It appears that my use of war metaphors in the opening paragraph of my last column confused a number of people, including someone who blogs at both the American Spectator and the Huffington Post.* * My sentence, “Obama’s advance troops have already taken over our college campuses, have bound and gagged our conservative professors, have ravished our virgins, have pillaged our stores of wisdom, and have ensconced themselves in the thrones of power in deans’, presidents’ and department heads’ offices” was circulated around the blogosphere and set off a chorus of chortling. The left-wing bloggers, especially, had a field day with my reference to “ravished our virgins.” They pointed out, in quite crude terms, that one must go to middle schools these days to find virgins.
I will begin with a reminder from English 102 that a metaphor is “A figure of speech that describes something as though it actually is something else, thereby enhancing understanding and insight” (“Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing” Fourth Compact Ed., Edgar V. Roberts).
So let me, as my more fashionable colleagues in English departments say, “unpack” this:
“Obama’s advance troops” are the tenured radicals who have left their legacy on college campuses. Their takeover began in the 1960s, but their protégés now control hiring, tenure, and curriculum choice. They have dispensed with the study of dead white men unless it is in innovative ways, like a conference on “Faulkner’s Sexualities,” for which they pin up posters on their office doors. William Faulkner, as you may recall, was the Nobel-prize-winning Southern novelist. Old-fashioned scholars used to study him for his innovative writing style, his mark on the modernist movement, as well as for the ideas he presented in his work.
But style and ideas are passé. Sexuality, or better yet, sexualities, is where it’s at if you are a scholar doing “cutting edge” research. Were I able to make the case that the focus of my dissertation, the Southern Catholic novelist Walker Percy, had multiple sexualities, I would not have had my paper proposal turned down at that great fair of English professors, the Modern Language Association convention, where the hippest scholars are interviewed and hired to tenure-track positions.
Tenured conservative professors, as old as most of them are, of course are not literally “bound and gagged.” Most of them probably served in the military, and so tenured radicals would not be able to take them down in a physical way. The actual violence on campuses is directed more at invited speakers like David Horowitz, Patrick Buchanan, and the Minutemen, by brave undergraduates who bear weapons of cream pies and bottles of salad dressing.
Those who are bound and gagged (metaphorically) are afraid to differ in opinion for fear of losing our temporary jobs when the talk in the faculty break room or part-timers’ office turns to political elections. There is always danger, for your lack of assent may make you conspicuous and thereby invite an ambush of questioning.
Self-censorship also occurs at faculty meetings, and the sight of a middle-aged Shakespeare scholar (in tweed), a citizen in good standing, quaking at the directives of the feminist department head is deserving of Sophocles. A chorus should come on the stage to weep for such a man reduced to nodding in agreement to a unanimous decision to approve a new assistant professor’s proposal for a course, “Popular Literature,” that would include rapper Tupac Shakur’s lyrics as “poetry.”
The “virgins” I had in mind are the young minds who are greeted with an onslaught of sexualities, lyrics about “ho”’s, and animal voyeurism in English class. They are also subject to efforts to make them into “agents of social change,” if their professor has read the influential, “Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Reconfiguring College English Studies,” by James Berlin. He guides teachers in helping students in “locating and naming the discursive acts that encourage unjust class, race, gender, and other power relations through the tacit endorsement of certain economic, social, and political arrangements.” All this is achieved through “critical thought,” according to the accepted wisdom. Such critical thought is opposed to “pre-critical thought,” which according to scholar Ann E. Berthoff is located in “religious ideology.” Even new graduate teaching assistants feel that their mission is to divest the “little kiddies” of their close-minded religious beliefs, as I can attest from having heard such comments at orientations.
“Pillaging our stores of wisdom” is a reference to the elimination of courses on such authors as Shakespeare and Milton, unless it is on their…”sexualities.” I have sat in classes where dead white male authors are used simply as whipping posts for sins of political incorrectness. “Texts” assigned on syllabi are often exclusively by leftist authors and give students the idea that the United States is a rapacious, imperialist, fascist regime. College students who have been pumped up with the idea of being “critical thinkers” have not even had exposure to conservative thought, unless it is through dismissive ridicule.
“Ensconced themselves in the thrones of power in deans’, presidents’ and department heads’ offices” is a reference to the fact that humanities departments veer left, as evidenced by records of voter registration and surveys. One study by Christopher R. Cardiff and Daniel B. Klein, as reported in 2005 in “Critical Review,” found that for every one Republican in the Humanities in California colleges there were ten Democrats. Other studies of English departments show the proportion of those in English departments to be skewed Democrat to Republican anywhere from 13.3 to one, to 19.3 to one. I would wager that the 5 to 10 percent who are Republican are near retirement.
The situation is dire.
Most of the conservatives writing about this issue have either abandoned the academy or have never taught. One 24-year-old editor of a blog on higher education described the situation as being that academia only “occasionally represses conservative thought.” I can tell you that conservative thought in most humanities departments has just about been banished. And I could count in numerous ways how this has been done. Many studies, statistics, papers, and surveys supporting my first-hand observations are presented in articles; but these are read mostly by academics. Those who are still in the academy are too afraid to write about what they see and experience. The strategy of the leftists is to cast their critics as alarmist exaggerators. But those who have managed to escape academia and are safe in their journalism jobs also seem incapable of understanding how widespread the rot is. Politicians talk about improving education but have no idea what is happening as they speak. Soon, everyone will forget that there even was such a thing as a conservative intellectual tradition. Referring to conservative and intellectual in the same breath is likely to bring derisive laughter from humanities professors. The radicals are winning this war. We need the help of the public and our political leaders to break through the barricade.
* The title of this piece is not intended to offend anyone because of race, creed, gender(s), economic class, educational level, grade in English 102, or inability to discern the finer literary elements due to environmental factors like overexposure to rap, heavy metal music, or Barry Manilow. In fact, the author implicates herself as being as much of a “dummy” in many regards, having on her own bookshelf a volume in the series for dummies, “Building a Web Site for Dummies.” As testament to her dumbness in this regard, she has just hired the services of a web page designer. The title for this essay, taken from this series, hence, is satirical. A review of this literary term is forthcoming in another paper, to be followed by one on “humor.” More lessons are being worked up in the teacher’s office and will be offered on a new web page devoted to informing the public and helping students protect themselves from tenured radicals. Get on my list at www.marygrabar.com to find out when and how.
** The source of this hailstorm on the blogs seems to be Conor Friedersdorf.