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Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution\u2014the term they tend to prefer is \u201celite\u201d\u2014and odds are that eventually someone who was a student there, who maybe resided only on the far periphery of your professional orbit, will become one or another kind of famous. At that point, out of the vast and silent ether, messages will come glowing into your inbox one after another. Do you remember this person? they will say. Was he your student? Did you work with him? We\u2019re hoping for some insight\u2014would it be possible for us to talk for a bit? I taught at a place called Bowdoin College for 16 years, and during the last of those there was a student in attendance you\u2019ve perhaps heard of. His name is Zohran Mamdani. And so, shortly after his startling, spirit-lifting victory in the primary last spring, the gentle flood of inquiries commenced. Word had gotten out not only that he went to Bowdoin\u2014again, a very pricey, very wealthy, quite comprehensively the-thing-that-it-is small liberal arts college on the East Coast\u2014but that, while there, he had majored in something called \u201cAfricana Studies.\u201d You can probably see where this is going. The first few messages wondered if I knew him (I don\u2019t think I did, though I certainly had students who did, and do), if I taught him (possibly? but in truth not that I remembered), but mostly if I could say something about what he might have been reading and doing and studying, there in his time at this little college on the coast of Maine. More than once, the name \u201cFrantz Fanon\u201d was broached\u2014which had the virtue of certain hand-showing clarity. It gives me no joy to admit that there are certain kinds of professors who love little more than seeing their names in the paper. It\u2019s not great, but there it is. (These are often the same sorts of people who will drop into an otherwise ordinaryish conversation phrases like, \u201cNo sure it\u2019s like when I was teaching that big lecture class, to my students at Yale University \u2026\u201d) But I like to think even they would\u2019ve been able to spot the coiled wires and rusty springs of this particular trap. Beneath its humdrum requests, every email said more or less the same thing: Can you explain how reading certain things can turn a person into a socialist\u2014and, possibly, a terrorist-sympathizing antisemite ? It\u2019s a storied gambit of the right at its most grimly predictable. \u201cPeople read Foucault,\u201d the redoubtable David Brooks once wrote, in (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/opinion/black-america-education.html) an actual column that I\u2019ve all but committed to memory, \u201cand develop an alienated view of the world.\u201d God, did I love this. An \u201calienated view of the world\u201d! Not by, like, trying to pay rent or having an insurance claim denied\u2014no, no, it was probably the (https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2020/06/29/our-man-foucault-by-peter-coviello/) Foucault you read in 2003. Anyway, it was clearly time to get the elaborate machinery of manufactured bewilderment and sour indignation up and running again. The storied choice between socialism and barbarism was made exquisitely clear a good many years ago in the United States, and both major parties chose barbarism. But then something strange happened. Some time after the initial rush died down, I got a message that seemed at least marginally less disreputable. A writer at the Times contacted me to talk. He said he was less interested in Mamdani himself than he was in the Africana Studies part\u2014a department of which, for a handful of years back at Bowdoin, I was indeed chair. This was a kind of dilemma. On the one hand, like a lot of my friends and peers I think it\u2019s wise to decline speaking to the Times on principle. The reasons aren\u2019t especially obscure: Palestine (https://writersagainstthewarongaza.com/boycott-nyt) superabundantly , but also decades of hyper-sensationalizing crime reporting, the neverending centrist stooge\u2019ing, all the (https://bsky.app/profile/nytpitchbot.bsky.social) unparody-able rest of it. On the other, though, this was not a request to write but to contribute something in the way of context, knowledge even, and I did in fact have some legit expertise on the question of Africana Studies, a discipline about which I have a lot of detailed, informed, enthusiastically ratifying things to say. Then too there was a whole other set of incentives. It\u2019s fair to say that, former student of mine or not, I\u2019ve loved Mamdani\u2019s campaign, and loved in particular the glad-hearted and admirably steady way he\u2019s brought what not that long ago would have been absolutely ordinary social-democratic priorities (in respect to affordability, housing, health, food, education) back into the realm of mainstream political discourse. For some time I\u2019ve been saying that the storied choice between socialism and barbarism was made exquisitely clear a good many years ago in the United States, and both major parties chose barbarism. They are obviously and consequentially different barbarisms\u2014one had reproductive freedom, vaccines, and trans health care in it, at least for a