As someone with a literature degree (I also studied health sciences) back when they actually taught with integrity, I have observed these trends. I worked as a tutor and caregiver to a young man at a very liberal school later on. He needed me to read his literature reading assignment. However, I was appalled at what they were having him …
As someone with a literature degree (I also studied health sciences) back when they actually taught with integrity, I have observed these trends. I worked as a tutor and caregiver to a young man at a very liberal school later on. He needed me to read his literature reading assignment. However, I was appalled at what they were having him read, and resigned from this little side job when I could not in good conscience read the garbage they were calling literature out loud.
That sounds a bit dramatic, but it’s part of the weaponizing and propagandizing of literature. It’s not education. It’s more akin to communist re-education sadly.
100% agree with all of the above. My company has a tutoring branch, and I see this every day. It's even worse at the university level than the high school level, and the communist propagandizing is very real.
I don't think calling the various approaches subsumed under "Critical Theory" or "PostModernism" "communist propagandizing" is at all an improvement over the reductive approaches you quite correctly object to.
This marks you as yet another blathering Alt-Right philistine who wouldn't know "communist propaganda" if it came up and bit you on the knee.
You mean that imposing Marx on literature is not communist propaganda? I guess it must just be a deeply thoughtful literary approach from people with deeply thoughtful ideals. As someone who comes from a post-Soviet background, I think I would know what communist propaganda is better than you, buddy.
Calling everything "alt-right" that you don't agree with is exactly the sort of dangerous rhetoric I am calling out here. Words have meaning.
What’s it got to do with Marx and his theories though? Marxists would argue that’s there’s nothing in these theories that have anything to do with class - except as an after thought in “intersectionality”. Marx wasn’t a suffragette, he wasn’t a fan of homosexuality, he didn’t even begin to think of trans or cis, and he would put all these people in the oppressor class if they owned capital.
He wasn’t a fan of making a living, personal hygiene (at one point, his filthy skin was so infected by erupting boils that he couldn’t sit), parenting (his two daughters committed suicide), and he was a hardcore racist. In fact, the only positive thing he did for civilization was when he died on 14 April, 1883, although at least 50 years too late.
Liberalism is more about freedom and less about imposing views onto others. Only the bravest rebel would be a neo-liberal in the humanities. Being a Marxist is the cool thing, or post-modern garbage. I would say that the Marxists have the benefit that if you agree with their loony assumptions, they actually have logical conclusions. The post-modernist, critical mindlessness seems to be nothing more than posturing.
I think the best example of where creative work is happening is to check out which classes people crash to enjoy the lectures. No one does this in English classes anymore, and they used to. I have seen them in history, foreign policy/government, and a few other fields. There is no Niall Ferguson or Paul Krugman in the humanities right now. They are frumpy old ladies who are easily offended and cannot bear to have anyone question their assumptions.
I actually think that the strangest aspect of humanities professors is that they are so similar to Victorian women. They are have the same thoughts, and none can bear to hear anything outside of their narrow views.
Indeed. Find me a literature student arguing Hume and Adam Smith were right about everything and I will be impressed. Tepid Marxism, not much.
What people often miss is that Marxism dropped the concern with social class as a source of oppression and exploitation and moved to other social differences while retaining the oppressor/oppressed framework. It stopped being about workers vs owners of capital when it was convenient.
Just find me a literature student who knows who Hume and Smith were and I will be impressed. For all the talk about making students "well rounded", humanities folks are amazingly ignorant of anything outside their field (or have bizarre caricaturish views of such) and in practice this advocacy for well-roundedness just means "force students to take our classes that they don't want to take"
> What’s it got to do with Marx and his theories though?
Marx and his theories didn't stand still when Marx died. There's a lineage to today's. What if "Marx wasn’t a suffragette"? By 1920s all then marxists were, and so on. Plus, as Marx said in the Communist Manifesto, approvingly:
> The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."
