The entire Lit Hub article is based on the premise that no one worth any salt has any objections to the critical-theory approach to collegiate pedagogy that has become fashionable at liberal arts colleges. It is fine if the author disagrees with these people who harbor such objections. But he goes much further: He dismisses their objections as if they barely exist, except among a scattered, utterly wretched few. But they do exist, and the numbers who harbor them are robust. And for this reason, the entire essay falls apart upon close inspection.
Crit Theory and its priesthood and acolytes operate like a cult with cult dynamics: they have a special gnostic "critical consciousness" that makes them separate and superior to lesser mortals, they see everything and everyone in pure black and white (shades of gray are excuses for oppression), they encourage you to cut off friends and family if they try to talk you out of the cult, they refuse to debate or defend dogma and resort quickly to denunciation and ad hominem, they even have special language of alchemical jargon that can turn up into down and true into false (and vice versa). They have no use for art, literature or thought unless these things can be instrumentalized to meet their various personal, professional and career needs. They are eunuchs in a harem, sterile critics and enemies of works they could never themselves create.
Most people who either critique or defend critical theory (or really any political or social theory at all - if I see one more failure to grasp Schmitt's friend / enemy distinction, I may literally die) have actually read and understood it.
If one of my undergraduate students misunderstood or misrepresented an author in the way that Coviello has either misunderstood or misrepresented Brooks in this instance, I would certainly comment on it and probably mark them down.
The thing to understand, the thing that should keep you up at night, is that all expertise today has the same problem. Medicine. Engineering. Public policy. All fail to do this kind of basic fact checking, and if you point these basic errors out, you get nothing but animosity.
No, in fact, there are many people in all those fields who fail to quote correctly and do basic factchecking, and many who do not. To make such sweeping statements as yours is the epitome of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Yes, there are some people left in academia who are generally interested in truth, but the influx of critical theory into nearly every domain (including the harder sciences now) has made it way worse. And when you have public communicators of science like Neil deGrasse Tyson who were once genuine defenders of reason capitulate, it makes me even more skeptical of genuine expertise. It's there, yes, but it's hard to find and it's receding.
Maybe you are strictly correct, but the idea of setting out to plagiarize something then then forgetting your point has a really nice comedic ring to it as a turn of phrase. Like someone "galloping madly off in all directions." (--Stephen Leacock.)
Comedic, perhaps, Ms. MacMilla, but he didn't forget the point, only the context of the quote. Brooks and he make the same point with the same quote, only he misunderstood/misremembered Brooks as speaking it to represent his own view.
You don't need to have read Brooks to have this extremely commonplace idea, TJ. He liked Brooks' elegant phrasing. So do I. Too bad he messed up and didn't realize or remember that he and Brooks were in this case on the same side.
It would breach my employer's academic integrity management framework, but we would then invite the student to a discussion so that they could explain themselves and we could establish the degree of intentionality involved.
I worked at a business paper where we would run a weekly Q&A with a local business person. One time we interviewed a guy who liked to quote lines from The Godfather as examples of business strategy. One of them was "Take the gun. Leave the cannoli," which he used as an example of keeping focused on business as opposed to personal stuff. That is the exact opposite of the actual dialogue of the movie. So we had to message him if he was OK with us flipping it. But he was so shocked that he had been misquoting the line, he asked us to just cut that part. Which we did.
Life is short. The oppressed- oppressor narrative is just too compelling to let it get complicated by facts, too little time. David Brooks be damned. He’s an old white guy isn’t he? Conservative even! Screw him.
Is it at all possible the LitHub piece was actually agreeing and appreciating David Brooks phrasing and making the same point? I can read the selection you quoted that way. It would of course be confusing to a reader unfamiliar with the column.
No I don’t think so. His reference to “the redoubtable” Brooks is clearly sarcastic, and saying it appeared in “an actual column” makes clear he is trying to say it’s amazing that anyone would write something so stupid.
Even if it was just "redoubtable", there would still be a way to read it charitably, but I can't make "an actual column" make sense in any way other than how Jesse read it.
Yeah, I'm trying to steel man this, and about the best that I can come up with is that he's basically saying, "even David Brooks admits that people on the right think this way". That he's sort of giving a backhanded citation of Brooks, noting how remarkable it is that someone might actually commit such an assertion about their own "side" to print. Even then, it's at best careless that he wouldn't make that clear.
