Any parent that sends his kid to an Ivy league school at $40,000 a year to study liberal arts is nuts !

Go Big Red— the place to be if you can’t decide between the Ivy League and the state ag school. Last summer I talked with a recent Cornell graduate and budding paleocon who had many such tales to recount. He liked to add, “Drive ten miles out of town, though, and you’re among normal people again.”

Do the English faculty ever drive ten miles out of town?

Just to clarify, the list Mike Adams published is not the entire English faculty, so perhaps there are still some teachers at Cornell who teach Shakespeare or Hawthorne from a non-PC direction. But it’s still horrendous.

It is obvious that it is grossly unnatural to have a line-up like the above, even if they were not the majority on the staff of that department. This implicates aggression; and only the government is powerful enough to have this perverting an influence. The mark of anti-merit policies is also evident, and affirmative action is known to be an official policy. Disestablishment of government schools could change this sort of pattern; but what else could? Surely no one will say that evangelists have overlooked these campuses, and thus brought on the evil?

Adams column is a joke, and I hope his scholarly work isn’t so shoddily misleading. Look at the actual faculty list at . Note that most every faculty member with the Scholarly and Professional Interests section filled in has an area of literary study as well as a theoretical specialty.

“Note that most every faculty member with the Scholarly and Professional Interests section filled in has an area of literary study as well as a theoretical specialty.”

So, if someone lists “Elizabethan literature” as their area of literary studies, and “Queer Theory” as their theoretical specialty, Mr. Sandifer trusts that this faculty member will do a good job of teaching Shakespeare within the Western tradition?

Quite honestly, yes - especially to undergraduates. I’ve seen very, very few professors who are teaching their current research to undergraduates (Which is appropriate - if their current research were the sort of thing an undergraduate could readily understand, it would probably not be very good scholarship). You seem to be making the assumption that being knowledgable about queer theory somehow erases all other kinds of knowledge.

Keep in mind also that this list of specialties is not really for undergraduates. They’re very unlikely to check it. The list is for graduate students, and, more specifically, prospective graduate students. A graduate student is expected to know the traditional western interpretations of texts already. I mean, that’s basically what the Subject GRE in Literature is - how many classic books have you read and how well do you know them. Which is why a place like Cornell lets its graduate students teach its undergrads - because undergrads are supposed to be learning what grad students already know.

The rise of the various forms of critical theory (And it is critical theory, not critical studies as Mr. Auster put it) has not erased traditional/canonical interpretations. It’s augmented them. Now, whether that augmentation is good or bad is beside the point. My point is that it’s simply a lie to claim that knowledge has disappeared, or that it’s not taught to college students anymore.

This is one of the standard leftist lines meant to obfuscate and conceal what the left is really doing. The left says, “Oh, no, it’s not true that we’re not teaching Shakespeare, the Great Books, the classic works of our civilization any longer. Therefore conservatives’ warnings about the destruction of our tradition are just hot air.” The truth is the leftist professors may be teaching these works, but teaching them in such a way as to debunk and deconstruct them, or at best, to use them to advance leftist views, which is another form of subversion.

This lying is intrinsic to the American form of leftism known as liberalism. In America, pure leftism, the attempt to topple the existing order of society and replace it by a “just” and “equal” order, will not sell. (The Communist Party USA realized this as far back as the early 1930s.) So the left consciously decides to lie, by presenting itself as “moderate.” The left does this in every area, from politics to curriculum. Among its own, it speaks the language of radicalism; to a general audience, it pretends to be moderate. Mrs. Clinton is a good example of this.

However, I agree that if the facts are as Mr. Sandifer states, then Mike Adams did a poor and misleading job of reporting by presenting a simplified picture of the facts. He didn’t say anything untrue. The teachers’ specialties are as he said. But he should have give the complete picture, saying how large is the English department, how many of the professors have these various leftist specializations, and so on. The picture is bad enough without his trying to leave the impression that it is 100 percent bad.

