Mar 1st 2013

Essays in Biography by Joseph Epstein

by Michael Johnson

Michael Johnson is a music critic with particular interest in piano. 

Johnson worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his journalism career. He covered European technology for Business Week for five years, and served nine years as chief editor of International Management magazine and was chief editor of the French technology weekly 01 Informatique. He also spent four years as Moscow correspondent of The Associated Press. He is the author of five books.

Michael Johnson is based in Bordeaux. Besides English and French he is also fluent in Russian.

You can order Michael Johnson's most recent book, a bilingual book, French and English, with drawings by Johnson:

“Portraitures and caricatures:  Conductors, Pianist, Composers”

 here.


1Joseph Epstein’s essay collections are among the most tattered books in my library, worn out as they are from reading and rereading. His new collection, Essays in Biography, arrived recently and is already a mess of dog-ears and pencil marks.

Epstein has a cult following as a sharp-tongued literary critic and stylist. He produced hundreds of essays during and after his 22 years as editor of American Scholar and his long stretch as professor in the creative writing program at Northwestern University, neither of which should be held against him. There may be something of the academic mandarin about Joseph Epstein but he can still jab from the shoulder.

For years, I have been going back to Epstein’s essays to soak up his blend of the erudite and the casual, sometimes delivered in caustic terms. I keep thinking that I might learn how it’s done. His favorite subjects are writers and writing, no doubt a reflection of his time as editor and professor, and he has a grand time sharing his views. You feel he has invited you to his table to regale you with lively information and sometimes cranky opinions. You may agree or disagree with him (he doesn’t seem to care) but the attraction for most readers is his love of words and ideas.

Epstein has said he gravitated to the essay form for its tight – but not too tight — parameters. He believes, as he told one interviewer, the success of the essay today may have something to do with the diminishing national attention span. “These days,” he went on, “one sees a novel of four hundred pages, sighs, and says, ‘There goes a week of my reading life.’” His personal contribution to the essay form is the care with which he builds context, which he carries out with far more diligence than other practioners of the genre. He will lay out in detail what a writer is trying to do, draw from his own extensive reading about the subject, then apply his personal standards and sensibilities. The result is an in-depth, sharply rendered profile of the writer or public figure under examination, with his own imprint imposed upon the individual.

 

Sketch by Michael Johnson

Sketch by Michael Johnson

What he looks for in a biographer or subject – as is evident in this collection — is a combination of clarity, structure and charm. He is impatient with poseurs and prevaricators, lazy thinking and sham. Most of all, he demands common sense and good writing. He explained in one of his interviews how he feels about language after a lifetime as a book lover: “I can scarcely any longer drag my eyes along prose that is ill written.” What he seeks, he said in an interview with The Jewish Daily Forward, is “the stylish, the refined, the understatedly elegant.”

The new compilation, his fourth and largest, reflects his kaleidoscopic range and iconoclastic views on thinkers, novelists, poets and the occasional academic intellectual. Most of the essays are extended book reviews built around new biographies or memoirs. Epstein is refreshingly all-inclusive in his choice of people to dissect – Susan Sontag, Alfred Kazin, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and George Santayana, then to the English: Max Beerbohm, George Eliot, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Cyril Connolly and others. He rounds off with popular culture figures, including Charles Van Doren, basketball ace Michael Jordan, George Gershwin, James Wolcott, W.C. Fields and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Finally there are the wild cards – a piece on George Washington and another on historian/philosopher Xenophon. About half the subjects leave him wanting, and when this happens he salts his work with strong opinions.

3Epstein is not particularly impressed by writers as people. One observation that brought me up short was a throw-away line in his assessment of Santayana: “So many writers, great-souled saints in their work, turn out to be utter creeps in their lives.” And in an Epsteinian whip-around, he adds that Santayana was “for the most part a case of the reverse.” Yet Epstein admires Santayana for his ability to make the world seem more understandable and to express himself with a “tincture of poetry.” It’s the average writers he objects to. After reading Santayana’s voluminous output, including the eighth volume of his letters, which he was reviewing for this essay, Epstein anoints him “one of the greatest of American writers.”

