Camille Paglia Disses Academia--Sort Of...

(A Reluctant Fisking)

In a blistering New York Times piece today, renegade academic Camille Paglia, frequently the most understandable if not the most controversial humanities professor on the American university scene, delivers a blistering attack on the recent asininity at Harvard. Praising—somewhat faintly—outgoing Harvard president Larry Summers' brave but doomed attempt to open the academy up to serious discourse, Paglia then takes a slightly different tack:

But whatever his good intentions, Mr. Summers often inspired more heat than light. His stellar early career as an economics professor did not prepare him for dealing with an ingrown humanities faculty that has been sunk in political correctness for decades. As president, he had a duty to research the tribal creeds and customs of those he wished to convert. Foolishly thinking plain speech and common sense would suffice, he flunked Academic Anthropology 101.

Paglia has got that precisely correct. And she continues:

While many issues are rumored to have played a role in Mr. Summers's resignation (including charges of favoritism in a messy legal case involving foreign investments), the controversy that will inevitably symbolize his presidency was the manufactured outcry early last year over his glancing reference at a conference to possible innate differences between the sexes in aptitude for science and math. The feminist pressure groups rose en masse from their lavishly feathered nests and set up a furious cackle that led to a 218-to-185 vote of no confidence by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences last March.

Instead of welcoming this golden opportunity to introduce the forbidden subject of biology to academic gender studies (where a rigid dogma of social constructionism reigns), Mr. Summers collapsed like a rag doll. A few months later, after issuing one abject apology after another, he threw $50 million at a jerrybuilt program to expand the comfort zone of female scientists and others on campus. That one desperate act of profligate appeasement tells volumes about the climate of persecution and extortion around gender issues at too many American universities.

Paglia then takes a somewhat arcane journey down the twisted path of academic cronyism, but then moves toward an astonishing conclusion—astonishing for a brilliant light like herself who has often been denied respect in academia because her opinions frequently veer out of the well-traveled realms of fashionable leftism. Even after the Summers debacle and after the constant harassment of student exercising their right to free speech, Paglia stands foursquare behind the dogged intent of tenured radicals to destroy the American system of education, particularly in the humanities, and replace it with far left propaganda and agitprop:

The ideological groupthink of Harvard's humanities faculty does patent disservice to the undergraduates in their charge, but it is the faculty alone that should properly determine curriculum and academic policy, a responsibility that descends from the birth of European universities in the Middle Ages. Over the past 40 years, there has been a radical expansion of administrative bureaucracies on American college campuses that has distorted the budget and turned education toward consumerism, a checkbook alliance with parents who are being bled dry by grotesquely exorbitant tuitions.

Mr. Summers's strategic blunders unfortunately took the spotlight off entrenched political correctness and changed the debate to academic power: who has it, and how should it be exercised? Nationwide, campus administrations faced with factionalized or obdurate faculties have in some cases taken matters into their own hands by creating programs or reducing and even eliminating departments. The trend is disturbingly away from faculty power.

Disturbingly? As one who has admired the feisty Paglia for years, even when disagreeing with her at times, I find her faulty logic here to be nothing short of breathtaking. After correctly drubbing the out-of-control hard leftists who infest and destroy America's humanities departments like steel-gutted Formosan termites, she actually expresses concern that an increasingly infuriated public, disgusted at getting ripped off for all the dollars it spends on higher education, is threatening to take away the power the tenured radicals have already squandered ten times over. Does Paglia actually think that these intellectual pygmies will police themselves????

In a way, she seems to grasp this paradox:

It now remains to be seen whether Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences is capable of self-critique. Will its members acknowledge their own insularity and excesses, or will they continue down the path of smug self-congratulation and vanity? Harvard's reputation for disinterested scholarship has been severely gored by the shadowy manipulations of the self-serving cabal who forced Mr. Summers's premature resignation. That so few of the ostensibly aggrieved faculty members deigned to speak on the record to The Crimson, the student newspaper, illustrates the cagey hypocrisy that permeates fashionable campus leftism, which worships diversity in all things except diversity of thought.

