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‘Helpless, Helpless, Helpless’ is the soundtrack…

… running through this defense of the politicized humanities.

 [A]dministrators — in thrall to university donors at private institutions, and who at public ones serve at the whim of state governments — represent the beachhead by which the academic Trumpism [William] Deresiewicz lusts for will arrive on campus.

Orwell, in “Politics and the English Language,” couldn’t have found a better example of a sentence squirrely with militancy (lusts? beachhead?), and intellectually lost in a strange old world. “Academic Trumpism” might as well be Revisionist Menshevism.

Margaret Soltan, December 4, 2024 3:44PM
Posted in: kind of a little weird

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4 Responses to “‘Helpless, Helpless, Helpless’ is the soundtrack…”

  1. Rita Says:

    “A more promising avenue is visible in those movements committed to preserving robust higher-education systems that treat students and workers humanely. At their best, these academic labor struggles articulate meaningfully with the struggles of working-class Americans more broadly.”

    LOL. Putting aside the non-English of “articulate meaningfully with struggles,” the idea that grad student unionization is the way forward for higher ed b/c it will resonate with the working class is the strongest signal of this essay’s cluelessness. When 30% of your union is “academic workers” (=PhD students), that just means your union, at least in the traditional sense of a working-class organization, is dead.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    It was pretty cruel of the CHE editors to forego any editing of this piece. It’s as if they want to make a spectacle of the semi-literacy.

  3. TAFKAU Says:

    Deresiewicz’s article, yet another contribution to the already tiresome “see, this razor-thin election proves that thing that I already believed” literature, deeply deserved an effective takedown. (We can guess, for example, that if a couple hundred thousand votes had distributed differently in MI, PA, and WI, Deresiewicz would not be writing about the vindication of woke culture.) I’m disappointed that this garbled mess was the rebuttal the Chronicle chose to publish.

  4. Margaret Soltan Says:

    TAFKAU: Either this was the best submission they received(!), or, as I suggested in my earlier comment, some malice was at work.

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