What in the actual fuck is Marx doing on a syllabus in an English class?!?!?! His prose was hardly interesting and definitely not worth the price of admission even if you discount his political drivel.
As for the quote from your parents, as former Soviet, I can hear their voices in my head.
Altering American culture via Marx is the aim of English and Education degrees. Critical pedagogy consciously forwards Marxian principles inside both types of degrees, interpreting literature and culture via the oppressor/oppressed binary and training US k-12/higher ed teachers to become liberators who help students identify their oppressors in their daily lives 👀
That’s how my MA in applied linguistics focused on teaching effectively (‘12-‘15) and my 2nd MA in composition studies, to teach students how to write for liberation (‘18-‘20). 2 fellow phd students at Virginia tech (‘20-‘25) openly identified themselves as Marxists…even after one adult Chinese PhD student recounted constant censorship, no private ownership, no 2A, no 1A, fear of being disappeared, and reading and praising Xi Jinping every Friday at her former university English department meetings.
Countering critical pedagogy and Marxism (plus social justice) put me on the outs at cal state, Virginia tech, and here in my current English dept. at University of Texas.
I once took a literary critique class and was assigned to review the “Marxist critique.” I wrote that I was troubled that anyone would give any credibility whatsoever to a worldview that resulted in the deaths of over 100 million people.
I think this is the best article you've written in sometime, Liza! The Humanities has been captured by leftist ideologues who want to make everything about identity politics and the class struggle. They have totally forgotten the whole point of literature in the first place. It is to connect us all to what makes us human and introduces us to new ideas and new ways of seeing the world we never thought of before. But as far as Ivy League leftists are concerned, there is only one way to see it-oppressor vs. oppressed. Many college English departments especially if they are in the Ivy League, worship thinkers like Karl Marx, Judith Butler, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Andrea Dworkin, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Martin Heidegger, Theodore Adorno, and Zygmunt Bauman. They consider them more important than the timeless moral messages contained in great works of literature like Romeo and Juliet, The Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, The Great Gatsby, Notes from the Underground, Jane Eyre, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Christmas Carol, Moby Dick, The Wizard of Oz, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Iliad, The Odessey, The Bell Jar, The War of the Worlds, and The Red Badge of Courage.
Sadly, History Departments have become this way as well. They are obsessed with pushing and overemphasizing topics like the class struggle, slavery, racism, sexism, gender roles, sexuality, gender identity, level of ability, and how bad and evil colonialism was. The AHA the American Historical Association, is very openly leftist and has passed resolutions against the Iraq War, Russia's Invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli "scholasticide" in Gaza. Former AHA President James Sweet for example, was forced to retract and apologize and his career was destroyed, when he dared to criticize the revisionist, anti-American, Afrocentric garbage that is the 1619 Project. Our local history museum here in St. Louis is doing land acknowledgements and hosted a panel discussion of only far-left professors and activists who wanted any historical statues they didn't like or agree with taken down. This is one of the many reasons why I decided not to volunteer with them. The NAI and the National Park System has also been captured by leftist idealogues. They've put out videos claiming that Indigenous people were idyllic hippies who were peaceful and lived in harmony with nature before the white man came along and ruined everything and that the National Parks weren't welcoming places for people of color.
As to Marxism itself, Liza's parents were right to be furious about Liza being taught this garbage in college. Three generations of Liza's family suffered under Marxist oppression and antisemitism. To all these leftist and Antifa types of college campuses here is something you need to understand, Communism killed hundreds of millions of people around the globe. Karl Marx and Frederich Engels were spoiled rich kids who knew nothing about the real world or how economics actually worked. Thus, why the Communist Manifesto is total rubbish. Marx himself by the way was racist, sexist, antisemitic, and homophobic in case you didn't know. Communism was terrible for people of color, ethnic minorities, Jews, Muslims, women, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, poor people, and people in the third world too. It also was awful for the environment. Communist countries were and are among the most polluted nations on Earth.
I'm pleased to see you connect Marx to Foucault. The Marxists and postmodernists were at odds with each other in the 1960's, but their argument was largely "inside baseball": which axis (economic or cultural) do we apply Marx's hierarchy of oppression to more?
I teach HS. One of my students was just early admitted to U-Austin last year (he's 17 now), so he's down in your part of the country. Jack wants to make AI safe for humanity. And if anyone can, he will.
You and I are like that little boy throwing tide-stranded starfish back into the sea... one student at a time, my friend.
