By Drew Tipson

This is just getting ugly. I can’t make much sense of your supposed refutations of recent letters. Worse, just as Socrates defied the contrivances of Alcibiades at the conclusion of The Symposium, my coy, seductive teasing appears to have no effect upon you. Hence, I thought that instead of again trading barbs so deeply ironic that neither or us can tell who’s on who’s side, I’d be mostly serious this time and introduce myself and my concerns a little further.

You see, it might surprise you, but I’m actually also deeply suspicious of shoddy scholarship based upon generalized, vague, and monolithic social theories. I tore through the "classics" long before college, and continue to study them here with undiminished interest. I think Foucault was a terrible historian and a poor theorist in general. I can’t stand Lacan. I read through Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s "Fashionable Nonsense" with great glee. I too am a skeptical person who thinks that phrases like "deconstructing the discourse" are too often associated sloppy thinking and historically lax, politicized scholarship. Have I met students who I’d accuse of that? Certainly, everyone likes easy answers sometimes. But I’ve yet to meet a Wesleyan professor I could fairly accuse of spouting Political Correct nonsense. And believe me, I’d have no qualms doing so. I’d enjoy it just as much, perhaps more than I enjoy chatting with you. Yet even those few courses I’ve taken which you’d probably find objectionable (Porn, Women Studies, and Astronomy), were commendable in their rigor, comprehensiveness, and academic integrity.

I’m therefore not quite sure what you think we did in COL 289 (you not having been there), but contrary to Karen Gross’s implication in her otherwise interesting column a few weeks back, censorship and notions of decency were key and continually contentious issues in the class, not jokes. No one was patting each other on the back for being sophisticated and risqué about sex. The course was not a big liberal circle-jerk or an excuse to stare at gritty pictures of masturbating midgets. We now have the global porn ring that is the internet, after all. Heck, in light of that monstrosity alone, don’t you think it’s academically valid to inquire why such a vast portion of our nation’s economy is now devoted to producing smutty pictures and grotesque, demeaning pleasures? You might even be surprised in the ways in which the smut you despise really relies primarily on people like you for much of its transgressive power.

You also asked for a bit of my response to Professor Schwarcz’s comments, so here goes:

"Professor, I know from experience that it is difficult, if not impossible, to have dialogue about something another person considers to be "social trash" devoid of any instructive value. I can only note that what a society tries to throw away can often teach us a great deal. I also find it very difficult to believe that among the hard facts of Chinese History there is no room for an academic assessment of, for instance, the formalized systems of prostitution that existed in several dynastic periods."

Anyway, Martin, despite waving your personal copy of Homer’s collected works around in a vaguely menacing fashion, I can’t see that you’ve had anything substantive to say about this issue. Perhaps you’ve just been distracted in trying to answer the spate of angry letters flying at you. But I, for one, would like to hear what you’d teach me in my four years of liberal arts schooling and exactly why each element is important or productive. Frankly, I’d like to know exactly what "factual information about the real world" you and Professor Schwarcz think I’m missing. Martin Benjamin’s Money? Meet Martin Benjamin’s mouth.

Tipson is a member of the class of 2000.