I have been calling attention for years, and don’t mind at all when people with bigger platforms than mine recognize that the first step in correcting failure is to admit failure. The refreshingly solid Republican victories in national election might be the sort of evidence that would encourage academicians to revise their priors. Let’s start with Michael Clune, professor of English at Case Western, with “We Asked for It” in the house organ for business as usual.
Over the past 10 years, I have watched in horror as academe set itself up for the existential crisis that has now arrived. Starting around 2014, many disciplines — including my own, English — changed their mission. Professors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields — such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument — as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.
In reading articles and book manuscripts for peer review, or in reviewing files when conducting faculty job searches, I found that nearly every scholar now justifies their work in political terms. This interpretation of a novel or poem, that historical intervention, is valuable because it will contribute to the achievement of progressive political goals. Nor was this change limited to the humanities. Venerable scientific journals — such as Nature — now explicitly endorse political candidates; computer-science and math departments present their work as advancing social justice. Claims in academic arguments are routinely judged in terms of their likely political effects.
The costs of explicitly tying the academic enterprise to partisan politics in a democracy were eminently foreseeable and are now coming into sharp focus.
Democracy is about emergence in government. The academic enterprise is about emergence in understanding. It sounds like I got out just before the real nonsense took over. Or perhaps higher education reverted to its roots in the seminary. (Is it any accident, dear reader, that Joe Stalin was a seminarian at one time?)