He enjoys taking Gore Vidal apart, as in his review of Vidal’sMatters of Fact and Fiction:

What Vidal has done is find books for review that result in essays which give full vent to his politics. Most of the essays are thus setups – so many milk bottles to be knocked over by Vidal’s spitballs. Vidal on West Point is the usual philippic about the military-industrial complex. Vidal on a book about ITT is the standard stuff about the evils of multinational corporations… In short, no surprises, though quite a few disappointments.

“The chief ploy in a Vidal essay,” he concludes,

is to point out that the emperor has no clothes, then to go a step further and remove the poor man’s skin. The spectacle can be amusing, assuming, of course, that it is not one’s own carcass that is being stripped.

Epstein is funny, yes, but he can also be grim. He does not hesitate to warn of the coming end of high culture. “Even to bookish people,” he writes in his piece on T.S. Eliot, “poetry is of negligible interest and literary criticism chiefly a means to pursue tenure.” Then he adds his personal death knell: “Literary culture itself, if the sad truth be known, seems to be slowly if decisively shutting down.”

4Part of Epstein’s appeal is his willingness to say precisely what he thinks, even about friends and ex-friends. He does not shrink even from knifing the iconic men who made such publications as The New Yorker: I was delighted to discover in these essays someone whose reservations are the same as mine. For example, E.B. White’s writing “seems thin, overly delicate, self-approving, sensitive.” Epstein had written in a previous essay that White’s specialty was “the declarative sentence: subject, predicate, direct object, indirect object, in that order… back to back, on and on.” Rereading James Thurber, he finds him “only faintly amusing”; Joseph Mitchell’s work seems “closer to history, or historical curiosity, than to literature.”

A.J. Liebling, gets a mixed review. Although productive and worthy in his younger days, when he had an eye for the offbeat and for regional or foreign characters, he faded later in life, Epstein writes. Anyone not from New York or France was a yokel. “The older he got, the lower his subjects became, the more rococo grew his prose. As a stylist, he belonged to the category of deliberate overwriters for comic effect” – men such as Mencken, Westbrook Pegler and Murray Kempton.

I took a special interest in the Liebling essay because for 50 years I have carried one of his paragraphs around in my head that made me laugh out loud then and still does. Liebling was writing in The New Yorker about Nigerian boxer Dick Tiger, with whom he spent a day gathering color for a profile. He took Tiger to a New York diner and observed the waitress bantering with the boxer. She asked him what they eat in Nigeria. “Hooman beings,” Tiger joked, sending the waitress scurrying back to the kitchen in horror.

5Epstein’s most debatable essay in this collection is his examination of Saul Bellow, his long-time friend, confidant and racquetball partner in Chicago. Bellow’s personal shortcomings and his record on the printed page are just too tempting for Epstein to ignore. On the personal side, Epstein says he found Bellow to be a “veritable porcupine of Jewish touchiness” and a terrible husband for each of his five wives. He suffered from something called Irish Alzheimer’s – “he remembered, that is, chiefly his grudges.” On the professional side, Epstein’s views seem particularly intemperate. Most readers, including this one, love Bellow’s wild storytelling and his mastery of the language. Yet Epstein casts the great Nobelist, prolific best-seller and giant of American letters as a writer “who could not construct persuasive plots.” He was no storyteller, either, Epstein avers, and his endings didn’t work. “ … he couldn’t quite seem to land the plane.”

He was rough on Adlai Stevenson, too, a man whose style seemed sometimes to lack any clear message and was “hopelessly utopian.” Epstein went on:

He preached sanity; he preached reason his very person seemed to exert a pull toward decency in public affairs. Yet there is little evidence in any of his speeches or writing that he had a very precise idea of how American society was, or ought to be, organized His understanding of the American political process was less than perfect …

But Epstein’s most acid jibes are reserved for memoirist and magazine writer James Wolcott who, he charges, has been guilty of “heavy injections of false energy and sloppy phrasing,” among other things. Wolcott started out as a rock music critic, not a promising context for fine writing, and he acquired bad habits, Epstein notes. “Such prose is beyond editing. It requires Drano.” A novelist friend of mine, fed up with Epstein’s negativity, labels him a “take-down artist.” Another critic grants him a backhanded compliment as a writer who has “mastered euphony.” To me, this is like complimenting a concert pianist on his nice trill.

