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Mark Bauerlein | |
|---|---|
 Bauerlein in 2011 | |
| Born | 1959 |
| Alma mater | University of California, Los Angeles |
| Occupation | Academic |
| Employer | Emory University |
Mark Weightman Bauerlein (born 1959) is an English professor emeritus at Emory University and a senior editor of First Things . [1] He also serves as a visitor of Ralston College, a start-up liberal arts college in Savannah [2] and as a trustee of New College of Florida.
Bauerlein earned his doctorate in English from UCLA in 1988, having completed a thesis on poet Walt Whitman under the supervision of Joseph N. Riddel. [3]
Bauerlein is a Professor Emeritus of English who taught at Emory University from 1989 to 2018, [4] with a brief break between 2003 and 2005 to work at the National Endowment for the Arts, serving as the director of the Office of Research and Analysis. [5] [6] While there, Bauerlein contributed to an NEA study, "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America". [7] In 2023, he was appointed by Ron DeSantis to the board of trustees of New College of Florida during a controversial purge at the college of the state university system.
Bauerlein has said he strongly opposes implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in colleges.
“I urge, and I’ve written this, that all DEI initiatives be eliminated from higher education, that DEI offices be absolutely closed, shut down,” Bauerlein said. “They lead students to develop bad ideas.”
According to Bauerlein, when DEI is incorporated into academia, the peer review process becomes corrupted.
“When you start saying, ‘Oh, we need to publish more writers who are not white men,’ the process has been corrupted,” Bauerlein said. “Right off the bat, standards go down. Peer review becomes politicized. This is the beginning of the fall of a discipline, and I’ve seen it happen many, many times.” [8]
Bauerlein's books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997) and The Pragmatic Mind: Explorations in the Psychology of Belief (1997). He is also the author of the 2008 book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30), [9] [10] which won the Nautilus Award. [11]
Bauerlein explains how his experience as a teacher led to his writing of The Dumbest Generation:
Because in my limited experience as a teacher, I’ve noticed in the last 10 years that students are no less intelligent, no less ambitious but there are two big differences: Reading habits have slipped, along with general knowledge. You can quote me on this: You guys don’t know anything. [12]
Apart from his scholarly work, he publishes in popular publications such as The Federalist, Chronicle of Higher Education , The Washington Post , The Wall Street Journal , The Weekly Standard and The Times Literary Supplement . [3]
In 2022, Bauerlein published a sequel to The Dumbest Generation titled The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth To Dangerous Adults. [13]
In 2012, Bauerlein announced his conversion to Catholicism. [14] He has described himself as an "educational conservative,” while he socially and politically identifies as being "pretty ... libertarian", according to an interview conducted by Reason magazine. [15] He endorsed Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. [16] Bauerlein has an identical twin brother. [14]
Stanley Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. Fish has previously served as the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a professor of law at Florida International University and is dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), formerly called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit civil liberties group founded in 1999 with the mission of protecting freedom of speech on college campuses in the United States. FIRE changed its name in June 2022, when it broadened its focus from colleges to freedom of speech throughout American society.
New College of Florida is a public liberal arts college in Sarasota, Florida. The college is a member of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges. In 2023, the state government of Florida overhauled its board of trustees in an attempt to transform the honors college into a conservative institution modeled on Hillsdale College. Since then, nearly 40% of faculty have resigned. New College has the smallest student enrollment in the State University System of Florida with 689 students as of 2022.
Azar Nafisi is an Iranian-American writer and professor of English literature. Born in Tehran, Iran, she has resided in the United States since 1997 and became a U.S. citizen in 2008.
William James Collins is an American poet who served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He was a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, retiring in 2016. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. In 2016, Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As of 2020, he is a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.
