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Wednesday, May 04, 2005

Casting about

A shorter post today—and, just to thank everyone for sticking with me through the last two 2000-word affairs, I’m tossing in a Fun Game as well.

OK, so everyone’s asking me if I’ve seen the profile of David Horowitz in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education.  Well, of course I have!  I’m a shadow member of the Network, after all.  And with all due respect to Siva, whose response you should definitely check out, I happen to think that the article is an important Next Step in the enterprise of getting Horowitz to discredit himself (thus distributing the “discrediting” task more evenly and fairly).

When last we heard David’s fantasies about professors, he was telling people that we make $150,000 and work six hours a week.  Here’s the update:

To gain the recognition he believed he deserved, Mr. Horowitz established [the Center for the Study of Popular Culture], which features conservative programs such as catered lunches with right-leaning luminaries who discuss their latest books. “I don’t have a platform in The New York Times,” he says.

If he were liberal, he contends, he could be an editor at the Times or a department chairman at Harvard University. And his life story would have already been told on the big screen. Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, his autobiography, has been out for eight years. “Someone would have made a film out of it if I was a leftist,” he says bitterly.

He claims he would make more money as a liberal, too, “at least three times,” what he earns now. According to the center’s most recent available tax form, Mr. Horowitz received an annual salary of $310,167 in 2003. He declines to give his current income, but in addition to his salary, Mr. Horowitz receives about $5,000 for each of the 30 to 40 campus speeches he gives each year.

As it happens, my salary of $930,501 is precisely three times Horowitz’s, and it’s a tad on the high end for Penn State English professors, but there’s a reason for that.  When I was offered this job five years ago, the dean said, “what can I tell you about Penn State?” I replied, “Penn State looks just great, frankly, but I’d need to be paid three times whatever David Horowitz makes.” “Done,” said the dean.  And you know, $930,501 really goes a long way in central Pennsylvania!  David didn’t even mention that—when you factor in the cost of living in State College as compared to Los Angeles, liberal professors in college towns really do turn out to be among the nation’s financial elite.  And you all thought we were merely hoarding cultural capital!  Bwah hah hah hah hah hah hah.

Then again, I’ve gotten paid $5,000 for a lecture exactly zero times—and my lectures are usually written out word by word, and they involve actual, sustained, sequential arguments; they’re not just rambling, stream-of-consciousness rants, like the “lectures” of some people I know.  And I lecture only a couple of times a year.  Really.  (In that bitter little review of The Employment of English, Mark Bauerlein got off the sentence, “Revealing how often he is invited to lecture by conference organizers, student organizations, literature departments, and faculty senates . . . Bérubé amply corroborates his entry into the star system.” But actually, that book referenced only four talks—one of which, as I pointed out in my reply, was a three-minute, bullhorn-enhanced speech in support of Illinois’s graduate student union, and one of which was an appearance before CUNY’s Faculty Senate, for which I was offered $100—which I refused.) So probably it all balances out in the end.

Now, here’s the Fun Game:  taking a tip from Geoff (in the comments to my last post), let’s cast Radical Son:  The Movie!  I think Dennis Hopper is a natural for the lead (he even has the right initials), but feel free to offer other suggestions.  (Also I think John Forsythe should do the voice of Richard Mellon Scaife, just as he did Charlie in Charlie’s Angels.) We’ll also need an entire supporting cast.  They’ll be rarely seen—we don’t want to take the focus off David—but they’re crucial as backdrops to the main story.  And what a story it is!  How many sequels should we plan?  Let’s get busy . . . there’s so much work ahead of us!

Posted by Michael on 05/04 at 09:05 AM
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