-
Ailes: A Voice for the Silent Majority
May 13, 2013 | 8 comments
-
Tangles of Pathologies
April 12, 2013 | 35 comments
-
An Enduring Partnership
March 25, 2013 | 5 comments
-
Spies, Traitors, Agents of Influence, and Useful Idiots
January 31, 2013 | 35 comments
-
On Knowing When to Shut Up
December 19, 2012 | 7 comments
Buy the Book
Hustlers, Hucksters, and the Betrayal of American Education
The poisonousness of identity studies.
The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the
Closing of the Liberal Mind
By Bruce Bawer
(Broadside Books, 378 pages, $25.99)
As college and university tuitions rise stratospherically, reaching levels that equal the annual earnings of a working family, economically stressed parents are expected to continue to foot the bills for what is an increasingly deficient product—an education too often consisting of courses taught by con men, perverts, misfits, masters of gibberish, and malcontents who hate our country, our society, and the institutions that reward them handsomely for minimal effort.
And for those students sufficiently naïve to be influenced, the results can be educations that equip them to do nothing. Rather than being taught to think, they’re taught to express grievances. Instead of being exposed to the best that’s been thought and said, they’re taught that all we treasure as a society—our whole system of values—is based on racism, sexism, imperialism, or any number of a huge subset of -isms.
How pervasive are these programs on individual campuses? Are they an integral part of the curricula? Or are they fringe offerings, primarily a form of tribute paid by the nervous politically correct managers who run the institutions to appease various militant groups and governmental bureaucratic educationists enforcing the unspoken quota systems that carry with them federal funding?
As our economy tightens, as people retrench and the theme becomes back-to-basics, they’re taking a hard look at the luxuries in which we’ve been indulging. This reexamination is happening across the board and includes the extraordinary and insufficiently explained expenses associated with higher education, as our colleges and universities, among them some of the most prestigious, increasingly charge more for less.
Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept, a hard-eyed examination of the Islamic fundamentalism that feasts on the soft underbelly of European welfare states, turns that hard eye on our centers of higher learning and the identity politics that since the great fl ourishing of the New Left in the ’60s and ’70s, have come, like cuckoos, to push the old liberal arts curricula out of the academic nests and replace them with victim-centric programs like black studies, women’s studies, Chicano studies, and a proliferation of sub-studies.
Bawer devotes four chapters to the primary identity areas, as well as a separate chapter to sub-studies. He builds each chapter by reading extensively the frequently semi-literate and jargonistic books, papers, and journals issued by the various identity groups; attending their meetings, conferences, and seminars here and in Europe; interviewing people involved with the groups and their critics; and through it all, for the most part, resisting the impulse to satirize and caricature, allowing the words and actions of the people involved to carry the message.
In his chapter on black studies, Bawer talks with Shelby Steele, now a fellow at the Hoover Institution, whose 1991 book The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America won the National Book Critics Award. “I was one of those who were in on the founding of black studies programs,” he tells Bawer, although he later came to believe that to be taken seriously, black subjects had to be offered by established departments. He believes African American literature, for instance, to be “a full, rich subject…but it had to be taught under the auspices of an English department, where the formal conventions of criticism were applied rigorously.”
In the early days, however, he tells Bawer, many of his fellow black studies advocates couldn’t care less about academic legitimacy, but rather wanted the power and money that autonomous departments would give them—power that guilty white academics were eager to confer. As Steele puts it, “We’d talk to the administrators, and talk them into having black studies programs…there was so much white guilt that you could just go into these places and they’d give you everything you wanted.…It was just a joke from the very beginning.”
He tells Bawer that he also became aware that “Black Studies attracted ‘obvious hustlers,’” not real educators. The proliferation of black studies programs in the 1970s, says Steele, provided “an avenue for minorities to gain the economic security of the university professorship.They had no real credentials, so their argument became ‘You have to hire me to do this because I’m black.’ So your blackness itself became your primary credential.”
