I Think This Course Was Offered At Centre

Roger Kimball takes down the academy...again.

Readers will recall that the Greek hero Hercules was required to perform a series of twelve labors, each seemingly impossible for a mortal. The fifth of these labors was to clean the Augean Stables in a single day--a task of ablution that can truly be described as Herculean since the huge stables were home to thousands of cattle. He managed to do it by diverting two rivers so that they rushed through the stables, flushing them of the accumulated ordure.

Clever chap, Hercules. And one, I have often thought, whose services would be of particular use to the contemporary university. Consider this newly posted "call for papers" from two professors, one at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the other at University College, London:

“Toilet Papers: The Gendered Construction of Public Toilets”

What could this possibly mean, you ask? Olga Gershenson (the U. Mass gal) and Barbara Penner (University College), the editors of this proposed contribution to the annals of scholarship, explain:

We invite contributions for the edited collection Toilet Papers: The Gendered Construction of Public Toilets.

Public toilets are amenities with a functional, even a civic, purpose. Yet they also act as the unconscious of public spaces. They can be a haven: a place to regain composure, to ‘check one’s face,’ or to have a private chat. But they are also sexually-charged and transgressive spaces that shelter illicit sexual practices and act as a cultural repository for taboos and fantasies.

This collection will work from the premise that public toilets, far from being banal or simply functional, are highly charged spaces, shaped by notions of propriety, hygiene and the binary gender division. Indeed, public toilets are among the very few openly segregated spaces in contemporary Western culture, and the physical differences between ‘gentlemen’ and ‘ladies’ remains central to (and is further naturalized by) their design. As such, they provide a fertile ground for critical work interrogating how conventional assumptions about the body, sexuality, privacy, and technology can be formed in public space and inscribed through design.

Stop the presses! Public toilets are "shaped by notions of propriety, hygiene and the binary gender division." Have you ever heard of anything more startling? No wonder academics at the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts and one of London's most distinguished universities are excited. You see what new avenues of research our humanities departments are opening up!

What you really see, of course, is the pathetic intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the humanities. "Fertile ground," forsooth! It is certainly well-manured ground. "[I]nterrogating how conventional assumptions about the body, sexuality, privacy, and technology can be formed in public space and inscribed through design" -- what nonsense. And what clichéd nonsense to boot. Is there a computer program that inserts some form of the verb "interrogate" and "inscribe" every thirty words? Or are Ms. Gershenson and Ms. Penner so thoroughly indoctrinated in the rhetoric of lit-crit-speak that they naturally emit this sort of rubbish?