Monday Smackdown: The Slow Death of the University. And Oxford High Table IS ON IT!!
I must say, if Terry Eagleton wants to make the case and elicit sympathy for the Oxford of his youth as it exists in his imagination, this is not at all the way to go about it:
...flanked by two burly young minders... who for all I knew were carrying Kalashnikovs under their jackets.... The president paused to permit me a few words of fulsome praise. I remarked instead that there seemed to be no critical studies of any kind on his campus. He looked at me bemusedly, as though I had asked him how many Ph.D.’s in pole dancing they awarded each year, and replied rather stiffly 'Your comment will be noted.' He then took a small piece of cutting-edge technology out of his pocket, flicked it open and spoke a few curt words of Korean into it, probably 'Kill him'....
This... might have taken place almost anywhere.... An event as momentous in its own way as the Cuban revolution or the invasion of Iraq is steadily under way: the slow death of the university as a center of humane critique.... The institutions that produced Erasmus and John Milton, Einstein and Monty Python, capitulate to the hard-faced priorities of global capitalism....
When I first came to Oxford... colleagues who had actually bothered to finish their Ph.D.’s would sometimes use the title of 'Mr.'... since 'Dr.' suggested a degree of ungentlemanly labor. Publishing books was regarded as a rather vulgar project. A brief article every 10 years or so... was... permissible.... College tutors might not even have bothered to arrange set tutorial times... the undergraduate would simply drop round to their rooms when the spirit moved him for a glass of sherry and a civilized chat....
If English departments survive at all, it may simply be to teach business students the use of the semicolon, which was not quite what Northrop Frye and Lionel Trilling had in mind.... The general idea is that if the student fails, it is the professor’s fault.... One result... is the growth of courses tailored to whatever is currently in fashion among 20-year-olds... vampires rather than Victorians, sexuality rather than Shelley, fanzines rather than Foucault, the contemporary world rather than the medieval one...
I don't know whether it is most of all the racism, the classism, the bureaucrats, the idiocy, or the narrow-mindedness.
Actually I do.
It is most of all the narrow-mindedness.
How can somebody fails to recognize that when literature professors of the 30th century teach nineteenth-century Britain, "Shelley" will mean not Percy's poems but Mary's technological horror novel?...
