Training for the Contemplative Life
- sofiapbaker
- Nov 14, 2022
- 1 min read
Updated: Sep 2
Quick, who do you think wrote the following?
To use the classroom … as a sort of ersatz political platform on which to mount an offensive against social ills out there is, in my opinion, deeply irresponsible and cowardly. Just as irresponsible is a hyperbolic rhetoric for critical analysis that pretends to be dealing with political issues but which remains a narcissistic exercise in posturing and mock seriousness.
If you answered “Edward Said,” chances are you have already read Daniel Gordon’s indispensable new history of academic freedom. You won’t have read those words anywhere else, because Gordon was the one who retrieved from the Columbia University Archives the unpublished paper where the quotation appears. That circumstance, in a way, illustrates Gordon’s main point in his book. In a landscape echoing with hyperpartisan thunders over the politicization of the classroom, neither the tribes of the left nor the right have any interest in citing the most-cited authority of post-colonial theory of the last forty years…