“During most of the twentieth century, threats to campus free speech and academic freedom came mostly from the right, and from outside institutions of higher learning. The new attacks on free thought that arose in the late 1980s turned this pattern on its head: they have arisen from leftist sources inside the ivory tower” (Donald …
Scratch and Sniff Multiculturalism
“What multiculturalism in the curriculum assuredly does not mean is a renewed emphasis upon the mastery of foreign languages or the close study of complex civilizations . . . the campaign to impose ‘multiculturalism’ amounts to nothing less than a war on Western civilization and, beyond it, a war on the very idea of civilization” …
This Should Actually Be “Lokism,” Prejudice Against Norse Trickster Gods
“At Smith College, a brochure is distributed to incoming students rehearsing a long list of politically incorrect attitudes and prejudices that will not be tolerated, including the sin of ‘lookism,’ i.e. the prejudice of believing that some people are more attractive than others” (Tenured Radicals, p. 9).
Making Sense: Our Secret Weapon
“Mas’d Zavazadeh, a follower of the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, put it bluntly when he declared in a review of a rival critic that ‘his unproblematic prose and the clarity of his presentation’ were ‘the conceptual tools of conservatism'” (Tenured Radicals, p. 8).
Oh. That Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick.
“Increasingly, second- and third-tier schools are rushing to embrace all manner of fashionable intellectual ideologies as so many formulas for garnering prestige, publicity, and ‘name’ professors (and hoping thereby to attract more students and other sources of income) without having to distinguish themselves through the less-glamorous and more time-consuming methods of good teaching and lasting …
Gaining Tenure Through “Eye of Newt” and “Dried Bat Liver”
“This is where the jargon of deconstruction, poststructuralism, and kindred Continental imports has been a godsend for ‘cutting edge’ academics. It has allowed them to indulge their moralism to the hilt while at the same time appearing to be intellectually sophisticated (or incomprehensible, which is often just as effective).” (Tenured Radicals, p. xvi).
How the Impotent Lecture on Power Relations
“From the Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson to the poststructuralist philosopher Michel Foucault, from Jacques Derrida to the legions of lesser-known feminist ‘theorizers,’ devotees of ‘cultural studies,’ and all-purpose academic radicals, you’ll find slightly different arrangements of the same old song: All cultural and intellectual life is ‘really’ a coefficient of power relations. This is …
And Just In Time Too
“Another law professor, the radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon, summed up a different aspect of the current situation when she declared that feminism’s ‘critique of the objective standpoint as male is a critique of science as a specifically male approach to knowledge. With it re reject male criteria for verification'” (Tenured Radicals, p. xii).
Untethered Virtue and Other Spooky Thoughts
“Respect for rationality and the rights of the individual; a commitment to the ideals of disinterested criticism and color-blind justice; advancement according to merit, not according to sex, race, or ethnic origin: these quintessentially Western ideas are bedrocks of our political as well as our educational system. And they are precisely the ideas that are …
They Feel Good All Over
“Like most modern tyrannies, the dictatorship of the politically correct has freely used and abused the rhetoric of virtue in its effort to enforce conformity and silence dissent. This is part of what makes it so seductive. How gratifying to know that one is automatically on the side of Virtue simply because one espouses the …