Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Fail Columbia "Grading the Columbia Journalism School," an essay by Eleanore B. Goodman in the January 1983 issue of The American Spectator, is guilty of many of the same criticisms...
...He goes to great lengths to point out that the Dartmouth Review is not the leader of any movement— in fact, Counterpoint, his journalistic baby, is said to have existed one year prior to the Review...
...Sean Warren Sherman Oaks, California Hart v. O'Lessker v. Brown Let me say to begin with that I much appreciate the literate review of my book [When The Going Was Good] by Karl O'Lessker in the January issue...
...Lindberg) with his assertion that the Dartmouth Review, and thereby with invidious association California Review, has been extremist and in poor taste...
...I trust that readers of the Spectator, and of what I quoted from the Review, will not allow you to get away with this...
...it taught me much of how to think, how to ask the right questions, and where to go to find these questions...
...He seems to apply the same philosophy when writing letters to the editor...
...O'Lessker must have been drowsing...
...The professor's word is made flesh," is simply not true...
...Bruce Krasnow Chicago, Illinois Eleanore B. Goodman replies: I was aware before I wrote my critique of the Columbia Journalism School that it would be resented by anyone who has an interest in maintaining the school's fine, though unmerited, reputation...
...Ross's assertion that Updike is "the foremost novel-istic chronicler of American mores in our time,'' I would like to suggest that he is actually among the foremost mediocrities of a very mediocre period in our literary history...
...When I see a rapist in action I do not, as I suppose you would, say: "You know, rape has a pernicious effect on a woman, not to mention society as a whole, and a recent survey published in Public Opinion magazine says that the majority of people think rape is immoral...
...And as for Fred Friendly's Media and Society course, Goodman states: "Whatever the case, exercises concerning individual rights did not interest many students...
...Whjther, as Mr...
...It was negligent of me to have forgotten it and, worse, not to have seen citation of it in the book's index...
...The book tries to set the background of the racial process in the war years of the forties (pages 9 and 10)—and that view was not first put forth in some interview which Mr...
...Please limit your comments to 200 words, and include full name, address, and telephone number...
...Just because no one has heard of Counterpoint, except as the continuing feature on "Sixty Minutes," doesn't mean Messrs...
...Gordon Stevens Brownstown, Pennsylvania The Old Corps Major David Boyd of the Army protests a mite too much in his attempt (TAS, January 1983) to correct William McGurn concerning our "senior" service ("Semper Fi-delis," TAS, November 1982...
...If he does not possess the moral courage to purify and elevate his fiction, at least he possesses the grammatical courage to incorporate, successfully, complex sentences into his narratives...
...I would also ask readers to take note of the difference between the two letters...
...And thank you for the little list of American cities...
...Is he saying that Counterpoint should garner more notice than the Review because it was first...
...Goodman has focused the essay on the school's liberal bias, weaving this premise among thin threads of fact and opinion...
...I myself have not read the book in some time and so am unable to quote directly by way of example...
...Incidentally, the number of students in Columbia's class of 1982 was 166, not the 174 as stated by Goodman...
...Pages 71 and 72 deal explicitly with the Brown decision...
...The seminar pitted our journalistic instincts against our human instincts...
...Podhoretz and Lindberg can't head a movement...
...The irony of Mr...
...Based on their points of contention with the Dartmouth Review, Podhoretz and Lindberg could become good taste specialists on campuses around America...
...The publications are not comparable, and the difference is not one of degree but of kind...
...To Mr...
...Regarding Mr...
...I can think of few comments during the seminar that went unchallenged, undebated and, more often than not, were left unanswered...
...That was why many questions were so controversial and why students grew frustrated at often not finding a clear-cut solution to the many journalistic dilemmas...
...Pages 92 and following deal with the significance of Jackie Robinson, and pages 202 and following with the significance of Floyd Patterson as a new sort of Heavyweight champion...
...I am glad the toll was no higher...
...And I would cut off his head with my chivalric sword or my even mightier pen...
...What does this mean...
...Having now re-read the pages in question I continue to believe that his discussion of the civil rights movement is strikingly inadequate to its importance...
...Last year I appeared on a television interview with John Podhoretz, the other co-founder of Counterpoint and son of Commentary's Norman...