Bawer discusses the development of the black studies/Black Power movement, with examples of the twists and turns of the dialectics of blackness and profi les of the most successful hustlers, among them Cornel West, who left his splendid sinecure at Harvard in a huff when the politically incorrect Larry Summers, who apparently didn’t get the diversity memo, called him on the carpet for giving easy grades and passing off rapping as a scholarly activity.
Among others still running their cons is Leonard Jeffries, who, despite his highly publicized antiwhite and anti-Semitic rants and nonsensical distinctions between “sun people” and “ice people,” is still a professor at the City College of New York, where he previously ran the black studies program. Another identity professor is Ron Karenga, who ran the black studies program at California State University-Long Beach and authored Introduction to Black Studies, considered the class of the field.
Among other things, Karenga asserts that when Columbus landed in America, “he found Blacks had already preceded him.” He also “claims for modern blacks not only the legacy of ancient Egypt but also that of Muhammad’s Muslim empire.” (Needless to say, this is not a popular view in Egypt and the Middle East.) “The Moorish empire in Spain represents not only a golden age in Islamic civilization,” Karenga wrote, “but also a golden age of civilization for Africa, Europe and ultimately the world.”
Few Europeans would accept Karenga’s view. Nor is it universally popular among other identity groups in which the celebration of Islamic civilization is muted. And in women’s studies, it can cause vituperative arguments about how to apply fashion-able “feminist post-colonial theory” to patriarchal countries where women are forced to cover themselves with unsightly black bags, denied the simplest of freedoms such as driving a car, and can be stoned to death for imagined breaches of decorum.
IN OTHER IDENTITY areas there are interesting intersections. There are PhD programs in disability studies, for instance, and presentations on the subject “are increasingly common at a range of identity studies gatherings.” At times, disability studies overlaps with queer studies. Bawer, who is himself gay, attends one such conference, where on a panel on “Queer Body Politics,” a presenter, speaking of similarities between “crips,” as she calls them, and “queers,” asks the question: “Are crip bodies queer bodies, and can we say that queer bodies are crip bodies?” In the course of her presentation, she singles out Queers on Wheels, an organization for gays in wheelchairs, which “tries an intervention in the hegemonic way of seeing from bodily difference.”
About the Author
John R. Coyne, Jr. a former White House speech-writer, is co-author with Linda Bridges of Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement (Wiley).
Letter to the Editor View all comments (19) | Leave a comment
More Articles by John R. Coyne, Jr.
More Articles From Buy the Book
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/10/29/hustlers-hucksters-and-the-bet
Follow us:
ADVERTISEMENT
SPONSORED LINKS
FLASHBACK TO: 1995
-
Pope Culture
A man of faith in a godless age is hitting Americans where it hurts.
-
Why the GOP Does Not, Like, Totally Suck
Mr. and Mrs. American Spectator Reader, let P.J. O’Rourke talk sense to your kids.
-
Dames at Sea
-
In the Absence of Guns
In Britain, defending your property can get you life.
-
The Metaphysical Martini
-
Counting the Costs of Clintonism
The debacle of this president’s administration is both a cause and a symptom of the decline of American values. Unless Congress impeaches him, that decline will go on unchecked. An eminent jurist surveys the damage and assesses the chances for the recovery of our culture.
-
Chuck McHagel
It won’t take long for conservatives to scratch this presidential wannabe off their 2008 scorecard.
-
The Legacy of Old John and Mother Fresh-Roasted
-
It’s the Best Time of the Year
The American Christmas, like the songs that celebrate it, makes room for everybody under the rainbow. Is that why so many people seem to be hostile to it?
-
The Bush Crack-Up
Was the President done in by the economy, or by the politics of the economy?
Clip of the Day
H/T to National Review Online
ADVERTISEMENT
drudge ette obama| 10.29.12 @ 6:13AM
Obama taught this rubbish in law school - it was all he was qualified to teach.