Like your efforts to mentor Jack and his desire to center humanity in AI, it’s one at a time 💯. I share a Peterson video with my writing students about how coherent writing improves thinking and influence https://youtu.be/bfDOoADCfkg. And , having worked for AI companies, I help them learn that AI can either aid that or seriously hinder that ability. I’ll bet Jack improves our use/reliance on AI…
Excellent article. The infiltration of academia by far left ideology goes back to Dewey if not before. It really broke open with Derrida, Foucault, Butler, etc, in the early 80s. These people have learned nothing from history. They are shallow linear thinkers. Society is too complex to model with their stupid theories. There is nothing new under the sun! We learn from experience and reality! Arrgghh!! Keep chipping away at this cancer!❤️
So very interesting! 20 years ago, when I was at uni in a post-Berlin-Wall Germany we read Said as well, but nobody - literally NOBODY - would have dared uttering the word Marxism or putting Marx on the syllabus. A person attempting something like this would probably have been dumped head-first in the nearest river (and the nearest river has a swift current). But it seems the last 20 or 30 years have not only mellowed THE WEST (TM) but western culture as a whole seems hell-bent on repeating the mistakes of the past.
I played their game by pretending to go along with the Marxist nonsense, but I always put in something in an essay that subverted it. My Karl Jung 25 page term paper was a masterpiece of that, if I do say so myself.
Great piece! But you left out the fact that Columbia English professors don’t care in the slightest about their students as human beings. They won’t talk to you about finding a job, or dealing with depression, or even about violent crime when it happens just off campus. The issue isn’t Marxism; it’s callousness, hypocrisy, and indifference.
In my English PhD program, we had to read "The Communist Manifesto"--twice!--and most coursework was sympathetic to the Marxist view. The head of our entire grad program was quite open about admitting his adherence to socialism. In one class, someone made an economic point that was simply factually inaccurate, and I spoke up with some evidence from F.A. Hayek. No one had any idea who that was, including the professor. He won a Nobel Prize for crap's sake! But that was consistent--we read all the Marxist thinkers, but no one had any idea of Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, Sowell, or any other free-market economists. So, I wrote my dissertation on integrating capitalist philosophy into literary theory, refuting Marxism. NO ONE from the faculty would sit on my committee--they HATED my project. But, I finished through force of sheer will and some kindness from professors at other universities. That dissertation fortunately became my first published book, so it was nice to stick it my professors :) And I've built a course for kids (https://www.english-champion.com/economics-and-literature) that provides a free-market literary perspective so they can be prepared for not only real life but for when they encounter the ideological hegemony of college English classes. We can fight against Marxism in English departments--we just have to speak up and present worthy alternatives.
I am no expert but I am pretty sure Marx, Hegel, Foucault, Beauvoir, etc...never wrote in English(or for the most part), then why put them in ENGLISH LITERATURE dept??
"Stepped foot." An English major says "stepped foot." The first few dozen times I saw this phrase, I thought it was an obvious typo; what was meant was "set foot." I may begin to suspect that this has come to be regarded as standard English. I even heard it in a TV commercial. These things happen. One reason this change in standard English seems more jarring to me than some others is "step," as I was brought up using that word, is intransitive: you may step on something or step toward something or step in something, but you don't "step something."
I'd no idea this is what is happening, despite some of the "news" reported. Having graduated from university in the early 1970s I recall how many of us were left-leaning, but what I experienced is nothing like what you so eloquently describe.
I agree with Noah Otte that this is one of your best. Thank you for writing and posting this. Unfortunately there is nothing I can change about the situation -- as I am not working in academia -- but I want to be aware at all times of what is going on so I can let others know. Apparently, it's been going on for a while.
Foucault certainly could be categorized as a libertarian (or libertine, more accurately.) However, the libertarian ideology is far more left-wing than right. It's Locke's liberationist tendencies, seeking to remove all unchosen constraints, on steroids.
The New Right's primary criticism of the neocons and libertarian legs of the "3-legged stool" is that they utterly failed to conserve anything over the last 60 years. George Will didn't "stand athwart history yelling stop", but rather stood to the side as the train barreled by muttering, "slow down a little, pretty please."
A true right-wing movement is Burkean instead of Lockean or Millian. (Although the latter was less liberationist than commonly believed. The modern Left likes to forget that whole despotism and barbarians part of Mill.) And Foucault was definitely not a Burkean.
I agree, I took issue with thinking of Foucault as a hard leftist the same way i struggle with the notion of rad-libs as hard leftist but your assessment is right
What in the actual fuck is Marx doing on a syllabus in an English class?!?!?! His prose was hardly interesting and definitely not worth the price of admission even if you discount his political drivel.
As for the quote from your parents, as former Soviet, I can hear their voices in my head.
