I will reiterate a bit of what I said in response to the original post:

I have long respected Alan Kors, but he is simply going off the deep end when he starts echoing the wretched Richard Vedder:

“The power of universities comes from their monopoly of credentials. As Richard Vedder so deeply understands in his Going Broke by Degree, they are the only institutions allowed to separate young individuals by IQ and by the ability to complete complex tasks. They do not add value to that, except in technical fields. Recruiters do not pay premiums because of what the Ivy League or the flagship state universities teach in English, history, political science, or sociology. They hire there despite, not because of that. Recruiters do not pay premiums because our children have been sent to multicultural centers for sensitivity training. Recruiters pay premiums for the value already there, which universities merely identify.”

If this were really true, corporate recruiters would be trying to hire fresh high school grads who have been admitted to Ivy League schools; they would be poaching these schools for students in their freshman year. This would be a fantastic opportunity for them. But as far as I know, this is not happening.

Furthermore, colleges do not have a monopoly on use of aptitude testing. As the link below makes clear

http://www.obecinfo.com/news_article.php?article=11

– I have seen others in places like the Wall St. Journal – companies are using SAT scores to screen college applicants. I don’t see why it would be any more illegal to screen high school graduates or people who had completed a little college this way.

There is plenty to criticize in higher education. But when critics – usually people with advanced degrees from high-end colleges, often near the end of long academic careers – starting saying that college is a waste of time, I’m ready to jump off. Increasingly this is happening among critics of higher education on the right. It seems to me they are simply making themselves sound bizarre. I literally can’t think of a better way for them to make sure everyone stops listening.

Fr. Paul Shaugnessy, S.J., had this to say in a different context:

In calling them "corrupt" I mean that these institutions have lost the capacity to mend themselves on their own initiative and by their own resources, that they are unable to uncover and expel their own miscreants. It is important to stress that this is a sociological claim, not a moral one. If we examine any trust-invested agency at any given point in its history, whether that agency be a police force, a military unit, or a religious community, we might find that, say, out of every hundred men, five are scoundrels, five are heroes, and the rest are neither one nor the other: ordinarily upright men who live with a mixture of moral timidity and moral courage. When the institution is healthy, the gutsier few set the overall tone, and the less courageous but tractable majority works along with these men to minimize misbehavior; more importantly, the healthy institution is able to identify its own rotten apples and remove them before the institution itself is enfeebled. However, when an institution becomes corrupt, its guiding spirit mysteriously shifts away from the morally intrepid few, and with that shift the institution becomes more interested in protecting itself against outside critics than in tackling the problem members who subvert its mission. For example, when we say a certain police force is corrupt, we don't usually mean that every policeman is on the take--perhaps only five out of a hundred actually accept bribes--rather we mean that this police force can no longer diagnose and cure its own problems, and consequently if reform is to take place an outside agency has to be brought in to make the changes.

Based on the links, I seem to be the main source of all this "contemptuous dismissal." I never felt contemptuous towards Kors or his article--it should be pretty clear that there are parts of the it that I admire, and he comes across as an outstanding and dedicated teacher. If my tone was more sarcastic than it needed to be, that's my mistake, but I don't believe I was dismissive. If what you've written here is all you got out of my post, I can see why you'd think I was being dismissive, because there isn't even a hint of the substance of my criticism.

Only the most hard core, uninformed cranks continue to insist that FIRE is a right-wing organization devoted to advancing a right-wing agenda.

My complaint about FIRE is that, based on the articles posted on their web site, the organization took a strong position favoring one side in a situation in which nobody's free speech was threatened. Co-founder Silverglate nonetheless conjured up a threat, apparently because he's convinced that the people on one side of the dispute are the type who reflexively stifle free speech. The only thing I've said about FIRE's overall agenda is that they seem to be doing some good work on behalf of an important cause.

Instead, his reflections on forty years of academic life are treated as instances of consummate intellectual dishonesty--presumably, one is led to suppose, because his conclusions offend those who see things differently.

Well no, one is not led to suppose, and I'm not offended just because he sees things differently. What bothers me is the contradiction between what he says he believes and what he does. It's pretty simple, really--he regrets the decline of intellectual pluralism and the triumph of ideology over pure critical acumen, but when he turns to the present the intellectual tolerance is gone and his ideology seems to have trumped his critical acumen.