while\u2014and I can tell you why I have sincerely preferred one to the other. But we oughtn\u2019t to kid ourselves. From the perspective of a world of increasingly unimaginable maldistribution of resources, cascading ecological collapse, a genocide cheered on by a putatively liberal order, (https://defector.com/the-next-history-book-on-palestine-will-have-joe-biden-in-it) both are (https://www.democracynow.org/2025/10/27/headlines/federal_judge_rules_ice_agents_illegally_detained_chicago_man_whose_daughter_is_fighting_cancer) barbarisms . Mamdani seemed to me a small glimmering break in the wall of all that. A part of me wanted to do him a solid. And so, after consulting with friends a little more media-seasoned than I, and exchanging some emails with the reporter laying out what I was and wasn\u2019t interested in speaking about, I agreed to an interview. I did this because, in ways you might think I\u2019d have outgrown by now, I\u2019m a fucking idiot. * As it happened, the reporter and I never spoke. We made an appointment that he missed, and because my current job is something of a bureaucratic black hole, I wasn\u2019t able to clear another time to talk. I did write him a longish message about Africana Studies, and he did speak with at least two of my former colleagues (who, bless them, acquitted themselves more than admirably). And he managed to write that story, which appeared in the Times less than a week before the mayoral election, under the anodyne title \u201c(https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/us/politics/zohran-mamdani-bowdoin-college-new-york-mayor-election.html) How a Small Elite College Influenced Mamdani\u2019s World View .\u201d It\u2019s a wreck, but of a form so pure, so purely Timesian, you almost have to admire it. It certainly is instructive. Here\u2019s the pitch: Mr. Mamdani graduated in 2014 from Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, with a bachelor\u2019s degree in Africana studies. And his experience there\u2014readings of critical race theorists in the classroom and activism for left-wing causes on campus\u2014is emblematic of the highly charged debate over what is taught in American universities. Critics say the growth of these programs, which aim to teach about historical events from the perspective of marginalized and oppressed groups, has turned colleges into feckless workshops for leftist political orthodoxy. \u201cCritics say\u201d is the tell, and does it ever go on telling. First, note that this criticism (\u201cMajors like Africana studies, or any of its siblings such as women\u2019s studies, these critics charge, promote a worldview that sees little to admire in American history. Some disparagingly call the entire field \u2018grievance studies\u2019\u201d) gives to the article the whole of its contrapuntal structure of argument: these scholars and teachers say Mr. Mamdani\u2019s education is substantial,yet critics say something else . But then note as well that this counter-position is substantiated, in its length and breadth, by: J. D. Vance and the National Association of Scholars (NAS), the former a man whose fervid anti-intellectualism needs no introduction, the latter a conservative 501(c)3 flush with money from the Olin, Bradly, and Castle Rock Foundations, and more lately affiliated with the Heritage Foundation and its delirious \u201cProject 2025\u201d document. The author refers to the group as \u201cconservative-leaning,\u201d which, ok. I guess you could say Latvia was a little antisemitic-leaning during the war. What you get is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of anything resembling \u201cappraisal\u201d surgically excised. It was this very NAS who, back in 2013, issued a white paper about the decadence and depravity of Bowdoin College particularly, clutching at pearls by the ropefull in objection to the college\u2019s justice-forward curricula, its alleged diminishment of the classical virtues, the bare existence of something called \u201cqueer studies.\u201d (Full disclosure: I was, in my full-throttle commitment to destroying those heralded civilizational virtues, also chair of the Program in Gay and Lesbian Studies for a while there.) It for sure made a sort of splash when it appeared, although the Times author does not note it did so chiefly by gathering around itself pleasing and extensive ridicule, most all of it on the grounds of being a bathetically unscholarly corporate-sponsored piece of risible chaff. The great Gawker headline summed it all up best: \u201cConservative Scholar\u2019s Investigation Says Bowdoin College is Awesome,\u201d it read, which I can say was much appreciated in the hallways of the college back then. For all that, I read last week\u2019s Times piece with a genuine sinking of heart, though not because it was especially unforeseen or even because it will have any serious effect, either on Bowdoin or on Mamdani himself, whose path to decisive victory went on quite undiverted. The gall, you could say, had a different savor. When writing to a journalist friend, I just said that it\u2019s a bit unravelling, right now, to be on the receiving end of this kind of belated real-time education in elite metabolization. Like so many other bits of Times coverage, the whole of the piece is structured as an orchestrated