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1990 - 1991 - 1992 - 1993 - 1994 - 1995 - 1996 - 1997 - 1998 - 1999 - 2000

 
HIRING À DEUX

The prospects for academic couples seeking joint appointments begin to improve as universities scrap old antinepotism rules in order to draw top talent to their campuses. Bidding for Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, George Mason University even attempted to sweeten its deal by offering Raisa a job, reports LF's Paul Elie. Of course, for less famous couples, the "trailing spouse" is still often viewed with suspicion, especially when she's a woman.

 
SIGN OF INDIGNATION

In these pages, Carlin Romano declares the New Criterion to be "a hybrid of hatred and mediocrity," as mired in ideology as its rival journals on the left - and less well written. "If the New Criterion were a candidate, it would be Pat Buchanan. But if it were a punctuation mark, it would be the plodding semicolon - the badge of dullard writers everywhere." In LF's next issue, a letter to the editor replies: "I resent being characterized as 'plodding.' I may often be maligned, but the fact remains that I play a usefully relaxing role in many a sentence." Signed: "semicolon."

 

Joyce's Ulysses passes out of copyright; John Kidd and Hans Walter Gabler battle over correct edition of the text

Paul Berman, ed., Debating PC

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars

Benno Schmidt Jr. announces resignation as president of Yale and becomes head of Chris Whittle's for-profit education company, the Edison Project

Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes that the Nation of Islam's The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews is "the Bible of the new anti-Semitism"

NEH chair Lynne Cheney delivers report to Congress blasting U.S. professors for putting politics ahead of truth and objectivity

 
 

William Telander gives Texas A&M $200,000 to research turning mercury into gold

Death of economist Friedrich von Hayek at ninety-two

Spike Lee teaches course on contemporary African- American cinema at Harvard

Long-fingernailed psychiatrist and cultural theorist Pierre-Félix Guattari dies August 29 at sixty-two

University of Maryland conference on "Genetic Factors in Crime" canceled after NIH withdraws funds

 
MOONIE U.

With a $26.9 million debt and its faculty on strike, the University of Bridgeport finds salvation. The Professors World Peace Academy (PWPA), an academic affiliate of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, offers the school $50.5 million in exchange for control of the board, the budget, and the hiring of top administrators. Despite faculty reservations and, in some cases, resignations, Bridgeport accepts the offer. By January 2000, the PWPA has pumped $105 million into the school and installed Neil A. Salonen, a Unification Church official, as university president.

 
THE BLOOM FACTORY

Famed literary critic Harold Bloom edits a series of "highbrow Cliffs Notes" for Chelsea House Publishers, reports LF's Chris Goodrich. Some scholars decry the books as "sleazy," "terrible," and "an academic scam," claiming that Chelsea reproduced and even revised their essays without permission. Nowadays, Bloom addresses a more general audience in How to Read and Why, and the Chelsea books continue to be published.

 

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