The Bonfire of The Nominee

On one side were such conservative heavyweights as Vice President Dan Quayle, columnist William Buckley and Lynne Cheney, chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Lined up in opposition was an imposing array of scholarly dreadnoughts, including the Modern Language Association of America and the American Council of Learned Societies. At issue was the nomination of Carol Iannone, 43, a conservative literary critic, to the NEH's 26-member National Council, which advises the endowment on spending its budget (for 1992: $170 million).

Score one for the politically correct. After an intense debate last week, the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee voted 9 to 8, largely along partisan lines, to scuttle the nomination. Echoing Iannone's academic foes, Senator Edward Kennedy contended that her scholarly credentials were too feeble to justify promotion to the council, whose charter requires members with records of scholarship or creativity.

A respected teacher of literature at New York University, Iannone earned her Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Stony Brook with a 1981 dissertation that was sharply critical of feminism. As her critics note, Iannone has published little scholarly work since then. But that may have been less relevant to her nomination's fate than the currently unfashionable quality of her critical reviews, many of which have appeared in the conservative monthly Commentary. In March she argued that a signal reason why so many top prizes had been awarded to recent novels by Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker was not literary merit but the fact that the authors were female and black. Meanwhile, the Senators approved without debate two political scientists who have written extensively for conservative journals. To judge by their scholarly publications, neither Harvard's Harvey Mansfield nor Michael Malbin of SUNY's Albany campus has ever challenged any favoritism allegedly accorded black writers.