Borking the humanities

National Review, June 10, 1991 by William McGurn

YOU HAVE TO wonder about the fates. Only a short time ago Carol Iannone was going about her business as a professor at New York University. She was not widely known outside the readership of Commentary, The New Criterion, and, of course, NATIONAL REVIEW, where she published sharp articles devoted to literature and contemporary culture. These essays are best described by Professor Donald Kagan, dean of Yale College, who says they are characterized by "clear and lively prose, free of jargon and cant."

That's not always the ticket to advancement in academe. But Miss Iannone's demonstrated good judgment must have attracted some attention, because in September she was nominated to serve on the grant-making council for the National Endowment for the Humanities. That nomination transformed her into a casus belli for America's academic mandarins.

First a word about the NEH. The academic twin to the National Endowment for the Arts, the NEH has never been as controversial, if only because its subject matter tends to be less of a minefield than the areas with which the NEA must deal (e.g., contemporary art, dance, and music). Where the NEA is probably best known these days for Piss Christ, the NEH can boast of funding the PBS documentary The Civil War.

The National Council for the Humanities is the NEH advisory group. Council member Aram Bakshian Jr. describes it as "something of a cross between a board of directors and the House of Lords," i.e., capable of giving important recommendations but without much direct power. When it was set up under the Johnson Administration, it was explicitly not limited to professors, and so among the "public" (non-academic) appointees all Presidents have slipped in friendly contributors. Starting small, the NEH budget ballooned under Nixon in a vain effort to appease the intellectual community, which of course rewarded him with nothing but contempt.

In the NEH's almost three decades of existence no one can recall a real catfight over a nominee, though there have been the understandable grumbles. What makes Carol Iannone different is that she has become the focus of a concerted attack by a few powerful academic interest groups, led by the thirty-thousand-member Modern Language Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and PEN. Ostensibly these groups are concerned about Miss Iannone's lack of academic credentials (her career is "not without merit," says MLA Executive Director Phyllis Franklin, but "it is without distinction"). But it's hard to believe that a liberal would have aroused the same opposition. Right now Miss Iannone's nomination rests with the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, chaired by Teddy Kennedy. Although in substance and procedure, her nomination process differs tremendously from that of Robert Bork for the Supreme Court, the smallness and dishonesty of those making the charges against her are a rerun.

"In some ways the attacks are Kafkaesque," says NEH chairman Lynne Cheney. "There is all this talk about qualifications.' But what's really going on is a classic case of political correctness. Carol has written an essay about the MLA, and Carol has written an essay about PEN. The question is whether PC is going to extend to the United States Senate."

The main charge against Miss Iannone is that she hasn't written enough for purely academic journals such as publications of the Modern Language Association. Surely this is the first time The New Criterion has ever been dismissed as a popular magazine. That aside, the charge is ludicrous on several counts. For one thing, Miss Iannone would be replacing a non-academic member, and in any case the mission of the NEH is precisely to sponsor projects that make the humanities more accessible to the public. For another, some of the MLA's own preferred topics-as gleaned from a New York Times Magazine piece on the MLA's recent convention in Chicago-speak for themselves. Among the scholarly papers delivered: Victorian Underwear and Representations of the Female Body," "Assume the Position: Pluralist Ideology and Gyno-criticism," "The Lesbian Phallus," and ... well, you get the point.

When the competency charge didn't seem to be working out, the opposition was quick to play the racism card. In an April 9 letter to Mrs. Cheney, the president of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Joel Conarroe, stated that Miss Iannone "clearly views all African-American writers the way the late Paul de Man viewed Jewish writers-as easily dismissed second-raters." Mrs. Cheney decided to ignore this patently foolish letter, as something sent in haste that the author would regret he had sent. But the letter soon surfaced in the newspapers, and the charge, utterly without foundation, is out there to be cited by those who don't even know whence it came. Mrs. Cheney says she is "appalled" by the accusation, and her correspondence makes clear that she has no intention of backing down.

Indeed, all this attention may have backfired on the MLA and its companions. The goal for these groups is to intimidate the Administration into withdrawing the nomination before going through the process, which effectively would give them a new veto power, like the one the Black Caucus has on civil-rights appointees. But Mrs. Cheney has stuck to her guns, she has the backing of President Bush, and although committee members Paul Wellstone (D., Minn.) and Barbara Mikulski (D., Md.) are just wacky enough to make this a crusade, even Ted Kennedy (with preoccupations of his own these days) has to realize that attacking a perfectly qualified woman for not having enough footnotes does not hold much demagogic potential.