Campus Bums . . . Again
by Robert Bruce (November 2017)
Total Confusion, by Tamra Pfeifle Davisson
—Willmore Kendall
If the best sinecure in America is a tenured full professorship, the worst fate may be that of a recent graduate in anthropology with a $100,000 loan. That the two are co-dependent is a national scandal. — Victor Davis Hanson
The offending words:
Personally, I rather doubt the existence of that Professor but, apocrypha aside, it’s a well-made point even if one can’t help thinking she squandered it on a hard case. It follows equally lucid comments on the American disease of safe spaces. Asked where she thought anxious students should flee to avoid difficult ideas the puzzled academic responded with a question of her own “Isn’t that what your private life is about, that you have your friends, that you create a social group around you of people with whom you feel comfortable? Why would that need to be an institutional space?” Why indeed. Heady stuff in the academy these days, and too much for a student union smarting from defeat over a still erect statue. Oxford is not yet Middleboro or even Yale and Americans will doubtless think a petition, and the offer of counselling for those who had been traumatised by the remarks, is a good problem to have. But all the same, this is still a bar too low for one of the most prestigious universities in the world and it is a testament to how far the prestige of free enquiry has sunk that we find Professor Richardson’s comments so remarkable. That difficulty is the price of learning is not something the Enlightenment invented, it is a truth written into the myths of all advanced civilisations and, when we see this principle inverted, we should not pretend this is a small matter. What we are seeing in the 21st century is a reversion to mankind’s self-imposed immaturity—particularly on American campuses where a marriage of mediocrity and tenure has driven learning to an abyss that not even Alan Bloom could have imagined.
a la Foucault, knowledge to a set of arbitrarily defined epistemes and the philosophers task to the unmasking of ubiquitous structures of oppression, it is hardly a surprise campuses should be awash with competing victimhoods. Conrad noted political crusades were fired by personal injuries, it is the singular accomplishment of our postmodern culture to fan them out; and only the most naïve understanding of human nature would lead us to think the resulting disposition will be a sunny one. David Hume, a very shrewd judge of mankind and burdened at the time with a very difficult houseguest captured the problem early on with characteristic sensibility. Remarking on Jean Jacque Rousseau, he wrote,
I have read your story. I don’t think it’s bad, but you must stop using too many adjectives. Study Hemingway, particularly his early work and learn how to write short sentences and how to eschew all those beastly adjectives. Surely it is better to say ‘She was a tall girl with a bosom’ than ‘She was a tall girl with a shapely, prominent bosom’, or some such rubbish. The first one says it all. Yours sincerely, Roald Dahl.
Williams lost the pomposity of youth and as a successful journalist was glad of the education. That’s what used to happen to adolescents. Can anyone imagine that Professor keeping his job at Yale? What today would we think of an author who gave that kind of tough love to a callow teenager?
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In Praise of the Uneducated
Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.—George Orwell
In H G Wells’ The Time Machine, the hero is transported to a future where grotesque Morlocks labour sullenly beneath the earth’s surface to produce the luxuries necessary to support the Elois—a fragrant and anaemic race whose lives are consumed by the leisured pursuit of fleeting sensations. Wells’ mother was a live-in servant and he spent his early childhood sequestered in the lower depths of the house and, when the London Underground started pushing the proletariat deeper into the bowels of the earth, the fixation with an upstairs-downstairs class system could only grow. Like most of the nonconformist liberal remnant drifting into the virtues of the Plan, Wells had a hatred of idleness, particularly in the gaudy, decadent colours of the rentier, and in the Edwardian era he would have seen many up close and personal not least amongst them the wealthier socialists who put their ancestors’ capital to work plotting the abolition of capitalism. Is socialism nothing but the false consciousness of idle privilege? Looking at Berkeley and San Francisco it’s difficult to avoid that conclusion, and nothing symbolises the barren achievements of the New left more succinctly than the ring of urban squalor surrounding these hippy cantons. Amongst the bobos, politics is intensely personal and conveniently global, but all the plastic straw banning and transgender pronouncing have made little impact on the lives of people cleaning up their trash. Moreover, for a city which prided itself on being the scourge of corporate power it is odd that its most visceral hatreds should be marshalled against the American working class.
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Robert Bruce is a low ranking and over-credentialled functionary of the British welfare state.
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