How incestuous.  Methinks, though, Mr. Brooks, that universities might have an easier time avoiding being "professionalized information-transmission systems" (and i think Michael Denning is more correct when he describes the primary function of the university as evaluation - the distribution of grades/transcripts/letters of recommendation as capital - rather than even a professionalized form of "information-transmission,") if they were less intent on lavishing perks and praises on a small elite minority within the professoriat (the Hills, the Blooms, the Gaddises, Kennedys, Kagans et caetera,) while brutally repressing the (omni)presence, and ignoring the vast reliance on and contributions of the majority of adjunct and graduate student instructors (whose pay and benefit packages in no way resemble that of Mr. Hill) but who do around 70% of all of Yale's teaching.  I suspect that at Yale and at universities, colleges, and high schools around the country, there are many far better teachers than "Charlie" Hill, far more committed to their students, (and, to boot, not culpable for the massacre of god knows how many Nicaraguans, but i suppose it isn't polite to talk about that now that Charlie just wants us to bomb those Arabs) not recognized by Brooks not only because of his own ideological biases(for this article is a neocon love fest after all - except for Worthen, i think) but because they may  1) not  encourage the egocentric hero-worship Hill likes to drown himself in (as, i think, do Gaddis and Spence and Kennedy, if to a lesser extent,) and 2) be too busy trying to get some form of job security, or teach seven hours a week while writing books or dissertations or articles to sit for repeated interviews with someone writing a book about them (how the fuck is that a shining example of platonic teaching anyway?) or are wholly excluded from the academic celebrity culture in which Brooks woudl clearly like to situate himself with this piece by virtue of doing academically rigorous work not designed to bolster the neoconservative project of a new american exceptionalist imperial vision.

 

Not to mention the fact that the university has been waging a bloody fight to keep thousands of these teachers silent for the last 17 or so years...