In order to suggest that he hasn't thought very hard about the crowd of professors he's criticizing, I quote a few people in "oppression studies" who don't seem any happier than Kors about the "therapeutic university." It's the kind of juxtaposition of perspectives that I'd want students to dig into, suspending judgment until they understood both sides. That seems to be the sort of thing Kors values as a teacher, too, but when he turns to the magazine-reading public he seems to want exactly the opposite, and doesn't challenge his readers to think of the ideological drones that run today's universities as anything more than "zealots" and "cowards."

Where he really runs of the rails is when he imagines that "truth in advertising" should entail that colleges admit they're going to "undertake by coercion [the students'] moral and
political enlightenment." And I explain why, based on my personal experience, I find it ludicrous to imagine that Duke--a place supposedly crawling with left-wing extremists--is really an ideological re-education facility.

I presume that you and many of your readers don't see the contradiction I see, and it shouldn't be that hard to explain why you don't. I'm sure I've made plenty of debatable points. But I've been barking up this tree for a while, and I get very little debate. Instead, I hear about how good the people on the right side are and how not-so-good those on the other side are. It's not a very compelling argument.

I'm glad to hear that the comment of mine that didn't appeared wasn't intentionally rejected. I'll make a note of that in my original post.

I find it interesting that Kors admits that female students and students of color endured disturbingly hostile educational environments in his day, all the while writing off their eventual academic success as simply a shift toward "therapeutic" studies.

What he cannot imagine is that, however wrongheadedly, many of these scholars, once they had a foothold in the academy, did what they could to ensure that their foothold became as permanent as possible. What he cannot imagine is that, having fought for hundreds of years for equal rights, women and minorities might be suspicious that their gains in the 70s and 80s wouldn't immediately be dismantled the second their opponents found the right tools.

What he cannot imagine is exactly what poet Ron Silliman, in his blog post today, reminds us was happening forty years ago on the campus of SF State:

"In California, then-governor Reagan tried mightily to get his pal Max Rafferty elected to the Senate, ousting Alan Cranston, a longtime liberal Democrat (and one-time boss of Charles Olson). Reagan’s plan was simple. He wanted to provoke a student revolt at one of the state’s public universities and then show the world that his administration had learned how to cope with such events through the deployment of overwhelming force. The campus he picked was San Francisco State,where I was a sophomore studying writing. The student body had raised funds for a new student union and had hired architect Moishe Safde – then a big deal thanks to his design of the facilities for the recent Montreal Expo. Reagan ensured that the plan for the student union was vetoed. He then moved to rescind the authorization for two of the school’s ethnic studies departments. The students voted to strike in response, but also decided not to go out on strike until late on election day. That way their actions couldn’t benefit Rafferty, who was Reagan’s secretary of education. Very quickly, however, Reagan’s plan to deploy overwhelming force came into play – police chased students on horseback, swinging their billy clubs indiscriminately; hundreds were arrested’; the school president, John Summerskill, a handsome JFK clone, was fired and a faculty member who’d put himself forward as the leader of the anti-student forces, linguist S.I. Hayakawa (he climbed onto a flatbed truck where the students’ sound system was located & tried to wrest the mike away from the speaker – someone grabbed Hayakawa’s signature tam-o-shanter, which made every TV news program in the state – but nobody reported what Hayakawa had done next, which was to bite student leader Ernie Brill) was appointed to replace him. Every teacher I respected was either fired or quit at the end of that term (everyone in the English Department & writing program knew Hayakawa). I had a Chaucer instructor who was carrying a pistol on campus out of fear of the police. And, thanks no doubt to philosopher John Searle’s trips over from UC Berkeley to identify 'known Berkeley radicals' inciting these events, somebody opened a CIA file on me, tho I wouldn’t learn about that for a decade."

Erin O'Connor's sinewy defense of Alan Kors's incisive and impassioned article (however sad but true) on the decline of the humanities in academia needs no words of mine to convince, though I'll add a few here to the mix. Her support of rare academically-oriented organizations consistently defending free inquiry, free speech, reason, and the traditional humanities such as FIRE, ACTA, and the NAS is to be commended, rather than clucked (or sputtered or howled) at by parti pris carpers. Further, her responses to criticisms of her choice of posts and her commentaries contrast favorably with the mandarin sneers, Jacobin rants, and pseudo-psychological slanders with which defenders of the traditional humanities are routinely greeted in other venues.