encounter. Some people say this; however, others say this . It\u2019s so offhand you can think you\u2019re gazing through a pane of glass. Only when you stand a little closer, or when circumstances make you a little less blinkered, do you notice the fact which then becomes blinding and finally crazymaking, which is just that there is zero, less than zero, stress put on the relation between those two \u201csides,\u201d or their histories, or their sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority, or any of it. Instead, what you get is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of anything resembling \u201cappraisal\u201d surgically excised. One can take some comfort, I suppose, from the sense that, in this instance at least, the stakes were pretty low. Unlike the austerity-battered and enormous urban working-class university where I now teach, Bowdoin is a preposterously rich school, beloved by and to (https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2025/03/24/reed-hastings-gives-bowdoin-college-50-million-its-largest-gift-ever/) the planetary ruling classes , and they\u2019ll be fine. Shed no tears for the place, or for what is functionally a bit of prestige-media advertising, unlikely even in its most churlish moments to discourage any of its chosen demographic from applying. As for Mamdani, he cruised to a victory that was no less resounding, and no less heartlifting, for being achieved in the teeth of so much (https://defector.com/defeat-isnt-enough-for-andrew-cuomo-and-his-pack-of-lunatics) unhinged hatefulness . But that comfort wears thin pretty quickly, and I imagine you can see why. In contexts not concerning the elite private colleges of New England and their decades-old conflicts and syllabi and on-campus squabbles, this mode of prestige media procedure matters absolutely and enormously, at scales difficult to tabulate. It\u2019s not hard to call them all to mind: \u201cClimate change is increasingly lethal, though critics say\u2026 it is not.\u201d Or, \u201cIsrael is murdering journalists in Gaza at historically unprecedented rates, though critics say\u2026 it is not.\u201d Or, \u201cTrans people claim to be real, though critics say \u2026\u201d Every bit of this is disheartening on its face. But it\u2019s actually worse than any first-blush irritation, that familiar annoyance that comes from encountering still another textbook exercise in witless triangulation. Because what this sort of reporting ultimately means is that if you have enough money to get somebody, anybody, to produce a white paper for you, which you can then put on some think-tank stationery? Then, my friend, you are ready to enter into the rushing current of elite reportage. For no matter how unhinged the position you\u2019ve taken, or paid someone marginally credentialed to sketch out on your behalf\u2014\u201cCan Woman Think?: We Investigate,\u201d \u201cIs the Negro a Man: A Reconsideration\u201d\u2014that opinion will, by virtue of such provenance, possess all needed evidentiary gravity for the Times . And then some. (Only yesterday the Times ran (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/opinion/women-workplace-feminism-conservative.html) this actual story , which is not parody.) It\u2019s all a bit humiliating\u2014or it is for me. Because I did take time for this reporter, despite my misgivings. I even went so far as to write my thoughts out for him, on the chance they might be clarifying or useful. \u201cThe first thing to say,\u201d I told him, \u201cis that Africana Studies at Bowdoin is less a singular pursuit than a suite of scholarly disciplines, condensed around a set of objects and questions.\u201d And then, warming to the pedagogical project, I talked about anthropology, art and architecture, music, religion, the history of science, whole grand traditions of invention and resolve. I talk about James Weldon Johnson, and Gwendolyn Brooks, and Charles Chestnutt, and Nella Larsen, and Hortense Spillers, and a good deal else and I mean\u2026 would you listen to how pathetic that all sounds? I read it over now with this kind of full-spectrum cringe of the spirit. It\u2019s the rattle of a person going on and professorially on, quite as if the substance of a discipline, or its intellectual trajectory, or even just the nourishing joy of sustained and serious study, mattered at all to the person he was talking to, or to the majestic institution he represents. And honestly, what could be more feeble? It\u2019s not that those things don\u2019t matter: (https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/memos-of-blood-and-fire/) they absolutely goddamn do , and will keep on mattering, and I wouldn\u2019t go on with the whole tedious business of teaching if I thought otherwise. It\u2019s just that they never mattered much to the Times and they are, to appearances, mattering less and less by the day. I should remember that, and so should you. (https://lithub.com/tag/africana-studies/) (Africana Studies) Africana Studies (https://lithub.com/tag/bowdoin-college/) (Bowdoin College) Bowdoin College (https://lithub.com/tag/david-brooks/) (David Brooks) David Brooks (https://lithub.com/tag/frantz-fanon/) (Frantz Fanon) Frantz Fanon (https://lithub.com/tag/journalism/) (journalism) journalism (https://lithub.com/tag/media/) (media) media (https://lithub.com/tag/new-york-times/) (New York Times) New York Times (https://lithub.com/tag/peter-coviello/) (Peter Coviello) Peter Coviello (https://lithub.com/tag/socialism/) (socialism) socialism (https://lithub.com/tag/zohran-mamdani/) (Zohran Mamdani) Zohran Mamdani (Peter Coviello) Peter Coviello Peter Coviello is the author of six books, including Long Players , a memoir selected as one of ARTFORUM \u2019s Best Books of 2018; Make Yourselves Gods , about the Mormon nineteenth century;\u00a0and most recently Is There God After Prince?: Dispatches from an Age of Last Things. He taught for many years at Bowdoin College and since 2014 has been at UIC, where he is Professor and Head of English. (Disqus) Please enable JavaScript to view the (https://disqus.com/?ref_noscript) comments powered by Disqus. (/) The Latest (https://lithub.com/5-book-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-12-11-2025/) (5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week) (https://lithub.com/5-book-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-12-11-2025/) (5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week) 5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week (https://lithub.com/did-jane-austen-invent-the-wellness-guy/) (Did Jane Austen Invent the Wellness Guy?) (https://lithub.com/did-jane-austen-invent-the-wellness-guy/) (Did Jane Austen Invent the Wellness Guy?) Did Jane Austen Invent the Wellness Guy? 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Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution\u2014the term they tend to prefer is \u201celite\u201d\u2014and odds are that eventually someone who was a student there, who maybe resided only on the far periphery of your professional orbit, will become one or another kind of famous. At that point, out of the vast and silent ether, messages will come glowing into your inbox one after another. Do you remember this person? they will say. Was he your student? Did you work with him? We\u2019re hoping for some insight\u2014would it be possible for us to talk for a bit?\nI taught at a place called Bowdoin College for 16 years, and during the last of those there was a student in attendance you\u2019ve perhaps heard of. His name is Zohran Mamdani. And so, shortly after his startling, spirit-lifting victory in the primary last spring, the gentle flood of inquiries commenced. Word had gotten out not only that he went to Bowdoin\u2014again, a very pricey, very wealthy, quite comprehensively the-thing-that-it-is small liberal arts college on the East Coast\u2014but that, while there, he had majored in something called \u201cAfricana Studies.\u201d You can probably see where this is going.\nThe first few messages wondered if I knew him (I don\u2019t think I did, though I certainly had students who did, and do), if I taught him (possibly? but in truth not that I remembered), but mostly if I could say something about what he might have been reading and doing and studying, there in his time at this little college on the coast of Maine. More than once, the name \u201cFrantz Fanon\u201d was broached\u2014which had the virtue of certain hand-showing clarity.\nIt gives me no joy to admit that there are certain kinds of professors who love little more than seeing their names in the paper. It\u2019s not great, but there it is. (These are often the same sorts of people who will drop into an otherwise ordinaryish conversation phrases like, \u201cNo sure it\u2019s like when I was teaching that big lecture class, to my students at Yale University\u2026\u201d) But I like to think even they would\u2019ve been able to spot the coiled wires and rusty springs of this particular trap.\nBeneath its humdrum requests, every email said more or less the same thing: Can you explain how reading certain things can turn a person into a socialist\u2014and, possibly, a terrorist-sympathizing antisemite? It\u2019s a storied gambit of the right at its most grimly predictable. \u201cPeople read Foucault,\u201d the redoubtable David Brooks once wrote, in an actual column that I\u2019ve all but committed to memory, \u201cand develop an alienated view of the world.\u201d God, did I love this. An \u201calienated view of the world\u201d! Not by, like, trying to pay rent or having an insurance claim denied\u2014no, no, it was probably the Foucault you read in 2003. Anyway, it was clearly time to get the elaborate machinery of manufactured bewilderment and sour indignation up and running again.\nThe storied choice between socialism and barbarism was made exquisitely clear a good many years ago in the United States, and both major parties chose barbarism.\nBut then something strange happened. Some time after the initial rush died down, I got a message that seemed at least marginally less disreputable. A writer at the Times contacted me to talk. He said he was less interested in Mamdani himself than he was in the Africana Studies part\u2014a department of which, for a handful of years back at Bowdoin, I was indeed chair. This was a kind of dilemma.