...Lindberg, what the liberals and their radical progeny have done to our educational institutions is the equivalent of raping them...
...It should puzzle no one, however, who has had even the most rudimentary introduction to economics...
...O'Lessker is certainly entitled to the view that the book does not give enough emphasis to this aspect of the fifties, but it is simply not true that the book does not "even mention" these matters...
...Commander-in-Chief Washington well understood the role of Marines: he had them aboard the nascent Navy's vessels from Maine to South Carolina several months before that service's "birthday" of October 30, 1775...
...Let me, though, reiterate my admiration for the book and urge you to read it at your earliest opportunity...
...The California Review goes too far for me, but at least it does not reach the fringe where we find the Dartmouth Review...
...The school's commencement program lists 162 graduates...
...Rather than engage in gainsaying over the quality of debate in the courses Mr...
...W. Crocker III Brigadier Editor California Review Del Mar, California Of all the magazine articles and television broadcasts about the Dartmouth Review, I never expected the Review to be labeled as "consistently tasteless" by a writer in, of all places...
...And his splendid account of the careers of Jackie Robinson and Floyd Patterson, while certainly recalling the overt racial prejudice of that era, fails to relate their individual triumphs to the broader sweep of the civil rights revolution...
...If memory serves, I believe it was originally published in the late forties and then reprinted in a revised edition by Devin-Adair in 1956...
...I would say: "Avast ye bounder...
...Maybe with a few big grants from foundations, they could start a finishing school whose motto, of course, would be "J'accuse...
...Jeffrey Hart Hanover, New Hampshire Karl O 'Lessker replies: Mr...
...Fitzpatrick hints, it is being suppressed or not, I can't say...
...It was he who said, "If the lead isn't pejorative, it's just boring...
...Even in The Roosevelt Myth, a work in which he mainly examines with a cold eye FDR and his scrofulous "kitchen cabinet," he pauses now and then to refute New Deal economic lunacies...
...The American Spectator welcomes correspondence from its readers...
...It's about the same as Bill Buckley calling George Bush a preppy or Suzanne Sommers calling Loni Anderson a bleach blonde...
...No writer before or since has been able to wade through the toxic nonsense of the Dismal Science and still remain civilized and coherent...
...Krasnow hang by his own thin threads...
...That's the whole problem...
...armed forces...
...After all, how can there be a movement if they're not leading it...
...What with all those punk rockers and Dartmouth Reviewers out there, they could travel from college to college noting, say, ethnic jokes in one place and pro-Arab causes in another...
...I had barely arrived in the studio when Podhoretz began to whine and ooze about the Dartmouth Review this and that and how our escapades were embarrassing "the movement...
...Crocker: I'm sorry I didn't catch you before you sallied forth, but I think you should know that if rape is the problem, raping back is not the solution...
...However, he has made several serious errors of ascertainable fact, most importantly as regards his theme that the book "does not even mention" the civil rights movement of the fifties, and makes no mention of the Brown versus the Board decision...
...CORRESPONDENCE Fail Columbia "Grading the Columbia Journalism School," an essay by Eleanore B. Goodman in the January 1983 issue of The American Spectator, is guilty of many of the same criticisms attached to the school itself...
...Incidentally, 174 names comprised the initial class list...
...Yes, we debated so-called conservative religions and so-called liberal religions, but one of the scenes that Goodman related, "The students nod...
...Fitzpatrick further suggests the value of reprinting that estimable work...
...It is, simply, historically inaccurate to say that "the Marine Corps arrived on the scene" in November, 1775, and that Marines "are relative newcomers" among U.S...
...Suffice it to say that when John T. Flynn touches on his favorite subject it is the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra rescuing Bach from a gang of drug-crazed rock stars...
...It's no surprise then that Lindberg, fellow neoconservative now working at Irving Kristol's Public Interest, is just as uncomfortable, except now they've decided that there is no movement...
...The Continental Congress resolved on November 10 of that year to raise two battalions of Marines, true, but American Marines had been in combat, afloat and ashore, since at least May 1775 (e.g., aboard Benedict Arnold's Liberty in the Lake Champlain action...
...I would also like to quibble (if that word is not too strong for Mr...
...Military historian Clyde H. Metcalf summed it up: "The marines of several states antedate the Continental Marines...
...These are dark times, my dear Mr...
