Brendan Slattery

The long-time editor of Phi Beta Kappa’s official journal has been forced into early retirement following a dispute over semantics and ideology.

Joseph Epstein, who assumed editorial control of the American Scholar in 1975, recently concluded a 23-year stint at the august magazine after receiving what amounted to a vote of no confidence from Phi Beta Kappa’s Senate, which doubles as the journal’s publisher.

A straight shooter who has exhibited little patience with contemporary attempts to sanitize the English language of any and all offensive words or terms, the decidedly un-PC Epstein ran afoul of one of the journal’s contributors when he substituted the word "homosexual" every time the writer favored "gay."

A compromise was reached when Epstein agreed to employ "gay" in some instances but not others, and the submitted review was published without fanfare.

Epstein considered the matter long forgotten when the Gay Community News, a Boston, Massachusetts newspaper ran two articles focusing on "Homophobia in Publishing"—fingering Epstein as one of the more prominent literary homophobes.

Unbeknownst to Epstein, his "gay vs. homosexual" critic—an MIT student—complained to the News that he had tinkered with the piece in an unprofessional manner, imploring fellow readers of the paper to dispatch letters of protest to Phi Beta Kappa. More than one hundred people, some of whom bore Phi Beta Kappa credentials, did exactly that.

According to Epstein, this provided a window of opportunity for some of his harshest critics on the 24-member Senate—85% of whom maintain academic posts—to expedite his removal from the journal.

"These were, for the most part, academics who had an investment in feminism, black history, and gay and lesbian studies," he said. "I had mostly treated these subjects in the American Scholar by ignoring them."

In his final column, wryly titled "I’m History," Epstein chronicled the stylistic and contextual evolution of the American Scholar under his stewardship, doing little to mask his disdain for the victim-driven interest groups holding court on many U.S. campuses.

"We ran nothing about gay and lesbian studies and almost no black history," wrote Epstein. "The truth was, I found much in current academic life either boring or crazy, and I didn’t want to devote much space to things in which I could not take any serious interest....I myself wrote an essay for the Hudson Review titled ‘The Academic Zoo.’ My condescension had to have left an unpleasant taste."

Epstein is convinced that these same individuals’ hatred for him motivated them to scuttle a $2 million grant from a conservative foundation—believed by some to be the New York-based Skirball Foundation, whose late founder was a loyal reader of the American Scholar—solely out of spite. The grant had one string: Epstein must be retained as editor.

"The generosity of the foundation was viewed by the magazine’s enemies on the Phi Beta Kappa Senate as a right-wing plot to save the job of the editor of the American Scholar," said Epstein in a reference to himself. "The annual interest on the two million dollars, which the foundation genuinely wished us to have, dangled temptingly for more than three years unused."

Epstein’s conspiracy theory has its detractors.

"His description of what happened is, I think, a bit slanted," said Arnold Relman, an emeritus professor of medicine at Harvard University and one of Epstein’s few supporters on the Senate. "Anyone who deals with foundation awards would agree that the Phi Beta Kappa Society acted reasonably. The negotiations have to be with the institution, not the individual."

Frederick Crosson, president of the Phi Beta Kappa Senate, also thinks Epstein overstated the level of opposition posed by his colleagues.

"I don’t think it’s true," Crosson told Campus Report. "There may have been individuals who indeed were not supporters (of Epstein), to put it mildly, but that certainly was not true of the Senate as a whole."

Founded at the College of William and Mary in 1776, Phi Beta Kappa, arguably the nation’s most prestigious liberal arts honor society, boasts some 600,000 members across the country, although its membership base has been declining in recent years as fewer elite students have opted to join. Those eligible must rank in the upper 10% of their class and pursue a broad course of study in the liberal arts.

Though Epstein prides himself on practically purging partisan politics from the pages of the American Scholar, while resisting being labeled himself, he bemoans campus conservatives’ lack of stomach for a fight.

"Phi Beta Kappa’s Senate, far from being representative of the organization at large, is almost wholly made up of academics, and in academic argument, I have noticed, the radicals almost always win, even though they rarely constitute a majority," he observed. "Conservatives, dependably a minority, usually don’t care enough to take a strong stand against them."

Epstein, who humbly admits that he never came close to approaching Phi Beta Kappa’s austere qualifications as a student (though the same could not be said for his wife), now teaches English at Northwestern University.