Riverwood Presbyterian Church

A prime example of the cumulative years of post-modern thought. Nothing about you matters…since there are no absolutes … no right or wrong, hence, no responsibility.. whether in the realm of aesthetics or scholarship or any other arena. After all, who’s to say? Just think… fat studies (and all the other marginal “studies” departments, some refenced in the article) ….are only the tip of the iceburg in how far this pretence at scholarship could go. I might pursue a “harried, middle class white woman’s” degree…but then again, I guess that’s been pretty well hashed out in “women’s studies” already. But what about the “violent persons” department…there are surely many contributing factors there other than moral shortcoming. And what about lazy people? or tightwads? Now that we know no on is at fault…that the whole concept of fault or responsibility is flawed…these “fields of study” can really be never-ending. But of course, as you observed, since no one can read, WHAT DOES IT MATTER?

Afterthought: It might be fun if you could bar from these departments and studies anyone who might be a “victim” of the area of study…No fat person,for example, in the interest of cold, reliable, objectivity…could participate in fat studies, No women allowed in women’s studies departments….etc. etc. Wonder how that would effect the research? Could turn out the emperor had no clothes on.

Dear Mr. Staggs,

I was, naturally, quite interested to see my statements about Fat Studies, quoted in the recent New York Times article, used as a spring board for your comments about the state of Higher Education today. Fair enough, in the sense that whenever one is quoted in the newspaper, one had better be prepared for a wide range of reactions. But might I ask you to have a good look at the quotation marks? I did not say all the things that you would seem to have me say. My position is that fatness is a human characteristic which seems to play (or, rather, have played in History) a large role in our lives, not least because it plays so large a role in how others perceive us. It is therefore worth studying. When I say that the fat should receive their due, I mean, simply, that it is one of the jobs of History to rescue from oblivion the experience of all people, particularly those heretofore little or mis-understood. That does, I believe, serve justice, though it is not my job as a scholar to allow that hope to influence my scholarship. Nor do I wish to suggest that the rescue operation for this particular historical cohort should preclude or take precedence over any number of other, more traditional subjects—for example the study of Shakespeare. You will note that I am never quoted in the article as calling for departments or courses in the subject, though a course on body images and perceptions through History would, I think, be of interest. (How, after all, did we arrive at our present attitudes towards the body, beauty, health, etc.?) Were you to visit my website or, much better, my classroom or read the paper that led me into this area of inquiry, you would, I think, find plenty of “hard work”, “education”, and “true scholarship.”

The world of scholarship is big and wide. It has room for students of every facet of human life. Study of one is not an enemy to all the others.

Yours respectfully, Robert Bucholz

I wanted to at least give my initial reaction to Prof. Bucholz’s comments. I’ll reserve the right to comment more later, as time constraints are fairly severe right now.

First, Prof. Bucholz is absolutely correct in pointing out that he did not call for the creation of a fat studies department, and I did not mean to impute that view to him. Additionally, I did not mean to diminish his scholarship and the hard work behind it. I apologize to him for leaving those impressions in my post.

All that said, the central point I was trying to make is that, at least from the outside (and I do realize from personal experience that media portrayals are NOT always accurate), it appears that higher education has its priorities out of order. Various “studies” departments (women’s studies, sundry minority studies, perhaps now fat studies) proliferate while the basics of university education (as noted in the Washington Post article) are on the decline.

My personal view of these “studies” departments is that they serve mainly to validate modern culture’s seemingly endless obsession with group victimhood, covering it with a veneer of academic study. Prof. Bucholz says, “it is one of the jobs of History to rescue from oblivion the experience of all people, particularly those heretofore little or mis-understood.” Fair enough. But where is the line between that task and identity-group grievance advocacy? And, more to the point here, would a fat studies department encourage that line to be crossed? I think so, and maybe Prof. Bucholz would agree.

Especially given the failure of universities (and the grade schools below them) to teach what has historically been considered the basics of an education, even debating a fat studies department seems like the academic equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

I welcome Prof. Bucholz’s (or anyone else’s) comments on this. It’s really fascinating, and I wish I had more time to devote to it.

Dear Mr. Staggs,

Thank you for your fair, temperate and considered response. In looking back over our exchange, it occurs to me that I owe YOU an apology, hereby tendered, for taking personally charges which you were making against a wider academic world.

In the end, we mostly agree. It’s true that I want fatness—and yes, shortness, tallness, and just about every other human characteristic—to be studied, because, as I believe can be demonstrated, these matters do have a profound effect on human interaction. (Quick: name the last fat American President. Could a fat man or woman be elected today? If not, why not? Doesn’t the answer to that question say something potentially profound about us?)

But I agree, in general, with your priorities: reading, writing and (perhaps most sadly lacking in our society today) objective critical thinking must come first, as they did as far back as the Medieval Trivium. Perhaps one reason I felt compelled to write a reply is that for the past 25 years I have been criticizing freshman writing and grading outlines, bibliographies and two drafts of junior and senior term papers—that is, performing precisely the sort of academic heavy lifting that you advocate. Jesuit universities are appropriately traditional about these things, but I can assure you that the vast majority of institutions of higher education still focus on them, albeit without being noticed in the New York Times. We really are on the same side here.

When it comes to funding and bricks-and-mortar issues, we SHOULD engage in debate, which, in a way, is what you and I have been doing. While my experience is that centers for Womens’ Studies and Black Studies, etc., have made tremendous contributions to the world of scholarship, not least because they cross disciplinary bounds, I would agree that there is no need for a department of “Fat Studies.” In a world in which so many Americans know so little about their own past (not to mention that we are, by my count, the 14th world empire to attempt to stabilize Iraq!), that would clearly be silly. (It might be useful here to draw some distinction between what we explore in our research and what we teach undergraduates.)

You are certainly correct to imply that, in pursuing this kind of scholarship, a much more important line to draw is that between scholarship and advocacy. I will admit that my tendency as a scholar is to be drawn to the underdog: after all, the “great ones of the earth” are not exactly neglected by scholarship or the media. Nor will I deny a certain amount of excitement at the idea that my scholarship might actually do someone some good, especially if they belong to a group that has been pushed around. (Most of my published work is on the personnel of the British royal household, a subject which has never generated an article in the New York Times or an appearance in the blogosphere.) But here is the key point: since I am a historian, what “good” I provide is only perspective, not a prescription for the future. And, as I am a scholar, I cannot even be concerned with that: I have to call the past as I see it, whatever the modern result for my audience, thin or fat.

In the end, I would like to believe that the academic enterprise is not a zero-sum game, that we can continue to work on traditional subjects and new ones in happy tandem, our reach always exceeding our grasp.

Like Queen Anne, perhaps, I want it all!

With all best wishes, Robert Bucholz