{"id":481,"date":"2012-09-02T23:28:06","date_gmt":"2012-09-02T23:28:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com.108-166-28-151.mdgnetworks.com\/wordpress\/?p=481"},"modified":"2013-02-12T23:31:04","modified_gmt":"2013-02-12T23:31:04","slug":"the-academic-establishment-goes-after-bruce-bawer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-academic-establishment-goes-after-bruce-bawer\/","title":{"rendered":"The Academic Establishment Goes After Bruce Bawer"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Bruce Thornton<\/p>\n

Frontpage Magazine<\/em><\/p>\n

Bruce Bawer, the intrepid international journalist and Freedom Center Shillman Fellow, has just published\u00a0The Victims\u2019 Revolution<\/em>, an expose of \u201cIdentity Studies\u201d in American universities. These are the programs predicated on the allegation that certain minorities in America, mainly women, gays, blacks, and Latinos, are victims of continuing prejudice, bigotry, sexism, and racism. Yet the focus on these programs is not on the gritty, pragmatic political slog necessary in a democracy for effecting change. Instead, as though these professors know their charges of endemic American prejudice are overblown, the curricula and scholarship of victim studies are characterized by the once trendy, now pass\u00e9, postmodern and poststructuralist fads that never stray from highly abstract obsessions with \u201crepresentation\u201d in language, art, and popular culture, all delivered in jargon-ridden pompous prose laced with progressive bromides.<\/p>\n

Anyone familiar with university life today knows how deeply these programs have penetrated the curriculum and the institution. As the\u00a0review<\/a>\u00a0on FrontPage shows, Bawer\u2019s survey is a penetrating contribution to documenting the absurdity, hypocrisy, and sheer mediocrity of such programs. What I find interesting is the response of academic orthodoxy to Bawer\u2019s catalogue of absurdities. Consider the review by Andrew Delbanco, professor of \u201cAmerican Studies\u201d at Columbia, in\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>. It is a textbook illustration of how the academic establishment goes after anyone who exposes the corruption of a reactionary, failing institution.<\/p>\n

Delbanco\u2019s main tactic is to deny that the problem even exists. According to Delbanco, Bawer\u2019s book contains only a \u201cmodicum of truth.\u201d The rest is a \u201ccaricature\u201d that is \u201cout of date.\u201d Bawer\u2019s targets are a \u201cshrinking sector of academic life,\u201d a relic of the \u201870s and \u201880s generation now \u201closing its grip.\u201d This is a curious statement, given how entrenched these programs are in most universities. Even at a middling Cal State university like mine, we have Women\u2019s Studies, Africana Studies, American Indian Studies, and Chicano and Latin American Studies. All offer numerous courses, award majors and\/or minors, and employ all together 17 permanent and numerous adjunct faculty. And they have a large presence in the General Education program, with a total of 42 courses. This institutional presence belies Delbanco\u2019s claim that the ideology underlying Identity Studies is \u201closing its grip.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for the nature of these programs, the catalogue description of Fresno State\u2019s Women\u2019s Studies Department confirms Bawer\u2019s analysis:<\/p>\n

Women\u2019s Studies is an approach that places women in the center of inquiry. The primary mission of Women\u2019s Studies is to analyze gender. Students acquire both a local and global perspective on gender. Attentiveness to diversity, privilege and power, and women\u2019s unique creative contributions to human experience are central aspects of this training. More than simply a body of knowledge, Women\u2019s Studies encourages students to apply their learning to transform their lives and their communities. Women\u2019s Studies offers a vital perspective everywhere gender impacts our world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This description encapsulates the central place of dubious postmodern theory in Identity Studies, as well as their focus on victimization. The emphasis on \u201cgender\u201d assumes as fact the highly contestable notion that being a female is not a question of nature, but of cultural and social \u201cconstructs\u201d that reflect not nature but \u201cprivilege and power.\u201d Note too another corrupting dimension of victim studies: the desire to \u201ctransform\u201d lives and communities, a political and ideological goal that sets aside the scholarly demand for truth, sound arguments, and intellectual integrity no matter whose political ox is gored. Thus the Women\u2019s Studies courses focused on rape and incest, not to mention the Victim Services Certificate offered by the department.<\/p>\n

