Links
Archives
Saturday, December 04, 2004
|
GOING COSMIC - OR, PLAYING RIGHT INTO THEIR HANDS
***In an English department dissertation defense, the student defending asserts the superiority of North Korea to South Korea and meets with agreement around the table. ***In a book written by an English professor, white supremacist David Duke and writer Bruce Bawer are discussed as if they were interchangeable. ***At a literary conference, an English professor defends the imperishable glory of the Chinese cultural revolution against its bourgeois detractors. ***After giving a talk about the modern American novel, a young English professor is approached by a senior professor: “That was intriguing but unformed. You need to put the analysis in Marxist terms.” These are just a few anecdotes about life in contemporary English departments from UD’s own experience. They tell us that when conservatives complain about far left bias in the university, they’re right, if only about certain humanities and social sciences departments. Most of academia skews soft-left, if you will; but it is scandalous that many English departments express a hard-left groupthink, in which things like the defense of Mumbia Abu-Jamal, the hiring of Susan Rosenberg, open contempt for religious people, and literature-free, propaganda-rich classrooms, are considered mainstream. The situation is most scandalous in the most inescapable courses - required English composition - where freshmen may confront political activists who couldn’t care less about writing -- indeed, who may believe that good writing is an ideological ruse. UD is always amazed when colleges get upset about high attrition rates after freshman year. You go to all of this trouble to attract the brightest students you can, and then you treat them to wildly stupid indoctrination sessions. What do you think is going to happen? It does no good for professors to pretend that this doesn’t go on -- it does. If you’re going to take on the escalating right-wing attack on the American university, you’re going to have to begin by clarifying the situation and by conceding that some of what goes on is nuts. Having said that, UD will now offer an example of how not to respond to conservative critics of groupthink in the academy. In a recent comment, Timothy Burke begins by referring us, somewhat wearily, to his earlier writings on the subject, and reporting that he’s “frustrated with most of the participants in the extended public conversation” going on right now. UD is a great admirer of Burke's writings and thoughts on the American university, but whoa. UD has been at countless academic conferences where panel members opened their papers in this way - “See my earlier work on this subject. Other people who’ve commented on the issue since then have added little.” It’s arrogant and off-putting. It’s exactly what conservative red-staters have in mind when they dismiss professors as snobbish and out of touch. Burke then, for the rest of his comment, goes cosmic. “Going cosmic” is UD’s phrase for something she’s seen a lot of academics do when confronted with a particular problem. Here the particular problem - worth taking seriously - is that, for a variety of reasons, most conservative voices are stilled in the academy, while many uninformed and irresponsible voices from a politically extreme position are encouraged. What is Burke’s solution to this problem? We can‘t get anywhere, he writes, until we have a “general reconstruction of knowledge and its architecture.” We must “change the entire infrastructure of publication, presentation and pedagogy.” But couldn’t our English departments, for instance, simply make an effort to recruit young professors with more text-based, ethical, or religious orientations toward literature? Such people do exist. Nah. First we have to reconstruct knowledge as we know it. “Groupthink isn’t enforced by partisan plotters,” says Burke, his language (“enforced… plotters”) giving him away. No one sensible on the subject thinks or speaks in terms of policing and conspiracy. The situation is more commonly described in Louis Menand’s terms: English professors are followers of fashion, and their fashion world remains dominated by leftwing obscurantism embodied in charismatic intellectual figures. These professors need to be encouraged to think for themselves, and to be open to new intellectual and political currents. And there are promising indications, in UD’s experience, that this is starting to happen. She’s heard that one of her colleagues now routinely teaches a section on “the return to aesthetics” in his graduate seminar. That’s how things become less nutty - gradually, from within. |