The news that Snooki was paid $2,000 more than Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison to speak at Rutgers University last week was taken as another sign of Civilization’s general decline. But high literature isn’t going down without a fight.
When the New York Post called up Toni Morrison for a comment (!) about the pay gap, 80-year-old Morrison:
dismissed Snooki’s higher fee, saying, “I don’t know her . . . and I don’t care.”
The “Song of Solomon” author also pointedly noted that she usually gets double her $30,000 Rutgers fee for appearances, but “I have some nostalgia about Rutgers because I used to teach there so, in effect, I cut my fee in half.”
Oh, it is on. Morrison knows that the way to best way to destroy a Jersey Shore cast-member is to be completely ignorant of their existence. It was either that, or a scathing, 2,500-word takedown of Snooki’s classic coming-of-age tale A Shore Thing in the New York Review of Books. It’s fitting that this clash comes courtesy of a college, as colleges represent the nexus of the loftiest human ideas and the lowest human behavior.
[Via Vulture, image via AP and Getty]