After the 5 December hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, elite universities, most notably Harvard, have been attacked from all sides. But, from long before that hearing, higher education has suffered a decline in respect by the American public, as Josh Barro noted in his 12 January article in The Atlantic. His title says it all: “American Universities Are Post-truth: Neither conservatives nor liberals trust academic institutions, because they are dishonest.” According to Gallup, from 2015 to 2023, Republican confidence in higher education declined from 56% to 37%; Independent confidence, from 48% to 32%; Democratic confidence, from 68% to 59%. The causes of the decline go back about another 35 to 40 years, to about 1975 to 1980.
I go back to the origins, to the causes, of this decline in confidence. But first, I must say that, to this trained, published, independent scholar, Barro’s article, one of those now appearing in a few media, is disheartening but not surprising. I long expected a reaction to what I knew was a corrupt approach to scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, with a corrupting influence on instruction in higher education. Luckily, my education predated the onset of the new fashions in these fields, and my publications reflect that education. It stressed accuracy and inclusiveness (all sides of the subject); it required crediting the ideas and words of others’ work on which one’s own work was based (plagiarism the academic sin). More older than younger scholars still adhere to traditional norms, so I do not accuse all scholars of the modern sins now committed.
The conditions for the corruption of scholarship were inadvertently created by the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Rights Movement, and the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. The Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Rights Movement made race and gender primary political issues. The Vietnam War highlighted class differences, with middle-class draftees claiming conscientious objector status, fleeing to Canada, or seeking academic deferments. Those granted deferments and others with these political concerns carried them into major colleges and universities, mainly into the humanities or the social sciences. Some remained as professors in academe, to which they had fled with their political commitments, not their love of learning.
In English, their political concerns led them to replace the previous critical approach to literature, New Criticism, with another, New Historicism. The difference between these approaches is significant. New Criticism views a literary work as an object of art, to be interpreted by the internal dynamics of its component parts; New Historicism, which dates to the late 1970s, views a literary work as a tacit expression of social forces, particularly the influence of race, gender, class, and, to a lesser extent, colonialism. The difference is between a work of literature as a unique literary representation of human experience or as a political statement about the distribution and operation of power in society. Unlike New Criticism, New Historicism has a political agenda. Almost invariably, it finds literary works subverting established authority or indicting the social order as racist, sexist, classist, or colonialist. Since most students take one or more English or social science courses, most students are exposed to this political instruction.
Instances of politically shaped criticism would burden my readers with critiques necessarily detailed to argue that politicized scholarship is not scholarship at all. For anyone interested, my critiques appears on Humanities Commons, a website for scholars: “Some Maladies of Early Modern Race Study in Shakespeare” (6 pgs.), “Race: Political Correctness vs. Scholarship in the Humanities (6 pgs.), or “Critical Race Study, Traditional Literary Scholarship, and Othello’s Jealousy” (12 pgs.).
Consider an article in a special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly on race study (2016). In “We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies,” Professor Ian Smith (Lafayette College) attacks historical scholarship and impugns the motives of scholars who approach race in Shakespeare on that basis. “Fetishizing historical accuracy is to claim the high moral ground of sound scholarship, a position from which to disguise resistance to race work, from which to promote a singular perspective and methodology as acceptable while placing firm restrictions on others” (pg. 120). I have read no other academic statement packed with so many objectionable points. I mentioned a few in a letter invited, then rejected, no reasons given, by the SQ editor. “Smith caricatures and sneers at ‘sound’ scholarship but asserts no alternative. Is it ‘unsound’ scholarship? Would it claim low moral ground?” The alternative is, as others label it, “politically engaged scholarship,” which is necessarily distorted by its orientation or objectives. Soon after this article appeared, Smith was elevated to the SQ editorial board.
Insinuations of racism aside, Smith’s statement is an undisguised attack on traditional scholarly standards. Labeling a commitment to “historical accuracy” as “fetishizing” disparages scholarly work to ascertain the truth and implicitly prefers work masked as scholarship to advance received political opinion on race. Deviations from such opinion prompt accusations of racism. Thus, despite a conference seminar’s favorable response to my history- and text-based paper “‘Othello Is Not about Race’,” the conference journal’s editor rejected it. Despite my request to see the readers’ withheld reviews and despite the previous editor’s support, the editor refused because, so he said, they were “inflammatory”; he meant that they accused me of racism. But, when I complained to the journal’s board, he claimed they were “entirely professional”; several board members responded by resigning. The article is my most popular one at Humanities Commons.
Professors experience pressures to take shortcuts to conduct research and publish results, secure funding and expand programs, get promotions in a competitive market with unclear or inconstant standards of advancement. Results may include deficient evidence, flawed methods, fallacious arguments, and plagiarism. The case of Professor Claudine Gay, former President of Harvard, is not an anomaly. Now added to this mix of motives are political ideologies concerning race, gender, class, and colonialism which pervade academe and demand conformity by any means necessary. Recent attacks on traditional scholarship for political purposes enable a disregard of its standards. The price paid is the loss of scholarly integrity, the abandonment of the pursuit of truth, the advancement of political agendas, declining respect inside and outside of academe, and instruction which is intellectually, morally, and politically corrosive.
These failures in academe are not merely “academic” issues. Corrupt scholarship will corrupt instruction to students, and their thus-corrupted education will influence their decisions which will affect their lives, their communities, and their country.
24-01-20 note: The corruption of political scholarship has spread corruption to university administration. One reason why Gay found herself unable to condemn antisemitism in student protests is that such a condemnation would imply the condemnation of the political biases of so much of what passes for scholarship and suitable instruction in academe.
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