe them, and then I would spend months editing them, trying to make them coherent, and then we would bring them out as special issues of our magazine, Salma Gandhi. There have been three dozen of these special topics, issues of Salma Gandhi over the years. Why am I telling you this? Well, basically, again, to suggest that argument, polemic, dispute, disagreement has always seemed to me at the heart of what I call the liberal enterprise, and it seems to me something that's central also to what I call academic life. It's what we want to see in the classroom as much as possible. We want people to feel that they are able to dispute what they hear in the classroom, including, by the way, things coming at them from the front of the room, from the professor, and of course we want students to feel that they can challenge things that are coming from other students in the room. That's the sort of nature of the discourse that I've always most valued, and it's the thing that drew me to academic life when I was young, and that maybe wanted to go to graduate school and become a professor of myself, and it's the sort of thing I've been drawn to do as a writer pretty much all of my adult life. Much of the writing that I did for many years, for decades, certainly in the first eight or nine books that I wrote, rightly falls under the heading of criticism. It's criticism. Criticism of books, criticism of political ideas, criticism of particular writers, criticism. The sort of thing that you read in brief, in a newspaper column, not in a news story, but in a newspaper column on the op-ed page, for example, the sort of thing you read at much greater length in a magazine of ideas, like Harper's Magazine, or The Nation, or The New Republic, or The Atlantic, those kinds of magazines, and that was what I always wanted to do, and it's what I did. I did it in the articles I wrote, hundreds of articles for those kinds of magazines, and in the books that I wrote. But over the years, I became more and more attracted to another kind of writing, which in general I think we refer to as personal essay or memoir. Perhaps some of you have been doing that sort of writing in classes here at Roger Williams. It's become more and more a feature of contemporary literary life, that great many people are attracted to the form of the personal essay and the memoir. It's hard even to imagine, for those of you who are not old enough to remember, but not so very long ago, criticism and so-called memoir were almost entirely, with very few exceptions, completely separate matters. So, for example, if you were to read a book review in The New Yorker Magazine, to pick a very prominent national magazine, you would know nothing about the relationship of the person who wrote that review to the material in the review. That person writing the review would tell you nothing about himself or herself in the review, nothing. And when I wrote my reviews or essays for Harper's or The New Republic or The Nation or the many magazines that I wrote for over the course of my career, the same way. You would know nothing about my relationship to those subjects. You would know what I thought about a particular issue. You would know whether I liked or disliked the particular book I was reviewing. But you would know nothing about me. You would know where I came from. You would know how I came to entertain these kinds of thoughts rather than those, because that was simply not the way it was done. And then, as I say, I began to discover that increasingly that sharp demarcation separating criticism and memoir or personal essay began to erode. And increasingly, many of us in the profession began to talk with one another about ways in which we could bring these kinds of things together. Now, I'm not suggesting that this was completely original with us, with people of my generation. Some of you have perhaps studied the essays of George Orwell. And if you had, you would perhaps have confronted an example of a writer who, going all the way back to the period of the 1930s and 40s, when Orwell was doing his writing, was able to blend personal essay with argument, criticism, analysis, polemic, and to do it in a completely persuasive and powerful way. But somehow, that example represented by Orwell seemed almost out of reach for the rest of us. I can't exactly say why, but it did. In the 1990s, my wife Peg Boyers, who is a terrific poet, became deeply absorbed with the work of an Italian writer named Natalia Ginsberg. And we went to Rome in the very early 90s, and my wife interviewed her on a couple of occasions for publication. And we ran a special issue of our magazine devoted to Ginsberg's work. And Ginsberg was another one of those figures who could write about herself, her children, her husband, her marriage, her religious conversion, her feelings about abortion in the most intimate and personal way, and make that kind of material seem to have a deep and resonating political import. That, in some way, as, hey, my wife was drawn to this work, and as a result, I began to read it as well. And for some reason, these things are sometimes mysterious. That did it for me. That was the thing that broke open in me, something that I didn't really know I could do before. And so I began to think about finding a way to write about myself, my life, my marriage, my children, my friendships, all kinds of doubts, misgivings I had about a thousand different things, and do it in a way that would make my own experience seem somehow representative of the experience that other people were having at the same time. A hard thing, because when you write about yourself, you want it to seem very particular, very specific. You don't want to write about yourself as a generic person, as a male. You want to write about yourself as a particular male with a particular background, who comes from a particular place, who had particular problems, who went through particular kinds of crises, and so on. If you're going to write about yourself, you want to write about yourself as an actual individual person. And yet, you want at the same time to do that in a way that makes your own peculiar experiences and thoughts and feelings seem to other people who read about these things, to connect with things that they too are going through or might conceivably go through in the future. And so I slowly began to experiment with that about 15 years ago, slowly. I began to publish some essays along those lines in a couple of cases for anthologies, where I was commissioned to write these pieces. And then I suddenly found that I wanted to write a book using this kind of