"Today’s identity politics . . . teaches the exact opposite of what we think a liberal arts education should be. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, I was given so many tools for understanding the world. By the time I graduated, I could think about things as a utilitarian or as a Kantian, as a Freudian or a behaviorist, as a computer scientist or as a humanist. I was given many lenses to apply to any given question or problem.
But what do we do now? Many students are given just one lens—power. Here’s your lens, kid. Look at everything through this lens. Everything is about power. Every situation is analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education. This is induction into a cult. It’s a fundamentalist religion. It’s a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety and intellectual impotence"
I want to believe that the pendulum is going to swing back because beautiful prose is beautiful prose, and while passing fads (like overdone wokeness in university English departments) may cloud that perspective, it's not possible to erase the truth about the literary canon. I will defend the relevance of Henry James to anyone, anywhere, at any time. And defending literature's past does *not* mean we don't also welcome new works by a variety of voices. This is not a zero-sum game!
The problem is that the chain is broken. The English professors of 2040 never read any literature, and they don’t particularly like literature. Nor do they have a deep well of knowledge about it.
Three weeks before going to my first — and for my class — fiftieth Columbia College reunion, this was indeed distressing to read, though I had long suspected Columbia had gone this route.
I went to the College because of the Core Curriculum. Yeah, we had to read a little Lenin and Mao so it would be “relevant” (I entered in 1972, a mere 4 years after 1968 and all that) but actually it was all very silly and dull compared to Aristotle, Machiavelli and Locke.
Yet what ensuing decades after graduation showed me was that CC and Humanities were the most important courses I took, ever-increasingly so as I got older . My major (experimental pyschology) turned out to be a brief though intense love affair, yet 50 years later, I still go for back to the books I read in the Core — most recently to the Odyssey, with the release of the superb Mendelsohn translaton.
Thank you for this post. I’m no crank conservative, btw, but rather a solid liberal in the European sense, and like you, the child of refugees from the commies.
I had a very similar experience, except my college career was drawn out for many years due to being in the national guard and having to take breaks due to basic training and deployment. As I kept leaving and coming back to school with months or years in between, the English Department became more and more unhinged. The final straw came when I took a course on grammar and composition as an elective (grammar and composition was not a requirement as an English major at my school) and all the works we looked at were obviously promoting extreme left viewpoints. The final paper I looked at before dropping out of school for good was about the amount of sexual discrimination women face in STEM fields and how they aren’t taken seriously because they are young and wear makeup. The author then went on to say that women shouldn’t be afraid to heroically wear as much makeup as they want to at the workplace as a way to fight oppression and the patriarchy. I remember asking the Teacher’s Assistant how privileged, sheltered, and delusional you would have to be to consider professional attire in a scientific workplace, like a lab, to be oppression. I then spent the rest of the class being lectured on the patriarchy and my male privilege.
Another college '72. I went to UC. Berkeley that year, starting out math/science and switching to an English major the next year because of the great literature I discovered there in used book stores. Reading the English classics, (often ten hours a day) going all the way back to Beowulf in the original, a two quarter course taught by Alain Renoir, son of Jean Renoir, the director of Grand Illusions and son of the painter Jean Renoir, I was swept away and changed my major again, inspired by this classical tradition to learn and read Latin and Greek. I went to U.of T, Toronto being a Canadian but disliked the teachers, not for any political agendas, but for their disection of all my beloved classics as if it were some frog. I totally agree with your analysis. I quit halfway through my M.A. never to return to academia, though I kept reading the great classics all my life.
Had a similar experience many years previous at Yale, where the English department then had been taken over entirely by the deconstructionism of Derrida, etc. I was so out of synch with the notion that the texts we were reading were to be understood for anything other than the stories and the characters themselves reaching out across the years. I dropped English as a major after my first term. We have no choice but to resist.
F-ing Derrida and differance. The professors loved to use him to make convenient and escalatory definition changing a hallmark of their propaganda machine. They also used him to justify making any text say anything you want, but only if it included a Marxist slant.
Well-written, and sad! You are brave to applaud a traditional perspective. Personally, as a reader and writer, I find a "leftist," anti-colonialist take on literature to be interesting and sometimes perceptive, though never at the expense of an author's intentions and use of language and structure; never at the expense of the sheer pleasure of reading; and never as a result of wish fulfillment on the part of the theorist.
