Diary

Entry 4

I taught again yesterday, but first I dropped into the University of Chicago faculty club for lunch at the “round table,” a large table, indeed round, reserved for law professors three days a week. Like King Arthur’s knights these professors are armed, but their swords are verbal. The rule is that there is to be no chitchat but instead a serious discussion of a topic of the day, which yesterday was the Enron scandal. The U. of C. is unusual for the emphasis the faculty places on contentious discussion, whether at meals or workshops where a speaker, often a faculty member rather than a student, gives a paper that the attending faculty and students try to improve, or, with occasional success, demolish.

When I first joined the U. of C. faculty, back in 1969, a splendid, terrifying economist, George Stigler, presided over the Industrial Organization Workshop, which became the focus of my developing interest in the application of economics to law. George set a tone of brutally candid criticism, pounding me so hard once when I gave a paper that another professor made him call me up and apologize, which he did with rather an ill grace—but he needn’t have bothered, because I thrived in that atmosphere. Had I not graduated from the Harvard Law School when professors still thought that law students needed a good hazing in order to prepare themselves for the ruthless world of legal practice depicted by Louis Auchincloss? Still of recent memory was the notable incident in which a shortish dark-haired student, already in ill favor with the curmudgeonly professor, was a few minutes late to class. When he entered, the room fell silent. He groped his way embarrassedly amid the sea of students to his seat and, as soon as he sat down, the professor pointed at him and screamed: “Get out, you … you ink spot!” That was going too far. Sometimes George and his colleagues went too far and browbeat the speaker to abandon a project that actually held some promise. But usually their criticisms were as bracing as they were searing.

There is a curious thing about criticism that people who are highly sensitive to criticism, which means people who either are insecure or take themselves too seriously (inconsistent traits nevertheless often found in the same person), too often overlook. George Orwell once remarked that Rudyard Kipling had been incessantly criticized by intellectuals during his lifetime and after his death, and yet when the dust settled it was Kipling who was still being read while his critics had been forgotten. Negligible work rarely attracts much criticism; it’s simply ignored. Only when a work gets under people’s skin do they bother to criticize it, and the deeper under the skin it gets the shriller the criticism. Often the reason a work gets under one’s skin is that it shakes one’s faith in oneself, one’s values, or one’s career. I believe I could write a book review or jacket copy that would kill a book with kindness, making clear by the character or volume of my terms of praise (“a feast,” “indispensable,” “courageous,” “an act of hope,” “compels admiration”) that the book had not challenged me but had merely reinforced my prejudices. The book that needs a favorable review is the good book that would otherwise be, not criticized, but overlooked.

Speaking of criticisms, I have been taking some knocks lately from reviewers of my most recent book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. They say it’s impossible for anyone to assess public intellectuals en masse, as I tried to do, when the subjects about which they opine on talk shows and in op-ed pieces and their other venues range from culture to race to ecology to the economy to foreign affairs. But you don’t have to be an ecologist to point out that if ecology professor Paul Ehrlich predicts in 1970 that by 1974 the United States may have to ration water and that by 1980 hundreds of millions of people will be starving to death because of overpopulation, there’s something wrong with his ecology. You don’t have to be a social scientist to realize that political scientist Robert Putnam is fooling himself when he contends that the “Saguaro Seminar” that he has organized is the key to restoring a sense of national community. Nor do you have to be a cultural historian to conclude that the literary critic Jacques Barzun is barking up the wrong tree in declaring the trend to informal dress in law firms and investment banks a symptom of the nation’s decadence. When academics step outside the ring of critical fire that is one of the glories of the academic culture at its best, the risk of their falling flat on their faces is very great. And it doesn’t require expertise in their fields to notice their horizontal posture.