Academe Quotes
Economic analysis is the first principle of Marxism. Professors who were genuine leftists would have challenged the entire economics-driven machinery of American academe the wasteful multidepartmental structure, the divisive pedantry of overspecialization, the cronyism and sycophancy in recruitment and promotion, the boondoggling ostentation of pointless conferences, the exploitation of graduate students and part-time teachers, the subservience of faculty to overpaid administrators, the mediocrity and folly of the ruling cliques of the Modern Language Association.
Camille Paglia
We do not need French post-structuralism, whose pedantic jargon, clumsy convolutions, and prissy abstractions have spread throughout academe and the arts and are now blighting the most promising minds of the next generation. This is a major crisis if there ever was one, and every sensible person must help bring it to an end.
Camille Paglia
Beware of the manipulativeness of rich students who were neglected by their parents. They love to turn the campus into hysterical psychodramas of sexual transgression, followed by assertions of parental authority and concern. And don't look for sexual enlightenment from academe, which spews out mountains of books but never looks at life directly.
Camille Paglia
We do not, of course, write literary criticism at all now. Academe has won the battle in which Wilson fought so fiercely on the other side. Ambitious English teachers now invent systems that have nothing to do with literature or life but everything to do with those games that must be played in order for them to rise in the academic bureaucracy. Their works are empty indeed. But then, their works are not meant to be full. They are to be taught, not read. The long dialogue has broken down. Fortunately, as Flaubert pointed out, the worst thing about the present is the future. One day there will be no... But I have been asked not to give the game away. Meanwhile, I shall drop a single hint: Only construct!
Gore Vidal
The VHP-mandated scholars, for their part, have not been aggressive enough to take the struggle into the enemy half of the field by focusing public attention on the quality of the evidence presented by the BMAC-mandated scholars and their allies in academe and the media. That is why the latter have gotten away with creating the false impression, at least among those unacquainted with the actual contents of the debate, that the pro-temple case is weak and fraudulent while, purely by implication, their own case must be unassailable.
Koenraad Elst
Just released in 1994 is Christina Hoff Sommers's landmark study, Who Stole Feminism?, which uses ingenious detective work to unmask the shocking fraud and propaganda of establishment feminism and the servility of American media and academe to Machiavellian feminist manipulation. This bracingly precise, fact-based book should be required reading for every journalist. Sommers is a courageous academic philosopher who was one of the very first to systematically critique current feminist ideology and who took tremendous abuse for it. ... Sommers has done a great service for women and for feminism, whose fundamental precepts she has clarified and strengthened.
Camille Paglia
One of the most distressing tasks of a university president is to pretend that the protest and outrage of each new generation of undergraduates is really fresh and meaningful. In fact, it is one of the most predictable controversies that we know. The participants go through a ritual of hackneyed complaints, almost as ancient as academe, while believing that what is said is radical and new.
Clark Kerr
[T]he wall of separation between public and private higher education has been eroding for the last half-century. Funding from public sources now constitutes the bulk of higher-education resources in the United States, whether in the form of government subventions for research and programs, or in the much vaster influx of government-guaranteed student loans. For all realistic purposes, the distinction between public and private higher education has ceased to exist. Further, the vast numbers of young American adults being drawn in to the college and university system (some 20.4 million, up by 25 percent from 2000 alone)-on the assumption that college degrees are virtually a sine qua non of entrance into profitable commerce or lucrative professions-has evaporated what little is left of the pretense that academe constitutes some monastic realm, beyond the orbit of civil society.
Allen C. Guelzo
Further, I have powerful enemies in academe, esp. in the US, and they will gladly exploit any slander they expect to get away with, in this case slander invested with Harvard authoritativeness. They have no scruples about using allegations that they know to be lies if these lies can do the job of harming. If I don't contradict these lies, they will use that as an extra argument in their innuendo, "and Dr. Elst has never even denied it!”.
Koenraad Elst
Pollock's attempt to even link the Out-of-India Theory with the Nazi worldview is the diametrical opposite of the truth; it was the rivalling Aryan Invasion Theory (which Pollock himself upholds) that formed the cornerstone and perfect illustration of the Nazi worldview. This linking could only pass peer review because of the general animus against Hinduism and Indo-European indigenism in American academe. The whole forced attempt to associate Hinduism with National-Socialism suggests a rare animosity against Hinduism.
Koenraad Elst
Authentic leftism is populist. It is based in working-class style, working-class language, working-class direct emotion, in an openness and brusqueness of speech. Not this fancy, contorted jargon of the pseudo-leftist of academe, who are frauds. These people who manage to rise to the top at Berkley, at Harvard, at Princeton, how many of these people are radical? They are career people. They are corporate types [...] They love the institutional context. They know how to manipulate the bureaucracy which has totally invaded and usurped academe everywhere. [...] They love to sit on endless committees. They love bureaucratic regulation. Not one "leftist" in American academe raised his or her voice against obscene growth of tuition costs, which have bankrupted a whole generation of young people.
Camille Paglia