Well, yes. I recall a poet and writer-in-residence who once sent me an extraordinarily candid email on just this topic. And then proceeded to write, "But please, don't make this public or mention my name in public. I am dreadfully afraid of those people." He was referring, of course, to the hard leftists who would not only muscle him out of his non-tenured slot, but would blackball him across the 50 states in the process, guaranteeing he'd never ply his trade again. He was literally petrified that I might betray him. Which I did not. But it's good folks like this gent who, afraid to lift a finger in dissent, allowed Hitler's rise in the 1930s. And it's decent Muslim Arabs who hide quietly away while the Islamofascists slaughter anyone who gets in their way. They don't want trouble. But somehow, it comes anyway, doesn't it?

Again, trying to write herself, Paglia continues:

If Harvard cannot correct itself in this crisis, it will signal that academe cannot be trusted to reform itself from within. There is a rising tide of off-campus discontent with the monolithic orthodoxies of humanities departments. David Horowitz, a 1960's radical turned conservative, has researched the lopsided party registration of humanities professors (who tend to be Democrats like me) and proposed an "academic bill of rights" to guarantee fairness and political balance in the classroom. The conservative radio host Sean Hannity regularly broadcasts students' justifiable complaints about biased teachers and urges students to take recording devices to class to gather evidence.

These efforts to hold professors accountable are welcome and bracing, but the danger is that such tactics can be abused. Tenure owes its very existence to past intrusions by state legislatures in the curricular business of state universities. If politicians start to meddle in campus governance, academic freedom will be the victim. And when students become snitches, we are heading toward dictatorship by Mao's Red Guards or Hitler Youth.

Oh, please. Is this a whiff of the anti-Bush meme again? Where is the logic here? We should continue to allow the corrupt tenure system to wreck the American university because "meddling" by outsiders will guarantee that "academic freedom will be the victim"? Excuse me? ACADEMIC FREEDOM IS ALREADY THE VICTIM. Who is Paglia kidding?

To even imagine that these witless poseurs who call themselves the "tenured faculty" can police themselves out of political correctness and academic oppression is beyond laughable. And the split metaphor accusing concerned students of emulating Mao's Red Guards or Hitler Youth? Earth to Camille: The Red Guards already run the humanities departments. And if you want to see Hitler Youth, why don't you check out the violent brown shirts of the left who show up to disrupt each and every attempt (few though they are) by a conservative to speak at a college campus?

Paglia concludes:

Over the last three decades of trendy poststructuralism and postmodernism, American humanities professors fell under the sway of a ruthless guild mentality. Corruption and cronyism became systemic, spread by the ostentatious conference circuit and the new humanities centers of the 1980's. Harvard did not begin that blight but became an extreme example of it. Amid the ruins of the Summers presidency, there is a tremendous opportunity for recovery and renewal of the humanities. Which way will Harvard go?

Camille, we already know which way Harvard went. The radicals ousted the square peg, in spite of the fact that the professional schools and the students overwhelmingly favored keeping Summers. This is not rocket science.

It is self evident to any sentient being at this point, except perhaps a professor, that any renewal in college Humanities Departments will take place from without, not from within. As he has for nearly 30 years now, Wonker calls for the immediate abolition of the corrupt tenure system and its replacement with a merit system imposed on the professoriat by outside, independent Boards of Trustees or Supervisors.

Perhaps some day in the distant future, some form of tenure could be reconsidered, once the Marxist ideologues are ousted from the schools and departments that they have utterly ruined by destroying any attempt at permitting diversity of ideas. But until then, it is crystal clear that the danger to the American academy is firmly entrenched within.

Saddam Hussein never willingly gave up his power. And still imagines he has it. He cannot conceive of not being in charge. The entrenched, bitter, dead-end left in academia is no different, as they hide snugly in their spider holes, smugly collecting handsome salaries (at least at the LaBrea Tarpits that constitute Harvard's humanities departments), sneering at their country and their benefactors, literally daring the chickenhearted public to come in and put a stop to it. Perhaps it's now time to oblige them and put their intellectual intimidation to a deserved end.

And perhaps it's time for Camille Paglia to realize that today's huge cadre of tenured radicals has no intention of giving up their tribe's control. It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you hang around bad people long enough, you're likely to become one of them. We'd ask Professor Paglia to consider that before she chucks a brilliant and highly original career in order to defend the demonstrably and utterly indefensible.