Note to avid readers of the great Grade Inflation Blog Series (part one of which can be found by scrolling down to my June 5 post): The promised additional posts on grade inflation's origins and continued causes are forthcoming. I find that, through some peculiar post-traumatic pedagogical transference, the prospect of blogging about grading is affecting me in very much the same way that the prospect of grading itself does. To borrow a phrase from Dana Carvey's Garth, grading "sucks my will to live." I therefore avoid it; I become enormously productive in all other areas of life as I find ever more inventive reasons not to do it; I age and wither as the stack of unmarked papers gathers accusatory dust; I struggle with my conscience in the manner of my puritan forebears, wracked with spiritual doubt, feeling my faith in the world sorely tried, knowing in my soul that I am a sinner in the hands of a bad case of procrastination. And then I suck it up and I do it, and, as best I can, I do it right (and, as best I can, I don't inflate). As with the grading, so with the blog: it will come, and hopefully, like the grading itself, it will be of some use.

Meanwhile, I quote two remarkable passages from the conclusion to Richard Bernstein's Dictatorship of Virtue. On the subject of radical (Marxist, feminist, materialist, postcolonialist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, etc.) academic scholarship, Bernstein says point blank what so many scholars, bent on believing that they work on a revolutionarily sharp cutting edge, seem so unwilling and unable to see--that too often what they do, and the way they do it, reeks of self-congratulatory, self-discrediting, unimaginative conformity:

"The fact is that assaulting the establishment, declaiming against the racism and sexism of society, reiterating the approved phrases about oppression and exclusion, promising to uncover previously neglected worlds, these require not a jot of courage these days. These are the sanctioned activities of the counterestablishment, the gestures and idioms that gain approval and lead to good opportunities, to jobs, to prizes, to book contracts, to prominence in American life. It takes no bravery to be a multiculturalist. There is no risk in smashing the icons. There are millions of dollars in foundation grants for people who claim they are doing so."

Had someone handed it to me this straight in grad school, I might have been spared some of the long years I spent finding out this hard truth on my own. But then, I might not have been terribly receptive to this perspective in grad school. Radical claptrap was new to me, after all; it didn't sound like claptrap and it did give me a sense of purpose (it is, indeed, designed to do just this, and as such it works wonders on the wide-eyed humanities grad student eager for a way to explain to the parents why she is still in school). Which leads me to the second important passage from Bernstein's conclusion, wherein he argues that the thrilling novelty of the radical stance will, in the manner of all novelty, eventually wear off:

"It might not last. I sense that a lot of the enthusiasts of the New Consciousness are like the Red Guards of China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. They will be swept along by their zeal and enthusiasm for quite a while, wreaking considerable damage during that time. They will impose the characteristics not of real but of ideological multiculturalism: they will replace the truly inspiring notion of greatness with the tepid concept of representativeness. They will push people to adopt, not a personal philosophy, but ethnicity, race, or sex as the principle of personal identity. They will exalt racial and sexual rage over reason. They will cover us over with a thick glue of piousness, which, in turn, will smother argument. They will undermine the quest for objective truth with a riot of subjectivities. They will turn almost anything they do not like into one of the new cardinal sins--racism, sexism, sexual harassment, homophobia--and they will try to punish those who commit those sins. They will confuse knowledge and appreciation of other cultures with cultural chauvinism, the superpatriotism of the small group. They will turn reading into an exercise in ethnic boosterism and the cultivation of "self-esteem," forgettiing Kafka's admonition that a book should be "the axe that breaks the frozen sea inside us." And then their immoderation and mindlessness and the fact that they do not fulfill basic needs will get the better of them. The pendulum will swing eventually in the other direction."

Bernstein wrote these words in 1994, when the trends he discusses were only a few years old. But here we are in 2002, and the novelty doesn't seem to have worn off. I got good and bored with it eventually, and the boredom helped me to see that much of what I had originally embraced, in the heat of the professional awakening that is graduate school, was a nasty soup of cliches, questionable opinions masquerading as truth, simplistic ideas dressed up in zippy jargon, embarrassing illogic, anachronistic philosophy, and patent misinformation. And since I grew bored, I've looked around me in wonder and disbelief at the many academics I know who are either not bored at all or are very good liars, to whom boilerplate thought seems to spring eternally new, who consecrate their missionary methodological zeal by ventriloquizing worn platitudes about race, class, gender, and identity, who teach their students to do the same. And I ask the same question over and over again: "Aren't they bored yet?" They aren't, they haven't been, and it doesn't look like they will be anytime soon.