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.
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!❤️
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.
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.
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.
While I agree totally (and from experience) that US literature programs promote theories, including "Far Left" ideologies to the point where a student is no longer studying literature, your essay gets off on the wrong foot since it is indeed the "Far Left" activism of graduate student TA's at Columbia and NYU over the last 20 years that--if nothing else--have at least highlighted the exploitation of graduate students in an EDU, which is a misplaced acronym since so many EDUs are badly disguised COMs. Also, that MA English students in the 90s and oughts engaged in activism to no longer be exploited should not be described as "Far Left." Asking for a living rage, actually, is a middle-of-the-road demand.
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.
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!❤️
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.
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.
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.
While I agree totally (and from experience) that US literature programs promote theories, including "Far Left" ideologies to the point where a student is no longer studying literature, your essay gets off on the wrong foot since it is indeed the "Far Left" activism of graduate student TA's at Columbia and NYU over the last 20 years that--if nothing else--have at least highlighted the exploitation of graduate students in an EDU, which is a misplaced acronym since so many EDUs are badly disguised COMs. Also, that MA English students in the 90s and oughts engaged in activism to no longer be exploited should not be described as "Far Left." Asking for a living rage, actually, is a middle-of-the-road demand.