Alan Kors is an engaging and impressive intellectual historian as well as a principled defender of free inquiry and speech on college campuses. I remember once spending a lively and enlightening entre nous hour with him at a conference several years ago where we discussed an early modern humanist polymath we'd each written a book on. Although the subject of the current invalidism of the humanities didn't come up at the time, his recent reflections on his vocation and on the current ideological cum careerist quicksands sucking down all too many humanities-department academics are thoughtful--however melancholy--revelations that also accord with my own sad observations and experiences in academia. Perhaps what is difficult for some defenders of traditional humanities to yield is the belief that, mutatis mutandis, classic writers, thinkers, and artists can give us real alternatives for thinking, creating, and living. I don't at all think Alan Kors has abandoned his critical sense when he candidly relates how zealotry, cowardice, and careerism in humanities departments (grimpeurs especially hate scrutiny) have contributed to their intellectual dereliction and demise.

Yeah, Professor Zimmerman, that last bit was for you. At least we can agree with Alan Kors's praise for the just triumph of racial and gender tolerance on campuses, though zealots, cowards, and careerists eagerly seized upon and exploited this triumph for their own ends after the poisonous Vietnam War carnival of protest and "relevance." Et apres ca, le deluge. . . . While you seem ready to concede a few points and to treat Kors's arguments, your responses deliver little more than assertions that the distinguished intellectual historian Alan Kors et alii are simply too uncritical, faux-sentimental, and unintellectual to discern disturbing trends in their profession. Add a few feeble tu quoques, et voila! And yes, I did read the attacks on Kors's article linked above (including the ludicrous "pseudoanalytical" rubbish from your commentators about conservatives as diseased sociopaths). Still, thanks for the faint praise and brownies . . .

Leave it to Luther Blisset as usual to interject some extraneous or diversionary commentary into a discussion. Who else could fathom the arcane link between what the tendentious and random recollections of Ron Sillman about a student-led "strike" (read: "law-breaking spree") at San Francisco State have to do with Alan Kors's article on the decline of the humanities?

On the other hand, the "what he cannot image" bits contain the predictable verbal struts wrapped in the banner of egalitarianism ("having fought for hundreds of years for equal rights . . ."). But it's just this ready invocation of egalitarian mantras whatever the cost by radical faculties and craven administrators, from the creation of social and political advocacy clubs like women's and ethnic studies departments to the excogitation of draconian speech codes that Kors contends has devalued humanities inquiry, teaching, and scholarship for all. Such destructive egalitarians were well described by Burke: "Those who destroy everything will certainly remove some grievance."

Sorry, JA, should have spelled it out simply and clearly. You see, Silliman discusses how in the late 60s, conservative politicians like Reagan used student politics to display shows of force, how conservative professors like Searle worked with the FBI against student activists, how Reagan tried to stir students into disobedience by firing left-wing professors and destroying the emerging ethnic studies programs, etc.

Which is to say, the minute left-wing professors and students gained any ground in the university system Kors admits was biased in his day, the minute the backlash started to turn back the clock.

As I wrote, I don't think the left academy should have preserved itself through the same bias the right academy used for centuries. But let's not pretend that the gains made by minority and female scholars and students would still be visible had they not preserved themselves by hook or crook.

I'm interested in how these culture-war debates work, so all this is instructive. I get it that Alan Kors is "important and influential," he's "launched a movement for free speech and intellectual fairness on campus," and he's "an engaging and impressive intellectual historian." I don't have an argument with any of that. But that's the gist of what I'm hearing--his reputation along with grim or snarky repetitions of his sad conclusions--and it doesn't amount to much as a counterargument.

It is relevant that Kors is relating his personal experience--O'Connor is right that "sentiments are not facts, and feelings are not reasoned arguments." But Kors' grim commentary on the contemporary university doesn't have the texture of personal reflection that makes his account of his education so resonant. Despite setting aside a "Column A of departments," he characterizes the younger generation of his colleagues and the university with sweeping generalities, and goes over the top when he claims that colleges and universities should state outright in their catalogs that it's their aim to be hard-line ideological re-education facilities. I'd think that even people who are solidly in Kors's camp would be able to grant that that's debatable, and not a conclusion that can sink or swim on sentiment.

I didn't charge Kors with intellectual dishonesty by pointing out the disjunction between the way he honors perspective as a teacher and the way he doesn't as an editorialist. The issue is how much of the professorial ethic should carry over--in my opinion it should be more rather than less. That's another point that I'd think could be treated as debatable and not, for instance, written off (falsely) as "tu quoques."

