Bérubé, Michael 1961-

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Bérubé, Michael 1961-

PERSONAL: Born September 26, 1961, in New York, NY; married Janet Lyon (a literature and women’s studies professor); children: Nick, James. Education: Columbia University, B.A.; University of Virginia, M.A., Ph.D., 1989.

ADDRESSES: Office— Department of English, Pennsylvania State University, 230 Burrowes Bldg., University Park, PA 16802. E-mail— [email protected].

CAREER: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, assistant professor, 1989-93, associate professor, 1993-96, professor, 1996-2001, director of Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, 1997-2001; Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Paterno Family Professor in Literature, 2001—, codirector of disability studies program, 2004—.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association (member of executive council, 2002-05), American Association of University Professors (member of national council, 2005—; member of executive committee, 2006—), National Council of Teachers of English (chair of Public Language Committee, 2006—).

AWARDS, HONORS: National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 1990; Humanities Released Time Fellowship, University of Illinois Research Board, 1990-91, 1996-97; honorable mention in Best American Essays, 1994, for “Life as We Know It”; Notable Books of the Year list, New York Times, for Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child; University of Illinois Incomplete List of Excellent Teachers, 1990-97, 1999, 2000; University Scholar, University of Illinois; National Humanities Center fellow (Assad Meymandi Fellowship), 2006.

WRITINGS

Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1992.

Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics, Verso (New York, NY), 1994.

(Editor, with Cary Nelson) Higher Education under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities, Routledge (New York, NY), 1995.

Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 1996.

The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

(Editor) The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, Blackwell (Malden, MA), 2005.

Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2006.

What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2006.

Also author of the blog Le Blogue Bérubé, 2004-07. Contributor to periodicals, including the Nation, New York Times Magazine, Dissent, Harper’s, and the New Yorker. Member of editorial boards, including for Comparative Literature Studies, Contemporary Literature, Electronic Book Review, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Minnesota Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Pedagogy, Postmodern Culture, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Symploke.

SIDELIGHTS: Called an “academic whiz-kid” by a Publishers Weekly reviewer, Michael Bérubé is an English professor who has written widely, persuasively, and popularly in repudiation of the conservative critique of academia. In books such as Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics, Higher Education under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities, and the 2006 work What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education, Bérubé has attempted to answer right-wing criticisms of the supposedly leftist-liberal bias in the nation’s universities. He deals with topics ranging from political correctness to multiculturalism and fostering the spirit of open inquiry. Additionally, in his 1996 book, Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child, Bérubé presents an account of the first years of his son Jamie, who was born with Down syndrome.

With his Public Access, Bérubé provides eleven essays that answer conservative critics of what they consider liberal academia. In this work the self-professed liberal progressive Bérubé admonishes other liberals to join in the debate and not leave the field to the polemics of think tanks and conservative spokespeople. A contributor for Publishers Weekly felt that the author’s “research is breathtaking and persuasive” in this collection. Reviewing the same work in World Literature Today, David S. Gross found it “most interesting” and “well-documented.”

In Higher Education under Fire, Bérubé “offers a complex, nuanced diagnosis of the threats and opportunities confronting a vital but troubled American institution,” according to Booklist contributor Mary Carroll. The book, edited by Bérubé and Cary Nelson, presents essays offered at a 1993 conference and includes both liberal and conservative perspectives on the problems facing higher education. For Susan Tal-burt, writing in the Journal of Higher Education, the “volume serves as a call to academics to engage in analysis and activism in order to reshape discourses surrounding higher education.” Talburt further noted: “The editors describe the book as a combination of the theoretical and the practical that stands as a corrective to misconceptions about university life,” and went on to conclude that “one of the chief strengths of this collection is the implicit and explicit dialogic mode across themes, a mode that challenges the reader to put his or her assumptions into play and to reflect on conflicting analyses and their implications for action.”