I think it is Mr. Sandifer who is doing a poor and misleading job of reporting. The full faculty list is available here:

http://www.arts.cornell.edu/english/faculty.html

Of those who list specialities, a large majority have one form of idiotic theoretical approach or other. People who feel that it is worthwhile to do a “feminist” or “postcolonial” or “queer” reading of a text are not people that love literature, but people who see literature as subordinate to (leftist) cultural and historical agendas.

There’s only so much time in the day. The rise of anti-humanist theory has taken away from better ways of approaching literature. And although the knowledge hasn’t actually disappeared, it slowly decomposes on shelves in the Cornell library auxiliary stacks while students are taught that present racial and sexual obsessions provide insight into great works of the Western tradition.

“You seem to be making the assumption that being knowledgable about queer theory somehow erases all other kinds of knowledge.”

No, I am making the assumption that such leftists will teach even undergraduates that a certain Shakespeare play reflects the sexism of the Elizabethan era, or that it is an example of the advancement of the class interests of the rich in that era, or other leftist garbage. This can be done without going into an advanced level of theoretical detail, which will be reserved for the graduate students.

You are missing the point. On Saturday, I tuned in to the ABC Evening News with Elizabeth Vargas. In reporting the funeral arrangements for President Reagan she said, “President Reagan will ‘lay’ in state in the capitol…”

Here is a woman who presumably graduated from a top tier university majoring in English or journalism and doesn’t know the difference between ‘lie’ and ‘lay.’ When I went to school, if I made such a glaring grammatical error in speech or writing, my teachers would be on me like winged Pegasus!

Instead of teaching correct grammar, high school and college English teachers of the past 20 or 30 years have concentrated their efforts on flawed interpretations of literature of dubious worth, leftist indoctrination through ‘values clarification’ and other more subtle techniques and on rewarding those who are over-creative and who spout the party line. Also, they are reluctant to point out their students’ grammatical errors for fear of damaging their self-esteem.

Can anyone remember the brouhaha that erupted about 40 years ago over the advertising jingle, “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should?”

Timegrid is making a good point, but it is quite different from the other things that have been discussed in this thread. Can’t he make his point, without telling other people they they are “missing” the point? To say, “you’ve been missing the point,” implies that everyone has been wasting his time until the speaker came along. And sometimes it’s not even true.

Timegrid neglected to mention was that it was Mr. Sandifer who missed this particular point (among others). Mr. Sandifer asserted that graduates of the PC-indoctrination gulags commonly called elite universities (like Cornell) are learning the core of Western literature, etc., and that the various leftist specialties are simply supplemental in nature.

Timegrid blew a nasty hole in that theory by pointing out that many of those who’ve graduated from such elite institutions - even those able to land a job with a well-known national news network - aren’t even capable of using correct grammar. However, I’m quite confident that Miss Vargas is extremely well versed in latest permutations of feminist literature and dogma.

I’m going to have to go ahead and assert some credentials here. How many of the people in this thread who are making broad statements about what is taught in college English classes nowadays has taken one in the past year? Two years? Five years? How many took the Lit GRE in the past two years? How many are currently enrolled in any graduate study in the humanities?

Much as liberal academia makes a great whipping boy, and I agree, it gets remarkably silly sometimes, this just isn’t how it works. As I said, that list of specializations is of virtually no interest to an undergraduate. They’re listed for the sake of graduate students, who are a whole different kettle of fish.

I can say with pretty good certainty, having gone through graduate admissions processes, that no admitted graduate student in any of the top 50 English programs in the country cannot explain, in good detail, why Othello is a tragedy, what is tragic about it, and what the aesthetic effect of the tragedy is. They can all describe with a reasonable degree of eloquence why a book, poem, or play moved them. They can identify iambic pentameter, know the difference between a dactyl and an anapest, etc. This is basic knowledge for a graduate program.

