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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Sunday, November 21, 2004

A READER EMAILS...


...in response to UD's post below [UD, 11/18/04: This Just In]. The historian David Gress takes issue with UD's insouciance about overwhelming liberal affiliation among university professors:



"UD paints a picture of disinterested scholars who happen to have leftist opinions. That may have been true 50 years ago. Then, people at least tried to be fair and believed in disinterested scholarship. But that is no longer the case.

First of all, the leading forces of humanistic academia have long since ditched the notion of disinterested scholarship (although they are cynical enough to drag out the notion if they can use it to hit conservatives for alleged bias).

Second, the fields and approaches humanists and even scientists choose are often subtly and in numerous ways conditioned by their liberal biases. Climatologists want to find evidence of global warming. Historians want to debunk Western civilization or American patriotism. You can often tell these biases by the peculiar reluctance these people have to consider contrary evidence, and the ill-concealed delight (often betrayed by a grimacing, twitching smirk at the corners of the mouth; I have seen it dozens of times) with which they will list all the points they believe favor their interpretation.

All of this is betrayal of scholarship and intellectual corruption. That's the true situation. Exceptions may exist, but they are getting fewer."





UD, having seen that smirk herself, believes she understands what Professor Gress is saying.

But what's at issue is whether what Gress describes represents intellectual and institutional betrayal and corruption on a truly significant scale. And answers to that will depend on personal experience in the academy over time, since the categories "liberal" and "conservative" as used in the questionnaires are too crude in themselves, UD thinks, to tell us much about professors and their politics.

Based on her own observations in that most extreme of liberal settings, the American university English department (where in a large faculty meeting one of UD's colleagues once referred to Hillary Clinton as "The Glorious Hillary"), but also her observations elsewhere, UD would want to continue to insist that it's not that most American professors are intellectually corrupt America-haters, but rather that there is indeed a relatively small number of ideology-idiots in ideology-infected fields who write propaganda and who don't know what scholarly disinterestedness is. They deserve our contempt and ridicule.

After them, there are large numbers of mainstream liberals whose scholarly work may indeed reflect a liberal cast of mind but is not necessarily vitiated because of that.

And then there's a large body of academics, UD would argue, for whom politics, beyond voting whenever possible for a Democratic candidate, doesn't mean much.




In short, UD fails to see the same widespread assault on Western civilization and its values that Gress sees dominating the American academic system. She sees quite a lot of stupid shit being taught all over American colleges, of course; but she considers it far too generous to assume that this shit has any self-conscious, self-respecting politics. In UD's experience, it doesn't. It's just stupid.

A final note. As someone who admires, teaches, and writes about Don DeLillo, a writer whose almost sentimentally patriotic novels have been dismissed by many conservatives as what one of them calls "acts of literary bad citizenship," UD is particularly careful about charging writers and teachers with things like lack of patriotism and disgust with Western cultural values. I don't revere DeLillo because I have liberal biases that his work massages; but I can imagine someone looking at his complex and, sure, sometimes scathing view of modern America and looking at my having voted for Kerry and deciding that I'm a leftist trolling for converts. I'm very far from being a leftist, and indeed have taught, this semester, many more books by conservatives (Robert Kagan, Jean-Francois Revel, Mark Lilla) than books by liberals (Don DeLillo). Not to mention books by writers whom some people categorize as reactionaries (Celine, Michel Tournier, Michel Houellebecq).

As UD has noted in previous posts, the subject is a complicated one which should be handled with care.