I avoided all racial and sexual studies in college (and law school) because I knew instinctively that these types of courses were a waste of time (and money) and I also had little tolerance for being brainwashed.
Something tells me that most of the people who take the ___studies courses (you fill in the blank) are rabid Obama voters.
Doctor_X| 10.29.12 @ 7:33AM
The only black professor at the University I go to told the only black Ph.D. candidate that he didn’t have to worry about finding a faculty job because big name universities will hire him just so they can have another black professor on staff.
This same professor was recently given a $1.8 MILLION grant to study ‘Black masculinity’. The sad thing his research will be pointless because he will never get to the true cause of problems in the black community because the causes are politically incorrect. He won’t see the black culture lead by women, unwed mothers, ravaged by drugs, and oppressed by a welfare mentality as the problem. He will have to come to some politically correct conclusion that it is the white man’s fault.
This is nothing more than the same class and race warfare that Obama is trying to use to keep control of the White House (which I am surprised he hasn’t re-named!)
cowgirl| 10.29.12 @ 8:53AM
How so right you are!! You have mentioned all the politically incorrect issues surrounding the black community and familes in the US with the exception of one more. The percentage of aborted black babies in the US far outweighs the population of blacks in America. Yearly about 14% of aborted babies are black - The black population in America is about 11%. Along with the high mortality rates of black men between the ages of 15 and 24 - due mainly to violent crimes associated with gang membership, the black community is facing huge challenges in staying afloat. It will be interesting to see if the Democrats dump the black community in favor of some other ethnic group in the near future as the black communities continue to shrink due ot Liberal, Democratic, and Progressive thinking.
Pecos Pete| 10.29.12 @ 7:35AM
To reduce the USA to a smaller view of its inherent strengths, the object is to Balkanize the American people. Once we do not see the nation as a commonality, we then become a separate people.
Ultimately the result of Balkanization is for the states to break away through secession. And that result is smaller, weaker units of economic, social and military citizenry providing significantly less security for all.
cicero| 10.29.12 @ 8:18AM
The American educational system has devolved into an institution organized to agrandize and enrich those who work there at the expense of those who are supposed to be educated there. The end product has nothing to do with the students, who are only the excuse for the transfer of wealth to the so-called educators. It will collapse as soon as those paying notice they get nothing in return for their money. That is the parents, for the students have no basis for comparison.
Byron| 10.29.12 @ 9:18AM
I believe in the NBS rule. Since for most of human existence life has been Nasty, Brutish and Short, it is easy to measure information on that basis. What studies will further improve the human condition? History, logic, math, classical culture, literature, science, ethics, engineering, medicine, agriculture... What studies lead to a reversal in the quality of life? Marxism, egoism, racism, the politics of sexual superiority... Information is so cheap and accessible now. Unfortunately so is misinformation.
Petronius| 10.29.12 @ 10:02AM
The real crime isn't mentioned here. These courses are required for white students. Not only must they suffer the insults of their inferiors and perverts, they are told they have to like it or else; no degree. And academics wonder why Men quit school early.
Aaron Investigates | 10.29.12 @ 10:21AM
I hope this book is not just preaching to the choir. I know that when I looked at some of the books my kids were required to read the lack of scholarship and amount of propaganda shocked even me, and I was expecting some liberal bias.
The problem is that reality does not change because falsehoods are taught and thus as I believe someone else mentioned real solutions to real problems cannot be found.
tminus1| 10.29.12 @ 10:40AM
I was glad to see that "Ex Uno Plures" is still in vogue among the intelligentsia. The last mention I heard of it was by this towering intellect:
"We can build a collective civic space large enough for all our separate identities, that we can be e pluribus unum -- out of one, many."
(Source: January 1994. From a Milwaukee speech by Al Gore to the Institute of World Affairs as quoted in Investor's Business Daily, October 25, 1996.)
C. Vernon Crisler | 10.29.12 @ 11:11AM
"Bawer, who is himself gay...."