In the same vein, Bérubé’s What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts? provides “a discussion of so-called liberal academic bias that effectively dismembers the charges of the right-wing of a bias reflected in America’s classrooms,” according to a contributor for Talking Dog online. Bérubé explained some of the reasoning for What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts? in his Talking Dog interview: “The fact that liberals outnumber conservatives on campus—by a ratio of roughly 2.6 to 1—is indisputable. What the culture-war right derives from this fact, however, are two highly disputable conclusions: one, that the ratio can be explained only by active collusion among liberals. . . [and] two, that this preponderance of campus liberals actively discriminates against conservative students as well as potential conservative colleagues.” Bérubé answers both charges in his work, noting the dearth of well-trained conservatives in certain fields, such as the sciences, and also by criticizing the anecdotal nature of much of the evidence given for the second charge. Vanessa Bush, reviewing What’sLiberal about the Liberal Arts? in Booklist, found it “a passionate appeal for preserving the best notions of the liberal-arts education.” Likewise, Scott Walter, writing in Library Journal, felt “Bérubé provides an effective liberal counterpoint to the conservative criticism of schools.”

Bérubé’s 1996 title, Life as We Know It, is a social critique of another sort. Inspired by his second son’s struggle with Down syndrome, Bérubé penned a book that was part memoir of the trials of raising a child with such special needs, as well as an examination of society’s reaction to such handicapped individuals. New York Times Book Review contributor Beverly Lowry commented that “Bérubé digs deep and wide. Trying to decipher how it is we came to think the way we do, he scans Darwinism, deconstruction, social constructionism, eugenics.” Lowry praised this work for its challenging premises: “Like all books of philosophical investigation, this one means to question more than to answer, to prick our minds and imaginations,” concluding that Life as We Know It is “an astonishingly good book, important, literate and ferociously articulated.” A Publishers Weekly contributor also had praise for the same work, remarking on its “impassioned reportage,” and further reporting that Bérubé “frames advocacy and righteous anger with wry humor.” Harold Isbell observed in Commonweal that Bérubé also “embarks on a provocative analysis of the pro-life, pro-choice controversy, a discussion which produces difficult questions and few if any easy answers.” Writing in the Nation, Nancy Mairs commented that Bérubé “uses his formidable intellectual skills. . . not merely to narrate in engaging detail the story of his son James. . ., but to explore the medical, social and political implications of being the disabled ‘other’ in the United States today.” For Mairs, Life as We Know It“is a book that needed to be written, asking hard questions that must be asked.”

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES

BOOKS

Bérubé, Michael, Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 1996.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, December 1, 1994, Mary Carroll, review of Higher Education under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities, p. 639; September 15, 2006, Vanessa Bush, review of What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education, p. 81.

Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 2006, Jennifer Jacobson, “Dangerous Minds.”

College Literature, fall, 2001, Kathleen McCormick, “Finding Hope in the Humanities,” review of The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Study, p. 129.

Commonweal, Harold Isbell, April 25, 1997, review of Life as We Know It, p. 27.

Contemporary Literature, summer, 1994, Bruce Robbins, review of Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon, p. 365.

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, January, 1994, Russell J. Reising, review of Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers, p. 150.

Journal of Higher Education, January-February, 1997, Susan Talburt, review of Higher Education under Fire, p. 106.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1996, review of Life as We Know It, p. 1112.

Library Journal, September 15, 2006, Scott Walter, review of What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts?, p. 70.

Nation, October 28, 1996, Nancy Mairs, review of Life as We Know It, p. 30.

New York Times Book Review, October 27, 1996, Beverly Lowry, “We Can Handle This,” review of Life as We Know It, p. 22; September 10, 2006, Alan Wolfe, “Defending the Ph.D.’s,” review of What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts?, p. 13.

Publishers Weekly, January 13, 1994, review of Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics, p. 59; August 26, 1996, review of Life as We Know It, p. 82; August 7, 2006, review of What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts?, p. 48.

World Literature Today, spring, 1995, David S. Gross, review of Public Access, p. 446.