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The Takeover - Tablet Magazine
The Takeover - Tablet Magazine
I the Age of Academe which elicited heated responses. Only now do I see
I got something wrong—as did my critics. Some had objected to a term
I introduced, “public intellectual,” as redundant and misleading. Others
rejected the main argument. I proposed a generational account of American
intellectuals. For earlier American intellectuals, the university remained
peripheral because it was small, underfunded, and distant from cultural life.
The Edmund Wilsons and Lewis Mumfords earlier in the 20th century to the
Jane Jacobs and Betty Friedans later saw themselves as writers and journalists,
not professors. But I missed something, the dawning takeover of the public
sphere by campus denizens and lingo.
But the story changes for the next generation—my ’60s generation. In pose we
were much more radical than previous American intellectuals.We were the
leftists, Maoists, Marxists, Third Worldists, anarchists, and protesters who
regularly shut down the university in the name of the war in Vietnam or free
speech or racial equality. Yet for all our university bashing, unlike earlier
intellectuals, we never exited the campus. We settled in. We became graduate
students, assistant professors and finally—a few of us—leading figures in
academic disciplines.
To be sure, this was not simply a series of individual choices. The conditions
that funneled the transitional generation onto campuses were hard to resist.
The life of the freelance intellectual, always precarious, had become virtually
impossible. Living in cities turned increasingly expensive as writing outlets
diminished. When Edmund Wilson wrote for The New Republic in the 1920s
the proceeds of one article could foot the bill for room and board for several
months. Sixty years later the payment could fund a few meals. At the same
moment, in the 1950s and ’60s, students poured into campuses and faculties
enlarged. For young intellectuals, the signs all pointed in one direction: an
academic career. Earlier American intellectuals imagined moving to New York
or Chicago or San Francisco to join an urban bohemia; my generation imagined
moving to college towns like Ann Arbor or Berkeley or Austin to join the
conference-going set.
Within 30 years, the timber and tone of faculties were refashioned. In the 1950s
the number of public leftists teaching in American universities could be
counted on two hands. By the 1980s, they filled airplanes and hotel conference
rooms. In the 1980s a three-volume survey of the new Marxist scholarship
appeared (The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses, vol. 1-
3). Endless new journals, each with their own followings, popped up, such as
Studies on the Left, Radical Teacher, Radical America, Insurgent Sociologist,
Radical Economists. In the coming years leaders of the main scholarly
organizations like the Modern Language Association or American Sociological
Association elected self-professed leftists.
The “famous” Marxist literary professsor was famous only to graduate students
in literature. From Homi K. Bhabha at Harvard to Gayatri Spivak at Columbia,
Fredric Jameson at Duke and Judith Butler at Berkeley, the leftist politics of
these scholars could not be doubted, but what was their impact inasmuch as
they could not write? A half serious, bad-writing contest awarded a prize to
professor Butler for this sentence:
I argued that the conservatives should awake from their nightmare of radical
scholars destroying America and relax; academic revolutionaries preoccupied
themselves with their careers and perks. If they made waves, they were confined
to the campus pool. In my more paranoid moments, I wondered if a cunning
plan had been enacted: Conservatives pretended to be outraged at radicals on
campus, but faced with a generation of subversive students, they judged it
would be better to keep them locked up in the university, which would limit the
damage. The secret appendix to The Conservative Strategy for the Twentieth
First Century declared, “Let us give the radicals English and Comparative
Literature, gender studies, sociology, history, anthropology and whatever other
departments and cockamamie centers they want on campuses, while we take
over the rest of America.” The plan largely worked. I wrote at the time, if given
the chance it would be worth trading every damn left-wing English department
for one Supreme Court. It would still be worth it.
My critics charged that I suffered from nostalgia for some old white dudes.
Intellectual life had markedly improved and diversified. Moreover, I
overgeneralized; they presented names of a half-dozen stalwart freelancers or
well-known professors. This argument continues.
But my critics and I both missed something that might not have been obvious
30 years ago. By the late 1990s the rapid expansion of the universities came to a
halt, especially in the humanities. Faculty openings slowed or stopped in many
fields. Graduate enrollment cratered. In my own department in 10 years we
went from accepting over a hundred students for graduate study to under 20 for
a simple reason. We could not place our students. The hordes who took courses
in critical pedagogy, insurgent sociology, gender studies, radical anthropology,
Marxist cinema theory, and postmodernism could no longer hope for university
careers.
What became of them? No single answer is possible. They joined the work
force. Some became baristas, tech supporters, Amazon staffers and real estate
agents. Others with intellectual ambitions found positions with the remaining
newspapers and online periodicals, but most often they landed jobs as writers
or researchers with liberal government agencies, foundations, or NGOs. In all
these capacities they brought along the sensibilities and jargon they learned on
campus.