This is utterly depressing, and even more depressing in that it is not surprising to me, given all the other reading I've been doing. I have a 14yr old who wants to be a writer, consistently wins the "paper of the year" award, very academic. She attends a small Classical school with a rigorous "great books" curriculum where they are reading the classics of the Western canon from Plato to Shakespeare and beyond. What do we do with teens like these? Where will she be able to pursue higher ed in literature that hasn't been totally corrupted? I'm going to have a lot of work to do to search out such a place.
"1 + 1 does NOT equal 2! You believe it does because you are a victim of propaganda!":
A young woman, who years ago had amazingly escaped from North Korea, once publicly reported on this bizarre assertion that a Columbia University faculty member had made to her after she'd eventually made her way to the U.S. and enrolled at Columbia University, too, herself, and also to study in the English Department, there.
And I myself believe that if politically left-wing supposed "teachers" and "scholars" can manage to, they will also try to corrupt and to do their best to ruin both the practice in the U.S. of the natural sciences and the learning and pursuit even of mathamatics, itself.
We have already begun seeing U.S. left-wingers attempting to do this by their having introduced the notion of "ethno-mathematics," as well as their bizarrely absurd idea that mathematics is racist and sexist.
I'm sorry for you -- thank God I earned my MA in English literature in 1976 and had professors who focused on the books we were reading.
But as a private school teacher years later, I saw what awaited you. By the late 1980s, student clubs were formed on the basis of skin tone, and sexuality was getting an airing; by the 2000s, it had gotten worse: Faculty meetings were being devoted to exploring our multiple identities, and administrators rather than the English department head (moi) were in charge of choosing the books students were to read.
Finally, I refused to play and retired a bit earlier than I might have.
Construct, Context, Perspective. The pale blue dot photo. The planet Earth as tabla rasa as regards human activity. Is the entire human ethos a construct? From which is derived all meaning. (Existential). Is meaning intrinsic discoverable? Creatible? Derived from powers we cannot know. Can none be found (Nihilist). Is art meant to be reflect, elevate, examine, critique? So many questions. I feel what you describe is a kind of corruption. Force me to think a certain way. What am I in church? A Hitler youth meeting? Study should be a multi faceted examination of the world and exploration. Thank you for writing.
There’s room for this but your key point it’s horribly lopsided. Dominant. Certainly it is not honoring any meaningful academic principle to read a criticism of a book without reading the book. That’s effectively propagandizing
CC '92 English major. I remember one of the factors in my choosing Columbia in 1988 was its English Dept. had resisted the rise of Deconstructionism. I had so many amazing professors and it was all original texts. I did not read a single essay, much less a book, of literary criticism or theory. Edward Mendelson teaching Conrad; Arnold Rampersad teaching Zora Neale Hurston; Carl Hovde teaching Frost; Shapiro and Taylor on Shakespeare; Wallace Gray teaching Faulkner. It was glorious. I'm now finishing my MFA in fiction at the University of St. Thomas-Houston, and it is everything a lover of literature could want.
This is so fascinating to me. As someone who went down a completely different path and now wants to pursue writing and studying literature, I always mourned that I didn’t study literature in school. I assume not all schools are the same, so maybe I would’ve had a different experience but it is reassuring to hear that maybe I didn’t miss out. Your article made me think of I think CS Lewis in Experiment in Criticism where he talks about how the majority has forgotten how to read and instead gets caught up in talking about literature criticism and commenting on each other’s criticism all while no one has actually read the original piece.
Traditions is valuable and so important. Thank you for sharing
This happened to a lot of people who took lit classes in college. It really was a thing, it was very silly, and we’d laugh about it among friends; but it’s also not the great social injustice of our time that some English classes at research universities were a little cringe.
I was excited when I got accepted into university anthropology in 1978. I thought I was going to study human cultures, history, belief systems, and how societies actually work.
What shocked me was how quickly I learned that curiosity had limits. My views were allowed only if they lined up with my professor’s views. That was not education. That was intellectual obedience training.
Anthropology should teach students to understand human beings, not train them to repeat fashionable conclusions. When a classroom punishes disagreement, it stops being a place of learning and becomes a church with tuition.
See Professors and the Pornography of Power:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/56415.html
...in which I quote Jonathan Haidt:
"Today’s identity politics . . . teaches the exact opposite of what we think a liberal arts education should be. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, I was given so many tools for understanding the world. By the time I graduated, I could think about things as a utilitarian or as a Kantian, as a Freudian or a behaviorist, as a computer scientist or as a humanist. I was given many lenses to apply to any given question or problem.