6To be sure, Epstein embraces some of the exceptional talents of the past century or so in this collection. T.S. Eliot receives the most supportive profile. While predicting the end of literary culture, Epstein dreads the thought of such an outcome. He credits Eliot at his best with representing such a prized culture and says that should its demise come to pass and prove definitive “the loss is of a seriousness beyond reckoning.” He has this to say about Eliot’s finest work:

Eliot’s best poems still work their magic, his powers of manipulating language to reveal unspeakable truths still resonate and register. His perfect-pitch phrasings stay in the mind the way litanies learned in childhood do.

And speaking as one essayist to another, Epstein praises Eliot for writing “with a range and an amplitude of interest not seen in literary criticism since Matthew Arnold in the previous century or Samuel Johnson nearly two centuries earlier. This breadth, in which he spoke not for literature alone but for the larger social context in which literature was created , made Eliot seem, somehow, grander, more significant than such estimable American critics as Wilson and Trilling.”

In his voracious reading, he finds other heroes and heroines, and grants them pride of place in his personal ranking. These include some surprises: Ralph Elllison, Isaac Rosenfeld, the poet John Frederick Nims, Max Beerbohm and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. To do justice to the great English novelist George Eliot, he quotes Henry James:

Of all the great Victorians, perhaps none was more complex, unpredictable, and finally astonishing than Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot. When the 26-year-old Henry James visited her in 1869, he wrote to his father that ‘she is magnificently ugly – deliciously ugly.’ He added that ‘in this vast ugliness (which James describes) resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end, as I ended, in falling in love with her.’

The depth of his intellect is on display in many of these essays. Writing of Isaiah Berlin, he observes:

Berlin’s own mind tended toward the historical, the exceptional case, the idea or cluster of ideas operating within a given time. He was not a pure thinker, but a reactive one who did better rubbing up against the ideas of others.

7What drives this man to write pretty much non-stop in his mid-70s (his 24th book, Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet, written with Frederic Raphael, is due out in February) is something that many writers will recognize. “I set out, usually, on a mission of self-discovery,” he told The Atlantica few years ago, “to find out what I really think about a subject. I don’t have fixed opinions or views when I start to write; it’s writing that forces them out of me.” “Simply to give pleasure at a fairly high intellectual level makes my day.”

The staff at Axios Press does have one charge to answer – failing to ask Epstein to write an introduction to this collection. He is always interesting in writing or speaking about his methods. In his previous collection of essays, Partial Payments, he explains where he is coming from:

I find that I have to put nearly everything in my writing, especially my somewhat complicated feelings, arguments and general assessments of writers who, when read at all closely, are never less than complicated themselves.

Before sitting down to compose, he says, he tries to read everything authors have written and much that has been written about them in an effort to discover what they are attempting to achieve in their novels, essays or poems. He conveys it all without wasted words in these well-crafted essays.

Is there more to come from Joseph Epstein? Driven as he is to guard the printed word, and to guide us to the best of it, I can’t imagine he will stop for a rest until he has to.





 


This article is brought to you by the author who owns the copyright to the text.

Should you want to support the author’s creative work you can use the PayPal “Donate” button below.

Your donation is a transaction between you and the author. The proceeds go directly to the author’s PayPal account in full less PayPal’s commission.

Facts & Arts neither receives information about you, nor of your donation, nor does Facts & Arts receive a commission.

Facts & Arts does not pay the author, nor takes paid by the author, for the posting of the author's material on Facts & Arts. Facts & Arts finances its operations by selling advertising space.