As for the leftists, after the late 70s they ultimately they found class to be an inconvenient subject, and that they really despised the working class for not being sophisticated enough for their likeling (plus modern academy leftists want to hang out with the elites and get publishing deals, and grants, and such, that the elites control, which makes the whole class critique thing a no-go).
> By 1920s all then marxists were, and so on. Plus, as Marx said in the Communist Manifesto, approvingly:
Not at all. Suffragettism was often looked at as just a side show for privileged women. Marxism did move on, but if it was merely following liberal trends then those trends were primarily liberal, not Marxist.
There was class politics in the early Suffragette movement, the overcoming of which is one of Sylvia Pankhurst’s many achievements.
“A working woman’s movement has no value. Working women are the weakest portion of the sex, how could it be otherwise?” - Emmeline Pankhurst.
It’s easy to see how such attitudes would give Leftists pause for thought. Nevertheless the (Socialist) Labour Party in the UK was first party to support women’s suffrage, from 1912.
Labels flyin', now. All those static, static labels, shocking everyone to irritation. Well. How have definitions changed, and--here's the tricky part--what have been the defining forces within the world that changed them? What's dominated the world over the last 30 years? One of those -isms.
You are correct. Marxism reduces people to categories. Which is stupid. Less stupid in his time than it is now. Stupid then. But unimaginably stupid now. Modern ‘studies’ also does that. You are black, a woman, one eyed - whatever. Your surface characteristics, which is all they are override you as a human. You are put into a box and told that is your experience. Although gender/queer/race/feminist studies is not technically Marxist they emerged from Marxist professors and Marxists everywhere when it became obvious Marxism as an economic theory has terrible effects and can’t rationally be argued. So, they changed the categories and re-divided.
Ask yourself this - how many ‘_________ studies’ profs are also economically Marxist? All of them. Show me a gender studies prof who is a capitalist and I would eat my hat.
These people don't care about liberal thought—it was never about that. It's about creating a myopic narrative and shutting out all viewpoints that deviate from the tiny window they've created. Hence anything that is not grotesquely far to the left is labeled "alt-right." But we all know horseshoe theory, so clearly he is projecting.
I dunno man. I've been a Liberal since the 70s, a combination of McGovern and Truman. It's sad to see a proud tradition reduce itself into a reactionary collective. Which applies to both sides. I loved your insight, and reality doesn't have a political bias.
You're half right. It's not communist propaganda per se, it's the propaganda of the uniparty of "progress", adopted not just by leftists and self-identifying as "establishment critics" (lol), but by every corporation, career bureaucrat, fashionable public intellectual, journalist, and aspiration elite wanabees.
But you're also full wrong: it's origin is leftist thought, from the 60s and 70s, which peaked and pioneered most of the cliches served today. The rest is just incremental updates. And that thought identified as communist more often than not back then. It's just that today's leftists shed the pretense of caring about the working class and class struggle (at best they ask for more taxes for the rich, but cozy up to every elite narrative, and suck to mega-corps and moguls pandering to their slogans).
Yes, Communism, or at least Marxist-Leninism, had consistent analytical thought if you could hold your nose when agreeing to their assumptions. Most post-modernist BS is little more than mental masturbation. I still have no idea how Foucault became so respected. It is a struggle to find anything of his that was not an academic equivalent of trying to be cool in the high school lunch room.
I just quit a graduate education program after completing all the coursework for this reason. When we treat every child as if they are intellectually disabled and likely in need of gender affirming social emotional lessons on the daily, we are no longer teachers, we are propagandists.
How sad. I respect your decision. That would be very difficult. The time and resources spent, but I would not choose to be a tool of the propaganda machine either. It’s heartbreaking. We somehow need to see this madness stop.
How do you feel about the accusation that many of the individuals who have promoted this system are exercising misplaced maternal instincts? Many have noticed that spaces that have succumbed to this form of lunacy tend to be female dominated, especially rich, childless females. I am thinking of Cory Clark in psychology (not humanities, but I can remember her name), or others who have examined this subject. This feels wrong to me, but the evidence has seemed strong. I wonder how we as a society can remedy certain unproductive female biases in a manner than is not prejudicial, assuming that such biases exist.