But what do we do now? Many students are given just one lens—power. Here’s your lens, kid. Look at everything through this lens. Everything is about power. Every situation is analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education. This is induction into a cult. It’s a fundamentalist religion. It’s a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety and intellectual impotence"
Hey, MY name is David Foster! And I approve this message!!
Hi David, reminds me of a poem...
https://speakupstudio.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Too-Many-Daves.pdf
I want to believe that the pendulum is going to swing back because beautiful prose is beautiful prose, and while passing fads (like overdone wokeness in university English departments) may cloud that perspective, it's not possible to erase the truth about the literary canon. I will defend the relevance of Henry James to anyone, anywhere, at any time. And defending literature's past does *not* mean we don't also welcome new works by a variety of voices. This is not a zero-sum game!
The problem is that the chain is broken. The English professors of 2040 never read any literature, and they don’t particularly like literature. Nor do they have a deep well of knowledge about it.
I wish I can be as optimistic as you are, but I’m afraid it might even get worse rather than better.
Three weeks before going to my first — and for my class — fiftieth Columbia College reunion, this was indeed distressing to read, though I had long suspected Columbia had gone this route.
I went to the College because of the Core Curriculum. Yeah, we had to read a little Lenin and Mao so it would be “relevant” (I entered in 1972, a mere 4 years after 1968 and all that) but actually it was all very silly and dull compared to Aristotle, Machiavelli and Locke.
Yet what ensuing decades after graduation showed me was that CC and Humanities were the most important courses I took, ever-increasingly so as I got older . My major (experimental pyschology) turned out to be a brief though intense love affair, yet 50 years later, I still go for back to the books I read in the Core — most recently to the Odyssey, with the release of the superb Mendelsohn translaton.
Thank you for this post. I’m no crank conservative, btw, but rather a solid liberal in the European sense, and like you, the child of refugees from the commies.
Best,
Toomas Hendrik Ilves
College ‘72
President of Estonia 2006-2016
I had a very similar experience, except my college career was drawn out for many years due to being in the national guard and having to take breaks due to basic training and deployment. As I kept leaving and coming back to school with months or years in between, the English Department became more and more unhinged. The final straw came when I took a course on grammar and composition as an elective (grammar and composition was not a requirement as an English major at my school) and all the works we looked at were obviously promoting extreme left viewpoints. The final paper I looked at before dropping out of school for good was about the amount of sexual discrimination women face in STEM fields and how they aren’t taken seriously because they are young and wear makeup. The author then went on to say that women shouldn’t be afraid to heroically wear as much makeup as they want to at the workplace as a way to fight oppression and the patriarchy. I remember asking the Teacher’s Assistant how privileged, sheltered, and delusional you would have to be to consider professional attire in a scientific workplace, like a lab, to be oppression. I then spent the rest of the class being lectured on the patriarchy and my male privilege.
Another college '72. I went to UC. Berkeley that year, starting out math/science and switching to an English major the next year because of the great literature I discovered there in used book stores. Reading the English classics, (often ten hours a day) going all the way back to Beowulf in the original, a two quarter course taught by Alain Renoir, son of Jean Renoir, the director of Grand Illusions and son of the painter Jean Renoir, I was swept away and changed my major again, inspired by this classical tradition to learn and read Latin and Greek. I went to U.of T, Toronto being a Canadian but disliked the teachers, not for any political agendas, but for their disection of all my beloved classics as if it were some frog. I totally agree with your analysis. I quit halfway through my M.A. never to return to academia, though I kept reading the great classics all my life.
Had a similar experience many years previous at Yale, where the English department then had been taken over entirely by the deconstructionism of Derrida, etc. I was so out of synch with the notion that the texts we were reading were to be understood for anything other than the stories and the characters themselves reaching out across the years. I dropped English as a major after my first term. We have no choice but to resist.
F-ing Derrida and differance. The professors loved to use him to make convenient and escalatory definition changing a hallmark of their propaganda machine. They also used him to justify making any text say anything you want, but only if it included a Marxist slant.
Derrida should be taught alongside The Emperor's New Clothes!
Well-written, and sad! You are brave to applaud a traditional perspective. Personally, as a reader and writer, I find a "leftist," anti-colonialist take on literature to be interesting and sometimes perceptive, though never at the expense of an author's intentions and use of language and structure; never at the expense of the sheer pleasure of reading; and never as a result of wish fulfillment on the part of the theorist.