Why is it basic knowledge? Because these professors, regardless of what their research specialties are (And that is what the list at Cornell is - a list of research specialties), are not teaching their current research to undergraduates. They’re teaching the exact program that Adams is wondering why isn’t taught anymore.

I have been in undergraduate classes at universities of the caliber of Cornell. They were taught by professors with specialties in Marxist and gender theory. And you know what? We spent a week talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s use of simile.

As for the fact that people don’t know grammar anymore… true enough. They also can’t write essays to save their lives - something that provides me with no end of frustration. This, however, is not entirely due to a widespread failure of education. Frankly, I doubt Elizabeth Vargas is well-versed in postmodern theory either. Idiocy is not evidence of a leftward slant in education - it’s evidence of idiocy. The better question is whether someone who graduates from the PhD program at Cornell knows the difference between lay and lie.

No matter how well versed in critical theory they may be, I’m going to guess that the answer to that question is yes.

I’m not arguing for gender theory, Marxist theory, or anything else here. And if Adams wanted to criticize the graduate curiculum at Cornell, I assure you, he’d find lots to take issue with. But to try to say that these criticisms extend to your average college student is just plain false.

Conclusive evidence has been given of freakish anti-value characteristics dominating a department, the character of which cannot be so very much out of line with academic liberal arts in general. Yet we are assured that these qualities are isolated and constrained by other factors. If they don’t influence students other than at the graduate level, this signifies a breakdown of civilization also, or even a worse one, if it could be true. Perhaps the idea also would be that graduate students insulate the others from a bad influence, but this is not much to hope for. It is as if one were to say,’the doctors are spreading a plague, but not to worry, we have them more or less quarantined’. What will happen when these anti-merit activists of literature become the exclusive rulers of these departments? How will any standards be maintained, when the idea is to attack any standards (such as might be called elite); will they be upheld by means of hypocrisy, subterfuge, corruption and lying? When radical egalitarians ruled in Cambodia, it would have been treacherous to say,’relax, they haven’t killed everyone’. The problem is also that those whose function it is to evaluate human activities in general, are themselves in need of a negative evaluation, and some serious withdrawal of privileges.

Here is Mike Adams’s follow-up column in which he responds to critics and explains the disaster in College English departments:

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/mikeadams/ma20040604.shtml

Many of us have been reading academic horror stories for years that did, in fact, concern undergraduate classrooms. Some of them have come from columns written recently by Mike Adams. Entire books have been written about the abuses of students by politicized professors. Organizations such as FIRE have been founded by people who are more accurately described as classical liberals than conservatives, solely to provide legal protection to students, and many of the abuses they report are of undergraduates.

As a result, when we read Mike Adams’ description of the Cornell English department faculty, it is entirely reasonable to assume that there is politicization of the curriculum. I personally experienced such events as an undergraduate, in courses where the course description itself was run of the mill humanities or political science, and in which my grade was adversely affected by my beliefs. Contra Mr. Sandifer, we are not jumping to conclusions based merely on a description of the faculty. We are basing our conclusions on a few decades of classroom horror stories, 99.999% of which involve the kinds of anti-Western pinko professors described in the web pages of the Cornell English department.

So because Mike Adam’s attempt to misrepresent the faculty of the English department at Cornell lines up with his other claims about modern academia, it must be true? Or from any number of biased sources?

I mean, let’s be frank here. It is not earth-shattering news that the academy has a left slant. It always has. In the 1920s and 1930s, when what’s now called a traditional English curriculum was being taught, it was being taught by leftists. There’s a reason that anti-intellectualism has been a hallmark of American society at every point - one of the central roles of the academy is scholarship, and one of the central functions of scholarship is inquiry and questioning. And the act of constantly interrogating and questioning social values is fundamentally liberal.

So if you want to prove that the academy is liberal, go ahead. It’s such a blindingly obvious statement, though, that I’m not at all sure why a site like Town Hall needs to reiterate it at least once a week.

