- Kimball, Roger.
Tenured Radicals.
3rd. ed.
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, [1990, 1991, 1998] 2008.
ISBN 978-1-56663-796-1.
-
If you want to understand what's happening in the United States
today, and how the so-called
millennial generation
(May 2008) came to be what it is, there's no better
place to start than this book, originally published eighteen
years ago, which has just been released in a new paperback
edition with an introduction and postscript totalling 65
pages which update the situation as of 2008. The main text
has been revised as well, and a number of footnotes added to
update matters which have changed since earlier editions.
Kimball's thesis is that, already by 1990, and far more and broadly
diffused today, the humanities departments (English, Comparative
Literature, Modern Languages, Philosophy, etc.) of prestigious (and now
almost all) institutions of higher learning have been thoroughly
radicalised by politically-oriented academics who have jettisoned the
traditional canon of literature, art, and learning and rejected the
traditional mission of a liberal arts education in favour of
indoctrinating students in a nominally “multicultural” but
actually anti-Western ideology which denies the existence of objective
truth and the meaning of text, and inculcates the Marxist view that
all works can be evaluated only in terms of their political context
and consequences. These pernicious ideas, which have been discredited
by their disastrous consequences in the last century and laughed out
of public discourse everywhere else, have managed to achieve an
effective hegemony in the American academy, with tenured radicals
making hiring and tenure decisions based upon adherence to their
ideology as opposed to merit in disinterested intellectual inquiry.
Now, putting aside this being disastrous to a society which, like all societies,
is never more than one generation away from losing its culture, and
catastrophic to a country which now has a second generation of voters
entering the electorate who are ignorant of the cultural heritage they
inherited and the history of the nation whose leadership they are
about to assume, this spectacle can also be quite funny if observed
with special goggles which only transmit black humour. For the whole
intellectual tommyrot of “deconstruction” and
“postmodernism” has become so trendy that intellectuals in
other fields one would expect to be more immune to such twaddle are
getting into the act, including the law (“Critical Legal
Studies”) and—astoundingly—architecture.
An entire chapter is devoted to “Deconstructivist
Architecture”, which by its very name seems to indicate you
wouldn't want to spend much time in buildings “deconstructed”
by its proponents. And yet, it has a bevy of earnest advocates,
including Peter Eisenman, one of the most distinguished of U.S.
architects, who advised those wishing to move beyond the sterility of
modernism to seek
a theory of the center, that is, a theory which occupies the
center. I believe that only when such a theory of the center is
articulated will architecture be able to transform itself as
it always has and as it always will…. But the center that
I am talking about is not a center that can be the center
that we know is in the past, as a nostalgia for center.
Rather, this not new but other center will be … an
interstitial one—but one with no structure, but one also that
embraces as periphery in its own centric position. … A
center no longer sustained by nostalgia and no longer
sustained by univocal discourse. (p. 187)
Got that? I'd hate to be a client explaining to him that I want the main
door to be centred between these two windows.
But seriously, apart from the zaniness, intellectual vapidity and sophistry,
and obscurantist prose (all of which are on abundant display here),
what we're seeing what Italian Communist
Antonio Gramsci
called the “long march through the institutions” arriving
at the Marxist promised land: institutions of higher education funded
with taxpayer money and onerous tuition payments paid by hard-working
parents and towering student loans disgorging class after class of
historically and culturally ignorant, indoctrinated, and easily
influenced individuals into the electorate, just waiting for a
charismatic leader who knows how to eloquently enunciate the trigger
words they've been waiting for.
In the 2008 postscript the author notes that a common reaction to the
original 1990 edition of the book was the claim that he had
cherry-picked for mockery a few of the inevitably bizarre extremes
you're sure to find in a vibrant and diverse academic community. But
with all the news in subsequent years of speech codes, jackboot
enforcing of “diversity”, and the lockstep conformity of
much of academia, this argument is less plausible today. Indeed, much
of the history of the last two decades has been the diffusion of new
deconstructive and multicultural orthodoxy from elite institutions
into the mainstream and its creeping into the secondary school
curriculum as well. What happens in academia matters, especially in a
country in which an unprecedented percentage of the population passes
through what style themselves as institutions of higher learning. The
consequences of this should be begin to be manifest in the United
States over the next few years.
November 2008 