Collect The Devil And Webster Narrated By Jean Hanff Korelitz Volume
book started as a toughsledding,star dud and built its way up to three, The author feels, especially in the beginning of the novel, the need to prove she has a verbose vocabulary and command of the minutiae of collegiate doings.
She pulls us through the life of a prestigious smallcollege president Naomi Roth, Roth is beleaguered by a student protest that will not end, and I admit that I wanted to know how it would all turn out.
After all, I too went to a small, liberal arts college whose name is actually mentioned on page! If you hang with it, there is a story to be told here after the initial slog.
Only picked this up after my spouse and one of her colleagues read and enjoyed it, . . and, well, I understand why they recommended it, and it struck close to home on oh so many issues, but I can't say that I loved it.
. . but I did enjoy it, . . even if it took me a while to buy in, Once I did buy in, the pages kept turning, even if I wasn't particularly satisfied with the end game,
Although a number of reviewers described it as satire, . . and I guess I see that or maybe I've just lost my sense of humor these lastyears, but it didn't resonate the same way, that, say, Richard Russo's Straight Man did for me, but that's a different animal.
If nothing else, the book didn't lack for modern, controversial, indeed, polarizing themes, Whether there were a halfdozen too many, I dunno, But I think I found myself contemplating the themes and the factions and their positions to the exclusion of the storyline more often than I would have liked.
Or maybe I was more interested in the constantly changing background than the primary story,
As an academic and former administratorofsorts married to an academic, plenty of the themes resonated, and having more than passing familiarity with not quite analogous small, academically rigorous liberal arts schools hypothetically mentioned in the book, the tone felt more accurate than not.
But did that justify the whole That's another story,
Ultimately, one wonders whether the book was written for that strange demographic that populates and revolves around elite with an emphasis on the elite academic institutions, or conversely, whether someone who is largely removed from the orbit/concerns/culture of elite schools would find this interesting, horrifying, or selfobsessed to the point of psychotic.
Given the general population even the general population of readers, far more students/alums experience large often excellent state colleges and universities, . . and the rare reference to a large state University felt nothing short of pejorative to this reader, at least,
Or maybe it was just a novel,
Elephant in the room: the narrative is very much driven by what is going on in the protagonist's head, and so, if you strongly prefer the show don't tell approach, this might not be your cup of tea.
There is so much that this book gets right that the big thing it gets wrong is not only jarring but disappointing because it takes you out of the narrative.
The author deeply understands selective admissions and the life of an elite northeastern college, The portrait of the president really captures the loneliness of women in power, and it is both heartbreaking and inspiring at the same time,
But if you know higher ed, you know there is no possible way a rich school would ever let the incident get out of hand.
The fact that there are no hordes of lawyers and PR flacks may make for better reading if you don't know colleges, but the improbability of the lone president facing the crisis alone kept pulling me out of the narrative.
It just couldn't happen.
I still enjoyed the book, found it filled with some great insights the explanation of why student radicals need to be present for every generation is worth the price of admission.
She is a good writer it was the implausibility that kept me from giving it five, Naomi Roth is the president of prestigious Webster College in Massachusetts, a two hundred and fifty year old institution that has weathered its share of controversy.
Once the bastion of white and prosperous Christian males minorities need not have applied in the past, Roth now prides herself on her school's reputation for academic excellence, intellectualism, open dialogue, and multiculturalism.
Naomi, who is unmarried, has a daughter, Hannah, a sophomore at Webster, Everything seems to be going Naomi's way, until suddenly, it isn't,
When a popular black professor is denied tenure, a student protest erupts, spearheaded by a Palestinian student named Omar Khayul, Omar and his fellow demonstrators pitch tents on Webster's grounds, and refuse to communicate with the administration, Matters escalate, and Naomi, in spite of her tolerant attitude towards the protestorsshe was an outspoken advocate for various causes back in the daybecomes the target of vicious and false attacks.
Once the media outlets get wind of the story, Naomi fears that she will be unable to bring Webster back to a semblance of normalcy.
"The Devil and Webster," by Jean Hanff Korelitz, is an involving tale about a bright, selfconfident, and forward thinking woman who is faced with a crisis she cannot handle.
Truth, alas, is the first casualty when a war of words breaks out, and Naomi is hampered by the fact that the tenure process is confidential.
The author, who writes intelligently thoughtfully, and elegantly, makes the point that being on the side of the angels does not protect an individual from false accusations and venomous attacks.