thing. And so I did a first book that came out about five years ago called The Fate of Ideas, in which I did this sort of thing. And then shortly afterwards, I was so, and now I'm going to turn really to the subject of my most recent book, which is the subject really that perhaps we'll be talking about in questions and answers in a little while. I've been teaching on a college campus for 51 years. I also taught on a graduate school campus in New York City at the New School for Social Research for 25 years. So I have a lot of experience in the academy and campus life. I've taught thousands of students. I'm very close friends with many of my former students who come up and see us and stay in our house on the weekend. And I know where they've come from. I know what they're thinking. And I've been increasingly disturbed by many of the things that I have observed on college campuses in the last decade or so. And I decided I had to try to find a way to write about these things. So I wrote an essay, one essay, and it came out in the pages of an important educational magazine called The Chronicle of Higher Education about five years ago. And that essay brought in hundreds and hundreds of letters. Some of them were private letters, letters from college presidents and deans who basically said in a variety of different ways, if you think what you're describing is bad, you should see what goes on on my campus. I could tell you stories you haven't dreamed about. That was sufficient encouragement for me to go forward. So I wrote a second piece also in The Chronicle of Higher Education and got comparable kinds of feedback. And there I knew I was set. I just had a sabbatical leave coming up. I left the country and I wrote the rest of this book. So what does the book do? Well, one of the things it does is to engage with things that you really, for the most part, only hear about vaguely if you're outside the university, if you're reading occasional news articles about things going on in the university. And of course, many of these things you only know about in an intimate way, if you yourself belong not only to that community, to an academic community, but if you yourself belong to that part of the academic community, which is often described as the left liberal cultural bubble. I am a long term denizen of the left liberal cultural bubble. I am a political liberal. I've been so all of my life. I know where many of the people are coming from who are behind the things that I try to describe and grapple with in my book. So I'm writing, for the most part, about my own people, my own cohort. I'm not targeting people who have political views that are drastically different from my own. I'm writing, for the most part, about my own colleagues, my friends, the people who sit at my dinner table on Saturday nights, the people who work at my Writers Institute in the summer. I'm writing about us, about our own cohort. And it seemed to me the best way to go about doing that was to write very personally from the inside. Now, what does it mean to write personally from the inside? Well, there are a lot of ways of thinking about that, right? How you do that. I mean, obviously, one thing you can do is you can tell stories, right? You can tell stories. This happened. That happened. This is what I thought. This is what I felt. This is what these other people thought and felt. You can do it that way. Another way, related, not completely unrelated, is to try to make your writing a kind of a conversation. What do we mean by that? We say, make your writing a kind of conversation. Well, I tried to find a way to create a conversation, first of all, with myself, where I could interrogate myself and ask whether I don't have all sorts of misgivings about my own opinions, about my own views, to ask whether, in fact, I'm capable of seeing some of the things I'm trying to describe as clearly as I like to think I actually do see them. So that's one kind of conversation, right? A conversation you can have with yourself. The kind of conversation probably every person in this room, now and again, maybe frequently, has, right? You say, but what am I doing? What am I saying? You hear something come out of your mouth, and you look at the faces of people in front of you, and you can tell right away, on many occasions, they're not hearing it the way you meant it, right? And you're asking yourself, why are they not hearing it the way you meant it? Is it just that you said the wrong word? Is it that you somehow have failed to make yourself clear? You ask yourself those kinds of questions, right? But then there's another way of conducting a conversation in a piece of writing of the sort I'm describing, and that is the conversation you conduct with other people within the framework of the thing you're writing, where, for example, you allow other people to speak in the piece you're writing, and you respond to them. You try to interrogate their thoughts. You try to understand where they're coming from. You try to understand why what they're saying doesn't quite break through to you. What kind of defenses have you built up in yourself that makes you resist the things that those people are saying to you? And, of course, if those kinds of conversations are going to be powerful as writing, powerful in terms of shaking you to your root, it's really important, if you can manage this, that the people you're listening to are people you can find a way to respect, or even better, people you might find a way to love. In one of my chapters of my new book on the subject of identity, I have an extended series of conversations back and forth with my son and son-in-law, my gay son and my gay son-in-law. Two people who are as close to me as anyone I've ever known who see things about identity in ways that are rather different from the way I see them. I let them speak. I try to hear them. I try to answer them. I talk back to them. I don't pretend that I get what they're saying. No, I confess that I don't always get what they're saying, and I try to meet them part of the way, out of love, out of respect, out of a desire to understand what we mean when we talk about identity. When we ask ourselves the question, now that we all ask ourselves again at one point or another, who am I? What am I? How does my identity affect the way that I think and speak and feel? So this is, in many ways, the nature of the book that I've written, which I wanted to sort of give you a little bit of a preliminary outline of in this way, and if you think about the subjects in the book, there are many different subjects in the book and there are