The academic left is in much worse shape
than I even realized. We can see how bad it has gotten in the read of the day:
a fearless academic immersed in the world of New York City higher education
calling out the shallow groupthink that characterizes political discussions in
the ivory tower.
Frederick deBoer is newly-minted PhD in English working
at Brooklyn College in support roles (“Academic Assessment Manager”; “WAC
Coordinator”) lacking the crucial word “professor” in his title. His blog
post titled, “condescending,
certain, and incoherent” is drawing a lot of attention,
including a link on heavyweight Instapundit.
The picture deBoer paints is of people who
seem to be in a collective trance. Their assumptions are mistaken for facts,
and are never enumerated, much less discussed. They remain hazy, varying from
person to person, because those assumptions are never challenged:
…the internal
contradictions and lack of clear theoretical footing were packaged with the
aggressive presumption that the conclusions were obvious.
This is a
constant condition for me: interacting with liberals and leftists who affect a
stance of bored impatience, who insist that the answers to moral and political
questions are so obvious that every reasonable person already agrees, who then
lack the ability to explain the thinking underlying their answers to those
questions in a remotely compelling way. Everything is obvious; all the hard
work is done; only an idiot couldn’t see what the right thing to do is. And
then you poke a little bit at the foundation and it just collapses. I suppose the
condescension and the fragility are related conditions, the bluster a product
of the insecurity at the heart of it all. You act like everything is obvious
precisely because you can’t articulate your position.
If you read the whole thing, you will see
that while deBoer enjoys challenging assumptions, he is no conservative.
His conclusion lays out the hazards the academic Left is inflicting upon itself
with the trance (my word, not his) they remain stuck in:
Few things
are more deadly to a broad political tendency than a (sic) eye-rolling
assumption that there is no work to be done. You combine that with the way
challenging questions have come to be seen as themselves offensive,
particularly in academia, and you have a left-of-center that cannot do the work
of figuring out what it is and what it stands for at precisely the time its
mission is most important. Our opposition’s taken control of everything, so how
do we respond? Race OR class or race AND class? Neoliberalism or socialism?
Identity or economics or both? Wonk autocrats or the grassroots? I know what
I prefer. But I don’t know what broad movement will emerge when
everyone is so busy being certain about the answers that they cannot articulate
or justify.
The stark contrast between the scholarly
duty to consider all possible explanations before reaching a conclusion and the
inability of so many academics to think through their own assumptions, much
less defend them, demonstrates fundamental corruption. The very legitimacy of
higher education is in peril, particularly the humanities and social sciences.
When there is no possibility of a bridge falling down, and when similarly
leftist colleagues are the sole judges of academic merit, a cultural spiral
toward the extreme probably is inevitable. It’s how you get attention
from a like-minded crowd.
Unless people like deBoer can yank the
leftists out of their political trance, they will be digging their own
political graves. At least 70% of the country laughs at the extremes of campus
leftists. Political strategies based on a shared fantasy have a poor chance of
success.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/12/a_fascinating_peek_into_the_mentality_of_the_liberal_bubble.html#ixzz4SIQfnWuv