It is the exodus from the universities that explains what is happening in the
larger culture. The leftists who would have vanished as assistant professors in
conferences on narratology and gender fluidity or disappeared as law professors
with unreadable essays on misogynist hegemony and intersectionality have been
pushed out into the larger culture. They staff the ballooning diversity and
inclusion commissariats that assault us with vapid statements and inane
programs couched in the language they learned in school. We are witnessing the
invasion of the public square by the campus, an intrusion of academic terms and
sensibilities that has leaped the ivy-covered walls aided by social media. The
buzz words of the campus—diversity, inclusion, microaggression, power
differential, white privilege, group safety—have become the buzz words in
public life. Already confusing on campus, they become noxious off campus.
“The slovenliness of our language,” declared Orwell in his classic 1946 essay,
“Politics and the English Language,” makes it “easier for us to have foolish
thoughts.”
Orwell targeted language that defended “the indefensible” such as the British
rule of India, Soviet purges and the bombing of Hiroshima. He offered
examples of corrupt language. “The Soviet press is the freest in the world.” The
use of euphemisms or lies to defend the indefensible has hardly disappeared:
Putin called the invasion of Ukraine “a special military operation,” and anyone
calling it a “war” or “invasion” has been arrested.
But today, unlike in 1946, political language of Western progressives does not
so much as defend the indefensible as defend the defendable. This renders the
issue trickier than when Orwell broached it. Apologies for criminal deeds of the
state denounce themselves. Justifications for liberal desiderata, however, almost
immunize themselves to objections. If you question diversity mania, you
support Western imperialism. Wonder about the significance of
microaggression? You are a microaggressor. Have doubts about an eternal, all-
inclusive white supremacy? You benefit from white privilege. Skeptical about
new pronouns? You abet the suicide of fragile adolescents.
Does diversity mean that every sector of society must demographically mirror
the composition of the country as a whole? Apparently so, but does this make
for a more diverse world? A new study of diversity in Hollywood run by UCLA,
and sponsored by blue-chip corporations, uses demographics of gender, race
and ethnicity as the self-evident standard to measure diversity. The Hollywood
study reports that “People of color accounted for 38.9 percent of the leads in
top films for 2021 … At 42.7 percent of the U.S. population in 2021, people of
color were again just short of proportionate representation among film leads.”
The gap of 3.8 percentage points troubles the diversity mavens. Work to be
done, comrades!
Now law professors, who often call themselves anti-pornography feminists and
critical race theorists, advance ideas to curtail free speech. In their tortuous
writings, one finds all the terms that they picked up from the postmodern
Marxists or the post-Marxists—hegemony, discourse, power, invention. To this
they add misogyny, white supremacy, and a dash of paranoia. For all their
sophistication, these learned professors are continuously gobsmacked by the
most elementary facts of society. Society is hierarchal! The rich have more clout
than the poor! The powerful dominate the weak! They repeat these
observations endlessly, as if they just discovered them. Apparently, they just did.
A problem emerges from the half-baked Marxism of the law professors and
their students, who toil and tweet in NGO land. Marx did declare that the ideas
of the ruling class are the ruling ideas, but qualified that both cleavages exist in
the ruling class and that a new revolutionary class challenges the dominant
ideas. Perhaps he was wrong, but at least he posited movement and conflict. It
could also be noted that the term “hegemony,” a favorite of campus leftists,
derives from the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. For all his
subtlety and inconsistencies, the imprisoned Gramsci saw social antagonisms as
ever-present. As one commentator has put it, “Gramsci’s concept of hegemony”
provides the basis for an intellectual elite to engage in a “war of position” that
will prepare the way “to overthrow the existing order.”
War of position? Nothing could be further from the minds of these professors,
who portray power as omnipresent and static. That the First Amendment is a
tool of the powerful, professor MacKinnon’s pathbreaking insight, comes right
out of hackneyed Marxism; it could be said with equal truth about any sector of
society. “Housing is a weapon of the powerful.” “The media is a weapon of the
powerful.” “Education is a weapon of the powerful.” For that matter professor
MacKinnon, who teaches to the most privileged at the most elite schools, is a
weapon of the powerful.
In the classic American case of 1919 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. set out
the criterion of “a clear and present danger” to the state as reason to curb free
speech. Holmes wrote the opinion in which two socialists, who had distributed
leaflets that encouraged peaceful resistance to the draft, were arrested. The
leaflets proposed among other things that draftees “Assert Your Rights.” In 1919
such talk constituted “a clear and present danger” to the government. They were
convicted and jailed.
The new free speech restricters balloon the category of injury and replace
individual harm with group harm. “We have not listened to the real victims,”
declares Charles R. Lawrence III, one of the principals in critical race theory.
We have shown “little empathy or understanding for their injury.” For Lawrence
“insulting words” are “experienced by all members of a racial group who are
forced to hear or see these words.”
The New York Times published an opinion piece by Sen. Tom Cotton that called
for the national guard to stem looting in the wake of the George Floyd riots.