chapters devoted to some of the hot button topics that many of you, without any question, have heard about and in many cases have thought about over these recent years. Even if you're not deeply invested in contemporary political issues, there are chapters of my book devoted to identity, disability, privilege, appropriation, hot button topics, that people are discussing and debating at the present moment. And I try to come at each one in a way that will seem personal and intimate and yet also rigorous. And throughout, throughout, I'm conducting not just an analysis but an argument. I'm arguing for thinking clearly and honestly about subjects which are often not engaged in an honest way. That is a sort of a current that runs all through the book that I've written. So what's a demand that I try to make of myself and only my reader, of course, can tell me whether I succeed in this. But it's a demand I make of my students, even in undergraduate writing classes. So of course you ask yourself when you're going to write something, do you actually have something to say? You have something to say. Is the thing you have to say worth saying an important question? Not always easy to answer. One more question, I think, essential, really essential. Is the thing that you want to say something with which an intelligent person could conceivably disagree? If the answer to that question is, I don't think so, well then my response would be, then you don't have anything to say. I'll do that one more time. Is the thing that you have to say something with which an intelligent person could conceivably disagree? And again, if the answer to the question is no, you have nothing to say. And there's no reason to go forward. No reason to write what you think to write. And I think that would be true if you were writing an ambitious term paper, an ambitious book review. And certainly it's true if you want to write an essay for a national magazine. And so with that as a kind of a guideline, I've gone forward. And you know, I can tell you honestly, just simple, candor, that in this new book of mine, as in the previous one, there were chapters I began, moved through to a very considerable degree, 10 pages, 15 pages, only to discover that I actually didn't have something to say. I thought I had something to say, but I didn't. And so I would just eliminate those drafts and so on and find other things to say. Well, I thought for a moment that I might give you just a couple of very short examples of the kind of conversation that I like to think of myself conducting in this book. The first one, very brief excerpt, is from the front of the book, the preface to the book. And I think when you hear it, whether you like it or not, that's up to you, I think you'll hear something that's a little bit unusual. I thought to write the preface to the book as a sort of a conversation directly, overtly, with myself. And so I decided to write it in the second person, using you throughout, addressing myself as you. It's the kind of thing that can become very annoying after a very short while, really annoying. And I would find it very annoying in someone else. And so I decided that I could only do this in a short preface to my book. And once I came to the end, I knew, well, that's the end of that. That cannot happen anymore. But it has an odd sound, and I thought I would share it with you. Okay? Just very brief. I'm not going to read you the whole preface, just a little fragment in the front. A student at a graduation party tells you she thinks you'll woke and you say, thank you. And you're not sure you know what that means. It's no small thing, she continues, for an old white guy like you. And so you think further about it the next day. Try to process the idea. Obvious that you can talk the talk, invoke the system and the market, inequality and abuse, neoliberalism and privilege, that you don't offend. After three classes with you, the student probably means mainly that you don't offend. Willing to talk politics when teaching your courses, not averse to assigning books, sure to provoke unrest. And yet, no prospect you think that you will spontaneously utter something that will lead decent people to walk out or turn their backs. Decent people, the kinds who sign up for your classes, attend your lectures, read your articles, occasionally send you email letters to express their encouragement or their disappointment. Even your kids, who are given to noting your deficiencies, assure you that you've written nothing to embarrass them. Not yet. Though they are wary of your insistence on coming out with things uncomfortable or contrarian, your habit of criticism, your tendency to quarrel with people in your own left liberal cohort. The pleasure you take in saying no to things many of your friends embrace. Maybe too reluctant to let people know you're with them. Pissed off about always needing to show your papers and confirm you're on board. Wanting to have it both ways. Wanting to be woke and yet disdainful of the rituals and empty posturing that signify your determination never to offend. In truth, if truth be told, not always on board, even with what passes for the higher wisdom in your own herd of independent minds. Your friendly demeanor, no longer sufficient to cover over the fact that you are unwilling to sit quietly, hands nicely folded in the total cultural environment many of your friends and colleagues want to inhabit. Total in that all are expected to speak with one voice about the right and the true. No misgivings permitted. An environment in which naysayers and dissidents are routinely asked to leave the room. Not always asked, you say. Wondering not for the first time how you can have avoided that fate yourself. Do you hear that voice? That's a certain kind of voice. It's a little harsh. It's very direct. And of course it's direct in several different senses of the word direct because it's directed at certain issues and persons out there in my own cohort, my own environment, and also directed at myself. And introducing right up at the front of the book a person who is alert to what other people are saying and thinking, including his own kids who are not entirely thrilled all the time with what this guy seems to be saying and thinking with his own habit of criticism, taking no prisoners, right? So that's one kind of a voice. And again, I think even just in those two pages you can hear it's not the sort of voice you would be well advised to use over the stretch of a book, not even over the stretch of a long essay. It just wouldn't work. I think it might very well provoke someone enough to