Altering American culture via Marx is the aim of English and Education degrees. Critical pedagogy consciously forwards Marxian principles inside both types of degrees, interpreting literature and culture via the oppressor/oppressed binary and training US k-12/higher ed teachers to become liberators who help students identify their oppressors in their daily lives 👀
That’s how my MA in applied linguistics focused on teaching effectively (‘12-‘15) and my 2nd MA in composition studies, to teach students how to write for liberation (‘18-‘20). 2 fellow phd students at Virginia tech (‘20-‘25) openly identified themselves as Marxists…even after one adult Chinese PhD student recounted constant censorship, no private ownership, no 2A, no 1A, fear of being disappeared, and reading and praising Xi Jinping every Friday at her former university English department meetings.
Countering critical pedagogy and Marxism (plus social justice) put me on the outs at cal state, Virginia tech, and here in my current English dept. at University of Texas.
its about promoting sexism by tricking the hottest chicks.
i swear.
its an op.
i completely know this.
targeting eclectic proto-cults.
I once took a literary critique class and was assigned to review the “Marxist critique.” I wrote that I was troubled that anyone would give any credibility whatsoever to a worldview that resulted in the deaths of over 100 million people.
I think this is the best article you've written in sometime, Liza! The Humanities has been captured by leftist ideologues who want to make everything about identity politics and the class struggle. They have totally forgotten the whole point of literature in the first place. It is to connect us all to what makes us human and introduces us to new ideas and new ways of seeing the world we never thought of before. But as far as Ivy League leftists are concerned, there is only one way to see it-oppressor vs. oppressed. Many college English departments especially if they are in the Ivy League, worship thinkers like Karl Marx, Judith Butler, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Andrea Dworkin, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Martin Heidegger, Theodore Adorno, and Zygmunt Bauman. They consider them more important than the timeless moral messages contained in great works of literature like Romeo and Juliet, The Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, The Great Gatsby, Notes from the Underground, Jane Eyre, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Christmas Carol, Moby Dick, The Wizard of Oz, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Iliad, The Odessey, The Bell Jar, The War of the Worlds, and The Red Badge of Courage.
Sadly, History Departments have become this way as well. They are obsessed with pushing and overemphasizing topics like the class struggle, slavery, racism, sexism, gender roles, sexuality, gender identity, level of ability, and how bad and evil colonialism was. The AHA the American Historical Association, is very openly leftist and has passed resolutions against the Iraq War, Russia's Invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli "scholasticide" in Gaza. Former AHA President James Sweet for example, was forced to retract and apologize and his career was destroyed, when he dared to criticize the revisionist, anti-American, Afrocentric garbage that is the 1619 Project. Our local history museum here in St. Louis is doing land acknowledgements and hosted a panel discussion of only far-left professors and activists who wanted any historical statues they didn't like or agree with taken down. This is one of the many reasons why I decided not to volunteer with them. The NAI and the National Park System has also been captured by leftist idealogues. They've put out videos claiming that Indigenous people were idyllic hippies who were peaceful and lived in harmony with nature before the white man came along and ruined everything and that the National Parks weren't welcoming places for people of color.
As to Marxism itself, Liza's parents were right to be furious about Liza being taught this garbage in college. Three generations of Liza's family suffered under Marxist oppression and antisemitism. To all these leftist and Antifa types of college campuses here is something you need to understand, Communism killed hundreds of millions of people around the globe. Karl Marx and Frederich Engels were spoiled rich kids who knew nothing about the real world or how economics actually worked. Thus, why the Communist Manifesto is total rubbish. Marx himself by the way was racist, sexist, antisemitic, and homophobic in case you didn't know. Communism was terrible for people of color, ethnic minorities, Jews, Muslims, women, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, poor people, and people in the third world too. It also was awful for the environment. Communist countries were and are among the most polluted nations on Earth.
Excellently put
I'm pleased to see you connect Marx to Foucault. The Marxists and postmodernists were at odds with each other in the 1960's, but their argument was largely "inside baseball": which axis (economic or cultural) do we apply Marx's hierarchy of oppression to more?
Jordan Peterson isn't always my cup of tea, but I use this video with my phil classes (my tiny contribution to saving Western Civilization) to connect these two concepts: https://web.archive.org/web/20180131193947/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbDggKqt3KA
Understanding the connection is critical to understanding (and correcting) the modern world.
Please keep saving western civilization, one class at a time. I do the same in first-year writing courses
I teach HS. One of my students was just early admitted to U-Austin last year (he's 17 now), so he's down in your part of the country. Jack wants to make AI safe for humanity. And if anyone can, he will.
You and I are like that little boy throwing tide-stranded starfish back into the sea... one student at a time, my friend.