No, what I take Adams comment to be trying to prove is that, not only is the academy liberal, but that it has totally erased all sense of traditional literary studies. Which is patent nonsense. Yes, the professors are liberal, and yes, this comes through in some of their teaching. But, as I’ve said, I have seen professors specializing in Marxist and gender studies teaching on Fitzgerald’s use of the simile. I’ve taken the Literature GRE - and woe betide anyone who tries to pass that without a traditional knowledge of English.

It is not the case that traditional knowledge of literature is dead. It’s not even the case that it’s dying. I’ve seen professors who specialize in black and queer studies argue that we need more focus on traditional great works curriculum in the undergraduate
curriculum. And,incidentally, his PhD was from Cornell.

There’s plenty to criticize academia for. And I’d love to see it get taken to task for it. But it’s counter-productive to throw around such easily refuted claims as this. Traditional studies of literature is not dead, English departments are not in the business of indoctrinating students to be gay Marxists, and Cornell is not the single greatest threat to western civilization. And, as entertaining as rhetoric along these lines is (And it is tremendously satisfying rhetoric. I use Town Hall columns in my intro comp courses as examples of effective rhetoric, actually), rhetoric of this nature isn’t particularly useful unless you’re really committed to preaching to the choir.

The increasingly obtuse arguments of Mr. Sandifer are simply ridiculous. I will deal with a few in the hope that someone reading has some interest.

1) The sources about leftist academia are referred to as “any number of biased sources”. The sources are from within academia, relating first hand information about the treatment of dissenting students, some stories involving legal action that became a matter of public record. If Mr. Sandifer wants to go through the websites of FIRE, Accuracy in Academia, etc., and convince us that we are being misled by these cases and stories, have at it.

2) “If you want to prove that the academy is liberal, go ahead.” A cousin to the straw man argument, this statement indicates that we are only stating the obvious. The truth of the matter is that “liberal” implies a free and open exchange of ideas, including the questioning of popular dogma, in the belief that the truth will win out. Leftism, in contrast to liberalism, seeks to deny dissenting voices any public forum for dissent. Hence “political correctness”, campus speech codes, shouting down conservative speakers on campus, refusing to fund conservative speakers in the first place, refusing to fund conservative organizations while corresponding leftist organizations get funded, harassing students with conservative opinions and giving them bad grades and throwing them out of the classroom amidst much self-righteous melodramatic rhetoric, gathering up conservative newspapers and burning them or destroying them in the pre-dawn hours before they can be distributed widely and read, etc. None of this is “liberal”. It is leftist. If Mr. Sandifer wishes to demonstrate that these stories are all fictitious, please track them down via various conservative sources and do so. If he wishes to demonstrate that conservatives are doing the same things to the same degree, please document.

The remainder of Mr. Sandifer’s post addresses straw man arguments of his own invention. Mike Adams might use hyperbole in an off-hand remark such as “Read classic literary works this summer, the kind that faculty used to assign before they got obsessed with teaching feminism and homosexuality” (paraphrasing here), but any intelligent person recognizes this as hyperbole. Yes, Shakespeare is still assigned. So are other classic works. Many of them are taught with the occasional leftist diatribe thrown in. They are taught by persons who despise our Western heritage, who despise white males, who agitate at curriculum meetings for a reduction in the time spent studying the works of “dead white males” and a corresponding increase in time spent reading Amiri Baraka or whomever. As a result, none of us trust these faculty to teach these works properly, and none of us are impressed in the least that Mr. Sandifer spent a whole week on Fitzgerald’s use of simile.

Perhaps Mr. Sandifer could further his education by reading the Mike Adams columns from the archives at townhall.com and dividing up the incidents described into the categories “liberal questioning and inquiry” and “leftist suppression of competing non-leftist ideas and persons”. I will provide a helpful list of column dates so that he need not read them all: June 2, May 13, March 1, February 16, 19, 23, and 26, and January 15. Keep in mind that the goal is not to find some sentence somewhere in each column that does not indicate leftist intimidation or indoctrination, but to agree or disagree with my conclusion that each column contains at least one example of leftist indoctrination, intolerance of dissent, or intimidation.

