<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The following is the full text of a letter published in edited form by\u00a0The Evening Standard<\/em><\/a> on 6th January 2020. I was invited to write it by\u00a0The Evening Standard\u00a0<\/em>in response to a blog post<\/a> of 2nd January by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Chief Special Adviser Dominic Cummings. This post invited applications from young, unconventional thinkers to positions at Downing Street, with Oxbridge English graduates being specifically discouraged from applying.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Putting aside which<\/em> \u2018long term projects\u2019 Dominic Cummings has in mind when calling for graduates to join the \u2018No10 political team\u2019 (privatising the NHS?), he is right to say that the term \u2018diversity\u2019 has been co-opted to identity politics and disconnected from \u2018genuine cognitive diversity<\/em>\u2019.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But he\u2019s wrong to associate this phenomenon with specifically \u2018Oxbridge English graduates\u2019. It is precisely in more traditional institutions that English instruction is least likely to enforce the less-profound forms of identity politics, and most likely to pay attention to literature per se<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Of literature, Cummings seems to approve. He calls for applications from \u2018true wild cards, artists\u2019, and \u2018weirdos from William Gibson novels\u2019. All <\/em>great writers are mould-breakers. If they didn\u2019t do something that was new as well as true, they wouldn\u2019t become canonical. More than anyone else, they have a deep and sharp sense of what life is about, and how people operate. When Cummings writes: \u2018you want to figure out what characters<\/em> around Putin might do\u2019, he is suggesting that you need literary-critical skills to understand Russian policy. He says that he doesn\u2019t want \u2018English graduates\u2019 who \u2018<\/em>spread fake news about fake news\u2019, but English graduates worth their salt are particularly qualified to identify and describe rhetoric and narratives, fake or otherwise.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Literary critics have to be sufficiently weird to understand what\u2019s going on in literature, and sufficiently clear-headed to be able to say exactly what that is \u2013 precisely the intersection of the intuitive and the competent that Cummings says is what he is looking for.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The full text of a letter published in edited form by The Evening Standard on 6th January 2020. I was invited to write it by The Evening Standard in response to a blog post of 2nd January by Prime Minister Boris Johnson\u2019s Chief Special Adviser Dominic Cummings. This post invited applications from young, unconventional thinkers to positions at Downing Street, with Oxbridge English graduates being specifically discouraged from applying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2644,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[233,232],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2640"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2640"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2645,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2640\/revisions\/2645"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}