...If the scene is all too gory for you, perhaps you should take a position farther from the front...
...Grammatical Courage Mitchell Ross's commentary on John Updike (TAS, January 1985) was a competent piece of writing, though not a noteworthy example of literary criticism, since he apparently wished to emphasize the virtues of Updike the sociologist rather than the deficiencies of Updike the artist...
...their existence, no doubt, helped to cause the establishment of an organization of marines serving all the colonies...
...His magnificent Men Of Wealth, alone, says more about historic and world economics than a whole boxcar load of Harvard professors reeling from the virulent whiffs of Keynesian obscenities...
...Keeney Jones Founder and former chairman The Dartmouth Review Tod Lindberg replies: For those readers who are not personally acquainted with the California Review and the Dartmouth Review, allow me to present them as personified by H.W...
...To Mr...
...I can see it now: the limp wristed good tasting junior neoconservative zionist anti-racist movement...
...Fraternity Row I was outraged to read Tod Lindberg call California Review an imitator of the Dartmouth Review in his intemperate article on "The Dartmouth Review and the Campus Right" (TAS, January 1983...
...As one of the 12 students who, with Goodman, took Pete Johnston's Spring Seminar: "Interpretive Writing of Social Trends," I can wholeheartedly say there was little concensus on much of anything in the seminar...
...Lindberg, and it takes mean and ugly men like myself to lead the forces of virtue, honor, and the American way...
...Hart is correct in saying that he did indeed mention the Brown decision of 1954...
...Kristol is, after all, vice chairman of an organization that gave your journal $10,000...
...O'Lessker vaguely r&members reading somewhere...
...Crocker III and Keeney Jones...
...That's why I wrote the essay...
...He is correct: The school does indeed teach its students "how to think, how to ask the right questions, and where to go to find these questions"—wherever two or three are gathered in liberalism's name, there are journalists in the midst of them...
...I see also that you have strong feelings about neoconservatives: e.g., that Irving Kristol seems, in your view, to be so illegitimate that the mere mention of him as my employer delegitimates me...
...I entirely agree with his view that it is a fine book...
...Fitzpatrick quotes, among others, Murray Rothbard, but is puzzled at the latter's casual reference to John T. Flynn's incisive exhumation of The Roosevelt Myth...
...Krasnow's response is that he was one of the students who played prominently in my thoughts when I penned the piece...
...The seminar, like the school itself, taught me little of what to think...
...His discussion of Brown, for example, has nothing to say about the substance of the case but focuses instead entirely on President Eisenhower's reaction to it...
...In my opinion, individual rights were of primary motivation...
...Prepare to meet thy doom for thy libidinous lack of decorum...
...John T. Flynn Was once very in He has since, alas Been cut off at the pass...
...Robert Lindsay Professor of Mass Communication and International Relations University of Minnesota Minneapolis, Minnesota...
...The ultimate answer does not come in an upper West-side Manhattan classroom, but must be answered in the newsrooms of Chicago, Akron, Hammond, Dallas, and many other towns in America every day...
...Tod Lindberg is a man careless with words...
...It has been and continues to be our intention to blaze new trails and boldly go where no conservative journal has gone before...
...It is as delightful as it is instructive...
...Next to the Foucault Pendulum and the mystique of golf, nothing baffles me more than the mystery of why John T. Flynn is not required reading in at least the politer circles...
...Krasnow mentions (I stand by the facts I recorded), I will let Mr...
...And in the end, public nuisances like the Dartmouth Review would succumb and print articles on such subjects as "The New Neo-quasi Pseudo Anti-Semitism...
...Tod Lindberg, who wrote the attack, is said to be a co-founder of Counterpoint at the University of Chicago...
...In Like Flynn Anent Vincent Fitzpatrick's deft sifting of New Individualist Review (TAS, February 1983), may I be permitted a clerihew...
...But though these authors mean to attack my argument, they themselves provide evidence for the points I made in my essay...
...And his Decline of the American Republic is enough to make an assassin weep...
...I think this is a strange attitude for many reasons, not least because Mr...
...Jones: As a long-time reader, and, since 1980, a contributor to the American Spectator, I am disgusted by your effort to use the Spectator to legitimate the Dartmouth Review...
Vol. 16 • March 1983 • No. 3
