First there was the fact-free smear merchant Jennifer Doyle (UC Riverside), now comes Jack Halberstam, professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, and another friend of Butler, Ronell et al.. From his public Facebook page on August 20 (!):
The letter, let's remember, was released by a right wing philosophy site long before the signatories were done crafting it.
As the humanities PhD student elsewhere, who sent this to me, remarked: "I don't know if that's just plain stupid or intentionally malicious (to use the letter's favorite word), but I'm incredulous at how a tenured professor, who should be a beacon of responsibility, is resorting to such deliberate defamation." I'm less sure it's deliberate: some of these people are just having trouble coping with what their pals did, and so are unconsciously wishing away the unpleasant facts. In any case, Marjorie Perloff, the distinguished poetry scholar (emerita at USC and Stanford), soon corrects Halberstam on his FB page:
The fact is that the letter was mailed to the president of NYU on May 11. So it's not true that the signatories had not done crafting it.
The letter's content was crafted and set: that's why it was being sent to hundreds of academics around the world for signatures. There were some typos, but that letter expressed the views of Buter et al. for which she has now (finally) felt the need to apologize, sort of. Halberstam adds to this the nonsense that this is a right-wing blog (I'm about as right-wing as Adolf Reed), but as often happens with these smear merchants, they use words in highly revisionary ways: "right-wing" in this context means something more like "someone who is critical of my friends."
As the humanities PhD student who tipped me off to this latest display wrote: "I really hope, however, that this whole affair will lead to some Götter- (or Götzen-)Dämmerung within the literature departments, in the sense of a return to doing real Wissenschaft." I share that hope. Both my parents earned graduate degrees in English, before English departments were colonized by "bad philosophy" and political posturing, when English scholars really had to be historians, philologists, and genuine scholars of diction and form. (I took so many English and Comparative Literature courses, I could have had a minor in the subject.) Many, of course, still are (and I have been glad to hear from many of them, who are appalled by this whole affair), though I can still recall when A. Walton Litz resigned from the English Department at Princeton in the 1980s to join the Creative Writing Program, because he wanted to be "around people who enjoy reading books." So three cheers for the disciplined study of literary texts and the many humanities professors who maintain that scholarly tradition today.
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