And a Good Riddance to Princeton’s Nancy Weiss Malkiel
Princeton Dean of the College Nancy Weiss Malkiel – the original Spawn of Satan, long before Drew Faust arrived on the scene – will not be coming back. The University has declined to renew her contract.
As a Princeton alum, this post is going to be rather personal. My only thought: thank God.
This is an excerpt from an interview I conducted with her several years ago in the Nassau Weekly. Malkiel reveals herself to be a true enemy of academic discourse.
DM: I wouldn’t measure success by who has or hasn’t read “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
JS: Don’t you think there are certain things that everyone should ---
DM: I don’t believe in a canon, I don’t believe any of our departments believe in a canon. Due to the explosion of knowledge in all of these fields it is such that they no longer operate that way. You should have a familiarity with, if you are an English major, different periods, different genres. It’s the same if you’re a history major. But it has long since passed since a department was willing to say confidently: “Here are the big books and you must’ve read those books.” Knowledge is too diverse and complicated in most fields to be able to do that anymore. I think that the biggest challenge is getting students better distributed among the departments. We have different levels of quality in education that our students receive while here because of the imbalance.
JS: What books have you read lately? What movies have you seen lately?
DM: I really enjoyed The Rule of Four this summer. I thought that was a good read, and I read it against the Da Vinci Code. That was interesting…
Malkiel is a woman who decried anti-intellectualism on campus but who rejected the idea of any sort of canon out of hand, whose own personal canon and primary reading list included “The Rule of Four” and “The Da Vinci Code,” who never left her office without her goddamn dog (which was itself a symbol of her husband’s conspicuous wealth and of her own conspicuous consumption), and who unilaterally launched a disastrous grade-deflation policy without engaging the student body in any debate over its course or its consequences.
Good riddance.
Update: Might we have jumped the gun? According to the Prince, the rumors of Malkiel's imminent demise are greatly exaggerated... We trust and pray that the Tory, not the Prince, is right...
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March 3rd, 2008 at 4:04 pm
FUCK YOU MALKIEL!!!!!
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:13 pm
good riddance indeed.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Yeah, I mean, I honestly don’t know anything about this lady, but fuck her for not accepting the conservative strictures foisted upon us by the racist, misogynistic scholars of our past. If I wanted a woman or minority’s opinion on something, I’d hire them to do some kind of menial labor for me.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:18 pm
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/03/03/20342/
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:29 pm
maybe the first time jacob’s ever wanted to agree with the Tory.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Oh no, she has a dog and she read The Da Vinci Code! What a terrible lady. I suspect there are deeper reasons behind your dislike of Malkiel.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Wow P11, that truly was some deeply insightful psychoanalysis. Maybe you’d have some idea of all the reasons not to like Malkiel if you’d been at the school for more than a semester.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:45 pm
more than a day, more like. goddamnit i hate that bitch.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Maybe he was referring to her reaction to “Top 10 Holocaust Movies?”
March 3rd, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Don’t you think yourself a mite presumptuous to label “The Rule of Four” and “The Da Vinci Code” some of her favorite books? All she said is that she enjoyed them.
March 3rd, 2008 at 6:59 pm
anyone defending malkiel needs to be punched hard in the throat. she is (was?) destroying princeton.
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Whatever one’s opinion of the Western canon, one cannot dispute the fact that there is a clear and linear tradition of influential thought with respect to Western literature, philosophy, and art. In order to claim any sort of expertise in these fields, one needs to have knowledge of this tradition. To claim that there is no set of books that one must have read is, quite simply, not true. You cannot be an expert in Western Philosophy if you have not read Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, etc. You cannot be an expert in Western Art if you are unfamiliar with Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, etc. I suppose one can claim that I am biased because my school has a Core dedicated to this very end, but I think my position is relatively unassailable.
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:26 pm
Columbia 08, you’re certainly right. I don’t believe anyone would impugn the importance of great books of history, and I don’t see Malkiel’s interview response as such. She certainly maintained the importance of fluency in different topics and genres of a subject. What she seemed less interested in was a required knowledge base. This shouldn’t be construed as anti-intellectual, but quite the opposite: a reaction to antiquated academic norms of intellectual discourse, whereby new forms of thought were squelched in honor of a hierarchical conservatism. Obviously a rational philosophy major is expected to be conversant in Descartes.