We live in a ragefilled environment these days everyone has his or her own agenda and fearlessly pursues it, Although we care about Naomi and admire her fortitude under fire, the book could have been even better had it been told in the first person from Naomi's perspective had Korelitz filled in some glaring holes about Naomi's shadowy past and had the author fleshed out certain characters, such as Omar Khayul and Naomi's friend, Francine, who is Webster's Dean of Admissions.
Although it deals with meaningful themes concerning identity politics and the rebelliousness of youth, "The Devil and Webster" has an unfinished feel about it, as if some important matters were never adequately addressed.
Existential Storms in Monastic Teapots
The modern university started life in theth century as an extension of the medieval monastery.
Its mission was to train
functionaries, mainly in Ecclesiastical Law and associated writing skills, to serve the needs of the huge international clerical state, Times have certainly changed: the Church is in decline the Law is still with us but rather more corporate than ecclesiastical and the young people who participate in it are likely not as rigorously celibate as their predecessors.
Nevertheless, despite the secularisation of the world, its function, and its denizens, the university maintains much of its monastic origins, It remains a place apart from worldly affairs, that is to say, economics and its demands to make a living, Like all enclosed communities it intensifies familial tensions among surrogate siblings and with the in loco parentis staff members so that otherwise trivial conflicts become worthy as the focus for the commitment of ones young life.
And because the monastic organisational ethos is one of voluntary cooperation not hierarchical direction, it is almost impossible to manage,
The university is the institution that Korelitz knows well, in its modern form to be sure, but also in its monastic temperament, She knows that behaviour in the university isnt governed by political correctness but by monastic mores, Ones fellow monks/students, no matter how annoying, are required to work out their own salvation, Besides, they may end up being ones superior one day no sense in alienating a prospective abbot or abbess,
The essence of monastic/university life is routine, everything occurs at its set time and season, As Korelitz says about her protagonist, a university president, who confronts the university as “a phenomenon that would return to bedevil her life again and again over the following years: institutional tradition.
” Korelitzs Dartmouthlike descriptions of these institutional traditions are not much different from similar descriptions from Oxford, Paris, and Bologna fromyears ago, Term times, lecture times, tutorial protocols, examination rubrics, all constitute a liturgy which is more rigid and more rigidly defended than any other formal regulations.
Weaving ones way through such a swamp of the way weve always done things” is as difficult for an administrator as it is for the students and teachers.
Disrupting routine is the only real tool of protest available, but its usually effective,
Monastic establishments depend vitally on benefactors, Traditionally these were the local nobility but corporate donors have slid easily into the role, The latter exercise their influence subtly but decisively, particularly through their influential power of appointment, It is this power indeed that connects the monastery, ancient or modern, to the worldly realities of economics and meaningful politics, The issue of lay patronage over church appointments was a major issue of the Middle Ages, The Church won the battle around the end of the first millennium but lost the war by the end of the second, The result is the modern universitys tenuous formal independence, Influence not power rules. And influence is very quiet about itself,
The issues addressed within the modern universities are different in name but not in substance from those that were popular in ancient monasteries: who is to be saved and how.
Perhaps the most urgent focus for this issue over the last several decades has been gender only partly because gender touches on sex much more because gender is a surrogate for the question of the orderliness of the universe followed closely by race, largely because it too has been such a source of privilege, and consequently order.
Two genders three if one includes the neuter but this has never been problematic since it refers to nonsexual beings is the ancient presumption upon which most sacred scriptures are founded.
What happens when gender is considered a spectrum rather than binary There are also two races white and all others, So what happens when the subtleties of race confront the meritocratic rules of white liberal society
Monastic eruptions and explosions are what happens.
Very quickly everyone becomes a fundamentalist, The fight is ostensibly about what constitutes reality: Gender abnormalities are just that abnormal vs, Gender abnormalities are the norm, Similarly Race distinctions are misleading vs, Race distinctions are unavoidable. Students believe they know the way really is and they never like it,
The fights, conflicts, protests at university, however, are actually not about reality, whats really there, but about the the attitude toward whatever there really is.
The issues, that is, arent ontological but ethical, This is what gets worked out in the monastery/university environment, Problems that previously have no name are articulated and argued, Its messy, beyond rational comprehension, and only temporary since the population is in flux, But its somehow effective.
Thus a university experience is inevitably moral, All concerned students, teachers and administrators eventually find they are challenged to look not there, in the objective world for solutions to problems, but here, in themselves for how they are complicit in whatever is occurring.
The students are formally instructed by their in the objective realities of the cosmos, while they all are socially indoctrinated in the acceptance of the subjective responsibility for their own psychic stance towards it.
It looks chaotic, sometimes nonsensical, but Korelitz understands what its about and she tells the story well in The Devil and Daniel Webster, .