make them want to throw that thing across the room after about eight or ten pages, right? And yet for maybe five or six pages you might think, oh, this is sort of interesting. This guy has a kind of an edge. I might see what comes next. And so when I thought about this, after I'd written the book, all the various chapters of the book, I had to think about, well, what would I want to follow that voice with, right? If this is a little harsh, a little edgy, a little forbidding, all right? What would I want to do? So I decided to put as a second chapter in the book a chapter on the subject of privilege because that chapter begins with a lengthy first-person anecdote which has to do with an experience that I had when I was a college student just starting out. I'm not going to read it to you. It's too extended to read it to you, but I'll tell you about it just a little bit so you have a sense of a way of coming at a big subject, the subject of privilege, right? In a way that's very personal and humble. So I was a first-generation college student. No one in my entire extended family had ever gone to college. I thought I was a working class boy and our family's Jewish. And we lived in Brooklyn and we all spoke the way we spoke. I was a good student. I went to a very good high school in New York City and then I went to the City University of New York. The tuition was $20 a year. We could have LAT. I couldn't do much more than that. That was the tuition for the year at the City University of New York. And so we go in and I had the first English professor I had in school. It was a guy named Professor Stone. This is, as you can imagine, rather a long time ago. And we had our first paper in my paper and he gave back the papers and I got A plus on my paper. Good. A plus on my paper. As I went up to get my A plus paper from the hand of Professor Stone, he said, I want you to make an appointment with the administrative department and come up and see me. So of course I looked at the paper and I figured, well, he must want to tell me how great I am. After all, I got A plus. I was just starting my college career. He must say, you got a great future ahead of you. Maybe you'd like to join the literary magazine. I figured, well. So of course I make the appointment and I go up to see the guy. And he tells me to have a seat. And this was a City University of New York. Believe me when I tell you, you never had appointments with professors. They didn't see you. There were no office hours. It was nothing. Nothing. This was the only time I ever, in my four years at the college, had an appointment with one of my professors at the City University of New York. I go up there and he tells me to sit down. He invites another professor to come in the room. He introduces me and he says, tell Professor Magdalena right here about the paper you just got back. So I tell him about it. It's about George Orwell, by the way. And I go on for a few sentences. He says, okay, that's enough. That's enough. Okay. That's fine. And he says, you see what I was telling you? Yeah. And the guy then I'll cut to the chase. And he says, you know, you're the first one in your families ever going to college. I said, yeah. He says, well, you know, you write really well. I said, well, thank you very much. You know, I'm thinking, yeah, again, he's going to recommend me to some fantastic thing. He says, I got to tell you, when you open your mouth, he says, if you continue to talk the way you talk, of course, I've been raising my hand in the class and so on. Quote, this is a very long time ago. 62 years ago. He said, no one will ever take you seriously. He told me that the sounds I made as a Brooklyn boy were such that no one could possibly take me seriously. Of course, this is, can you well imagine, the first time I had ever heard anything remotely like this. I mean, it took me a while to process so on. The other professor who'd been invited in said the same thing, you know, basically supported my professor. And they then said, you know, you must immediately enroll in speech therapy courses for the rest of your career and learn to get rid of your Brooklyn accent. Of course, every one of my family spoke the same way. We all lived in Brooklyn. My grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe and so on. And, you know, so of course, I was not at all defensive about this. I was humiliated. I was humiliated. My feelings were hurt, you know, but I did exactly what I was told. I enrolled in speech therapy. I took speech therapy courses for seven semesters and I did what I was supposed to do, which is to say I worked on changing the way I spoke. Now, this is a story I tell at the front of my chapter on privilege, in part because it, I'm talking to you as a writer, right, just for a moment as a writer, because it makes me what I am and what I was young, vulnerable, right, uncomfortable, not like the guy who speaks in that opening chapter that I read you, right, the first couple of pages from, right. And I wanted my reader of my book to hear this other voice, a vulnerable young voice, coming from another kind of perspective altogether. And of course, on that basis, I wanted to be able to introduce to my reader the thought that the subject of privilege is complicated. It's not easy. It's a word that has been weaponized, right. It can be, I give many examples of this in my book, it can be used in a very casual way to put people down, not for anything that they've done, but for what they are, right. So, you know, you say someone is the beneficiary of privilege without knowing anything in particular about the person you are accusing of privilege. That it's important to know something more about someone than that the person is male and therefore has male privilege, right. Just to take one example, which male, what kind of privilege. So, one of the things I do when I give my story about my encounter with a professor as a freshman student in the college is to ask whether I was not at that moment the beneficiary of an extraordinary kind of privilege, the privilege of having been insulted and humiliated and made strange, right. We don't think of privilege in that way, right. I was given the extraordinary, right, privilege of being insulted and humiliated and made to feel that there was something I needed to do at once. Now, of course, you might very well legitimately dispute what that professor told me, right. We could disagree about this. I'm a very close friend of the writer, Jamaica Kincaid. And when Jamaica read, she has a blurb on my book, when she read that incident in the book, she said, I would have