Talk:Russell Jacoby

THIS is the guy who attacked Hannah Arendt?!?

Pretty clear why they gave him a "folding chair": He hasn't earned a real one, yet behaves as if his pedestrian scholarship entitles him to defile the corpses of truly important thinkers. What a sad tool. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 115.187.74.68 (talk) 10:56, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

AHA Membership

Before I deleted it, the article included the sentence, "He belongs to the American Historical Association." I don't see how this is the least bit extraordinary or worthy of inclusion in his Wikipedia encyclopedia entry. According to the AHA, there are 14,000 individual and 4,000 institutional members. Being a history professor and not belonging to the AHA is more noteworthy than being a history professor and an AHA member. Meanwhile, the article says almost nothing substantive about his life beyond facts that can be learned from his c.v. and/or his department website. Where is the genuine biographical information? Poldy Bloom (talk) 16:25, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Is there really a FOLDING CHAIR of Critical Theory? Seems like a joke or prank

We are told that he holds the Moishe Gonzalez Folding Chair of Critical Theory. This seems like a joke, Folding Chair? Where is the supporting evidence. If it really exists, then it is worth explaining why it is a FOLDING CHAIR. Using Google, the references to this chair seemed to sourced from this Wikipedia entry, which seems suspicious. The UCLA History department webpage http://www.history.ucla.edu/people/faculty?lid=827 says "Professor in Residence" as does his apparent home page http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/history/jacobyr/

205.189.194.208 (talk) 20:01, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

This was indeed vandalism, which was added to the article in these edits in January 2011:[1] Well spotted, but next time you should remove it yourself, rather than leaving it to be noticed by another user, which in this case it wasn't for another two years. Robofish (talk) 13:14, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Actually, having checked his UCLA page, it does now list the 'Folding Chair': [2] Perhaps it is real after all. I've restored it to the page pending further investigation. Robofish (talk) 13:21, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Confirmed with the man himself - it's correct. Robofish (talk) 00:04, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

It is a joke that he made, but still a joke: "And his position in the history department at the University of California at Los Angeles is sufficiently irregular – he is listed as “professor in residence” and does not have tenure – to suggest someone half in the door and half out. He lists among his awards the Moishe Gonzales Folding Chair in Critical Theory -- an homage to the late social theorist Paul Piccone, founding editor of the journal Telos. The improbable name Moishe Gonzales was the pseudonym Piccone used for some of his particularly scathing critiques of academic trends."https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/02/13/review-velvet-prisons-russell-jacoby-american-academia

He doesn't seem to have posted his CV on the web, so I'm going to replace this with what can be reliably sourced from the above article and the current UCLA webpage. Mwphil (talk) 20:36, 24 December 2022 (UTC)