The only other possibility I can come up with is that Brooks is mining this assertion from his own past work, and that the author simply provided the wrong link. Brooks has been nothing if not introspective lately about the conservative ideology he has maintained throughout his life—to go so far as to embrace Ta Na Hesi Coates, which I suppose might be a point in favor of the possibility of being positively referenced by a black intellectual.
Still, I guess it's possible that Brooks actually said this himself at one point, and that the author carelessly searched for the quote and didn't notice he had gotten the wrong article. That seems like a bit of a stretch though, since he claimed to have all but committed it to memory.
I was thinking along the lines of your first paragraph. The person I disagree with made a good point, and I've memorized the column. But it was just a thought.
I don't know Coviello's work. It's clear from brief descriptions on the UI website that he's part of the critical theory movement that has long been dominant in certain fields of the Humanities; how uncritically he adopts some of its more dogmatic elements I can't tell from Googling. But, honestly, "left-of-center" refers to about 40% of politically engaged Americans and the majority of those would be more aligned with Chuck Schumer than critical theory.
What Caviello got wrong was the ascription of this position to Brooks, rather than to those whom Brooks was criticizing. He was apparently working from memory and his memory betrayed him -- I couldn't count all the times I'd done something like this (thank the Lord none made it into print . . . I think). Or perhaps he did check Brooks' column and misread it (again). More stupid and less irresponsible, but not really all that hard to do. The bottom line is that he and Brooks agree that this is a simplistic reduction that those "right-of-center" make [please note scare quotes].
I admire Jesse's writing -- I'm a subscriber -- but elevating this to a salient symptom seems to me just as irresponsible as Coviello's sloppy citation. I think the lesson to draw is not that there is "intellectual rot in left-of-center spaces" than, "In times like these we all need to be more careful." Also, we all need to show a little grace.
I agree that charity is important, but it has limits. For Coviello to quote an article, and link directly to it, and make a basic error about its contents is not to be overlooked. I agree that it could well be an honest mistake, but this doesn't make it less concerning. Accidentally getting a quote entirely wrong when you claim to have nearly memorized the original source is a pretty major error.
Mr. Nicholas, Once again, he did not get the quote wrong. He actually said nothing untrue -- David Brooks did write it, just as Coviello said. What Coviello did was either to misread or misremember Brooks' column and construe Brooks as stating his own idea rather than ascribing it to others and suggesting it was a common response to minimize statements of those reporting experiences of racism, which he'd come to feel was not legitimate.
If you've read the Brooks column I think you might agree that it is one of Brooks' most interesting but most unclear op-eds, and the ascriptive nature of the phrases in question relies entirely on the "however" of the following sentence. Recalling a column like that and mischaracterizing the phrase because of sloppy reading, memory, or self-fact check is the type of error that anyone who is not perfect can make. It is not a "pretty major error." It's an error *anyone of any ideological persuasion* could make, and that used to be the sort of lapse editors routinely saved authors from.
What's a pretty major error in my view is taking this screw-up and inflating it until it's a symptom of intellectual rot over the huge range of an entire side of the political spectrum. It's "gotcha," "pearl clutching," "bothsideism," or whatever stupid meme you want to invoke, and that sort of stuff is destructive -- it can play no role in getting us out of the insanity of the present moment. I read Jesse Singal because I take his project to be precisely getting us out of that insanity, and I think it's a lot more important to call him out on what I see as his error than to pile onto Coviello.
I think we agree on the facts. I'm saying that ascribing the statement to Brooks when it was, in fact, a thing he was arguing against, is a major error.
I totally agree that it's an understandable error, a human one, etc., but I don't think that makes it less legitimate to point the error out.
I don't think Mr. Singal is saying that this one error, by itself, is proof of a vast lowering of left-wing intellectual standards. He's clearly saying that this is a recent example of something he has encountered over and over again, and provided links to articles that give several other examples. He as also written numerous articles in the past providing further examples.
I'm not saying I agree with him, but I don't think he's failed to make a reasonable case.