grabbed that professor and thrown him down the stairs for saying that to you. I'm not making that up. I would have grabbed him by the two shoulders and I would have thrown him down the stairs, right, for insulting and humiliating you in the way that he did. So we could disagree about this, right. But I, because of who I was, what I was, where I came from, I had no inclination to challenge what I had been told. I didn't think I had the grounds for resisting what I had been told and I came to think of it as a privilege and I did it, right. And then, of course, I began as I thought about in writing the book, in writing the chapter about privilege, I began to think, well, think about the privilege enjoyed by my professor, who felt clearly no reluctance at all to insult and humiliate me, right. After all, what could I do to him? So he had an extraordinary privilege as well. And that was a sort of a way for me into the whole subject of privilege for thinking about it in racial terms and in gender terms and to try to suggest that it's not an easy subject. It's actually very complicated. And there are ever so many other things like privilege, which we've come to employ in ways that suggest that we have no notion of how complicated they are to think about and how uneasy we should be when we reach for them and use them as weapons to put people down instead of thinking about what those people actually are, what kinds of privilege they actually do enjoy. And one of the things that I say in this book is that, of course, even if you think about privilege as a very complicated subject, well, it's not only a complicated subject, it's something that exists. It's real. Privilege exists. It's real, right. We all have different versions of privilege and we all enjoy different kinds of privilege. There is no question about that. Anyone who doesn't know that there really is something that goes under the name of white privilege has just not really thought at all, right. Of course, of course, there's white privilege. I mean, if you deny that, you're just, you're not thinking, you know. And is there such a thing as male privilege? Of course, there's such a thing as male privilege, right. The question is, what kind of white privilege, what kind of male privilege, when, in what circumstances, and so on, one has to actually think about these things. And so that's one of the things that I try to do in this book. And again, one of the related things I do is to tell colorful stories that will place the reader where I myself am placed. And so I can, so you can think in very concrete terms about what all of these ideas amount to when you employ them. I could go on for a very long time and I'd be happy to do that, but I would much sooner respond to questions or statements. And so would anyone like to start us off? Thank you. Yeah, you said earlier you got letters from professors about things happening on their campuses. Care to elaborate more on that? I'm just kind of curious, you know, of some of the instances they maybe wrote about, who wrote to you about it. Sure. Well, of course, in some cases, they wrote to me about the kinds of things that we've been reading about in the newspapers and magazines dealing with affairs on campuses all across the country. Some of these developments have gotten national attention. I'm talking about incidents at places like Middlebury College, where a controversial speaker was prevented from speaking, which that itself is an interesting subject for us to talk about. Perhaps, maybe not. And violence was finally the result of the efforts to block the controversial speaker. And so there's that. There have been other comparable incidents at Oberlin College, at Northwestern University. I mean, dozens and dozens of schools. There have been recent stories about developments at Williams College, for example. But let me give you a very concrete example of this kind of thing, and the kind of thing that I got letters about. At Northwestern, which, you know, was in Evansdale, Illinois. It's a very good school. It's a very good school. There's a professor of journalism, and she, about four or five years ago, published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, an article, a very controversial article. I would not write this article myself, but she wrote it. And in the article, she questioned certain kinds of prohibitions and restrictions on relations between members of departments and department chairs or administrators, generally romantic relationships, right? And even about relationships between graduate students and faculty, and graduate faculty at the university. She said, I don't really understand why these kinds of relationships should be prohibited. Okay? Again, I wouldn't write this article myself, but I'm pretty fearless when it comes to most things, but I would not write that article. But she wrote it and was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. And this professor was then brought up on Title IX charges on the grounds that students at the university, Northwestern University, remember, she didn't publish this in a campus publication. She published it in a national publication. She was brought up on charges on the grounds that she had, by virtue of publishing that article, created a hostile and unsafe environment on the Northwestern campus, simply by virtue of her being there and walking on the campus and going to school. So that was, you know, that's the kind of issue that we get. And of course, it gets into a very complicated area of what's sometimes called free speech controversy, right? There's such a thing as a question. What do we mean when we talk about free speech? I'm not a free speech absolutist. There are certain things that I will not allow to be said in my classroom, for example. A student in my classroom cannot say about a story handed in by another student. That's stupid. I would say, no, we don't speak to one another that way. We don't call one another stupid. We don't call one another's work stupid. If we do that, we won't be able to have civil conversation in the room. So no, that's not permissible. But you know, there are all sorts of complicated issues involved in free speech. Perhaps some of you have read recently, again in the national news, about disputes around the use of the n-word. A very important black writer named Walter Mosley, one of the most successful black writers in the country, wrote an article in the New York Times op-ed page about this about two months ago. I don't know if you saw it, but you could Google it, Walter Mosley, right? The n-word. Walter Mosley, again, a prominent