Following the resignation of Claudine Gay earlier this week, the job is vacant, waiting for a qualified candidate to step forward.
If you want to try your luck, there are certain criteria you’ll have to meet, and I’ll give you a clue: academic attainment is strictly optional.
Prof. Gay, for example, rose to her lofty heights without having published a single book. In over 20 years of academic toil, she published a mere 11 articles – about half the output regarded as the absolute minimum for any academic post.
However, apparently any publication in such fields as Black studies (unlike ‘white’, ‘Black’ must always be capitalised, and, if you don’t know this, you won’t get the job), counts as ten in any traditional academic discipline. Applying that multiplier gets Prof. Gay up to a respectable five a year, which should signpost your path to the summit. Just read up on Black participation in US politics and how it attests to institutional racism.
If you feel that even such a modest effort is beyond you, don’t despair. Why should you ruin your eyesight by reading and writing if many a lesser light has done so before you? Just copy their work, which Prof. Gay has done on over 40 occasions, about four per article, and you may be in line for a $900,000 a year professorship (which, unlike her administrative post, she gets to keep).
What you do have to demonstrate is unwavering commitment to the ideology of diversity and inclusion, of which Prof. Gay is both a practitioner and a beneficiary. The demands of that ideology don’t seem unduly stringent: when asked whether advocating the genocide of Jews would contravene Harvard’s code of conduct, Prof. Gay replied that this depended on the context.
In other words, if you wish to promote another Holocaust, all you have to do is find an appropriate context for doing so. For example, any attempt by Israel to defend herself is definitely conducive to such self-expression, as amply demonstrated by Prof. Gay’s alma mater and other campuses around the world.
Since I left the US some 35 years ago, I’ve only been catching glimpses of American academic life, but that has been enough to compare it unfavourably to my Moscow University, circa 1970.
Yes, we were immersed in the sewage of Marxist twaddle and had to regurgitate it by rote to pass our exams. But at least we were able to cleanse ourselves of the putrid stench by mocking all that nonsense in private, swapping ribald jokes about everything we were supposed to hold dear. Professing commitment to communism could get a student on the good side of the local Party committee, but it would turn him into a pariah at student get-togethers.
Even at our lectures, we could drive our professors to distraction by posing questions that Marxism couldn’t answer (“Please, sir, how does dialectical materialism explain human thought?”). However, the woke ideology pervading American (and other) universities allows no such latitude.
I’ve spent the past few days in the company of two American professors, both erudite, clever, witty – and (brace yourself) conservative, even though they ply their trade in the humanities.
The rarae aves have fed me on a steady diet of horror stories about academic life at US universities. For example, the slightest deviation from the critical race theory would blackball the dissident from any academic post in eternity.
When I lectured in Moscow in 1970-1972, I could permit myself the odd smirk or joke that left my students in no doubt where I stood politically, which was a million miles away from the received ideology. An American (or any Western) professor of, say, sociology can do no such thing.
If he as much as hints that, say, different races are differently able in different fields or that some divergencies between men and women are physiological rather than environmental, he’ll be out on his ear faster than you can say ‘politically incorrect’. To make sure professors stay on the straight and narrow, they have to take courses in diversity or at least fill in questionnaires testing their ideological purity.
Much has changed since 1987, when Allan Bloom published his seminal work The Closing of the American Mind, in which he predicted some of today’s mayhem. In the past, he wrote, he had seen his task in disabusing students of their misguided prejudices. His current students, however, had no prejudices – other than hatred of any prejudice.
Yet Edmund Burke correctly identified prejudice, which is to say intuitive a priori knowledge, as a key beacon lighting up any sound mind. It places thought within a certain discipline. That has a liberating effect, for any lack of discipline turns freedom into anarchy, replacing creation with destruction.
Relativism reigned, wrote Bloom: every view was deemed as good as any other, no intellectual hierarchies existed, the students’ minds were so open that their brains had fallen out. Now, Prof. Bloom is no longer with us, so he can’t testify that the problem has been fixed. Today’s students have a full complement of prejudices, and they’ll defend them with their lives or, to be more exact, their professors’ jobs.
Students deny professors any right to point out logical inconsistencies or factual errors in their arguments. You have your truth, prof, I have mine, and it’s as good as yours – or possibly better for being more up to date. And if you disagree, I’ll report you to your ‘chair’ (the word ‘chairman’ has been expurgated from the academic lexicon: taking our cue from the Brothers Grimm, we now have animate pieces of furniture).
The very concept of absolute truth has ended up in what the godfather of Marxist post-modernity, Trotsky, described as the rubbish bin of history. Landing on top of it with a deafening thud were academic freedom, capacity for analytical thought, commitment to following irrefutable facts and sound ratiocination wherever they would lead.
It would be too obvious to point out (but I’ll do it anyway) that, when academic freedom goes down, it drags every other freedom with it. Those students who police their professors with the hysterical zeal of Mao’s Red Guards not only vote but, in a few years, will affect how the silent majority will vote.
Ideological neo-Marxist extremism is already rending America asunder, with the rest of the West following closely in her footsteps. Another mighty push may suffice to plunge the country into the morass of unadulterated tyranny, and modern history serves up numerous examples of universities begetting cannibalistic despotism. Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge were all Sorbonne graduates, not illiterate peasants.
The situation is dire and, if you want to know how dire, read The Guardian’s comment on Prof. Gay’s resignation. It was helpfully provided by the American hack Moira Donegan, and one would have thought we have enough homegrown vegetables of this type:
“Her resignation is merely the latest episode in the rightwing’s assault on education – a project that has increased in its virulence and success in recent years, but which has been decades in the making. Republicans hate education, and they have demonstrated this hate in both their policymaking and in the public theatre of their cultural grievance.”
If Republicans indeed hate the kind of education Prof. Gay provides, I say more power to the Republicans. But I’m afraid Miss Donegan gives them too much credit; the problem goes well beyond mere interparty squabbles. It’s not political but civilisational, and that’s a hell of a note to start the year on.