Like your efforts to mentor Jack and his desire to center humanity in AI, it’s one at a time 💯. I share a Peterson video with my writing students about how coherent writing improves thinking and influence https://youtu.be/bfDOoADCfkg. And , having worked for AI companies, I help them learn that AI can either aid that or seriously hinder that ability. I’ll bet Jack improves our use/reliance on AI…
Excellent article. The infiltration of academia by far left ideology goes back to Dewey if not before. It really broke open with Derrida, Foucault, Butler, etc, in the early 80s. These people have learned nothing from history. They are shallow linear thinkers. Society is too complex to model with their stupid theories. There is nothing new under the sun! We learn from experience and reality! Arrgghh!! Keep chipping away at this cancer!❤️
So very interesting! 20 years ago, when I was at uni in a post-Berlin-Wall Germany we read Said as well, but nobody - literally NOBODY - would have dared uttering the word Marxism or putting Marx on the syllabus. A person attempting something like this would probably have been dumped head-first in the nearest river (and the nearest river has a swift current). But it seems the last 20 or 30 years have not only mellowed THE WEST (TM) but western culture as a whole seems hell-bent on repeating the mistakes of the past.
I played their game by pretending to go along with the Marxist nonsense, but I always put in something in an essay that subverted it. My Karl Jung 25 page term paper was a masterpiece of that, if I do say so myself.
Great piece! But you left out the fact that Columbia English professors don’t care in the slightest about their students as human beings. They won’t talk to you about finding a job, or dealing with depression, or even about violent crime when it happens just off campus. The issue isn’t Marxism; it’s callousness, hypocrisy, and indifference.
Marxists love the working class but not the individual worker.
In my English PhD program, we had to read "The Communist Manifesto"--twice!--and most coursework was sympathetic to the Marxist view. The head of our entire grad program was quite open about admitting his adherence to socialism. In one class, someone made an economic point that was simply factually inaccurate, and I spoke up with some evidence from F.A. Hayek. No one had any idea who that was, including the professor. He won a Nobel Prize for crap's sake! But that was consistent--we read all the Marxist thinkers, but no one had any idea of Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, Sowell, or any other free-market economists. So, I wrote my dissertation on integrating capitalist philosophy into literary theory, refuting Marxism. NO ONE from the faculty would sit on my committee--they HATED my project. But, I finished through force of sheer will and some kindness from professors at other universities. That dissertation fortunately became my first published book, so it was nice to stick it my professors :) And I've built a course for kids (https://www.english-champion.com/economics-and-literature) that provides a free-market literary perspective so they can be prepared for not only real life but for when they encounter the ideological hegemony of college English classes. We can fight against Marxism in English departments--we just have to speak up and present worthy alternatives.
Sajjad Mehsud the woke sophist.
I am no expert but I am pretty sure Marx, Hegel, Foucault, Beauvoir, etc...never wrote in English(or for the most part), then why put them in ENGLISH LITERATURE dept??
i dont even know if like chinese literature or mexican literature is a major.
I apparently got out just in time!
"Stepped foot." An English major says "stepped foot." The first few dozen times I saw this phrase, I thought it was an obvious typo; what was meant was "set foot." I may begin to suspect that this has come to be regarded as standard English. I even heard it in a TV commercial. These things happen. One reason this change in standard English seems more jarring to me than some others is "step," as I was brought up using that word, is intransitive: you may step on something or step toward something or step in something, but you don't "step something."
I'd no idea this is what is happening, despite some of the "news" reported. Having graduated from university in the early 1970s I recall how many of us were left-leaning, but what I experienced is nothing like what you so eloquently describe.
I agree with Noah Otte that this is one of your best. Thank you for writing and posting this. Unfortunately there is nothing I can change about the situation -- as I am not working in academia -- but I want to be aware at all times of what is going on so I can let others know. Apparently, it's been going on for a while.
In practice, Foucault really wasn’t much of a leftist. I can make the case that the American libertarian movement doesn’t exist without him
Foucault certainly could be categorized as a libertarian (or libertine, more accurately.) However, the libertarian ideology is far more left-wing than right. It's Locke's liberationist tendencies, seeking to remove all unchosen constraints, on steroids.
The New Right's primary criticism of the neocons and libertarian legs of the "3-legged stool" is that they utterly failed to conserve anything over the last 60 years. George Will didn't "stand athwart history yelling stop", but rather stood to the side as the train barreled by muttering, "slow down a little, pretty please."
A true right-wing movement is Burkean instead of Lockean or Millian. (Although the latter was less liberationist than commonly believed. The modern Left likes to forget that whole despotism and barbarians part of Mill.) And Foucault was definitely not a Burkean.
I agree, I took issue with thinking of Foucault as a hard leftist the same way i struggle with the notion of rad-libs as hard leftist but your assessment is right