black writer, was reading out a passage of a literary text that he was teaching. He read out the n-word. He was brought up on charges for having created a hostile and unsafe environment in his classroom. And Walter, whom I know just a little bit, wrote an op-ed page article for the Times, in which he said, I'm not allowed to read out the n-word in a passage of a text. He said, quote, I am the n-word. I can't read it out. I'm not calling anybody the name. Well, this is one of those many areas in which people disagree. And, of course, you can disagree about when that sort of thing is or is not so offensive that it creates a hostile environment in which it's impossible to teach, to go on and to learn. When I teach the writings of Richard Wright or James Baldwin in my classes, as I always do, and they use the n-word, when I read out a passage of a text, I just say we're not reading out that word. Why? Because there are people in my class who will be so hurt and offended just by hearing the word sounded that it will make what we have to say very difficult to go on with. So it's not worth it. Why are we going to do that? We can just decide. But I have very good friends, including black friends who are professors who disagree with me about that. They say, no, you can read out that word. If it's in a text by Richard Wright, you can read that word. Well, okay. So we disagree. So, again, so-called free speech, well, it plays well. It's a great expression. We are all of us upholders of free speech. It's, again, one of those issues that's a great deal more complicated than it sometimes seems, right? I mean, we all know the example, right? You know, you can't yell fire in a crowded theater, even if you feel like, right? Even if you feel, you can't. Context, context has a great deal to do, right, with what we give ourselves permission to say or to do. By the way, there is also a difference between saying certain things in a classroom where you can actually have a back-and-forth intimate conversation and saying the same kinds of potentially explosive or offensive things in a big auditorium where there is no opportunity to have a back-and-forth. That big difference, right? Big difference. You have a classroom with 20 students, right? And you say something loaded or offensive or you can talk about it, right? A student can say, I didn't like it when you said X or Y. And you can say, that's interesting. Explain that. And then another student can jump in and you can have an exchange. But in a big auditorium, you can't. So I would say, you know, if you're in a big auditorium, other kinds of restraint are required. You've got to be more sensitive, right, in that setting, that context. Other questions, perhaps? Hi. Yes. So you talked about, like, the privilege of being humiliated earlier. How did that play into your writing career? And how did that either keep you going or kind of hold you back from being something? That's a great question. So, you know, again, because of who I was and where I come from at that time, I was not poised to feel offended. I was not poised to hold the professor accountable for doing something terrible to me. Again, I felt insulted and humiliated, you know. Also because I thought I expected something so different. I thought I was going to congratulate me and tell me how great I was and tell him instead, he was telling me no one would ever take me seriously, right? So I mean, that was a big disappointment. But all it did really for me was to make me feel more and more that, you know, I wanted to make myself as impressive a person as I could. And if it meant, if being impressive meant that you also had to sound, right, a certain way, I was willing to do that. Now, as I got older, not too much older, I began to think, because I began to read more, that there was a kind of a class element in this, which made me increasingly feel somewhat uncomfortable, right, as I began to think about it. Because after all, what the professor was saying to me was that, I mean, I'm translating it, right? I didn't hear it this way when he said it to me. He was saying to me, you sound low class. You sound low class. And therefore, right, if you sound low class, no one will ever take you seriously, right? And, you know, and so I had to think, you know, a great deal more about the class bias that was built into this encounter with this professor. And of course, as I got older, and I began to think more about it, and I did think a lot about it over all the decades. And so on very often, I told this story to my own students at my dinner table. We have six student assistants who always work for our magazine. And we have them over to our house for dinner several times a semester. And we have, you know, intimate talks with them about their lives and my life and so on. And very often the students that we would have to the house would be very offended on my account by the story that I told. And they would say, they would never tolerate, you know, what I had tolerated. They said, I would never, if a professor said that to me, I would never tolerate it. I would bring them up on charges and so on. But that notion of bringing someone up on charges, it would never have occurred to me in a thousand years. I looked up to this professor who is like a god, you know. He was, you know, learned. He spoke beautifully. He dressed beautifully. And the idea of bringing him up on charges, after all, I mean, he hadn't touched me. He hadn't violated my space or anything like this. He just gave me some advice, you know. So I just took it as one of the forms of advice that I came to take, you know, over the course of my young lifetime. And I say this, you know, I was a person who took advice. I was also kind of a rebellious person. I mentioned, I was a war resistor. I thought I was going to go to prison because I refused to meet the requirements of the draft board at a time when there was a draft. But still, I was willing to take advice. And so this was just another form of what I thought of as good advice. It didn't hurt me. I don't think it hurt me. Yeah. Other questions. Shall I ask a question? Oh, great. Thank you. I was fascinated, Professor Boyers, by your roundtable discussion that you had or that you orchestrated the idea of accepting views from both sides. And I have to admit, I had a privileged education as well. And coming up through the ranks, and I taught English for some 30 years, I always understood that the way a teacher should teach is right down the middle. Here's what they think on the left. Here's what they think on the right. Now, what do you think? And if you don't