I do see this pattern and have had similar thoughts myself. But I am childless and find telling others how to live their lives and manage their affairs abhorrent. I have never desired to become a moral scold.
So, I’m not sure I understand what drives this behavior. Perhaps you need to add self-righteousness into the equation. Or, at least a sense of arrogance.
Thank goodness my M.A. in literature dates back to 1976. I dabbled in mother-child psychobabble in my paper on Frankenstein, but for the rest it was the literature itself with its motifs and metaphors and historical and social milieus that interested me.
As an upper school teacher in the 1980s and 1990s, I began to hear deconstructionist stuff from my colleagues with Ph.Ds. Well, I thought, amused, to each his own.
When I changed schools and taught only middle schoolers, I didn't have to listen to pretentious talk any more. A mixed blessing: Not only did the younger teachers in my department not spout Derrida, but in fact they knew nothing at all. They hadn't read Vanity Fair in college, they didn't know who Trollope was, they hadn't studied English or American history. They didn't even know Civil Rights history: They hadn't heard of Emmett Till.
They were products of Teachers College, and before "writing units" they studied How to Write a Paragraph booklets. I lived in a state of professional astonishment: You're telling me you have to read up on how to write a paragraph?
What did they get their degrees in? Education? For which, I guess, the writing of paragraphs was optional.
I'm sorry for today's students, taught initially by undereducated elementary and middle school teachers and later by pretentious I don't know whats. We are seeing the results in far too many young people, empty vessels wearing pretty scarves and marching to the beat of a murderous unseen ayatollah.
Thank you for sharing these experiences and reflections. It truly is tragic and wrong. Young people deserve a good education not propaganda and fluff. I taught college age before working in the counseling field. I hear you loud and clear. I still try to invest in young people and mentor some when possible. It’s sad.
Thanks. It was just a side job. I was glad to help this disabled student until it violated my principles so much I felt it better to resign. I had a full time job days, so I just did it to help.
For mass market silly literature, I highly recommend "How to be an Anti-Racist" or "White Fragility." The latter is not as terribly written, but it is difficult to imagine that the author could have gotten this published in any other era.
For general silliness, check out any book that sounds like a 1990's Lifetime Network made for TV movie. If you look at books with the words "deconstruct" and "queer" or "gender" in them, just open to a middle section and see how long the sentences are. If the are really long, it is probably a good candidate for a shit book.
In general, the quality of the writing has gotten so bad. History books are like a fun Brad Pitt movie compared to the dreadful prose in so many literary works, or worse, anything with the word "critical" in it. In general, certain fields are simply dead. If anything important were happening, people would have fought to preserve the mission, or at least the relevance of their fields and departments. Clearly no one cared.
The fact of the matter is that if every one of these departments were to disappear tomorrow, not one would notice. Presidential helicopters do come on to campus to pick up literary critics for emergency white house visits (my history honors program professor at university was buddies with Bill Clinton at Yale, and they picked him up like this sometimes). These fields were allowed to rot because no responsible adults were watching.
It's been too many years ago...but I remember thinking to myself that reading these crass words out loud to a young man was not something I was willing to do. He and his family were sad to see me resign, but I couldn't in good conscience read those. The university was a well known liberal arts college in my area. The only reason I took the job was to help out someone with a disability so they could do the basic things necessary to attend college. I was glad to help until those raunchy books made it too much of a conflict internally. I honestly can't remember the titles. But I thought to myself that if this is what he's paying thousands of dollars tuition to study, our country is going downhill fast.
As someone with a literature degree (I also studied health sciences) back when they actually taught with integrity, I have observed these trends. I worked as a tutor and caregiver to a young man at a very liberal school later on. He needed me to read his literature reading assignment. However, I was appalled at what they were having him read, and resigned from this little side job when I could not in good conscience read the garbage they were calling literature out loud.
That sounds a bit dramatic, but it’s part of the weaponizing and propagandizing of literature. It’s not education. It’s more akin to communist re-education sadly.