This is utterly depressing, and even more depressing in that it is not surprising to me, given all the other reading I've been doing. I have a 14yr old who wants to be a writer, consistently wins the "paper of the year" award, very academic. She attends a small Classical school with a rigorous "great books" curriculum where they are reading the classics of the Western canon from Plato to Shakespeare and beyond. What do we do with teens like these? Where will she be able to pursue higher ed in literature that hasn't been totally corrupted? I'm going to have a lot of work to do to search out such a place.
Go to Hillsdale college.
Perhaps your daughter would take a liking to St. John's College in Annapolis in Maryland? Have you checked on that?
"1 + 1 does NOT equal 2! You believe it does because you are a victim of propaganda!":
A young woman, who years ago had amazingly escaped from North Korea, once publicly reported on this bizarre assertion that a Columbia University faculty member had made to her after she'd eventually made her way to the U.S. and enrolled at Columbia University, too, herself, and also to study in the English Department, there.
And I myself believe that if politically left-wing supposed "teachers" and "scholars" can manage to, they will also try to corrupt and to do their best to ruin both the practice in the U.S. of the natural sciences and the learning and pursuit even of mathamatics, itself.
We have already begun seeing U.S. left-wingers attempting to do this by their having introduced the notion of "ethno-mathematics," as well as their bizarrely absurd idea that mathematics is racist and sexist.
I'm sorry for you -- thank God I earned my MA in English literature in 1976 and had professors who focused on the books we were reading.
But as a private school teacher years later, I saw what awaited you. By the late 1980s, student clubs were formed on the basis of skin tone, and sexuality was getting an airing; by the 2000s, it had gotten worse: Faculty meetings were being devoted to exploring our multiple identities, and administrators rather than the English department head (moi) were in charge of choosing the books students were to read.
Finally, I refused to play and retired a bit earlier than I might have.
Good luck.
Construct, Context, Perspective. The pale blue dot photo. The planet Earth as tabla rasa as regards human activity. Is the entire human ethos a construct? From which is derived all meaning. (Existential). Is meaning intrinsic discoverable? Creatible? Derived from powers we cannot know. Can none be found (Nihilist). Is art meant to be reflect, elevate, examine, critique? So many questions. I feel what you describe is a kind of corruption. Force me to think a certain way. What am I in church? A Hitler youth meeting? Study should be a multi faceted examination of the world and exploration. Thank you for writing.
There’s room for this but your key point it’s horribly lopsided. Dominant. Certainly it is not honoring any meaningful academic principle to read a criticism of a book without reading the book. That’s effectively propagandizing
CC '92 English major. I remember one of the factors in my choosing Columbia in 1988 was its English Dept. had resisted the rise of Deconstructionism. I had so many amazing professors and it was all original texts. I did not read a single essay, much less a book, of literary criticism or theory. Edward Mendelson teaching Conrad; Arnold Rampersad teaching Zora Neale Hurston; Carl Hovde teaching Frost; Shapiro and Taylor on Shakespeare; Wallace Gray teaching Faulkner. It was glorious. I'm now finishing my MFA in fiction at the University of St. Thomas-Houston, and it is everything a lover of literature could want.
This is so fascinating to me. As someone who went down a completely different path and now wants to pursue writing and studying literature, I always mourned that I didn’t study literature in school. I assume not all schools are the same, so maybe I would’ve had a different experience but it is reassuring to hear that maybe I didn’t miss out. Your article made me think of I think CS Lewis in Experiment in Criticism where he talks about how the majority has forgotten how to read and instead gets caught up in talking about literature criticism and commenting on each other’s criticism all while no one has actually read the original piece.
Traditions is valuable and so important. Thank you for sharing
I must have stumbled into the conservative faux-grievance corner of Substack. Am I the only reader who is straining to believe this?
This happened to a lot of people who took lit classes in college. It really was a thing, it was very silly, and we’d laugh about it among friends; but it’s also not the great social injustice of our time that some English classes at research universities were a little cringe.
I was excited when I got accepted into university anthropology in 1978. I thought I was going to study human cultures, history, belief systems, and how societies actually work.
What shocked me was how quickly I learned that curiosity had limits. My views were allowed only if they lined up with my professor’s views. That was not education. That was intellectual obedience training.
Anthropology should teach students to understand human beings, not train them to repeat fashionable conclusions. When a classroom punishes disagreement, it stops being a place of learning and becomes a church with tuition.