… 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.
December 4th, 2024 at 10:02PM
“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.
December 4th, 2024 at 11:52PM
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.
December 5th, 2024 at 6:28AM
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.
December 5th, 2024 at 6:56AM
TAFKAU: Either this was the best submission they received(!), or, as I suggested in my earlier comment, some malice was at work.