100% agree with all of the above. My company has a tutoring branch, and I see this every day. It's even worse at the university level than the high school level, and the communist propagandizing is very real.
I don't think calling the various approaches subsumed under "Critical Theory" or "PostModernism" "communist propagandizing" is at all an improvement over the reductive approaches you quite correctly object to.
This marks you as yet another blathering Alt-Right philistine who wouldn't know "communist propaganda" if it came up and bit you on the knee.
You mean that imposing Marx on literature is not communist propaganda? I guess it must just be a deeply thoughtful literary approach from people with deeply thoughtful ideals. As someone who comes from a post-Soviet background, I think I would know what communist propaganda is better than you, buddy.
Calling everything "alt-right" that you don't agree with is exactly the sort of dangerous rhetoric I am calling out here. Words have meaning.
What’s it got to do with Marx and his theories though? Marxists would argue that’s there’s nothing in these theories that have anything to do with class - except as an after thought in “intersectionality”. Marx wasn’t a suffragette, he wasn’t a fan of homosexuality, he didn’t even begin to think of trans or cis, and he would put all these people in the oppressor class if they owned capital.
These ideologies are firmly liberal.
He wasn’t a fan of making a living, personal hygiene (at one point, his filthy skin was so infected by erupting boils that he couldn’t sit), parenting (his two daughters committed suicide), and he was a hardcore racist. In fact, the only positive thing he did for civilization was when he died on 14 April, 1883, although at least 50 years too late.
Liberalism is more about freedom and less about imposing views onto others. Only the bravest rebel would be a neo-liberal in the humanities. Being a Marxist is the cool thing, or post-modern garbage. I would say that the Marxists have the benefit that if you agree with their loony assumptions, they actually have logical conclusions. The post-modernist, critical mindlessness seems to be nothing more than posturing.
I think the best example of where creative work is happening is to check out which classes people crash to enjoy the lectures. No one does this in English classes anymore, and they used to. I have seen them in history, foreign policy/government, and a few other fields. There is no Niall Ferguson or Paul Krugman in the humanities right now. They are frumpy old ladies who are easily offended and cannot bear to have anyone question their assumptions.
I actually think that the strangest aspect of humanities professors is that they are so similar to Victorian women. They are have the same thoughts, and none can bear to hear anything outside of their narrow views.
Indeed. Find me a literature student arguing Hume and Adam Smith were right about everything and I will be impressed. Tepid Marxism, not much.
What people often miss is that Marxism dropped the concern with social class as a source of oppression and exploitation and moved to other social differences while retaining the oppressor/oppressed framework. It stopped being about workers vs owners of capital when it was convenient.
Just find me a literature student who knows who Hume and Smith were and I will be impressed. For all the talk about making students "well rounded", humanities folks are amazingly ignorant of anything outside their field (or have bizarre caricaturish views of such) and in practice this advocacy for well-roundedness just means "force students to take our classes that they don't want to take"
Indeed. Agreed on all points.
> What’s it got to do with Marx and his theories though?
Marx and his theories didn't stand still when Marx died. There's a lineage to today's. What if "Marx wasn’t a suffragette"? By 1920s all then marxists were, and so on. Plus, as Marx said in the Communist Manifesto, approvingly:
> The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."
As for the leftists, after the late 70s they ultimately they found class to be an inconvenient subject, and that they really despised the working class for not being sophisticated enough for their likeling (plus modern academy leftists want to hang out with the elites and get publishing deals, and grants, and such, that the elites control, which makes the whole class critique thing a no-go).
> By 1920s all then marxists were, and so on. Plus, as Marx said in the Communist Manifesto, approvingly:
Not at all. Suffragettism was often looked at as just a side show for privileged women. Marxism did move on, but if it was merely following liberal trends then those trends were primarily liberal, not Marxist.
There was class politics in the early Suffragette movement, the overcoming of which is one of Sylvia Pankhurst’s many achievements.