Sheesh....sounds like Bawer is part of the problem, not the solution.
Everyone knows these black studies, women's studies, or chicano studies classes are a joke. When you take calculus, physics, and other hard subjects, you have to find easy classes to balance them out. That's about the only thing useful about any of these gender or race classes.
Occam's Tool| 10.29.12 @ 6:32PM
Mr. Crisler: read "While Europe Slept," by Bawer. Think of him as an Ed Koch type, only a bit more right wing. This is a gay guy who realizes that Christian evangelicals have problems with gay marriage, while Islamists have problems with gays living, and understands the difference.
I balanced out my hard classes with interesting ones---religion and classics and history.
J.C.Eaton| 10.29.12 @ 1:38PM
When I enrolled in High School 5 2 years ago, I was informed that I would study Latin for at least two years. Never mind that it was a "dead language", I was going to breathe life into it. I was also going to study world history, algebra, English, and first and foremost: Religion. Latin was especially difficult...that was one of the best reasons for me to be forced to study it. The "studies" courses are NOT difficult: they are bulltweedle. Hence, in my view, their popularity. BTW, Conservatism is difficult too; liberalism is easy. Get a helmet- life is difficult.
gene| 10.29.12 @ 4:54PM
BEFORE WWII started, Adolf Hitler stated publicly what he was going to do to the Jewish people in Europe. No one believed him. He then went ahead and did EXACTLY what he said he was going to do.
The Liberal weinies who infiltrated the U.S Educational system? They stated EXACTLY what they were planning on doing more then a half century ago. No one believed and ignored them. They went ahead and did EXACTLY what they were planning on doing. We will pay a terrible price for many decades to come. A terrible price!
Occam's Tool| 10.29.12 @ 6:26PM
You know, I did my undergrad at TCU. My prof in sociology was a Radical; he liked me because I was a Conservative and we could get into some interesting arguments. I earned an A in his class. But we studied things like Durkheim and suicide.
My early Roman Emperor professor still teaches at TCU. He was a Progressive, and used to protest Reagan at night while excusing Caligula by day. But the class reviewed Suetonius and Tacitus, and I still like ancient history to this day. Another A, and an actual life-long interest kindled. I also took Biblical Literature and Life (A) and Religions of Mankind (A). (I also took a biology major which I did not care for---I took it for pre-med, and honors physics and chemistry, both of which I aced. Organic Chem was a B plus. I placed out of calculus with an AP 5.)
TCU cost $3000/yr then for tuition; now it costs close to $20,000/yr for tuition 28 year later. In the sciences I'm sure the classes are still good; I have no idea about the humanities. I'm sure pre-med is still solid.
But why can't we teach classics anymore? Tacitus is timeless.
Bill8472| 10.30.12 @ 1:44PM
Just to add to your point: my students (adult students at a Jesuit university) are thirsty for instructors who will tell them the intellectual history of the West. They don't Western Civilization or The Western Intellectual Tradition anywhere else. They tell me so. Unfortunately, I have to shoehorn what little I know into an ethics in business course, where I outline the history of Western ethical thought from the classical Greeks through economic theory and Locke, Adam Smith, and Marx. My students tell me that they've never been told these things in a coherent way that explains the thrust of Western thought.
Bill8472| 10.30.12 @ 1:47PM
About 99% of the time, they end up rejecting Marx, saying that Marxian idealism is nuts and Locke and Smith had the right ideas.
Occam's Tool| 10.29.12 @ 6:27PM
Oh, and TCU now has a professor of Islamic Religious Studies at Brite Divinity School. Sigh.
Butch| 10.29.12 @ 8:04PM
I had a blind date once who majored in Obese Lookist Gender Studies. I told her I was Butch's roomate, and that he was sick and couldn't show up for the date.
Bill8472| 10.30.12 @ 1:40PM
“Are crip bodies queer bodies, and can we say that queer bodies are crip bodies?”
Well now, there's a question for the ages.