March 3rd, 2008 at 8:28 pm
how snarky of you, ivygate. I wish you had been able to come up with something better than her dislike for canon literature as a reason to hate her. As someone who is (thank god) neither at Princeton or in new jersey, I might need more reasons to hate her other that the fact that she reads trashy lit in the summer.
and the above post from Mr. Savage takes itself to seriously to be on this website. Isn’t there supposed to be … um…. er, humor?
March 3rd, 2008 at 8:35 pm
If only the study of humanities was as simple as engineering and science. There, you absolutely must know and be familiar with basic concepts before you can expand and combine them to form more complex topics.
Unfortunately, philosophy, literature, art, and a whole lot more is neither as direct nor as linear. I think that’s where the beauty of it lies, though.
Then again, many of the most influential mathematicians, physicists, etc. also refused to follow what was set down before them… and they were often bat-shit crazy to boot.
March 3rd, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Why couldn’t this have happened sooner? The only thing Dean Malkiel has done in her tenure is to force the grade deflation policy on students and faculty. I don’t think anyone in retrospect now looks kindly upon that policy. Since no other institutions took up arms against grade inflation it only served to hurt the past few graduating classes in their pursuits after college.
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:12 pm
Isn’t this post a little nasty?
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Maybe Jacob Savage’s was just written poorly, but I’m inclined to agree with “ummm”. If she has anti-intellectual leanings, this post didn’t convey them.
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:41 pm
yeah, well, no humor here. i got a bit carried away by my own anti-malkiel sentiment. but as you can see from just about every princetonian who’s posted a comment here, i’m not exactly the only one. too bad the news isn’t true.
March 3rd, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Yeah, just making sure that everyone reads the last part of your comment. No field is completely linear, but it’s rare to find a true scholar in any field that doesn’t know a lot about the “basic” fundamental concepts. This is at least as true in the humanities as it is in math and science. Go Core!
March 4th, 2008 at 12:35 am
@ummm: Dean Malkiel says in the interview:
“But it has long since passed since a department was willing to say confidently: “Here are the big books and you must’ve read those books.” Knowledge is too diverse and complicated in most fields to be able to do that anymore.”
…
I would argue that knowledge is NOT too diverse and complicated (within the scope of a given particular field) such that there are no canonical books that must be read in order for a student to claim expertise. While it is true that new work should not be ignored, there is no reason why we need to exclude either new or old ideas. While I agree with you that Malkiel’s position is not necessarily anti-intellectual, per se, it is, in my opinion, nonetheless ill-informed.
March 4th, 2008 at 12:42 am
The Tory has retracted its story.
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/03/03/20342/
March 4th, 2008 at 12:49 am
Holy shit, man. Are we honestly still fighting the canon wars? I had no idea that the seemingly outlandish and conservative views of Allen/Harold Bloom continue to hold such weight among our generation’s scholastic elite. If cultural indoctrination can be so easily swallowed by ostensibly critically-thinking Ivy Leaguers, I shudder at the thought of our nation’s ability to elect a black man or woman to the office of the presidency.
March 4th, 2008 at 1:18 am
You sir, are an idiot. Not only do you lump together the disparate opinions of Harold and Allen Bloom, but you also suggest that the Western Canon is based on something other than a merit-driven view of history. In other words, you’re alleging that the Western Canon is bigoted. I’m not white. I’m supposed to like Alice Walker. I think Alice Walker is pure shit. Shakespeare will always be better than Alice Walker. Shakespeare will always be white.
…
FYI: Harold Bloom did include the Mahabharata, Ramayana, Koran, Borges, Neruda, Marquez, Achebe, Rushdie, and more on his supposedly bigoted list of the Western Canon.
March 4th, 2008 at 7:07 am
Aristotle will always be there. No-one has ever been prevented from reading him. Stop worrying about whether one and all are required to do so during their undergraduate careers.
March 4th, 2008 at 8:10 am
for those of us not @ pee you, it’s a little hard to understand from the article why she is so loathed. could an “update” be provided with some more subtantive case against her? having a dog, arguing against a static curriculum, and having read the DVC hardly seem to correlate with the venom of people’s posts against her.