“A working woman’s movement has no value. Working women are the weakest portion of the sex, how could it be otherwise?” - Emmeline Pankhurst.
It’s easy to see how such attitudes would give Leftists pause for thought. Nevertheless the (Socialist) Labour Party in the UK was first party to support women’s suffrage, from 1912.
https://blue-stocking.org.uk/2017/08/31/race-class-and-the-demographics-of-the-british-suffragette-movement/
Labels flyin', now. All those static, static labels, shocking everyone to irritation. Well. How have definitions changed, and--here's the tricky part--what have been the defining forces within the world that changed them? What's dominated the world over the last 30 years? One of those -isms.
You are correct. Marxism reduces people to categories. Which is stupid. Less stupid in his time than it is now. Stupid then. But unimaginably stupid now. Modern ‘studies’ also does that. You are black, a woman, one eyed - whatever. Your surface characteristics, which is all they are override you as a human. You are put into a box and told that is your experience. Although gender/queer/race/feminist studies is not technically Marxist they emerged from Marxist professors and Marxists everywhere when it became obvious Marxism as an economic theory has terrible effects and can’t rationally be argued. So, they changed the categories and re-divided.
Ask yourself this - how many ‘_________ studies’ profs are also economically Marxist? All of them. Show me a gender studies prof who is a capitalist and I would eat my hat.
Seriously? Did you actually read what she wrote? When did such mindless labeling become acceptable to Liberal thought?
These people don't care about liberal thought—it was never about that. It's about creating a myopic narrative and shutting out all viewpoints that deviate from the tiny window they've created. Hence anything that is not grotesquely far to the left is labeled "alt-right." But we all know horseshoe theory, so clearly he is projecting.
I dunno man. I've been a Liberal since the 70s, a combination of McGovern and Truman. It's sad to see a proud tradition reduce itself into a reactionary collective. Which applies to both sides. I loved your insight, and reality doesn't have a political bias.
I agree with all of the above and with classical liberalism—we need to do all we can to keep liberal thought alive.
You're half right. It's not communist propaganda per se, it's the propaganda of the uniparty of "progress", adopted not just by leftists and self-identifying as "establishment critics" (lol), but by every corporation, career bureaucrat, fashionable public intellectual, journalist, and aspiration elite wanabees.
But you're also full wrong: it's origin is leftist thought, from the 60s and 70s, which peaked and pioneered most of the cliches served today. The rest is just incremental updates. And that thought identified as communist more often than not back then. It's just that today's leftists shed the pretense of caring about the working class and class struggle (at best they ask for more taxes for the rich, but cozy up to every elite narrative, and suck to mega-corps and moguls pandering to their slogans).
Yes, Communism, or at least Marxist-Leninism, had consistent analytical thought if you could hold your nose when agreeing to their assumptions. Most post-modernist BS is little more than mental masturbation. I still have no idea how Foucault became so respected. It is a struggle to find anything of his that was not an academic equivalent of trying to be cool in the high school lunch room.
Oh Michael…..You must be so proud of your command of the key phrases of the progressive leftist childish spoiled party…..
critical theory and post modernism are ignorant inventions of dull minds. Minds that have never, ever done anything useful.
Have you yourself ever tried to be useful or productive in society?
Does communist propaganda do that?
More often than your average commie wants to admit, I'm afraid.
Very sad
I just quit a graduate education program after completing all the coursework for this reason. When we treat every child as if they are intellectually disabled and likely in need of gender affirming social emotional lessons on the daily, we are no longer teachers, we are propagandists.
How sad. I respect your decision. That would be very difficult. The time and resources spent, but I would not choose to be a tool of the propaganda machine either. It’s heartbreaking. We somehow need to see this madness stop.
New universities appear to be the only answer.
How do you feel about the accusation that many of the individuals who have promoted this system are exercising misplaced maternal instincts? Many have noticed that spaces that have succumbed to this form of lunacy tend to be female dominated, especially rich, childless females. I am thinking of Cory Clark in psychology (not humanities, but I can remember her name), or others who have examined this subject. This feels wrong to me, but the evidence has seemed strong. I wonder how we as a society can remedy certain unproductive female biases in a manner than is not prejudicial, assuming that such biases exist.
