Such an excellent interview with Jeff Rich, Liza! 👏👏👏 Jeff did a wonderful job asking good questions and then just letting you respond and tell your own story. You are absolutely right to make the correlation between how the Soviet Union treated literature and how many universities in this country do today. In both cases if it didn’t meet their ideological litmus test it was to be discarded, banned or removed from the curriculum. I think people today forget the enormity of Soviet crimes. The liquidation of the Kulaks, the brutal suppression of the Kronstadt Rebellion, the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his entire family, the Holodomor in Ukraine, Stalin’s purge of the Soviet Union’s best and brightest military officers, the Katyn Forest Massacre, the deportations of numerous ethnic groups, the mass rape of German women by Soviet soldiers, the persecution of Soviet Jewry in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the brutal Soviet response to the 1953 East German Uprising, 1956 Hungarian Uprising, and the 1968 Prague Spring, the invasions of Poland, Finland, and Afghanistan, and the USSR’s support for the murderous PLO among other things.
Liza went to Columbia thinking she was going to have the time of her life. Unfortunately, she would soon find out otherwise. They were only interested in classic works of literature in so much as they could use them to talk about identity politics and the class struggle. Metamorphosis was considered “triggering” and “hurtful” so it was removed from the curriculum despite its importance to the literary field. This is total nonsense and classic whiny spoiled brat behavior by rich and upper middle class Ivy League students. Her professors were no better. They graded her papers based on how much they agreed with her arguments. Skipping over T.S. Eliot because he was conservative and religious? Classic Columbia and classic academia! There’s no room for conservative, libertarian or moderate voices on much of the college campuses nationwide. They had no respect for real literature.
I would agree with Liza, that Margaret Atwood’s book The Handmaiden’s Tale is complete garbage and way overrated. I never had any interest in reading it and don’t understand why some consider it a classic. Liza’s description of Atwood’s terrible behavior at a bookstore event where she went on an unhinged rant about how evil Trump is and how he’s making America into the real life Handmaidens Tale is exactly what I would’ve expected from her. Toni Morrison is definitely overrated as well. I would also add to that list Maya Angelou. I thought her list was really good and that The Sound and the Fury and The Master and the Margarita definitely belong on the list of Top 100 books to read before you die.
I think Liza makes an excellent point when she says both the left and the right have the wrong approach to dealing with the Humanities and education. The left has ideologically captured the Arts and much of academia and are molding it to their liking and the right seeks to just demolish education and the Arts and get everyone to go into fields like mathematics, business and STEM. These are both terrible approaches. Instead, let’s reform the Humanities and higher education and bring back the classical humanistic tradition.
Such an excellent interview with Jeff Rich, Liza! 👏👏👏 Jeff did a wonderful job asking good questions and then just letting you respond and tell your own story. You are absolutely right to make the correlation between how the Soviet Union treated literature and how many universities in this country do today. In both cases if it didn’t meet their ideological litmus test it was to be discarded, banned or removed from the curriculum. I think people today forget the enormity of Soviet crimes. The liquidation of the Kulaks, the brutal suppression of the Kronstadt Rebellion, the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his entire family, the Holodomor in Ukraine, Stalin’s purge of the Soviet Union’s best and brightest military officers, the Katyn Forest Massacre, the deportations of numerous ethnic groups, the mass rape of German women by Soviet soldiers, the persecution of Soviet Jewry in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the brutal Soviet response to the 1953 East German Uprising, 1956 Hungarian Uprising, and the 1968 Prague Spring, the invasions of Poland, Finland, and Afghanistan, and the USSR’s support for the murderous PLO among other things.
Liza went to Columbia thinking she was going to have the time of her life. Unfortunately, she would soon find out otherwise. They were only interested in classic works of literature in so much as they could use them to talk about identity politics and the class struggle. Metamorphosis was considered “triggering” and “hurtful” so it was removed from the curriculum despite its importance to the literary field. This is total nonsense and classic whiny spoiled brat behavior by rich and upper middle class Ivy League students. Her professors were no better. They graded her papers based on how much they agreed with her arguments. Skipping over T.S. Eliot because he was conservative and religious? Classic Columbia and classic academia! There’s no room for conservative, libertarian or moderate voices on much of the college campuses nationwide. They had no respect for real literature.
I would agree with Liza, that Margaret Atwood’s book The Handmaiden’s Tale is complete garbage and way overrated. I never had any interest in reading it and don’t understand why some consider it a classic. Liza’s description of Atwood’s terrible behavior at a bookstore event where she went on an unhinged rant about how evil Trump is and how he’s making America into the real life Handmaidens Tale is exactly what I would’ve expected from her. Toni Morrison is definitely overrated as well. I would also add to that list Maya Angelou. I thought her list was really good and that The Sound and the Fury and The Master and the Margarita definitely belong on the list of Top 100 books to read before you die.
I think Liza makes an excellent point when she says both the left and the right have the wrong approach to dealing with the Humanities and education. The left has ideologically captured the Arts and much of academia and are molding it to their liking and the right seeks to just demolish education and the Arts and get everyone to go into fields like mathematics, business and STEM. These are both terrible approaches. Instead, let’s reform the Humanities and higher education and bring back the classical humanistic tradition.