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RALEIGH — ‘Tis the season, and even the protest wing at UNC-Chapel Hill is in a giving mood. Or so it seems, as their complaints against the prospect of a Western Civilization program funded by the John William Pope Foundation grow ever sillier. To wit:
• “Judith Bennett, a professor of medieval history and Western civilization, said teaching in a Pope-funded program would make her feel like ‘Art Pope is sitting in the back of the classroom.'” — Jane Stancill, The News & Observer (N&O), Nov. 25
• “She [art professor elin o’hara slavick] said she had hesitated showing some artwork in her classroom, for fear of a political organization putting ‘a plant in my classroom that will tell on me.'” — Jane Stancill, N&O, Dec. 13
• “On the contrary, the only climate of ‘fear and protest’ at UNC is that fostered by the mocking, hollow attacks leveled by the Pope Center and its supporters. UNC has a strong history of welcoming debate on a diverse range of issues, but [the Pope Center’s criticisms] are neither substantive nor constructive.” — Kimberly L. Dennis, UNC-CH graduate student, letter to the N&O, Dec. 19
• “Conservative faculty do not have their courses mocked on the Pope Center’s Web site or on other national anti-progressive sites. Conservative faculty have just about the entire culture on their side, while progressive faculty are always struggling against the tide.” — Jennifer Ashlock, UNC-CH sociology lecturer and graduate student, UNC-CH graduate student, letter to the N&O, Dec. 19
• “The problem is the tone of hostility, of mocking. … It’d be one thing if it were incisive criticism. Bring it on. But the mocking, vicious hostility, it really bothers me.” — UNC-CH English professor Reid Barbour, The Herald-Sun. Nov. 15
Apparently there’s a real fear among some faculty at UNC-CH (a public institution) that a conservative might broadcast what they’re teaching. And that they’d be mocked for it. It sounds as if they know they can’t defend in public what they teach.
No less than Aristotle observed that mockery — provided there’s a point behind it — is not only “incisive criticism,” but the most incisive: “Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor, for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.” (Inability to take a joke, readers kindly take note, is “suspicious.”)
“The satire of philosophic nonsense is one of the oldest literary forms,” George Mason professor of law F.H. Buckley wrote in his book The Morality of Laughter.
There are, however, those with a risible resistance to laughter, Buckley observed. The Puritan, for example, fails to laugh “through an excessive concern for moral or political duties.” Remember H.L. Mencken’s famous jest about Puritanism? “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.” Apply it to Buckley’s observations that “The modern Puritan devotes himself to political rather than religious duties” and that this Puritanism “is particularly pronounced in the academy.” Does that not explain this spectacle of self-righteous professors carping about mockery and fearing political infidels in the classroom?
“Laughter is little heard in the academy today,” Buckley wrote, “and the turn to power and to politics explains why this is so. The English scholar who has lost interest in literature and who cares only for politics has exchanged the joy of beauty for the power to chastise those who do not share his political views, and his Faustian Bargain merits our laughter.”
Modern Puritans are suspicious of laughter, Buckley wrote, because it distracts people “from the serious business of remedying injustice.” So it’s not just laughter they’re suspicious of; it’s anything not solely focused on remedying injustice. In Buckley’s summation, “We are given a finite number of minutes to live, and those not spent in the struggle to end sexism or racism are wasted.”
Apropos of that, UNC-CH associate professor of Women’s Studies Karen M. Booth wrote in to the N&O Dec. 19: “They [the Pope Center] have condemned the creation of programs designed to make our education more accessible to racial and ethnic minorities (and then expressed shock, as Sanders does, that he and the Popes could be considered racist). I am sure that if UNC created a disability studies program — something that [Charles] Dickens’ [Tiny] Tim could have used — Sanders, with the Popes’ blessing, would make it his immediate task to ridicule and condemn it.”
Now that is a curious justification for a new academic program at a flagship state institution, isn’t it? What thinking individual could resist the urge to ridicule? As the Roman satirist Juvenal (one encounters his work while studying Western Civ) observed, “Difficile est saturam non scribere.” It’s hard not to write satire.
Tiny Tim needed … a disability studies program? Academic programs are created expressly for the purpose of making education more accessible to racial and ethnic minorities? Why, no wonder they oppose Western Civilization! That’s just time wasted studying history, politics, philosophy, art, literature, language, etc. That’s not academic — it’s not solely designed to remedy sexism and racism!
Then one wonders: Say, which group’s accessibility to education was boosted by the departments of chemistry, physics, and history? Are there discrete racial, ethnic and gender groups that are naturally attracted — bound by their genes and skin color, as it were — to biology and math?
No, of course not. It is to laugh.