From Winfield Myers' guest comment for NRO, "Reading Between the Lies During Campus Visits":

Before you embark, examine the school's website carefully. Remember that the goal of a college's web designers is to present the school as administrators want it to be seen, not necessarily as it is. Look at course descriptions and syllabi in the History and English departments, two bellwethers of curricular trends. Take note of the treatment of these subjects (chic professors make a living at unintended self-parody) or descriptions that employ the words race, class, or gender along with other trendy terms; these indicate a high degree of politicization -- the substitution of politics for genuine learning.

Myers makes a number of other suggestions to the prospective student (find out how much teaching is done by grad students rather than faculty, find out what kinds of student groups are funded by student activities fees and what are not, find out whether the school has an actual core curriculum or whether it has mush that it calls a core curriculum, find out whether the residences are PC gulags, and so on). All good advice, by the way.

But what interests me about Myers' list is the diagnostic priority he gives to History and English departments. These departments are the pulse point of campus culture. Figure out what the climate is like in these departments, he says, and you've figured out the campus climate. Look at them first, before you look at anything else. Examine their course descriptions for signs of absurdity and ideological rigidity, and read those signs for what they are: indications that education has ceded to a perverse combination of posing and politicking. Then read those signs as omens of a larger institutional decline.

This is just the sort of rhetoric that makes people in English and History departments roll their eyes with contempt for the reactionary right. It's Roger Kimballesque, it's D'Souzish, it's just the sort of thing humanities academics regularly dismiss as misguided and misleading, as a form of cheap pandering to a conservative anti-intellectual public. But it's hard, on some level to see why, since with the exception of the comment about unintended self-parody Myers' description of the humanities tallies perfectly with the humanities' most treasured descriptions of itself: academic humanists want desperately to believe that they are deeply relevant, that they affect and even set culture on campus and beyond, and Myers says they do; academic humanists want desperately to believe that they are at the forefront of curricular innovation, and Myers says they are; academic humanists proudly proclaim that they and the work they do are political, and Myers echoes that proclamation. Myers is not mischaracterizing the humanities at all; what he is doing, however, is suggesting that the humanities as they seek to be are deeply and dangerously flawed.

He's right. Proof? The fact that by and large humanists respond to such charges in just the way I described above--with withering contempt, mockery, dismissal, and tired ad hominem attack. Any discipline that refuses to explain itself to the world is an intellectually dishonest discipline. Any discipline that prefers instead to close in on itself, whose members respond to challenges from beyond not by answering them clearly and inviting public discussion of its mission, but by retreating ever deeper into jargonized language that no one outside the club can understand, is a discipline more defined by defensiveness than by inquiry. Any discipline that makes challenges from outside the basis for a rigid system of internal control, such that any similar questioning from within the ranks becomes grounds for ritual expulsion (via ostracism, or bad grade, or tenure denial) of the offending individual as an evil right wing reactionary, is not a discipline at all. It is a cult.

The fact is that practitioners of a politicized humanities do not think they should have to answer to anyone whose politics do not come up to their standard of righteous radicalism. They see their work as that of exemplifying the right, radical way of the mind, and they envision their teaching and writing as opportunities to stage their exemplary approaches for readers and students who will, ideally, be morally edified by what they call their "praxis." A student who questions that radicalism is a problem--someone to be watched closely and handled with care and graded accordingly. Students who do not question that radicalism, but rather accept it--eagerly, in some cases, unthinkingly in others--are the students radical teachers want in their classes. Radical pedagogy of the sort I am describing here requires passive, unreflective students because it is often unthinkingly reflexive itself, adopted more as a matter of conformity with prevailing professional norms rather than as a matter of deliberate, informed personal choice.

Hence Myers' astute observation that you can tell if a department has conceded intellectual content to fashion and politics by looking at how heavily it leans on those three rote little words, "race," "class," and "gender" (to this I would add "identity"). There are other categories of analysis, but in some courses, and some departments, you wouldn't know it. Likewise, there is nothing magical about these categories. They do not automatically lead you to truth, but in some courses and some departments, you'd think they do. What they do lead to is foregone conclusions. An English course that purports to address race, class, and gender is more than likely to be oriented around a predictable and rigid series of claims about identity, power, and oppression. These claims do not vary much from course to course, though the ostensible content of the course may vary a great deal--race, class, and gender work as well for Shakespeare as they do for Victorian novels and black women writers, reducing every text in their wake to a variation of the same old political cipher.

So, to make a long blog short, Myers is right about the academic humanities, depressingly so. And he'll stay right as long as humanists respond to legitimate criticism by rolling their eyes rather than cleaning up their act.

Last spring, I had the honor of sitting next to John Searle at a dinner. He asked me, on finding that I teach college English, what I thought English departments would be like in twenty years. I replied that if they kept on as they are, English departments would probably not exist twenty years from now. "That's what I thought," he nodded, biting into a piece of steak.