Employees of the Times protested and charged that the piece put Black staffers
“in danger.” Again, this was an article in the editorial section of the paper, page
14. In the American adaption of Stalinist show trials, the editor of the opinion
section confessed. He regretted “the pain” he caused. He resigned.
In early 2015, two French Muslims forced themselves into the French satirical
journal Charlie Hebdo, which published caricatures of Muhammad. They shot
12 people point blank—writers, cartoonists, and others. In the spring of that
year the American branch of PEN, the international association of writers,
wanted to bestow on the magazine its “freedom of expression award.” It would
seem cut and dry: writers and cartoonists killed in cold blood for their satirical
work. But no. Some of America’s most celebrated writers protested the award to
Charlie Hebdo. They did not exactly support the murders. “An expression of
views, however disagreeable, is certainly not to be answered by violence or
murder,” they opined. The “certainly” is a nice touch, as if doubt arises. But
“power” exists and the “inequities” between those who write and those written
about “cannot, and must not, be ignored.”
The writers, who were killed, had power. The killers, not so much. “To the
section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled, and
victimized, a population shaped by the legacy of France’s various colonial
enterprises, and that contain a large percentage of devout Muslims, Charlie
Hebdo’s cartoons of the Prophet must be seen as being intended to cause further
humiliation and suffering,” the PEN letter lectured. Several hundred very
righteous writers, including Teju Cole, Deborah Eisenberg, Michael Ondaatje,
Joyce Carol Oates, and Francine Prose fixed their signatures. To the extent that
writers possess power, compared to nonwriters (or noncartoonists)—as
indicated in the PEN protest letter—the inequalities might block all writing,
except about oneself, a temptation many writers already find irresistible.
With marginality as the limit for free speech, how might have the new arbiters
viewed Voltaire and his brethren of 18th-century France. The philosophes were
an elite who attacked the benighted Catholics, who probably felt injured and
disrespected. The power of the church was fast crumbling—it would soon be
disestablished in the French Revolution—and the good Catholics were often
rural and poor. Weren’t they marginalized?
In 2004 Theodoor van Gogh, a Dutch actor and film producer, was murdered in
the streets of Amsterdam—on his bicycle—by a Muslim extremist. He had made
a 10-minute provocative film with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the feminist born to a
Muslim Somali family, that denounced the treatment of women in Islamic
societies. The assassin pinned a note with a knife to van Gogh’s body that
threatened Hirsi Ali. In his book Murder in Amsterdam, Ian Buruma considers
the events and its principals, but like today’s free speech skeptics observes that
Hirsi Ali attacked a marginalized community, “a minority within an embattled
minority.” In that sense, he comments, Hirsi Ali is no Voltaire.
Yet the same issue emerges. What makes a marginalized community, which
constrains free speech? The 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie ordered
Muslims anywhere to execute the author, with a fat reward bankrolled by Iran
for this pious deed, and it encompassed not only Rushdie but his publishers and
translators. There are well over 1 billion Muslims. Rushdie himself noted that
over the decades support for him has ebbed. People who once defended me, he
observed, would now “accuse me of insulting an ethnic and cultural minority.”
The situation of the estimable Voltaire could not be more different than the
current critics of Islam; he lived at the border of France and Switzerland, so he
could quickly flee if French authorities sought to arrest him. Along with other
philosophes he never dreamed he could be killed either by the state or angry
Catholics anywhere. Detained, censored or exiled, yes. Murdered, no. Voltaire
had no security detail—unlike Rushdie and Hirsi Ali. For critics of religious
dogmatism in 18th-century France, the possibility of getting killed was zero.
For critics of Islam in the 21st-century world, the possibility of injury or death
is real—as the critics know. The comment by Buruma, which is seconded by
others, could be more justly reversed: Voltaire was no Hirsi Ali.
When employees protest that they feel unsafe because their company is
publishing an offensive article or book, we know what university courses they
have taken. When the ACLU drops any mention of the First Amendment from
its annual reports; when one of its directors declares, “First Amendment
protections are disproportionately enjoyed by people of power and privilege”;
and when its counsels its own lawyers to balance free speech and “offense to
marginalized groups,” we know they studied critical race theory. When women
are dropped from Planned Parenthood literature with the explanation, “It’s time
to retire the terms ‘women’s health care’ and ‘a woman’s right to choose’ … these
phrases erase the trans and non-binary people who have abortions.” Or when
the NARL (National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) announces it
is replacing the phrase pregnant women with “birthing people” and declares,
“We use gender neutral language when talking about pregnancy, because it is
not just cis-gender women who get pregnant”; we know those who authored
these changes majored in gender studies and critical blather.
Russell Jacoby is the author of 10 books, most recently On Diversity: The Eclipse
of the Individual in a Global Era and Intellectuals in Politics and Academia. He is
Professor Emeritus, Department of History, UCLA.
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