Alice Gast is a textbook author. The sixth and apparently final edition of her Physical Chemistry of Surfaces was published 25 years ago.
She is also the president of Imperial College London, where she is simultaneously considering removing any reference to the college’s founder, T.H. Huxley, and fighting charges of bullying and harassment.
Stephen Warren reports on the T.H. Huxley fiasco:
Earlier this month the President’s Board at Imperial College convened to decide what to do with the recommendations of their History Group, which was commissioned by the President Alice Gast and Provost Ian Walmsley, to examine the university’s history “through its links to the British Empire”. The most striking recommendation is that the founder of Imperial College, T H Huxley, be “cancelled”, with the Group proposing removing his name from a building and consigning the famous terracotta bust of him to a cupboard.
Ben Quinn reports on the toxic workplace charges:
Britain’s highest-paid university chief and another senior executive created a culture of favouritism and exclusion at Imperial College, according to damning details of a report released after she had attempted to suppress its publication. Imperial’s president, Alice Gast, last year apologised after an independent report found that she and the college’s chief financial officer had bullied members of staff. However, they have resisted calls by student and academic representatives to resign, while she attempted to block the report’s release under freedom of information.
Warren notes that Professor Gast is also attempting to quash the publication of objections to the proposed removal of Huxley’s name from wherever eyes might see it: “In response to the call for an open and transparent dialogue, there have been 208 contributions emailed in, over half from alumni. These include several lengthy essays, some from professional historians. An assurance was given that these would all be made available to the Imperial community to read, anonymised. This is what one would expect; sharing these views and insights would register the range and strength of opinion and allow everyone to gain a deeper understanding of Imperial’s history. But that hasn’t happened.”
It must be exhausting to try to keep everyone silent, not that I feel particularly sorry for dear Professor Gast, though maybe a little. What is it like to be a failed scholar whose unquenchable ambition shifts from research to administration to prove to oneself that one “belongs,” though one knows otherwise and hates oneself for it? Cancel culture arrives as a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it allows one the delicious opportunity to take the scholars down a notch — in the name of moral integrity no less! But it’s also a curse because it is a reminder of one’s servitude to the whims of students and boards of directors. It must be a life shot through with fear, self-loathing and bitterness.
In other news
What makes David Jones tick? Jack Hanson attempts an answer at Lapham’s Quarterly:
His work was praised in the strongest possible terms by W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, and Igor Stravinsky. He also became, following his death, one of the more frustrating examples of artistic obscurity. Subject to frequent revival attempts—most recently during the centenary years of World War I, with a series of Faber & Faber reprints, a biography, and gallery and museum exhibitions—his work is a catalogue of curious, beguiling engravings and letterings; breathtaking landscapes and still lifes in eddying watercolor; and dense, disjointed poems of haunting beauty. Yet for all the variety, there is a clear thread running through Jones’ oeuvre that begins to look like the heart of a single ongoing effort to deepen a communion with something that seems at all times present and yet elusive.
Propaganda can be art, Kyle Smith argues, in a review of Jed Perl’s Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts:
Perl spends much of the book asserting without offering much evidence that, though art can be political or didactic, it’s the art that comes first. Approvingly he quotes Flannery O’Connor as an authority on this: “art is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made; it has no utilitarian end. If you do manage to use it successfully for social, religious, or other purposes, it is because you make it art first.” . . . Though I respect the boldness of the claim, and wish Perl could write anything he believes with one-tenth the clarity, I don’t think she was. Note that as O’Connor was issuing a categorical dictum she felt impelled to qualify it: Art can have no utilitarian end, but it can be secondarily utilitarian as long as it is firstly artistic. All of the talented propagandists in the history of creation bristle. Was not Animal Farm the product of, rather than the accidental purveyor of, a sociopolitical impulse? How about Mrs. Warren’s Profession or “Strange Fruit”?
Matthew Schmitz praises Joachim Trier’s new film The Worst Person in the World:
Julie (Renate Reinsve) is a millennial woman in modern Oslo who slides toward her mid-thirties with no certainty about what she should do or whom she should love. Anything that gives a life lasting shape also limits its possibilities. Choosing one future requires rejecting countless others. Julie recoils from commitment, and so ends up alone. That is how we see her at the film’s opening—sheathed in black silk, smoking on a balcony with the city stretched out behind her, standing in splendid isolation as she looks at her phone. This image is echoed at the film’s end, when she is looking at another screen—this time a computer in an apartment she shares with no one.
Did secularism start at the trial of Jesus Christ? That’s David Lloyd Dusenbury’s argument in The Innocence of Pontius Pilate: How the Roman Trial of Jesus Shaped History. Nathaniel Peters reviews:
The heart of his argument . . . is that the trial of Jesus is responsible for the creation of the concept of “the secular,” especially from Jesus’s response to Pilate “my kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36) and Augustine’s commentary on that text in his Homilies on the Gospel of John. “Wherever Augustine’s commentary on John’s Pilate trial is not read — as in much of the Byzantine and Islamicate zones — the ‘secular’ never crystallizes,” Dusenbury concludes. And later, when figures such as Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Pufendorf wrestle with the question of church-state relations, they do so in light of Jesus’s words.
Barton Swaim reviews three new books on Abraham Lincoln: “Most books on Lincoln are imbued with a sense of tragic melancholy—like those on JFK, only more so. The Lincoln Conspiracy, by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch, is a refreshing counterinstance to this generality.”
Anne Margaret Daniel writes about Hemingway’s fourth and final wife:
Close your eyes and imagine you’re married to Ernest Hemingway. Now, imagine it twice as bad, and you’ll be approaching the life story of Mary Welsh Hemingway. Hemingway was married four times: to Hadley Richardson in 1921, to Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927, to Martha Gellhorn in 1940 and to Mary Welsh in 1946. In every swap, he divorced his current wife for her successor. Mary wrote her own memoir, How It Was, after Hemingway’s death in 1961. Now Timothy Christian has written a well-researched and intensely detailed look at the life of a fascinating woman who became the steward of Hemingway’s literary estate and reputation long before he died.
Dominique Noguez imagines that the poète maudit and gunrunner Arthur Rimbaud didn’t die at the age of 39 after living the second half of his life in Africa. Instead, he returns home to great literary acclaim, after publishing several works in a more “mature” style, and converts to Catholicism. I review his Three Rimbauds in my latest column.
Also, I talked to James Matthew Wilson about the market of university literary magazines and contemporary poetry. Listen here! (And if you have enjoyed the podcasts, help us out by giving it a rating or a review!)