 

 

Browse articles by author

More Current Affairs

Nov 3rd 2024
EXTRACT: "The likelihood of escalation in the coming weeks and months means that there will be economic and financial risks to manage. A large-enough Israeli strike on Iran could severely disrupt energy production and exports from the Gulf. If Iran gets desperate, it could try to mine the Gulf and block the Strait of Hormuz, while also striking Saudi oil facilities. In this scenario, the world would experience stagflationary shocks similar to those that followed the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1979 Iranian revolution."
Oct 9th 2024
EXTRACT: "The continuing cycles of violence can easily spiral out of control, precipitating a wider war involving nuclear powers. Moreover, Netanyahu’s goal of 'total victory' against an ideological movement cannot be achieved by military means alone." ..... "So long as both sides seek to inflict maximum damage on the other to right past wrongs, the violence will not end. Netanyahu may think that total victory is in sight, now that Hezbollah is badly damaged and Gaza reduced to rubble, but that is an illusion. All he has done is create more enemies who will want to restore their honor by killing in a war without end."
Oct 9th 2024
EXTRACTS: "Nasrallah was on a mission to destroy Israel. It was a mantle he had taken up from countless other Arab leaders, from Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem who met with Adolf Hitler in 1941 to discuss the destruction of the Jews, to Azzam Pasha, the secretary-general of the Arab League who described the Arab invasion of the then-nascent Israel in 1948 as a 'war of annihilation'. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser – an icon of pan-Arabism in the 1950s and 1960s – pledged more than once to 'destroy Israel'. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who founded Fatah, nurtured their own dreams of liquidating the Jewish state." ...... "Alas, Israelis have built their own dangerous dream palace of 'total victory', erected on a foundation of nationalist fervor, religious messianism, and political intransigence. There is a scenario in which Israel’s military exploits change the region for the better. Unfortunately, far from being the standard-bearer for some enlightened political vision, Israel’s current government is committed to fighting a war on all fronts, with no view toward any political future that Israel’s neighbors could possibly accept."
Oct 8th 2024
EXTRACT: "But in the real world, slain leaders are replaced. Those who bury their dead do not forget or forgive, and those who have felt the punishment of arms do not forego weapons but embrace them. So it seems unlikely that’s how the story will end. Sadly, it’s far more likely it will never end."
Oct 3rd 2024
EXTRACT: ".....,Russia will probably spend about $190 billion, or 10% of GDP, on the war this year, and that figure presumably represents the peak, given the constraints imposed by Western financial sanctions. Whenever Russia can no longer finance a budget deficit, it will have to cut public expenditures, and its non-military outlays have already been pared to the bone."
Sep 12th 2024
EXTRACT: "Throughout recorded history, crises and tragedies have inevitably spurred apocalyptic interpretations that seek to imbue temporal catastrophes with some divine or redemptive meaning. One can see this in the doctrines of the major monotheistic religions, and even in modern totalitarian ideologies, such as communism and Nazism. One way or another, humans appear inclined to believe that, without Satan, there is no redeemer. To understand just how dangerous this logic can be, look no further than Gaza, where a tragedy of Biblical proportions is fueling the messianic hallucinations of Israel, Hamas, and American Christian evangelicals alike."
Aug 7th 2024
EXTRACT: "China knows that the war has had catastrophic consequences for both Russia and Ukraine. Estimates indicate that Putin’s conflict in Ukraine could cost Russia US$1.3 trillion (£1.0 trillion) and at least 315,000 in troop casualties. So, win or lose, the post-war damage to Russia would be immense. This is bad news for China. Not only will it have a weakened ally, but the west could then have a free hand to consolidate its resources in dealing with the 'Chinese threat'."
Jul 27th 2024
EXTRACT: "......, regardless of the folly of political violence, the attempt on Trump’s life was futile inasmuch as ridding America, and the world, of Trump, would by no means rid us of Trumpism, which was and remains a symptom, and not the root cause, of this country’s moral and epistemic decline. How else could so many millions of Americans support this man? No one can claim that they do not know what he stands for (insofar as he stands for anything other than himself) or what his intentions are: he has made it very clear that his second administration will be not only authoritarian, but fascist in rhetoric and deed.
Jul 17th 2024
