Dealing with excess Sunday, October 17, 2021
Scene from "The Chair" Some blog readers, particularly those who subscribe to the NY Times, will be aware that the Times now has John McWhorter, associate professor of linguistics at Columbia, as a columnist. His function seems in part to be to comment on, and critique, on trends in academia related to excesses in identity politics of the type recently satirized by the Netflix series "The Chair." It's certainly not a Good Thing for academia when it is critiqued from the right for "cancel culture" and from the left in dramas such as "The Chair." We noted in a post a little over two weeks ago that UCLA is not immune from such attention.* (Yours truly has been asked about that UCLA case independently of the blog, so reports about it continue to circulate.)
The latest McWhorter column: At the University of Michigan recently, the music professor Bright Sheng — who’s had a superlative career as a composer, conductor and musician — wanted to share with his students how Giuseppe Verdi transformed Shakespeare’s “Othello” into the acclaimed opera “Otello.” That transformation is a rich and instructive topic in music composition. In September, Sheng showed his undergraduate composition seminar the 1965 film based on the Royal National Theatre’s stage production of “Othello,” with Laurence Olivier playing the title role in blackface makeup, in line with the custom of the era.
Some students took offense: One told The Michigan Daily that she was “shocked” and that Sheng failed to first contextualize what the class saw. Sheng apologized. Days later, 50
UCLA Faculty Association Blog: 4th Quarter 2021