An apologist like Delbanco no doubt would argue that these programs are too few and too small to warrant concern. But the theoretical, political, and ideological assumptions behind them can be found all over the university, in traditional departments like history, philosophy, and English that increasingly have abandoned their curriculum for courses focused on victim identity. In English, for example, fewer and fewer students are exposed to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and the other great writers of the tradition. Instead, they take courses that focus on contemporary writers from those minority groups officially designated as victims. Students read novels, essays, and poems that revolve around the experience of victimization at the hands of white, racist, patriarchal, homophobic Western culture. When the old masterpieces are assigned, they are interpreted through the victim studies lens, with generous dollops of postmodern and \u201cpostcolonial\u201d theory alleging showing that all literary and aesthetic values and truths are mere arbitrary constructs favoring and legitimizing an oppressive, exploitative power structure dominated by white males. This is why Edward Said\u2019s\u00a0Orientalism<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 \u201ca work of malignant charlatanry,\u201d historian Robert Irwin writes, \u201cin which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from willful misrepresentations\u201d \u2014 is one of the most assigned books in English courses.<\/p>\n

Finally, the ideological assumptions of Identity Studies are institutionalized in the university\u2019s various programs and offices promoting \u201cdiversity,\u201d policing \u201chate speech,\u201d and rooting out \u201csexual harassment.\u201d All such administrative offices are given investigative and punitive powers over the faculty on the assumption that certain \u201cprotected groups\u201d are by definition victims of oppressive behavior, hateful speech, invidious exclusion, underrepresentation, and discrimination at the hands of their non-minority colleagues \u2014 precisely the assumptions underlying Identity Studies. This intrusive, ubiquitous administrative apparatus, which institutionalizes and validates the bad theory victim studies programs traffic in, makes Delbanco\u2019s claim that they are a \u201cshrinking sector of academic life\u201d either myopic or duplicitous.<\/p>\n

Delbanco\u2019s attempt to make the corruption that Bawer documents disappear is buttressed by other tricks of misdirection. He claims, for example, that whatever the damage done to the university by what Bawer calls the \u201cvictims\u2019 revolution,\u201d the old university was worse because it excluded women and minorities or failed to teach \u201csocial history.\u201d Yet even if true, this fact has nothing to do with the intellectual corruption and politicization wrought by victim studies programs, which is Bawer\u2019s point. If universities had been concerned about correcting these ills Delbanco decries, all they had to do was hire more faculty trained in the disciplines of English, history, or philosophy who would develop courses and practice scholarship in these neglected areas. There was no need to create new departments predicated not on scholarly methodology and disciplinary competence, but on identity politics and newfangled theories.<\/p>\n

No more pertinent to Bawer\u2019s critique is Delbanco\u2019s bathetic complaints about the \u201cmany young people mired in poverty, damaged by dysfunctional schools, languishing in prison or drowning in debt.\u201d Just how does the jargonish, incoherent scholarship of elite university professors help with these problems? Indeed, many of those students \u201cdrowning in debt\u201d did so pursuing useless degrees like Chicano Studies or Women\u2019s Studies, which in most cases only prepare them to be university professors, having given them precious few of what Delbanco calls \u201cmarketable skills.\u201d<\/p>\n