EXTRACTS: "Iran unveiled a digital clock counting down the days to the destruction of Israel in 2040. The display, located in Tehran’s Palestine Square, embodies the Islamic Republic’s long-held commitment to annihilating the Jewish state. Some view this promise as a mere rhetorical exercise...." ----- "From Adolf Hitler to Vladimir Putin and even Osama bin Laden, history has taught us to take threats of ideologically inspired attacks at face value. " ---- "......., the key enabler of Iran’s war of attrition is, in fact, Israel’s own government. Netanyahu’s unrealistic goal of achieving 'a complete victory' in Gaza serves Iran’s strategy of miring Israel in an inconclusive conflict while orchestrating a long-term plan to destroy the Jewish state." ----- "It turns out that the only truly irrational, trigger-happy fanatics in this lethal equation are Netanyahu and his theo-fascist allies, who are determined to engage in an apocalyptic war in Gaza and Lebanon." ---- "These messianic hallucinators have a willing collaborator in Netanyahu. Together, they are doing more to annihilate the Jewish national project than Iran could ever hope to achieve on its own."
Jul 16th 2024
EXTRACTS: "In her dissenting opinion in Trump v. United States, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor declared that with the majority’s ruling, 'the President is now a king above the law'. In this, she is wrong: the majority opinion has given the US president far more power than English kings had at the time of the American Revolution." ---- "In June 1686, 11 of the 12 hand-picked justices ruled in favor of the king. Echoing the king’s own solicitor, Sir Thomas Powys, the Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys contended that if the king did not have leeway above the law, 'the preservation of the government' might be in jeopardy." ---- "In 1689, the English people roundly rejected such reasoning and asserted that their kings would thereafter be subject to the law. They set a precedent by removing James II from office. The Supreme Court’s decision goes beyond threatening more than two centuries of American jurisprudence; it overturns four centuries of Anglo-American jurisprudence. The Roberts majority did not give the president the power of an English king; it gave the president power that an English king could only covet."
Jul 4th 2024
EXTRACT: "Most American voters who believe that Trump is the best defender of democracy are not fascists, much less communists. The very thought would horrify them. But they almost surely have a strong opinion on who constitutes the true American people: God-fearing, hard-working, and most probably white. And they worry that these ordinary Americans are being displaced by illegal immigrants, and that their way of life is being threatened by new ideas about gender, race, and sexuality emerging from elite universities. Trump is stoking these fears and exaggerating these threats. His line that the US courts are attacking not only him, but every right-thinking American is horribly effective. Since he is heard as the true voice of the people, he is the purest democrat. As a result, liberal democracy might not withstand another four years of his rule."
Jul 3rd 2024
EXTRACT: "....the debate showed all too clearly that he is suffering cognitive decline and cannot possibly serve as a competent president for another four years. If Biden is true to his word, and stopping Trump from regaining the presidency is his overriding goal, he needs to announce that at the Democratic Convention in August, he will release his delegates from their obligation to vote for him, and instead ask them to vote for the candidate with the best chance of defeating Trump."
Jul 3rd 2024
EXTRACTS: "Both Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Supreme Court have just announced grand opinions trying to resolve the fundamental constitutional issues raised by former President Donald Trump’s claim to absolute immunity" ---- "According to Sotomayor, who wrote for the three dissenting justices, Roberts’ sweeping grant of immunity has 'no firm grounding in constitutional text, history, or precedent.' ” ----- "For what it’s worth, I think that Sotomayor is right and Roberts is wrong." ----"But for now, it is much more important to consider the objection raised by Justice Amy Coney Barrett to both Roberts’ constitutional glorification of the presidency and Sotomayor’s devastating critique of Roberts’ majority opinion." ---- "Barrett is right to ask why Roberts and Sotomayor did not join her in adopting the problem-solving approach that they have repeatedly endorsed in many other contexts." ---- "Roberts took the path that not only betrayed Founding principles, as Sotomayor argued, but also betrayed the very principles to which he has dedicated his entire career. "
Jul 1st 2024
EXTRACTS: "Netanyahu’s disdainful criticism of Biden. Netanyahu knows how indispensable the US is to Israel, as no country has provided Israel with more financial, military, and political support than the US. And no American president has ever been more supportive and committed to Israel's security than President Biden. But then, leave it to the most loathsome Netanyahu, who dares to criticize the president for suspending the shipment specifically of 2,000-pound bombs to continue with his devastating bombardment of Rafah that could indiscriminately kill thousands of innocent civilians." ---- "All Israelis who care about their country’s future must rise and demand the immediate resignation of this corrupt and brazen creature who inflicted untold damage on the only Jewish state, making it a pariah state."