know, let's have a debate and discuss it. And when they ask me, well, Fulton, what do you think? I'd always say, see me after class. And if they stop by to see me after class, I continue the charade. I call it a charade because I think you should let the student leave the room not knowing where you're coming from. And I would say, well, I think this way, but the other side thinks that way. It seems that that trend is gone from teaching these days. And then it's more at the teacher not hesitating at all to what they say, proselytize, or even some people say indoctrinate from the podium. And I'm wondering if that is a new trend in academia and should it be corrected? Or what is the, here's the second question, the purpose of academia. As I saw it, is to learn the master's climb to the shoulders of the giant so you can see farther than the giant. And secondly, to learn the art of criticism. And that seems to have gone down the tubes too. Because all those old books, the masters were all written by dead white guys. We have these movements today that we'd much rather discuss. Can you comment on both today, the falling out of debates and the advent of movements to take over Scholastic? Well, of course, as you know, it's two very big, very broad questions you've raised. I have always felt that there is, for me, a clear distinction between what goes on in the classroom and what goes on, for example, with my own students at the dinner table. But that's different. And I would never say to my students in my class, I come at this material from the perspective of a left liberal. I would never say that. Never. Because after all, that would suggest, among other things, that students in the class who don't come at the material from that perspective know that they're at a somewhat of a disadvantage in the classroom. And the way that I'm going to assess them and think about the things they say. So I don't want to do that at all. But I have to say, I do agree that the word you use proselytizing in the classroom has become more and more commonplace in certain parts of the academy. I have many young faculty members in my own department right now who would never proselytize in the classroom, who stick to the material and try to conduct debate or discussion exactly in the way that you suggest. But there are other people, and this has been the case going back decades as well, of professors who use the classroom as a platform in which to promote certain views. There is a debate in higher education now. It has been raging for about 30 years, about 30 years, about whether or not the classroom ought or ought not to be used, right? To promote what are sometimes called beneficial social values. There is a book that was published in the early 90s by a very brilliant writer named David Bromwich. It's called Politics by Other Means. And he talks specifically about the issue that you've raised, which is the question of whether or not when we teach and when you learn what we're doing together is working to create a better society built around beneficial social ideas. And that has always seemed to me something that is separate from the true mission of the university. The true mission of the university is to get people to think about things in as complicated a way as possible and then to make up their minds about those things as they see fit. Thinking is the goal, right? I mean that's what we're all involved in, right? To learn how to be better, clearer, more honest thinkers. And so I've always felt that that's the way to do it. But there are people who disagree. By the way, I'm very smart people who disagree with that. People who really believe that the goal of a higher education is to get people to think the right thoughts and to cling tenaciously to those right thoughts. And, you know, that, well, different strokes. And of course, one of the things that I argue in my new book is that this is not a happy moment in the university. Many of the most noxious controversies that have evolved over the course of the last 10 or 12 years have exactly to do with this kind of effort to get people on the same page, to see things exactly in the same ways, to be able to identify exactly the wrong way to talk and the wrong way to think. You know, I'm going to give you an example because I think it's a kind of a vivid example and I think it's a good one. The shortest chapter in my book is devoted to something that happened at my own school, so it's a very intimate kind of event. A couple of years ago, one of my younger colleagues came running into my office and said, did you see the poster that's hung up on the door of the English Department Office? I say no, so we go out together and they're hung on the English Department Office door is a poster. You know, I teach at Skidmore College, right? And here's a poster and it says, big bold letters, keep Skidmore safe. So I think keep Skidmore safe. Well, you know, yeah, I want to keep Skidmore safe. You know, safe from what? You know, but let's know. What do we want to keep Skidmore safe from? So we go down under the heading and we want to keep Skidmore safe from what it's called ableist language. And ableist language, there are examples given on the poster. What are examples of ableist language? Now, think of this comes out of that term, ableist language comes out of disability studies, a growing and influential area of scholarly research in the university. I have two very brilliant younger colleagues who are writing books and disability studies that are extremely good, interesting. What's ableist language? I'm going to give you the examples from the poster. Okay? Stand on your own two feet. Learn to walk in someone else's shoes. You've heard expressions like that, yes? Right? These kinds of expressions are identified as offensive and ableist because they could conceivably make a disabled person feel uncomfortable. A person who couldn't stand on his or her own two feet. Okay? Now, in disability studies, there are many, many instances in which the author's study, the way in which expressions of this kind are embedded in the language. Most especially in literary language. So if you went to Shakespeare, you went to Charles Dickens, you would find huge numbers of instances of ableist language. Right? Okay. You get it, right? So what is the poster? So, of course, this is fine. You want to make this argument, you can make the argument. And you can talk about it. It's a subject. Why not? Why not talk about it? But the poster says, if your professor should use an expression of that kind, turn a deaf ear, right? Cast your eye upon. I'm giving