Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> Same as Summers' attack on West; he's fair game because he's black. I'll
> believe otherwise when I see West go after white lightweights on the Harvard
> faculty. I could name about three dozen off the top of my head, many of whom
> have accomplishments rather more slender than West's.
>
I've sort of wondered over the years at the thinness of the contributions from Harvard professors of english. I understand that Helen Vendler is quite respected as a critic of 20th century poetry -- but I've always suspected that what got her her Harvard berth (and her escape from Boston U) was her rather nasty review in the NLRB of a number of books by feminist critics. (I just corrected "birth" to "berth"; perhaps I should have left the misspelling.)
During an exchange over some issue in Critical Inquiry some years ago, one writer remarked that in the '30s the chair of the Harvard English Dept was little known even in Harvard.
Carrol