I wonder, though, if the resident rhetoric patrol can come up with the latin for "lump and dismiss." Unlike O'Connor, he seems to know my name, but he blithely lumps me together with the rubbish-spewing commenters on Timothy Burke's blog. And based on the links in the post, aside from Mike (above), who raises a specific and reasonable objection, I seem to be the only person criticizing Kors' article. If anything, that suggests I'm a fringe quack, but O'Connor seems to want to multiply me--there's "quite a bit of contemptuous dismissal," and she's

shocked by the amount of vitriol that was slung in Kors' direction, not least because the academic establishment, if it does nothing else, readily grants authority to analyses based on personal experience and is so friendly to reflective memoirs that it even tolerates a few that have been exposed as fabrications. But Kors is no Rigoberta Menchu, and critics accord him no such authority.

Talk about a promotion--I'm no only "critics," I'm the academic establishment! Wait till I tell Rigoberta...

Robert Zimmerman has merely to peruse the ample resources of the NAS (including their well-researched reports and studies on humanities education, e.g., sections of their 1996 report, The Dissolution of General Education 1914-1993) or links from the ACTA posts for copious, specific evidence of the politicization and decline of the humanities Alan Kors refers to in his article. In addition to his personal revelations, Kors has also listed several much more detailed analyses (e.g., Patai and Corral's anthology, Ellis's book on the corruption of the humanities, Sokal and Bricmont's book--one could add many others here) of systematic academic malfeasance in jettisoning disinterested scholarly inquiry in favor of tarted-up socio-political ideology. And the FIRE organization he co-founded has taken up hundreds of cases due to unconscionable and unconstitutional practices at institutions of higher learning, from denials of due process and free speech (bolstered by speech codes that FIRE president Greg Lukianoff characterizes as "absurd, tenacious, and everywhere") to institutional programs of political and social indoctrination.

Unlike Zimmerman, who sees Kors's revelations on humanities education as unintellectual, hypocritical, and unethical, I salute Alan Kors for raising his voice beyond furtive whisperings in faculty lounges. What seems most piquing to Zimmerman and his ally Tim Burke (and yes, Zimmerman is correct to point out I read his remarks on Kors's essay on Burke's website) is that Kors has rejected the academic self-censorship that has worked so well in the past in stifling revelations of unhealthy trends in humanities education, such as the tedious but trendy obsessions with race, class, and gender displayed in countless papers, journal articles, conferences, and books that qualify academics for positions. Once scholarly organizations like the MLA and the AHA now routinely make meretricious political pronunciamentos, and the former specializes in sponsoring bizarre conference topics that sweep the stables of "pop culture" in content, much to the reported disgust and amusement of observers. So it's not as if Kors's essay is an unprecedented violation of some fancied code of academic omerta; evidence and precedents for his views abound. Perhaps I could agree with Zimmerman that Kors's suggestion that college catalogs present explicit ideological disclaimers is debatable; indeed, from the colleges' point of view, the implicit ideological expectations of faculty and student conformity are so much more effective! And, I would add, insidious.

I've no reason to doubt Zimmerman is a tyro in the so-called culture wars as he says (music departments are perhaps freer of these sorts of conflicts), though I think if he surveyed past debates and discussions on Erin O'Connor's site, he'd find more diversity of views expressed (including his) than on many other websites.

Sorry LB, though I'd read Silliman's piece before I commented above, I didn't then and still don't see how this tendentious interlude written by a sixties radical (replete with Ronald Reagan, John Searle, and S.I. Hayakawa as villains in stage motley) sheds much light on Kors's lament about what has happened to the integrity of academic humanities teaching and scholarship in the last forty years. Given Kors's commentary in the article and his role in FIRE, I can hardly imagine him a foe of freedom of thought, expression, or civil liberties.

And it certainly doesn't appear by your comments above that you even believe in the possibility of disinterested scholarship and teaching--it's merely a right/left zero sum game in an academia where it's political tortoises all the way down. If so, we disagree. And it's not the proper office of governments to create and sustain partisan political institutions (called taxpayer-supported universities and colleges) and activist clubs (called women's and ethnic studies departments, et al).

Nor do I really see this supposed centuries-old "right academy" as anything more than a scarecrow or bogus bogey you've been waving about. In general, I think that the idea of the wider opening of opportunities in education and elsewhere was due much more to a general consensus about what was fair and just rather than through radicals' demands and actions described by Silliman. Nevertheless, sorry capitulations by unctuous administrators to radical groups did set the stage for the politicization and decline of the humanities Kors describes in his article.