Glad we're set on the facts, Mr. Nicholas. I would agree it's an embarrassing error, but since it makes no difference to Coviello's actual argument whether Brooks was characterizing the statement as his own or as a common meme I don't think there's any objective way to assess it as major. This is a rabbit hole with no end, so let's acknowledge we differ.
I'm with you on your next point: it's perfectly legitimate to call it out. But it should be called out at scale, and at scale I think it's certainly not worth its own post, much less the fire-alarm level of this post.
Where we really part company is where Mr. Singal claims this as a symptom of "intellectual rot" and ties it to any particular sector of the intellectual spectrum. Singal is very good on spotting and calling bullshit where he sees it and I've been very impressed with his generally reasonable and even-handed calls in the time I've been reading his blog. I would never dispute that there is sloppy/dishonest argument among progressive and liberal writers, and that if you went looking you'd quickly pile up hundreds of examples. But I also would never concede that there is less sloppy/dishonest argument among MAGAish and conservative writers. (I know how I'd quantify the two sides' transgressions, but since it would completely reflect my liberal bias I know better than to make any claim about that.)
And I think Mr. Singal has no basis whatever to claim that the particular type of benign screw up Coviello's lapse represents (benign in that it does not affect his argument -- in an ideal world, Coviello would send Brooks an email apologizing for misattributing the sentiment, and perhaps he has) occurs more often among politically energized writers of any stripe than among the population at large. I'm sure we're seeing more of this than ever these days because publishing one's thoughts without time for careful review or editorial scrutiny has become a mass enterprise in e-zines, blogs, and social media of all kinds. But I really have no reason to believe that the human disposition to say and do stupid things has fundamentally changed since the electorate chose to put Plato to death.
Truthiness is the new standard. If it could be right at some primitive level (e.g., the quoted words are accurate) and advances one’s argument, that’s good enough. If you challenge it, and try to make the distinction between truthy and true, you must be the one with an agenda.
Or my hypothesis: he read the Brooks column quickly and carelessly in 2020, found what he expected Brooks to say and committed that to memory. Only that wasn't what the column actually said. He then wrote his current piece without checking-- because he was *sure* what he had read in 2020.
I'm not sure that's better, but it does seem like the most likely scenario-- and a cautionary tale for all about what we are sure is true.
Thanks for your comment. This was my take as well. Almost like a verbal-memory equivalent of a visual illusion. Like that sign with the words "I love Paris in the the springtime", and on a quick read you read only one "the". As you wrote, he remembered his interpretation of what he *expected* Brooks to write, not what Brooks actually wrote.
The only time I ever misquoted someone was in college. I failed to note that the person was quoting someone else—someone she had herself misquoted, as it turns out. She was furious with *me*.
And this guy Coviello got paid to TEACH? At Bowdoin, no less, which costs about $86,000 a YEAR. Back in the 1970s I attended a similar school—Pomona College—that now suffers from similar sloppy ideological indoctrination instead of rigor and critical thinking. My daughters went abroad for college and thank God for that.
He didn't just get paid to teach. As his article notes, he chaired the programs in Gay and Lesbian Studies and in Africana Studies. A look at his bio ( https://engl.uic.edu/profiles/coviello-peter/ ) suggests he's published quite a bit related to Gay and Lesbian Studies, and absolutely nothing related to Africana Studies.
I've been curious why Bowdoin felt that what qualifies someone to be chair of Gay and Lesbian Studies must also qualify them to be chair of Africana Studies.
He's not at Bowdoin anymore; he's at UIC. Here he (over)writes a 4,000 essay about how his department is underfunded and that's rilly bad. Seriously, man, that's some prose styling you've got there. Oof.
The entire Lit Hub article is based on the premise that no one worth any salt has any objections to the critical-theory approach to collegiate pedagogy that has become fashionable at liberal arts colleges. It is fine if the author disagrees with these people who harbor such objections. But he goes much further: He dismisses their objections as if they barely exist, except among a scattered, utterly wretched few. But they do exist, and the numbers who harbor them are robust. And for this reason, the entire essay falls apart upon close inspection.