\nOn the one hand, like a lot of my friends and peers I think it\u2019s wise to decline speaking to the Times on principle. The reasons aren\u2019t especially obscure: Palestine superabundantly, but also decades of hyper-sensationalizing crime reporting, the neverending centrist stooge\u2019ing, all the unparody-able rest of it. On the other, though, this was not a request to write but to contribute something in the way of context, knowledge even, and I did in fact have some legit expertise on the question of Africana Studies, a discipline about which I have a lot of detailed, informed, enthusiastically ratifying things to say.\nThen too there was a whole other set of incentives. It\u2019s fair to say that, former student of mine or not, I\u2019ve loved Mamdani\u2019s campaign, and loved in particular the glad-hearted and admirably steady way he\u2019s brought what not that long ago would have been absolutely ordinary social-democratic priorities (in respect to affordability, housing, health, food, education) back into the realm of mainstream political discourse.\nFor some time I\u2019ve been saying that the storied choice between socialism and barbarism was made exquisitely clear a good many years ago in the United States, and both major parties chose barbarism. They are obviously and consequentially different barbarisms\u2014one had reproductive freedom, vaccines, and trans health care in it, at least for a while\u2014and I can tell you why I have sincerely preferred one to the other. But we oughtn\u2019t to kid ourselves. From the perspective of a world of increasingly unimaginable maldistribution of resources, cascading ecological collapse, a genocide cheered on by a putatively liberal order, both are barbarisms. Mamdani seemed to me a small glimmering break in the wall of all that. A part of me wanted to do him a solid.\nAnd so, after consulting with friends a little more media-seasoned than I, and exchanging some emails with the reporter laying out what I was and wasn\u2019t interested in speaking about, I agreed to an interview. I did this because, in ways you might think I\u2019d have outgrown by now, I\u2019m a fucking idiot.\n*\nAs it happened, the reporter and I never spoke. We made an appointment that he missed, and because my current job is something of a bureaucratic black hole, I wasn\u2019t able to clear another time to talk. I did write him a longish message about Africana Studies, and he did speak with at least two of my former colleagues (who, bless them, acquitted themselves more than admirably). And he managed to write that story, which appeared in the Times less than a week before the mayoral election, under the anodyne title \u201cHow a Small Elite College Influenced Mamdani\u2019s World View.\u201d It\u2019s a wreck, but of a form so pure, so purely Timesian, you almost have to admire it. It certainly is instructive.\nHere\u2019s the pitch:\nMr. Mamdani graduated in 2014 from Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, with a bachelor\u2019s degree in Africana studies. And his experience there\u2014readings of critical race theorists in the classroom and activism for left-wing causes on campus\u2014is emblematic of the highly charged debate over what is taught in American universities.\nCritics say the growth of these programs, which aim to teach about historical events from the perspective of marginalized and oppressed groups, has turned colleges into feckless workshops for leftist political orthodoxy.\n\u201cCritics say\u201d is the tell, and does it ever go on telling. First, note that this criticism (\u201cMajors like Africana studies, or any of its siblings such as women\u2019s studies, these critics charge, promote a worldview that sees little to admire in American history. Some disparagingly call the entire field \u2018grievance studies\u2019\u201d) gives to the article the whole of its contrapuntal structure of argument: these scholars and teachers say Mr. Mamdani\u2019s education is substantial, yet critics say something else. But then note as well that this counter-position is substantiated, in its length and breadth, by: J. D. Vance and the National Association of Scholars (NAS), the former a man whose fervid anti-intellectualism needs no introduction, the latter a conservative 501(c)3 flush with money from the Olin, Bradly, and Castle Rock Foundations, and more lately affiliated with the Heritage Foundation and its delirious \u201cProject 2025\u201d document. The author refers to the group as \u201cconservative-leaning,\u201d which, ok. I guess you could say Latvia was a little antisemitic-leaning during the war.\nWhat you get is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of anything resembling \u201cappraisal\u201d surgically excised.\nIt was this very NAS who, back in 2013, issued a white paper about the decadence and depravity of Bowdoin College particularly, clutching at pearls by the ropefull in objection to the college\u2019s justice-forward curricula, its alleged diminishment of the classical virtues, the bare existence of something called \u201cqueer studies.\u201d (Full disclosure: I was, in my full-throttle commitment to destroying those heralded civilizational virtues, also chair of the Program in Gay and Lesbian Studies for a while there.) It for sure made a sort of splash when it appeared, although the Times author does not note it did so chiefly by gathering around itself pleasing and extensive ridicule, most all of it on the grounds of being a bathetically unscholarly corporate-sponsored piece of risible chaff. The great Gawker headline summed it all up best: \u201cConservative Scholar\u2019s Investigation Says Bowdoin College is Awesome,\u201d it read, which I can say was much appreciated in the hallways of the college back then.