or is it just the grade deflation? in which case the argument against her comes off as rather self-serving.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Savage, this is what you cover: With absolutely no regard to student opinion (I want to emphasize this—NO regard), Malkiel pushed through a radical grade deflation policy that put Princetonians at a distinct disadvantage among other Ivies in the job and graduate school market. By Malkiel mandate, our GPAs were forcibly lowered: only so many A’s and B’s allowed per class, per department. So while the average Harvard student can cruise through college with a 3.6 or higher (80% graduate with honors, how nice), it requires twice the effort on the part of a Princetonian to maintain higher than a 3.5. The situation would not be so bad if Malkiel had advertised the changes to universities and employers, as she had promised to do, but she did NOT do so. The above posts are sufficient to demonstrate that very few people outside of Princeton have even heard of the policy. Malkiel claimed that our official transcripts would prominently mention the policy, but they do not: it is in light grey ink on the back of the transcript buried among miscellaneous details and description. As most applications are now facilitated by centralized data-gathering web-based services (LSAC, GMAC, etc), most graduate schools, be they law, business, medical, or academic, no longer even look at official transcripts. This is to say nothing of the perceptions of employers. Whom would you hire? The Harvard grad with the 3.6 (or higher), or the Princeton grad with a 3.5? In the uber-competitive world of finance in which many Princetonians seek employment, the choice is easily made. Princeton is alone in pursuing a grade deflation policy, and Princetonians are alone in suffering the consequences.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:18 am
IVYGATE PLEASE COVER THIS: http://www.columbiaspectator.com/node/29730
Easily one of the dumbest/sappiest things I’ve ever read.
March 4th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
anyone else think it’s funny that even jacob savage can’t work these stupid message boards and accidentally posted twice?
March 4th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
She’s also responsible for the D in PDF. It was previously only pass-fail.
March 4th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
With the massive exception of Math 55, Harvard has been cake so far. easier than HS by far
March 4th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
A large part of the reason that I turned down Princeton was my fear of the grade inflation… There went some of your yield, bitches.
March 4th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Between grade inflation and liberalizing curriculum requirements, it has become ridiculously easy to “succeed” in the Ivy League. The idea that someone with a 3.8 in Native American Studies or Studio Art has had even remotely similar education experience to a Chemistry major with a 3.6 is absolutely ludicrous. I can take tribal drumming next term and probably get an A and in some sense be seen as doing something more worthwhile than someone getting a B+ in advanced math classes. I don’t know if going back to a canonical curriculum is the answer, but the way things are now is out of hand.
March 4th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Ok Dartmouth, your red (man) baiting is showing. You could have went Jewish or African American Studies but you decided to go there. Your point is basically right but not because the curriculum could not be just as challenging, I just doubt (only by comparison with ethnic studies programs in general) that you are right. Same thing could be said of Poli Sci or Econ. That being said it is not because pursuing a Chem is so impossibly hard- it isn’t any harder than a good ethnic studies or soft science. But at least in our era of declining standards it is more quantifiable. As for the canonical curric- we need to expand it, reform it but NOT eliminate it. PS The article would have been more compelling if it concentrated on the grade deflation issue and omitted DM’s summer reading.
March 4th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
It would be nice if y’all could post a real retraction of the original story…the current update is tentative at best (doesn’t mention that the Tory itself disavowed the rumor-mongering). Seems a bit mean to leave the question open to those who don’t bother to click on the Prince link.
…On another note, I’m a little confused about the general perception of grade deflation as having a negative impact on grad admissions and job prospects. Does anyone have hard evidence to suggest deflation’s made it more difficult out there? Because the only non-anecdotal evidence I’ve seen (admittedly from the administration) indicates job/grad school prospects have gone up, not down, since grade inflation’s been implemented: http://www.princeton.edu/odoc/faculty/grading/faq/#comp000047219e980000000b7278c0
I know, there are likely other factors driving up those rates, but until someone does a comprehensive statistical analysis of the data showing that, controlling for the other factors, grade deflation has had a negative impact on the rates, I think we should take the raw data on its face value and admit that grade deflation hasn’t hurt grad/job prospects.
March 5th, 2008 at 12:09 am
Wow, I didn’t know that Dolores Umbridge was teaching at Princeton now.
March 5th, 2008 at 10:54 pm
Wait until we have hard data? You’re a fool. To get that data you would need to poll all the grads applying for jobs and follow-up on their offers. Then, you would need to get employers to say why the declined to interview/offer. That will NOT happen; employers will not give you that info. 1) It’s private; 2) it opens them up to lawsuits; and, 3) why would they take the time to respond to so many inquiries?
The effect on placements is probably negative; but, the effect on morale is clearly negative. I suppose she choked down her hubbie’s argument that markets are efficient ergo all employers will figure out that Princeton students are still just as smart and capable as ever. Except that the efficient markets hypothesis is pure garbage. Whatever her reasons, she hasn’t helped Princeton grads find it in their hearts to keep Princeton so well-funded. Way to undercut the development office!