expressions, right? You must immediately tell your professor to stop and never again to use that kind of language. On the poster, if your professor should refuse or if your professor should say okay and continue to use such language, you are obligated to go to the human resources office and bring your professor up on Title IX Chargers for creating a hostile environment. These are the steps to go through to do that. So what you get here is the creation of what you might call our surveillance society in which ordinary language, right, can become, right, criminal. It can actually bring people up on charges, right? Have them removed from their teaching positions, right? For saying stand on your own two feet or turn a deaf ear. So we then found that every department office in our college, it's a good college. Every department office had that poster affixed to its department office door. No department chair in our college had refused to have that poster affixed to the door. So, you know, if you've been thinking about the creation in the university of what I call in my book a total culture in which everyone is required to think the same thoughts, speak the same words, right? Well, this seemed to me and to a number of my friends at the college a perfect example of the kind of thing we've been talking about and so of course I immediately wrote to the professor whose disability studies classes had been involved in this and I said, you realize you're concerned with creating a hostile environment on the college. Could anything be more hostile than encouraging students at this school to bring their professors up on formal charges for saying, right, stand on your own two feet? Could anything be more hostile than that? I also write in this chapter that as I was sitting there and thinking about writing the letter to this professor, I of course thought I was going to take down a Shakespeare volume and search out some ableist expressions and say, you know, you won't be able to teach Shakespeare anymore, you know, because they have all this terrible ableist language, you know, in it and then I thought, no, I'm not going to do that. Actually, I saw right up on my shelf a extraordinarily popular, important and influential book by Ta-Nehisi Coates called Between the World and Me. That had been a book which the year before had been required for all incoming freshman students at the college and I was teaching a freshman seminar that year and so I had to teach that book to my classes. Now, of course, when I taught it, I didn't think about ableist language. I mean, I don't think anybody who taught that book was thinking about ableist language but there it was, it was up on the shelf so I took down this important book by the most important and influential black writer in the country. And I took it down and I just started browsing through it and here, one ableist expression after another, after another and I wrote to this professor who was behind the poster and I said, do you realize if at our college we had been lucky enough to recruit Ta-Nehisi Coates to teach at Skidmore College, you would be asking our students to bring him up on charges and get rid of him. That's the logic involved in this, in this poster. So it is, it's the kind of thing that some of the time when you think about it strikes you as quite incredible but when you find enough examples, enough instances of it and there are many, right, in my book and then you begin to think, no I'm actually describing something that's very widespread, that goes very deep in the culture of the university and it's something that we have to be able to identify and think about. So that's, you know, what I've been trying to do. There was another part of your question that I know I didn't address. The last decision, the decline of the scholasticism, I'm not sure if that's... Yeah, or I see, I see, well you know it's funny, I think from what I've been traveling a lot over the last several months I've been speaking at at least one college or university every week, in some cases two and I've met a lot of faculty members and my sense is that there is no sort of specific tendency of that sort. I see it in some areas. I'm going to give you an example. Very often professors, particularly younger professors, not because they're young but because of their situation and I'll explain this. Are thinking about enrollment in their classes and many of them think, and I understand this completely, they think if I'm going to attract significant enrollment in my class I have to make my class sound sexier and juicier than it used to sound. So if I've been hired as a medievalist and I'm worried that I'm not going to get the kind of enrollment that I want in my medieval literature class, I've got to offer my medieval literature class in a sexier way. How? How about sex in the literature of the Middle Ages? Rather than medieval... I'm not making this up. I'm not creative enough to make these things up. So that's a way to package the course. Does it mean when you offer a course in sex in the Middle Ages that it has no valid content? No, of course it doesn't mean that at all. No, you can have a perfectly interesting and valid and challenging course in sex in the literature of the Middle Ages but it's different. It's different and one would have to study the particular instance and in order to determine whether or not the content of the course was serious. I think in most cases, at least in my experience, it is. It is. But that's the sort of thing that I see in my own department and I'm not surprised. The struggle for enrollment is very real particularly in the humanities right now. I can tell you that at my school three years ago, these are numbers I just saw on Monday this week, three years ago there were 95 English majors. Two years ago there were 85 English majors declared. This year there were 47 declared English majors. This is a trend. It's national. It's national. It affects not just English courses but humanities courses and so very often in the humanities you do have a serious concern about enrollment and it's not only a concern shared by administrators but also most especially by younger people who are worried about whether their services will be wanted in the future. That's maybe not part of the substance of certainly has nothing to do with the substance of my book but it's there. It's real. I think we need to we're at our end but one I want to thank you also. I want everybody to open again the books for sale out there. Bob I'm sure would be happy to sign it and also continue conversation up here as well. Thank you very much for staying.