\nFor all that, I read last week\u2019s Times piece with a genuine sinking of heart, though not because it was especially unforeseen or even because it will have any serious effect, either on Bowdoin or on Mamdani himself, whose path to decisive victory went on quite undiverted. The gall, you could say, had a different savor.\nWhen writing to a journalist friend, I just said that it\u2019s a bit unravelling, right now, to be on the receiving end of this kind of belated real-time education in elite metabolization. Like so many other bits of Times coverage, the whole of the piece is structured as an orchestrated encounter. Some people say this; however, others say this. It\u2019s so offhand you can think you\u2019re gazing through a pane of glass. Only when you stand a little closer, or when circumstances make you a little less blinkered, do you notice the fact which then becomes blinding and finally crazymaking, which is just that there is zero, less than zero, stress put on the relation between those two \u201csides,\u201d or their histories, or their sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority, or any of it. Instead, what you get is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of anything resembling \u201cappraisal\u201d surgically excised.\nOne can take some comfort, I suppose, from the sense that, in this instance at least, the stakes were pretty low. Unlike the austerity-battered and enormous urban working-class university where I now teach, Bowdoin is a preposterously rich school, beloved by and to the planetary ruling classes, and they\u2019ll be fine. Shed no tears for the place, or for what is functionally a bit of prestige-media advertising, unlikely even in its most churlish moments to discourage any of its chosen demographic from applying. As for Mamdani, he cruised to a victory that was no less resounding, and no less heartlifting, for being achieved in the teeth of so much unhinged hatefulness.\nBut that comfort wears thin pretty quickly, and I imagine you can see why. In contexts not concerning the elite private colleges of New England and their decades-old conflicts and syllabi and on-campus squabbles, this mode of prestige media procedure matters absolutely and enormously, at scales difficult to tabulate. It\u2019s not hard to call them all to mind: \u201cClimate change is increasingly lethal, though critics say\u2026 it is not.\u201d Or, \u201cIsrael is murdering journalists in Gaza at historically unprecedented rates, though critics say\u2026 it is not.\u201d Or, \u201cTrans people claim to be real, though critics say\u2026\u201d\nEvery bit of this is disheartening on its face. But it\u2019s actually worse than any first-blush irritation, that familiar annoyance that comes from encountering still another textbook exercise in witless triangulation. Because what this sort of reporting ultimately means is that if you have enough money to get somebody, anybody, to produce a white paper for you, which you can then put on some think-tank stationery? Then, my friend, you are ready to enter into the rushing current of elite reportage. For no matter how unhinged the position you\u2019ve taken, or paid someone marginally credentialed to sketch out on your behalf\u2014\u201cCan Woman Think?: We Investigate,\u201d \u201cIs the Negro a Man: A Reconsideration\u201d\u2014that opinion will, by virtue of such provenance, possess all needed evidentiary gravity for the Times. And then some. (Only yesterday the Times ran this actual story, which is not parody.)\nIt\u2019s all a bit humiliating\u2014or it is for me. Because I did take time for this reporter, despite my misgivings. I even went so far as to write my thoughts out for him, on the chance they might be clarifying or useful. \u201cThe first thing to say,\u201d I told him, \u201cis that Africana Studies at Bowdoin is less a singular pursuit than a suite of scholarly disciplines, condensed around a set of objects and questions.\u201d And then, warming to the pedagogical project, I talked about anthropology, art and architecture, music, religion, the history of science, whole grand traditions of invention and resolve. I talk about James Weldon Johnson, and Gwendolyn Brooks, and Charles Chestnutt, and Nella Larsen, and Hortense Spillers, and a good deal else and I mean\u2026 would you listen to how pathetic that all sounds?\nI read it over now with this kind of full-spectrum cringe of the spirit. It\u2019s the rattle of a person going on and professorially on, quite as if the substance of a discipline, or its intellectual trajectory, or even just the nourishing joy of sustained and serious study, mattered at all to the person he was talking to, or to the majestic institution he represents. And honestly, what could be more feeble?\nIt\u2019s not that those things don\u2019t matter: they absolutely goddamn do, and will keep on mattering, and I wouldn\u2019t go on with the whole tedious business of teaching if I thought otherwise. It\u2019s just that they never mattered much to the Times and they are, to appearances, mattering less and less by the day. 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