Dorothy Allison is an American writer from South Carolina whose writing focuses on class struggle, sexual abuse, child abuse, feminism and lesbianism. She is a self-identified lesbian femme. Allison has won a number of awards for her writing, including several Lambda Literary Awards. In 2014, Allison was elected to membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Craig Womack is an author and professor of Native American literature. He self-identifies as being of Creek and Cherokee descent, but is not enrolled with any Native American tribe. Womack wrote the book Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, a book of literary criticism which argues that the dominant approach to academic study of Native American literature is incorrect. Instead of using poststructural and postcolonial approaches that do not have their basis in Native culture or experience, Womack claims the work of the Native critic should be to develop tribal models of criticism. In 2002, Craig won Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year Winner. Along with Robert Allen Warrior, Jace Weaver and Greg Sarris, Womack asserted themselves as a nationalist, which is part of an activist movement. The movement significantly altered the critical methodologies used to approach Native American literature.
William Craig Rice was an American educator. He was the Director of the Division of Education Programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Charles R. Kesler is an American political scientist. He is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University. He is editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and the author of several books. He also serves on the Board of Trustees at New College of Florida.
Andrew Warren Sledd was an American theologian, university professor and university president. A native of Virginia, he was the son of a prominent Methodist minister, and was himself ordained as a minister after earning his bachelor's and master's degrees. He later earned a second master's degree and his doctorate.
Aliteracy is the state of being able to read but being uninterested in doing so. This phenomenon has been reported on as a problem occurring separately from illiteracy, which is more common in the developing world, while aliteracy is primarily a problem in the developed world. In 2002, John Ramsey defined aliteracy as a loss of a reading habit usually since reading is slow and frustrating for the reader.
Isabel Wilkerson is an African-American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
Laurie L. Patton is an American academic, author, and poet who is the 17th president of Middlebury College and incoming president of President of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She will complete her service to Middlebury in December 2024 and begin her presidency of the Academy in January 2025.
Emory Williams, Sr. was an American businessman and entrepreneur. He was the chief financial officer of Sears Roebuck during the 1960s, when Sears was the largest retailer in the world. He went on to become president and chairman of the Sears Bank, a Chicago lender, and the president and chairman of Chicago Milwaukee Corp, a railroad and real estate company, before setting up manufacturing businesses in China in the 1990s.
A classic is a book accepted as being exemplary or particularly noteworthy. What makes a book "classic" is a concern that has occurred to various authors ranging from Italo Calvino to Mark Twain and the related questions of "Why Read the Classics?" and "What Is a Classic?" have been essayed by authors from different genres and eras. The ability of a classic book to be reinterpreted, to seemingly be renewed in the interests of generations of readers succeeding its creation, is a theme that is seen in the writings of literary critics including Michael Dirda, Ezra Pound, and Sainte-Beuve. These books can be published as a collection such as Great Books of the Western World, Modern Library, or Penguin Classics or presented as a list, such as Harold Bloom's list of books that constitute the Western canon. Although the term is often associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature from all traditions, such as the Chinese classics or the Indian Vedas.
Donald Phillip Verene is an American philosophy professor and author. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Emory University.
Ronald Dion DeSantis is an American politician serving since 2019 as the 46th governor of Florida. A member of the Republican Party, he served as the U.S. Representative from Florida's 6th congressional district from 2013 to 2018. DeSantis was a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, withdrawing his candidacy in January 2024.
Robert Alexander Andrade is a Republican member of the Florida Legislature representing the state's 2nd House district, which includes parts of Escambia and Santa Rosa counties.
Florida Senate Bill 266, also commonly known by its Florida House of Representatives counterpart House Bill 999, is Florida legislation relating to public universities within the state. Under the legislation, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and certain college majors relating to DEI would be eliminated or heavily restricted; the legislation phrases such courses as being based on "unproven, theoretical, or exploratory content". The legislation would prohibit state universities from including DEI and political identity filters within higher education hiring processes, and bans the usage of critical race theory in hiring. The law was filed in the Florida House of Representatives on February 21, 2023, by Republican representative Alex Andrade, while a Florida Senate version was filed seven days later by Republican state senator Erin Grall. The senate version of the legislation, which was noted as less intense in its requirements than the house version, ultimately passed and was signed by governor Ron DeSantis, concurrently with the similar Florida House Bill 931, on May 15, 2023. SB 266 took effect on July 1, 2023.
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