I do see this pattern and have had similar thoughts myself. But I am childless and find telling others how to live their lives and manage their affairs abhorrent. I have never desired to become a moral scold.
So, I’m not sure I understand what drives this behavior. Perhaps you need to add self-righteousness into the equation. Or, at least a sense of arrogance.
Or narcissism.
As a teacher, I think there's a lot of validity to it. I've seen it first hand.
Amen. 🙏
You made the right decision
Thank goodness my M.A. in literature dates back to 1976. I dabbled in mother-child psychobabble in my paper on Frankenstein, but for the rest it was the literature itself with its motifs and metaphors and historical and social milieus that interested me.
As an upper school teacher in the 1980s and 1990s, I began to hear deconstructionist stuff from my colleagues with Ph.Ds. Well, I thought, amused, to each his own.
When I changed schools and taught only middle schoolers, I didn't have to listen to pretentious talk any more. A mixed blessing: Not only did the younger teachers in my department not spout Derrida, but in fact they knew nothing at all. They hadn't read Vanity Fair in college, they didn't know who Trollope was, they hadn't studied English or American history. They didn't even know Civil Rights history: They hadn't heard of Emmett Till.
They were products of Teachers College, and before "writing units" they studied How to Write a Paragraph booklets. I lived in a state of professional astonishment: You're telling me you have to read up on how to write a paragraph?
What did they get their degrees in? Education? For which, I guess, the writing of paragraphs was optional.
I'm sorry for today's students, taught initially by undereducated elementary and middle school teachers and later by pretentious I don't know whats. We are seeing the results in far too many young people, empty vessels wearing pretty scarves and marching to the beat of a murderous unseen ayatollah.
Thank you for sharing these experiences and reflections. It truly is tragic and wrong. Young people deserve a good education not propaganda and fluff. I taught college age before working in the counseling field. I hear you loud and clear. I still try to invest in young people and mentor some when possible. It’s sad.
I don't blame you for ditching the gig!
Thanks. It was just a side job. I was glad to help this disabled student until it violated my principles so much I felt it better to resign. I had a full time job days, so I just did it to help.
What are some examples of the appalling books you refer to, please?
For mass market silly literature, I highly recommend "How to be an Anti-Racist" or "White Fragility." The latter is not as terribly written, but it is difficult to imagine that the author could have gotten this published in any other era.
For general silliness, check out any book that sounds like a 1990's Lifetime Network made for TV movie. If you look at books with the words "deconstruct" and "queer" or "gender" in them, just open to a middle section and see how long the sentences are. If the are really long, it is probably a good candidate for a shit book.
In general, the quality of the writing has gotten so bad. History books are like a fun Brad Pitt movie compared to the dreadful prose in so many literary works, or worse, anything with the word "critical" in it. In general, certain fields are simply dead. If anything important were happening, people would have fought to preserve the mission, or at least the relevance of their fields and departments. Clearly no one cared.
The fact of the matter is that if every one of these departments were to disappear tomorrow, not one would notice. Presidential helicopters do come on to campus to pick up literary critics for emergency white house visits (my history honors program professor at university was buddies with Bill Clinton at Yale, and they picked him up like this sometimes). These fields were allowed to rot because no responsible adults were watching.
It’s been enough years ago, I don’t recall any specific titles or authors.
What were some of the books? So curious
It's been too many years ago...but I remember thinking to myself that reading these crass words out loud to a young man was not something I was willing to do. He and his family were sad to see me resign, but I couldn't in good conscience read those. The university was a well known liberal arts college in my area. The only reason I took the job was to help out someone with a disability so they could do the basic things necessary to attend college. I was glad to help until those raunchy books made it too much of a conflict internally. I honestly can't remember the titles. But I thought to myself that if this is what he's paying thousands of dollars tuition to study, our country is going downhill fast.