Crit Theory and its priesthood and acolytes operate like a cult with cult dynamics: they have a special gnostic "critical consciousness" that makes them separate and superior to lesser mortals, they see everything and everyone in pure black and white (shades of gray are excuses for oppression), they encourage you to cut off friends and family if they try to talk you out of the cult, they refuse to debate or defend dogma and resort quickly to denunciation and ad hominem, they even have special language of alchemical jargon that can turn up into down and true into false (and vice versa). They have no use for art, literature or thought unless these things can be instrumentalized to meet their various personal, professional and career needs. They are eunuchs in a harem, sterile critics and enemies of works they could never themselves create.
Yes, this makes sense to me. I wonder where does curious and rigorous critical thought now live in the academic intellectual world?
Most people who either critique or defend critical theory (or really any political or social theory at all - if I see one more failure to grasp Schmitt's friend / enemy distinction, I may literally die) have actually read and understood it.
If one of my undergraduate students misunderstood or misrepresented an author in the way that Coviello has either misunderstood or misrepresented Brooks in this instance, I would certainly comment on it and probably mark them down.
Only “probably” mark them down?
Definitely mark them down if it occurred in any of the assessment items we actually set.
The thing to understand, the thing that should keep you up at night, is that all expertise today has the same problem. Medicine. Engineering. Public policy. All fail to do this kind of basic fact checking, and if you point these basic errors out, you get nothing but animosity.
No, in fact, there are many people in all those fields who fail to quote correctly and do basic factchecking, and many who do not. To make such sweeping statements as yours is the epitome of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Yes, there are some people left in academia who are generally interested in truth, but the influx of critical theory into nearly every domain (including the harder sciences now) has made it way worse. And when you have public communicators of science like Neil deGrasse Tyson who were once genuine defenders of reason capitulate, it makes me even more skeptical of genuine expertise. It's there, yes, but it's hard to find and it's receding.
It's like he was trying to plagiarize Brooks' point but forgot what he was doing half way.
He wasn't plagiarizing, he was quoting out of context.
Maybe you are strictly correct, but the idea of setting out to plagiarize something then then forgetting your point has a really nice comedic ring to it as a turn of phrase. Like someone "galloping madly off in all directions." (--Stephen Leacock.)
Comedic, perhaps, Ms. MacMilla, but he didn't forget the point, only the context of the quote. Brooks and he make the same point with the same quote, only he misunderstood/misremembered Brooks as speaking it to represent his own view.
The only quoted part was the first bit, the rest was stealing Brooks' point.
You don't need to have read Brooks to have this extremely commonplace idea, TJ. He liked Brooks' elegant phrasing. So do I. Too bad he messed up and didn't realize or remember that he and Brooks were in this case on the same side.
Trying to quote someone, forgetting their position, then stealing their actual position and presenting it as your own is plagiarism.
It would breach my employer's academic integrity management framework, but we would then invite the student to a discussion so that they could explain themselves and we could establish the degree of intentionality involved.
If you say so, TJ.
I’ve seen some extremely disingenuous interpretations of the Times article on Bluesky. True to form, no one challenged any of them.
I worked at a business paper where we would run a weekly Q&A with a local business person. One time we interviewed a guy who liked to quote lines from The Godfather as examples of business strategy. One of them was "Take the gun. Leave the cannoli," which he used as an example of keeping focused on business as opposed to personal stuff. That is the exact opposite of the actual dialogue of the movie. So we had to message him if he was OK with us flipping it. But he was so shocked that he had been misquoting the line, he asked us to just cut that part. Which we did.
Life is short. The oppressed- oppressor narrative is just too compelling to let it get complicated by facts, too little time. David Brooks be damned. He’s an old white guy isn’t he? Conservative even! Screw him.
How did you get into the slack channel you lifted this from?
🤣
Is it at all possible the LitHub piece was actually agreeing and appreciating David Brooks phrasing and making the same point? I can read the selection you quoted that way. It would of course be confusing to a reader unfamiliar with the column.
No I don’t think so. His reference to “the redoubtable” Brooks is clearly sarcastic, and saying it appeared in “an actual column” makes clear he is trying to say it’s amazing that anyone would write something so stupid.
Even if it was just "redoubtable", there would still be a way to read it charitably, but I can't make "an actual column" make sense in any way other than how Jesse read it.