Jun 12th 2024
EXTRACTS: "One of the more amusing exercises on the economic calendar is the International Monetary Fund’s annual review of the United States. Yet while everyone knows that the US government pays absolutely no heed to what the IMF has to say about its affairs, the Fund’s most recent Article IV review of the US economy is striking for one unexpected finding. Readers will be startled to learn that, in the IMF’s estimation, US government debt is on a sustainable path." ---- "What then could go wrong? Well, US institutions could turn out not to be so strong. Donald Trump has a personal history of defaulting on his debts. As William Silber has observed, Trump in a second presidential term could instruct his Treasury secretary to suspend payments on the debt, and neither Congress nor the courts might be willing to do anything about it. The gambit would be appealing to Trump insofar as a third of US government debt is held by foreigners. The damage to the dollar’s safe-asset status would be severe, even if Congress, the courts, or a subsequent president reversed Trump’s suspension of debt payments. Investors in US Treasuries would demand a hefty risk premium, potentially causing the government’s interest payments to explode."
Jun 9th 2024
EXTRACT: "An all-too-familiar specter is haunting Europe, one that reliably appears every five years. As citizens head to the polls to elect a new European Parliament, observers are once again asking whether far-right anti-European parties will gain ground and unite to destroy the European Union from within. To be sure, skeptics of this doomsday scenario have always argued that the far right will remain divided, because nationalist internationalism is a contradiction in terms. But it is more likely that specific policy disagreements – mainly over the Ukraine war – and drastically diverging political strategies will prevent Europe’s various far-right parties from forming a 'supergroup.' ”
Jun 9th 2024
EXTRACT: "While the dreadful legacy of his Conservative predecessors – the morally vacuous Johnson and the reckless Liz Truss – would make it extremely difficult for Sunak to offer a credible vision of a better future, many of his current problems are self-inflicted. For example, he supported Johnson’s bid for the Conservative leadership, a decision that reflects poorly on his judgment. Sunak has also been a Euroskeptic since he was a schoolboy and was an early supporter of Brexit."
Jun 8th 2024
EXTRACTS: "Why are so many young people attracted to far-right politics? Polls show that 36% of French people aged 18-24 support Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, while roughly 31% in the Netherlands back Geert Wilders’s nationalist, anti-immigration ..... 26% of Americans aged 18-29 prefer former US President Donald Trump over the incumbent Joe Biden." ---- "Center-left parties had become increasingly associated with urban elites who benefited from a globalized economy in which immigrants provided cheap labor and well-educated cosmopolitans could seek financial profit or intellectual stimulation wherever they desired." ---- "Trump does not have to convince many young people to vote for him. If enough of them refuse to vote for Biden, either because he is too old, too conservative, or too pro-Israel, Trump could win November’s presidential election. If elected, he will continue to shatter the norms and wreck the institutions that allow democracy to function."
Apr 13th 2024
EXTRACT: "That said, even if Europe were to improve its deterrence capabilities, it would be unwise to assume that leaders necessarily make rational decisions. In her 1984 book The March of Folly, historian Barbara Tuchman observes that political leaders frequently act against their own interests. America’s disastrous wars in the Middle East, the Soviet Union’s ill-fated campaign in Afghanistan, and the ongoing war of blind hatred between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, with its potential to escalate into a larger regional conflict, are prime examples of such missteps. As Tuchman notes, the march of folly is never-ending. That is precisely why Europe must prepare itself for an era of heightened vigilance."
Apr 13th 2024
EXTRACTS: " Nathan Cofnas is a research fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. His research is supported by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust. He is also a college research associate at Emmanuel College. Working at the intersection of science and philosophy, he has published several papers in leading peer-reviewed journals. He also writes popular articles and posts on Substack. In January, Cofnas published a post called “Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem.” No one at Cambridge seems to have been bothered by his argument that people on the political right have, on average, lower intelligence than those on the left." ---- "The academic world will be watching what happens. Were the University of Cambridge to dismiss Cofnas, it would sound a warning to students and academics everywhere: when it comes to controversial topics, even the world’s most renowned universities can no longer be relied upon to stand by their commitment to defend freedom of thought and discussion."