William M. Chace, in “Affirmative Inaction” (Winter 2011), quotes Lyndon Johnson: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” Johnson is speaking not of a group but of a person, who, handicapped by history, culture, or misfortune, cannot be expected to compete at first with others. When affirmative-action proponents specified groups, they assumed that all minorities were disadvantaged and all whites privileged, creating a situation where the children of middle-class and wealthy minorities used the truly disadvantaged to claim an easy pass to admissions. And when affirmative action morphed into quotas, the outcomes were often substituted for opportunity and performance, as institutions were pressured to assure success.
Affirmative action, without quotas, is necessary and desirable, but the criteria must be applied equally to individuals, not to groups, and without regard to religion, color, or ethnicity. After all, isn’t that what we were talking about in the first place?
John Dente
Wilmington, Delaware
William M. Chace replies: I agree with John Dente, and so did the Supreme Court, that “affirmative action, without quotas, is necessary and desirable, but the criteria for both admission and achievement must be applied equally to individuals, not to groups—and without regard to religion, color, or ethnicity.” This is one way of understanding what the Court meant when it allowed academic institutions to take race into consideration as one of several factors in the admission process. Each individual applicant should, it said, be evaluated on the basis of all he or she could bring to that process. Groups were not to be admitted, but individuals, assessed one by one, could be.
Kitty Kelley (“Unauthorized, But Not Untrue,” Winter 2011) was absolutely correct in her jaundiced assessment of “authorized” biographies. The real or perceived notion that the subject of a biography exerts editorial power over the final product undermines any credibility the work may have.
Kelley’s critics sound foolishly self-serving when they assail her “unauthorized” (read: independent) investigations and yet fail to identify a single factual error in her work.
A lifelong writer and editor, I ruefully agree with Kelley’s take on the declining state of American journalism generally. As coverage of celebrities and politics wallows in the shallows of banality, it’s increasingly obvious that our media are manipulated. The lust for profit, combined with craven institutional cowardice, reinforces a statist agenda by dumbing down the daily “news” report.
Kenric Ward
Fort Pierce, Florida
Kitty Kelley wonders why people don’t like unauthorized biographers. Oprah, for example, worked for decades building her brand. Whether or not you’re a fan, you must concede that Oprah’s success is phenomenal. Along comes Kitty to leech onto Oprah’s name and fame to sell a biography. The goal, according to Kelley, is to write the truth about Oprah. The truth is that Oprah has entertained and taught millions for decades, and done it with grace. Kelley’s objective is to find something that will capture the media’s attention and get her on talk shows, something out of character with what the public thinks of as Oprah’s image. One act or careless word or bad relationship of Oprah’s is elevated by the biographer to the importance of Oprah’s lifetime body of work. The merit of a man, or a daytime talk show hostess, is not measured by one act. Everybody knows that, except for Kitty Kelley.
Joyce O’Connor
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Thank you for Richard Restak’s article in the Winter 2011 Scholar, touching upon some of the more superficial domains of philosophy now being investigated with imaging by neuroscientists, such as time sense and the phenomenon long known as “secondary elaboration.”
Though Dr. Restak may not have been taught about the brain’s plasticity by his medical school professors, his assertion that brain plasticity is a 10-year-old idea is just patently wrong. Brain plasticity was first conceptually implied in 1957 when a young doctoral candidate, Bernadine Smith, showed that intensive teaching could change a child’s abilities as measured by IQ tests. By 1964, two laboratories had independently proven that brain morphology and chemistry could be altered by experience. Less than two years later, Marian Diamond demonstrated that the brains of animals are altered in mass, density, and volume by stimulation at any age and not—with the notable exception of primary language acquisition—only during certain windows of development as had been previously thought.
The leap to generalizing from these studies in mammals to humans was just a formality, as the educational psychology literature from the 1970s makes plain.
Richard Barnett Bloom
West Chester, Pennsylvania
Richard Restak replies: Plasticity was long “conceptually implied” in the pedagogical literature, but the extent of plasticity in the microarchitectural, chemical, and molecular domains remains even today a disputed topic. For instance, while it is true that the brain produces new brain cells throughout its life span, it is known with confidence to do so only in certain anatomical sites. Further, the plasticity I was referring to in my essay was not the experimentalist’s ability to alter the animal brain by surgical manipulation but the more recent discovery of the normal human brain’s short-term modifiability. The act of reading this sentence, for instance, changes the brain of the reader (as shown via neuroimaging) during the few seconds it takes to read it.
My overriding thought while reading Paula Marantz Cohen’s essay, “The Seduction” (Winter 2011), was simple: I wish I had had a professor like her in college, even once!
I loved reading from my earliest days, but the dreadfully boring and overanalytical literature classes I took in college, requiring voluminous amounts of reading, nearly made me a lifelong nonreader. It seemed to me that the teachers were trying to make us hate what we were assigned to read. Even if you love something, being forced to consume it is not going to make you a lifelong fan. Nonetheless, I “overcame” and have continued to this day (at 50 years old) to be a voracious reader. I’m sure I’m not alone; Cohen’s article should be required reading for all literature professors worldwide.
Andrew B. Simmons
Chicago, Illinois
Congratulations to Paula Marantz Cohen for adjusting her teaching approach to meet the needs of her students, even at the risk of being criticized by her colleagues for resorting to mere high school methods. Her decision to be more selective in course requirements, to work along with students in close-reading exercises, and even to reach outside the prescribed syllabus when another reading selection becomes relevant to discussion, honors the fact that students of literature, regardless of age or college major, need to be shown how to engage themselves in the text, how to actively read in order to gain control and confidence, and how to understand the opportunities for discovery that literature offers.
What Professor Cohen has employed in her classroom is innovative only in the sense that it is apparently rare at the college level. Her methods are actually tried and true; they simply need to be recognized not as alternative, or even lesser approaches, but as teaching, pure and simple. In these days when fewer and fewer young people are choosing to read for pleasure, it is essential for the teacher of literature to show them what they are giving up. Literature teachers have the power to nurture the students they serve. They also have the power to deaden intellectual curiosity. Professor Cohen has effectively addressed this significant responsibility. May others heed the call.
Anne Maier
Rochester, New York
I appreciated Colum McCann’s reflection in “The Word Made Flesh” (Winter 2011) on boxing as a metaphor for writing—and I suppose that makes the editor the cut-man. But I’ve always preferred the metaphor of writing as an amusement park. Like a Disneyland technician, the writer creates a sense of wonder—a magic kingdom—all the while hiding the gears, levers, wires, mirrors, and trapdoors.
It’s not as much fun as “punching a spot behind your opponent’s head,” but it’s more effective.
Edwin Battistella
Ashland, Oregon
William Zinsser’s articles—on the net and in print—are always entertaining; I especially enjoy his pieces on writing.
Barbara Springer
Cloudcroft, New Mexico
Thank you, William Zinsser, for “Zinsser on Friday.” I look forward to it each week. It turns out, I have been a reading fan of yours since your years as editor of the Yale Alumni Magazine in the 1970s.
Spence Toll
Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania
