I've admired John Ellis ever since I read his excellent and sad Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities. Ellis explained to me many of the patterns I was beginning to think I saw in the academic humanities--and put them into perspective in a way that helped me understand why the enterprise of the English department (scholarship and teaching) was coming to seem so bankrupt. It's not that there is no value or purpose in studying and teaching about literature and culture--I read and write and study like my life depends on it, because in some obscure but very real ways, it does--but that the way the academic humanities has come to do those things over the past several decades amounts to an airless, blinkered, and ultimately self-defeating enterprise.

There are all kinds of good reasons for this--and Louis Menand, for one, does a grand job of explaining some of them in his new book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. That's another post for another time, though. Right now, I'm interested in John Ellis.

Ellis is an emeritus professor at UC Santa Cruz--and began teaching at the University of California in 1966. He's been watching the UC system for a long time--and has a special perspective on the campus unrest that is roiling the university right now as California goes broke and higher ed feels the pinch. Here he is at Minding the Campus, with a piece entitled "How the Campuses Helped Ruin California's Economy":

All across the country there were demonstrations on March 4 by students (and some faculty) against cuts in higher education funding, but inevitably attention focused on California, where the modern genre originated in 1964. I joined the University of California faculty in 1966 and so have watched a good many of them, but have never seen one less impressive that this year's. In 1964 there was focus and clarity. This one was brain-dead. The former idealism and sense of purpose had degenerated into a self-serving demand for more money at a time when both state and university are broke, and one in eight California workers is unemployed. The elite intellectuals of the university community might have been expected to offer us insight into how this problem arose, and realistic measures for dealing with it. But all that was on offer was this: get more money and give it to us. Californians witnessing this must have wondered whether the money they were already providing was well spent where there was so little evidence of productive thought.

The content vacuum with filled with the standby language of past demonstrations, and so there was much talk of "the struggle," and of "oppression," and---of course---of racism. "We are all students of color now" said Berkeley's Professor Ananya Roy, and a student proclaimed that this crisis represented "structural racism." (Why not global warming too?) Berkeley's Chancellor Birgeneau called the demonstrations "the best of our tradition of effective civil action." Neither Chancellors nor demonstrations are what they used to be. The nostalgia for the good old days surfaced again in efforts to shut the campus down by blocking the entrance of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. It didn't seem to occur to anyone that the old "shut it down" cry was somewhat misplaced when keeping it fully open was what the present demonstration was about, but then this was not an occasion when anyone seemed to have any idea of what they were trying to achieve.

One group at UCLA stumbled into the truth, though it was a truth they did not understand. At Bruin Plaza a crowd chanted "Who's got the power? We've got the power." In its context this was just another slogan of a mindless day, but the reality is that those people do indeed have the power, and routinely use it in a way that makes them the author of their own troubles. Let me explain.

Ellis's conclusion focuses on the tragic irony of it all:

The irony here really cries out for attention: a large state university system needs a free market economy that hums along in top gear so that the revenue needed to support it can be generated. But California's two unusually well developed state university systems provide enormous local voting power in many Assembly districts for a bitterly anti-capitalist ideology that sabotages the California economy. The campuses are shooting themselves in the foot. The power that those students and faculty chanted about is indeed theirs, and if they used it to elect sensible assemblymen and state senators their problems would be solved by the healthy business climate that would result. The votes that they actually cast are the source of their troubles.

Only one idea for solving the funding crisis was floated on March 4. It was to repeal the state's requirement that taxes can only be raised by a two thirds vote, so that taxes can be raised yet again and more money made available to the campuses. In other words, let's make the funding crisis even worse, by driving out of California even more wealth and wealth creating capacity, and raising the unemployment level even more. "California is not a tax-heavy state," said Assemblyman Joe Coto, whose office is right next door to San Jose State University, which enrolls 31,000 students. And that raises the question: how much longer will the California citizenry want to support a system of higher education that keeps its legislature stuck on stupid? It's not a question for this state alone.

I'm still reading Atlas Shrugged, by the way. Rand has a word for people who think the way the campus protesters do. She calls them "looters."