I don’t know, I think “biased” is a pretty good word to describe websites that have the explicit goal of uncovering leftist bias in academia. When you set out with conclusion in mind, it’s awfully easy to find the evidence you’re looking for.

But, since my reasoning appears to be “obtuse” to you, let me offer my point in the form of a simple and clear question - one that you have yet to refute with any reference to a similarly detached and objective source:

If traditional interpretations of classic works are not taught to undergraduates, why is the Literature GRE focused almost entirely on traditional interpretations of classic works? After all, if the test required of almost all prospective graduate students in the field of English tests that knowledge, it does follow that their undergraduate education would focus on that knowledge.

I’m wondering what Mr. Sandifer’s own position is in relation to this topic. Is he a _supporter_ of the traditional curriculum, who wants to assure his fellow traditionalists, namely us, that the traditional curriculum has not, in fact, been destroyed? That doesn’t seem likely, as I believe he’s already identified himself as being on the left.

Is he then a moderate leftist who thinks the academic left is getting a bum rap, because he believes leftism is completely compatible with the preservation of the traditional curriculum and has no intention of destroying it? But that raises the question why academic leftists would want to preserve the tradition, given their unending bitter indictment of it as the source of inequality and oppression.

Which leads to a third possibility: Is Mr. Sandifer a hard leftist who is consciously concealing the truth, namely that the left controls the academy, that they are using their power to destroy whatever remains of traditional intellectual disciplines and to erect their own leftist system in its place, and that they must conceal this fact because if leftists admitted that they’re in power, their mask of being tribunes for the oppressed would be stripped away?

In taking the position he’s taken on the state of the humanities in today’s leftist universities, Mr. Sandifer would seem to be in the position of a member of a socialist government who is hotly denying that his government is socializing the economy or has any intention of socializing the economy. He’s in the position of an EU bureaucrat who is denying, as an absurd myth invented by right-wingers, the belief that the EU aims at seizing sovereign power over the nations of Europe, even though that is the EU’s expressed aim.

Mr. Sandifer is what is referred to in the Internet vernacular as a “troll” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll ). He has commented here before, and in a similar fashion. “Don’t feed the trolls” is usually good advice.

“insubstantial irritation that disrupts discourse”

A good description of a certain familiar type of behavior.

“If traditional interpretations of classic works are not taught to undergraduates, why is the Literature GRE focused almost entirely on traditional interpretations of classic works? After all, if the test required of almost all prospective graduate students in the field of English tests that knowledge, it does follow that their undergraduate education would focus on that knowledge.”

Even though Mr, Sandifer does not answer the questions I posed to him, such as concerning the Mike Adams columns I listed, I will answer his simple question. I have been proposing that, while classics are taught still to undergraduates: (1) The commentary provided by the faculty are more likely to be a leftist slant on the classics than an appreciation of our Western cultural heritage, and (2) that there is a finite amount of time in the undergraduate curriculum and some classics time has been displaced by some trendy leftist/Third World/victim class writings. Thus, if a century ago a college education had twice as many hours devoted to the classics, with virtually no leftist slants given by Marxist theoreticians, and zero hours devoted to reading Rigoberta Menchu or some other leftist fraud, then there has been a significant degradation of the education offered.

However, that degradation is not so total that there is ZERO teaching of the classics. Certainly a graduate with a degree in English literature, who is taking the GRE in English literature, should have had enough exposure to them to take the test. A few snide leftist remarks by professors might remove some of the luster of the classic works in the student’s mind, but surely he could still summarize the work and comment on a passage taken from it.