So too with his hypocritical rhetoric lamenting utilitarian \u201ccorporate-minded universities\u201d that exploit adjunct faculty who \u201cstruggle to piece together a living with multiple part-time jobs.\u201d The \u201ccorporate-minded\u201d university has been a gold-mine for tenured faculty like Delbanco, who make 6 times what a part-time faculty member makes while doing one-third the teaching, and who grow fat on release-time, research grants, travel-money, and other goodies that a lot of that student debt Delbanco weeps for went to pay for. And what could be more utilitarian than the victim studies\u2019 aims to \u201ceffect social change\u201d or \u201ctransform society\u201d or, Delbanco\u2019s stated goal for education, to \u201cfind themselves\u201d? The old liberal education wasn\u2019t about students finding themselves, but about developing a critical intelligence that gave them intellectual autonomy by liberating them from the received wisdom and stale orthodoxy of the sort peddled in the politically correct classroom.<\/p>\n

Delbanco\u2019s review illustrates how the university patrols the borders of institutional orthodoxy in order to protect its power and privilege. But Delbanco\u2019s Marxist (as in Groucho) argument \u2014 Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes? \u2014 is unconvincing for anyone who has seen the dysfunctions and failures of politicized American universities.<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a92012 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine Bruce Bawer, the intrepid international journalist and Freedom Center Shillman Fellow, has just published\u00a0The Victims\u2019 Revolution, an expose of \u201cIdentity Studies\u201d in American universities. These are the programs predicated on the allegation that certain minorities in America, mainly women, gays, blacks, and Latinos, are victims of continuing prejudice, bigotry, sexism, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[79,22,187],"tags":[1023,1036,128,93,1018],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-7L","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":800,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/elizabeth-warren-and-the-frauds-of-diversity\/","url_meta":{"origin":481,"position":0},"title":"Elizabeth Warren and the Frauds of Diversity","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 10, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine For anyone familiar with the American university and its gospel of multicultural diversity, the revelation that Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren exploited her 1\/32 Cherokee ancestry to pass as a minority is a dog-bites-man story. For decades now universities have depended on the superficially\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2373,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-end-of-post-racialism\/","url_meta":{"origin":481,"position":1},"title":"The End of Post-Racialism","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 4, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPageMagazine.com So much for Obama striking a new tone on race. President Obama\u2019s response during his press conference to the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates \u2014 that the Cambridge police officer \u201cacted stupidly,\u201d despite Obama\u2019s confession that he didn\u2019t know what really had happened\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3326,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/california-abandons-history-for-melodrama\/","url_meta":{"origin":481,"position":2},"title":"California Abandons History for Melodrama","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 21, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society Just when you think California can\u2019t get any wackier, the state legislature steps up and proves you wrong. Despite a looming fiscal catastrophe that should be concentrating the minds of politicians, the Assembly is set to vote onSB 48, a bill already\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5409,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/liberal-racism\/","url_meta":{"origin":481,"position":3},"title":"Liberal Racism","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 8, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"The assault on skilled, independent, intelligent blacks by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers When Barack Obama accused Hillary Clinton of \u201cplaying the gender card,\u201d the hypocrisy that typically defines our public discourse on race descended into the surreal. Obama\u2019s whole career has been created by and has exploited the perception\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6228,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/race-industry-leeches\/","url_meta":{"origin":481,"position":4},"title":"Race-Industry Leeches","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 18, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine The trial of George Zimmerman is over, but the persecution of him by the race industry isn\u2019t. The Department of Justice is currently combing through the case to find some pretext, no matter how specious, for charging Zimmerman with a violation of civil-rights laws.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/6997620771_14cfd16c9a.jpg?fit=500%2C400&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7166,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-race-hacks-defend-their-industry\/","url_meta":{"origin":481,"position":5},"title":"The Race-Hacks Defend Their Industry","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 1, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 The race-hack usual subjects recently attacked Congressman Paul Ryan for stating that the problems plaguing the poor\u2013\u2013incarceration, fatherless children, drug abuse, rampant violence, and welfare-dependence\u2013\u2013 are a consequence of a dysfunctional culture that scorns marriage, parenthood, education, work, and virtues like self-control. Given that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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