Writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Illinois English professor Lennard Davis reflects on the streak of anti-intellectual solipsism that has shown itself in the academic humanities in recent years. Davis opens with an anecdote about a student's unwillingness to explore ideas and authors that she does not already know about:

Recently, in a graduate course on theory, I decided to end the semester with a reading of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, a compelling critique of biopolitics by the trendy Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben. When I reread it for the final class, I was struck by the work's powerful and applicable insights. Indeed, one of the graduate students told me how engaged and excited he was about the material, and he even dragged himself to class with stomach flu to participate in the discussion.

By contrast, one of the brightest and most voluble students in the class--let's call her Pandora--came in having obviously not read the book. She hadn't even bought or borrowed it. During the discussion she looked bored, and at the end of the class she said to me, "I don't think much of Agamben, judging from what I heard today. Who is this guy? And if he's so great, how come I've never heard of him?"

Davis is careful to differentiate his argument from "right-wing academics who defend the literary canon and warn of the dangers of political correctness." But at the same time, in detailing the inauspicious results of his generation's reformist zeal, Davis' concerns dovetail with those of the Roger Kimballs and the Dinesh D'Souzas. Much as he would like to be keeping different company, Davis is, perhaps, in better company than he knows. After all, the academy can't begin to reform itself meaningfully until people on either side of the political divide can agree that there is a problem.
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Davis makes excellent points, but Allan Bloom made them 18 years ago.

The article is subscribers-only so I can only comment on this excerpt. It's hard to know wheether this is really a phenomenon because there is only one example of one student's behavior on one particular day. I don't think "anti-intellectual" and "closed-minded" are the right words. Almost any graduate student is pretty much by definition not anti-intellectual.

Furthermore, there are always trendy topics in any field, so it's hard to say if this attitude is any worse than it's ever been before. I do, however, get the impression that names are more famous than ideas in the humanities, which seems absurd because a name is too narrow and too broad. It's too narrow to serve as a metonymic substitute for the breadth of their life's output. And it's too broad to cover an idea or concept that is actually the child of several thinkers. Also, it encourages the creation of academic celebrities, such as Fish and Spivak, who then overshadow the Agambens of the world.

As Chris writes, one example does not a trend establish. And in this particular example, the student simply sounds lazy. Judging from her own comment, the class had a good conversation about Agamben, so it's hard to conclude that her laziness is evidence of anti-intellectual tendencies in the academy.

Now, I do believe that the consumerist model of undergraduate and graduate curricula has damaged intellectual curiousity. When I was in graduate coursework a few years ago, I faced many grad students who refused to take courses outside of their narrow field of specialization. Grad students in earlier periods were especially prone to dismiss any literature that came after their periods as irrelevant to their fields.

But I think this is more a survival strategy, however misguided, than it is a symptom of anti-intellectualism. Now that deans want grad students to finish a dissertation and find a tenure-track job in five years; and now that dissertations themselves are increasingly more like book manuscripts; and now that job committees want grad students who have also proven a committment to publication and conference attendence; with all these forces, I can see why some grad students and faculty advisors believe it is best to focus early and often. A few generations ago, a grad student in English at an Ivy League university could conceivably receive a Ph.D. with an annotated bibliography or non-argument-driven single author study for his/her dissertation. But now, the dissertation is no longer simply a place to show one's knowledge of a field; today, it is a place to "shine," to foreshadow one's contribution to original thinking in a sub-specialization. Those pressures could also make a student ignore Agemben, if his work doesn't touch on the narrow issues of one's dissertation research.

I'd like to see more distribution and interdisciplinary requirments at the undergraduate or graduate levels. Such curricula reform will foster intellectual curiosity and "diversity" far more than, say, pointing the finger at literary critics who mix the personal and the political. Blaming anti-intellectualism on critics forgets how little criticism most students read before reaching grad school.

Jesus, Spivak. Yeah. That brings up the point I wanted to make, which is that there's the opposite problem as well - people being read because they're being read by others, not because they're actually any good.

As a Philosophy student, I saw plenty of that. (I read the tiny amount of Spivak I did in English classes, but I was negatively impressed, to say the least.) The primary examples being Derrida and Baudrillard, neither of which could actually write to save their lives.

While I suspect the young student in the article was not motivated to not read Agamben because of being burned with overhyped, incomprehensible blather, I imagine plenty of others have been so affected - certainly I continue to studiously ignore any author promoted only by those who quote Derrida, Baudrillard, Lacan, et al.

(Lest I be accused of philosophical Francophobia, I'd like to submit that Merleau-Ponty was a very good writer indeed, and able to express ideas using language that people can actually understand. On the other hand he's been dead for, what, over three decades now?)

"And if he's so great, how come I've never heard of him?"...I would guess that this remark reflects an attitude of *trendiness*, a phenomenon which is now afflicting all aspects of American society. If a few people jump to the left side of the boat (and I use "left" here with no political implications) everyone else wants to jump there, too, for fear of being left behind..and ditto for the right side. Psychologically, I suspect this is very similar to the attitudes which make people in traditionalist societies want to keep doing what they've always done...in both cases, the desire is for social approval more than for doing the sensible thing.

Although we see this attitude everywhere, it seems particularly strong in academia, since the reward system seems to favor it and there is no counterbalance.

I'm mildly skeptical that the explanation offered by Davis is correct. From personal experience, I can attest that scientists often have the very same attitude, so it cannot be that the "personal is political" meme or identity politics that is responsible.

More likely, success in academia comes to those who project confidence the best; and the type of confidence academics are most impressed by seems to be the insouciant-skeptical attitude.

As a former engineering grad student, I agree with agms, that this attitude is not limited to any field of study. I like the term "intellectual curiosity" to describe how students go outside of their assignments or "generally accepted" notions. However, grad students tend to be worked so hard (at least in engineering) that the "intellectual curiosity" is almost beaten out of them. Also, it tends not to be rewarded, at least short-term.