(Click on the logo to return to the main blog.)

An Astonishing Admission of the Obvious
04/21/2003

Well, there you go. The battle is all over. After decades of intellectuals' ideas corroding our society and wreaking havoc, the torch bearers have been forced to concede as much. And their response? "Why the hell were you listening to us, anyway?"

So Sander L. Gilman, a professor of liberal arts and sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, replied instead. "I would make the argument that most criticism — and I would include Noam Chomsky in this — is a poison pill," he said. "I think one must be careful in assuming that intellectuals have some kind of insight. In fact, if the track record of intellectuals is any indication, not only have intellectuals been wrong almost all of the time, but they have been wrong in corrosive and destructive ways."

Mr. Fish nodded approvingly. "I like what that man said," he said. "I wish to deny the effectiveness of intellectual work. And especially, I always wish to counsel people against the decision to go into the academy because they hope to be effective beyond it."

So what's the point? What's the justification for their jobs? They're wrong, of course. Intellectuals can be effective and relevant — just not intellectuals of the only stripe that's been broadly tenured in the recent past. The lesson that these exemplars of modern intellectualism have drawn from their inability to make their own political biases intellectually coherent is not that their biases are incorrect, but that logic, theory, and contemplation are useless.

I'd say it's time for them to retire, or to be retired, to expedite the changing of the ideological guard. Perhaps they know this, and that's why they are choosing to poison the campus's well.

Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:49 AM EST