Yeah, I'm trying to steel man this, and about the best that I can come up with is that he's basically saying, "even David Brooks admits that people on the right think this way". That he's sort of giving a backhanded citation of Brooks, noting how remarkable it is that someone might actually commit such an assertion about their own "side" to print. Even then, it's at best careless that he wouldn't make that clear.
The only other possibility I can come up with is that Brooks is mining this assertion from his own past work, and that the author simply provided the wrong link. Brooks has been nothing if not introspective lately about the conservative ideology he has maintained throughout his life—to go so far as to embrace Ta Na Hesi Coates, which I suppose might be a point in favor of the possibility of being positively referenced by a black intellectual.
Still, I guess it's possible that Brooks actually said this himself at one point, and that the author carelessly searched for the quote and didn't notice he had gotten the wrong article. That seems like a bit of a stretch though, since he claimed to have all but committed it to memory.
I was thinking along the lines of your first paragraph. The person I disagree with made a good point, and I've memorized the column. But it was just a thought.
I appreciate the impulse behind steelmanning, but there’s only so far one should have to bend over backwards (to mix metaphors).
I don't know Coviello's work. It's clear from brief descriptions on the UI website that he's part of the critical theory movement that has long been dominant in certain fields of the Humanities; how uncritically he adopts some of its more dogmatic elements I can't tell from Googling. But, honestly, "left-of-center" refers to about 40% of politically engaged Americans and the majority of those would be more aligned with Chuck Schumer than critical theory.
What Caviello got wrong was the ascription of this position to Brooks, rather than to those whom Brooks was criticizing. He was apparently working from memory and his memory betrayed him -- I couldn't count all the times I'd done something like this (thank the Lord none made it into print . . . I think). Or perhaps he did check Brooks' column and misread it (again). More stupid and less irresponsible, but not really all that hard to do. The bottom line is that he and Brooks agree that this is a simplistic reduction that those "right-of-center" make [please note scare quotes].
I admire Jesse's writing -- I'm a subscriber -- but elevating this to a salient symptom seems to me just as irresponsible as Coviello's sloppy citation. I think the lesson to draw is not that there is "intellectual rot in left-of-center spaces" than, "In times like these we all need to be more careful." Also, we all need to show a little grace.
I agree that charity is important, but it has limits. For Coviello to quote an article, and link directly to it, and make a basic error about its contents is not to be overlooked. I agree that it could well be an honest mistake, but this doesn't make it less concerning. Accidentally getting a quote entirely wrong when you claim to have nearly memorized the original source is a pretty major error.
Mr. Nicholas, Once again, he did not get the quote wrong. He actually said nothing untrue -- David Brooks did write it, just as Coviello said. What Coviello did was either to misread or misremember Brooks' column and construe Brooks as stating his own idea rather than ascribing it to others and suggesting it was a common response to minimize statements of those reporting experiences of racism, which he'd come to feel was not legitimate.
If you've read the Brooks column I think you might agree that it is one of Brooks' most interesting but most unclear op-eds, and the ascriptive nature of the phrases in question relies entirely on the "however" of the following sentence. Recalling a column like that and mischaracterizing the phrase because of sloppy reading, memory, or self-fact check is the type of error that anyone who is not perfect can make. It is not a "pretty major error." It's an error *anyone of any ideological persuasion* could make, and that used to be the sort of lapse editors routinely saved authors from.
What's a pretty major error in my view is taking this screw-up and inflating it until it's a symptom of intellectual rot over the huge range of an entire side of the political spectrum. It's "gotcha," "pearl clutching," "bothsideism," or whatever stupid meme you want to invoke, and that sort of stuff is destructive -- it can play no role in getting us out of the insanity of the present moment. I read Jesse Singal because I take his project to be precisely getting us out of that insanity, and I think it's a lot more important to call him out on what I see as his error than to pile onto Coviello.
I think we agree on the facts. I'm saying that ascribing the statement to Brooks when it was, in fact, a thing he was arguing against, is a major error.
I totally agree that it's an understandable error, a human one, etc., but I don't think that makes it less legitimate to point the error out.
I don't think Mr. Singal is saying that this one error, by itself, is proof of a vast lowering of left-wing intellectual standards. He's clearly saying that this is a recent example of something he has encountered over and over again, and provided links to articles that give several other examples. He as also written numerous articles in the past providing further examples.