If Mr. Sandifer would like to argue that the two forms of degradation of the literature curriculum that I listed above would render a student unable to take the English literature GRE, he may do so. Otherwise, he could spend time answering the questions posed to him on this thread instead of arguing against straw men.

I would like to add a third form of degradation to Mr. Coleman’s account: using the classic works, not to sneer at them, but to turn them into teaching tools of liberal-leftist messages. For an example of this mentality, read this review from last January’s Atlantic of a new translation of Don Quixote. The reviewer, Terry Castle, an English professor at Stanford, adores Don Quixote—but she adores it in the most incredibly programmatic liberal manner. Every single thing she notices and likes about the book, she likes because it’s advancing some typical liberal idea: chiefly that it’s the first novel that has no sense of God or transcendence, a completely modern, material view of life (a point she must repeat about seven times, showing that for liberals the denial of religion is itself a religious experience); and that the book is diversity-friendly, and its portrayal of Moslems is sympathetic. So, she adores Don Quixote because it’s non-Christian, and pro-Moslem. Her treatment of the book thus unselfconsciously adheres to the alienist liberal line every step of the way. This is the way liberals are. They don’t live in relationship to the real world. They live inside the world of liberalism, the way a bee lives inside its hive; whatever supports liberalism they like, whatever doesn’t support liberalism they dislike or ignore or cannot even conceive of.

And I’ll bet Castle is a relative moderate in today’s academia.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/01/castle.htm

It is a deceptive, falsely reassuring argument, on the classicizing effects of the standardized tests for admission to graduate school, which is offered. Such a test deals with common elements of all (or most) undergraduate English department instruction. It couldn’t provide a common denominator if it didn’t do that, and would have no reason for being continued. The tests can’t give much coverage to any new trends or anti-western authors who aren’t being taught everywhere. The common culture is only an artifact in this case; the pro-western effect is occurring in spite of all efforts to go the other way. Murray’s Human Accomplishment gives some indirect information on the failure of the leftist scholars in many subjects to achieve consensus on replacements for the great names. If they could agree on their nominations, the GRE would certainly fall into line, too. If these tests are all that restrains the anti-merit activists in the professoriate from going third-world in a more complete way, that is an alarming observation in itself, surely not a reassurance.

Mr. Adams’ latest article focuses on yet another aspect of life in the academic gulag: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13727

Apparently the politburo at UNCW can’t be bothered to perform routine criminal background checks on prospective students - even in the face of two rape/murders in the last 6-7 weeks. Adams was too polite to speculate on the most likely reason for administration stonewalling about background checks and confined his criticism to the administrators’ hypocrisy of saying it would be too expensive after shelling out 40K for the privilege of hearing George Mitchell blather on about liberal dogma. At the risk of being most impolite, I’ll give the reader a clue:

If criminal background checks were performed, it might mean less diversity on campus - a fate worse than rape and murder. It’s acceptable to break a few white eggs to make that perfect rainbow omlet, you know.

I think Mr. Sandifer and Mr. Coleman may be talking past each other. Mr. Coleman’s complaint has to do with speech codes, PC, suppression of conservative opinions, and so on. But Mr. Sandifer’s defense of the academy seems to deal only with the charge that traditional works and traditional approaches to those works have been done away with. Thus he writes:

“No, what I take Adams comment to be trying to prove is that, not only is the academy liberal, but that it has totally erased all sense of traditional literary studies.”

By the way, notice the loaded language: “totally erased all …” So, if even a tiny bit of traditional literary studies survived somewhere, Mr. Sandifer would say that that proves him right.

Indeed it is a false dilemma, to suggest that we have no alternatives but the hyper-racialized nihilists in every elite liberal arts professorship, or none of them in such positions. If those were the alternatives, as at length, may yet happen, then we should chose the alternative with no such professors, because otherwise there are no minimum standards. These harpies are poisoning the culture with their propaganda for race war and nihilism. It takes a large flow of government money to install a pro-minority anti-culture as vicious and useless as the current one, but the people can turn it down.