I'm not saying I agree with him, but I don't think he's failed to make a reasonable case.
Glad we're set on the facts, Mr. Nicholas. I would agree it's an embarrassing error, but since it makes no difference to Coviello's actual argument whether Brooks was characterizing the statement as his own or as a common meme I don't think there's any objective way to assess it as major. This is a rabbit hole with no end, so let's acknowledge we differ.
I'm with you on your next point: it's perfectly legitimate to call it out. But it should be called out at scale, and at scale I think it's certainly not worth its own post, much less the fire-alarm level of this post.
Where we really part company is where Mr. Singal claims this as a symptom of "intellectual rot" and ties it to any particular sector of the intellectual spectrum. Singal is very good on spotting and calling bullshit where he sees it and I've been very impressed with his generally reasonable and even-handed calls in the time I've been reading his blog. I would never dispute that there is sloppy/dishonest argument among progressive and liberal writers, and that if you went looking you'd quickly pile up hundreds of examples. But I also would never concede that there is less sloppy/dishonest argument among MAGAish and conservative writers. (I know how I'd quantify the two sides' transgressions, but since it would completely reflect my liberal bias I know better than to make any claim about that.)
And I think Mr. Singal has no basis whatever to claim that the particular type of benign screw up Coviello's lapse represents (benign in that it does not affect his argument -- in an ideal world, Coviello would send Brooks an email apologizing for misattributing the sentiment, and perhaps he has) occurs more often among politically energized writers of any stripe than among the population at large. I'm sure we're seeing more of this than ever these days because publishing one's thoughts without time for careful review or editorial scrutiny has become a mass enterprise in e-zines, blogs, and social media of all kinds. But I really have no reason to believe that the human disposition to say and do stupid things has fundamentally changed since the electorate chose to put Plato to death.
Truthiness is the new standard. If it could be right at some primitive level (e.g., the quoted words are accurate) and advances one’s argument, that’s good enough. If you challenge it, and try to make the distinction between truthy and true, you must be the one with an agenda.
Jesse, good column. Since you are interested in Lithub, here's a piece I edited about them: https://arcmag.org/some-of-the-news-thats-fit-to-print/
Is it possible he is so media illiterate that since Brooks didn't put the sentence in quotes that he thought it was an expression of Brooks's words?
Or my hypothesis: he read the Brooks column quickly and carelessly in 2020, found what he expected Brooks to say and committed that to memory. Only that wasn't what the column actually said. He then wrote his current piece without checking-- because he was *sure* what he had read in 2020.
I'm not sure that's better, but it does seem like the most likely scenario-- and a cautionary tale for all about what we are sure is true.
Thanks for your comment. This was my take as well. Almost like a verbal-memory equivalent of a visual illusion. Like that sign with the words "I love Paris in the the springtime", and on a quick read you read only one "the". As you wrote, he remembered his interpretation of what he *expected* Brooks to write, not what Brooks actually wrote.
This is valuable. I live in terror of misquoting someone.
The only time I ever misquoted someone was in college. I failed to note that the person was quoting someone else—someone she had herself misquoted, as it turns out. She was furious with *me*.
And this guy Coviello got paid to TEACH? At Bowdoin, no less, which costs about $86,000 a YEAR. Back in the 1970s I attended a similar school—Pomona College—that now suffers from similar sloppy ideological indoctrination instead of rigor and critical thinking. My daughters went abroad for college and thank God for that.
He didn't just get paid to teach. As his article notes, he chaired the programs in Gay and Lesbian Studies and in Africana Studies. A look at his bio ( https://engl.uic.edu/profiles/coviello-peter/ ) suggests he's published quite a bit related to Gay and Lesbian Studies, and absolutely nothing related to Africana Studies.
I've been curious why Bowdoin felt that what qualifies someone to be chair of Gay and Lesbian Studies must also qualify them to be chair of Africana Studies.
Is that with room and board?
Yes
Good piece
He's not at Bowdoin anymore; he's at UIC. Here he (over)writes a 4,000 essay about how his department is underfunded and that's rilly bad. Seriously, man, that's some prose styling you've got there. Oof.
https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/memos-of-blood-and-fire/