Luke Ford

Russell Jacoby writes in 2000:

* A specter haunts American universities or, at least, its faculties: boredom. A generation of professors entered the universities in the middle and wake of the sixties, when campuses crackled with energy; today these teachers are visibly bored, if not demoralized. One report found college and university faculties “deeply troubled” with almost 40 percent ready and willing to leave the academy.’

* Intellectuals have not disappeared, but something has altered in their composition. They have become more professional and insular; at the same time they have lost command of the vernacular, which thinkers from Galileo to Freud had mastered. Where the Lewis Mumfords or Walter Lippmanns wrote for a public, their successors “theorize” about it at academic conferences.

* It was easy to list the conservative tracts decrying educational misdeeds (Illiberal Education, Tenured Radicals, The Closing of the American Mind), but where were the rejoinders? The liberal professors growled and scowled, but had trouble answering in limpid English; instead they collected conference papers. When their books finally appeared, they lacked bite. In the liberal view, education proceeded swimmingly; it had become more diverse, multicultural, and exciting, a fact only crabby conservatives failed to fathom. A strange inversion had taken place; liberals and leftists, once critics of the establishment, had become its defenders.

* “There’s plenty of intellectual activity going on in America now,” grumbled Walter Kendrick in one of the first reviews, which appeared in the Voice Literary Supplement. For instance, “The very existence of the Voice Literary Supplement (a public intellectual journal) proves that the situation isn’t quite so bleak as Jacoby maintains.” This turned out to be a stock response. Reviewers championed themselves, their journals, and their friends as refuting my argument. “The reason Jacoby can’t find young radical intellectuals is that he looks for them in the wrong places,” claimed Lynn Garafola, a historian of dance. What are the right places? Periodicals like Cineaste, Performing Arts journal, and The Drama Review; she finds many public intellectuals, some very close to home, actually one in her home (her husband, Eric Foner, author of “widely read volumes”), as well as people down the block such as “October editor Rosalind Krauss, an art critic so well known that a New Yorker profile (on someone else) opened with a descrip tion of her living room.” The last is particularly touching. A description of one’s living room in a New Yorker profile (of someone else) ratifies status as a public intellectual. How could I miss that?

* Beyond slighting their friends and acquaintances, my critics charged me with the primal crime for all progressives: nostalgia. For many of my reviewers history only advances, as if twentieth-century death camps improved upon nineteenth-century prisons. To suggest otherwise brands one a hopeless romantic. These reviewers operate with ossified categories: Either toot your horn for the contemporary intellectuals or cry in your soup for the past.

* This book is about a vacancy in culture, the absence of younger voices, perhaps the absence of a generation. The fewextremely few-significant American intellectuals under the age of thirty-five, even forty-five, have seldom elicited comment. They are easy to miss, especially because their absence is longstanding. An intellectual generation has not suddenly vanished; it simply never appeared. And it is already too late-the generation is too old-to show up.

* A public that once snapped up pamphlets by Thomas Paine or stood for hours listening to Abraham Lincoln debate Stephen Douglas hardly exists; its span of attention shrinks as its fondness for television increases. A reading public may be no more. If younger intellectuals are absent, a missing audience may explain why.

Russell Jacoby wrote in the original 1987 edition:

* …the habitat, manners, and idiom of intellectuals have been transformed within the past fifty years. Younger intellectuals no longer need or want a larger public; they are almost exclusively professors. Campuses are their homes; colleagues their audience; monographs and specialized journals their media. Unlike past intellectuals they situate themselves within fields and disciplines-for good reason. Their jobs, advancement, and salaries depend on the evaluation of specialists, and this dependence affects the issues broached and the language employed.

* Today nonacademic intellectuals are an endangered species; industrial development and urban blight have devastated their environment. They continue to loom large in the cultural world because they mastered a public idiom. The new academics far outnumber the independent intellectuals, but since they do not employ the vernacular, outsiders rarely know of them.
Academics write for professional journals that, unlike the little magazines, create insular societies. The point is not the respective circulation-professional periodicals automatically sent to members may list circulation far higher than small literary reviews-but the different relationship to the lay public. The professors share an idiom and a discipline. Gathering in annual conferences to compare notes, they constitute their own universe. A “famous” sociologist or art historian means famous to other sociologists or art historians, not to anyone else. As intellectuals became academics, they had no need to write in a public prose; they did not, and finally they could not.

* intellectuals. In 1970 the ten leading intellectuals were: Daniel Bell, Noam Chomsky, John Kenneth Galbraith, Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Robert Silvers, Susan Sontag, and “tying” at tenth place, Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson.’ None could be considered young, with the possible exception of Susan Sontag (thirty-seven in 1970). The absence of the young even on the extended list of the “top” seventy intellectuals troubled Kadushin… “The elite American intellectuals as we saw them in 1970,” Kadushin noted, “were basically the same ones who came to power in the late 1940s and early 1950s.”

* When universities occupied a quadrant of cultural life, their ills (and virtues) meant one thing. When they staked out the whole turf, their rules became the rules.

* Academic writing developed into unreadable communiques sweetened by thanks to colleagues and superiors.

* Daniel Bell recalls that when he was about to be granted tenure at Columbia University, an awkward question came up. They asked ” ‘Do you have a Ph.D.?’ I said `No.’ They asked, `Why?’ I said, `I never submitted a thesis.’ ” This was happily resolved by awarding him a Ph.D. for past work, his book The End of Ideology.

Such informality reflects a past era; it is next to impossible to obtain university posts without a Ph.D., as did Irving Howe or Alfred Kazin, or to be awarded degrees on the basis of past work, as were Daniel Bell or Nathan Glazer. A younger intellectual could no more show up for a dissertation “defense” with a collection of essays written for several magazines, which constituted The End of Ideology, than he or she could show up without taking the requisite number of credits and seminars-and without paying the proper fees.

* To live from selling book reviews and articles ceased to be difficult; it became impossible. The number of serious magazines and newspapers steadily declined (and the pay scale of those remaining hardly increased), leaving few avenues; the signs all pointed toward the colleges. If the western frontier closed in the 1890s, the cultural frontier closed in the 1950s. After this decade intellectuals joined established institutions or retrained.

* The cadence of his prose and his measured liberalism distinguished Trilling, but not the brilliance, originality, or force of his thought. His reach, in fact, was limited, no further than AngloAmerican literature; his social theory, thin; his philosophy, weak. His essays which often originated as lectures to admiring audiences, suffer on the cold page. What Trilling wrote of V. L. Parrington, in the opening essay of The Liberal Imagination, could almost be said of himself. He was not “a great mind … or an impressive one … what is left is simple intelligence, notable for its generosity and enthusiasm.”24 Even a sympathetic study of Trilling suggests his essays suffered from vagueness or “weightlessness.”

* Thinking and dreaming require unregulated time; intellectuals perpetually lingering over coffee and drink threaten solid citizens by the effort-or the appearance-of escaping the bondage of money and drudgery. Guardians of order have denigrated, almost for centuries, critics and rebels as mere “coffee house intellectuals.”‘ In the catalog of bourgeois sins bohemian intellectuals earn a double entry, thinking too much and doing too little. Crown aristocrats have been no less disdainful. When the count who lurched Austria into World War I was warned that war might ignite a Russian revolution, he retorted, “Who is supposed to make that revolution? Herr Trotsky in the Cafe Central?”‘ (For several years Trotsky lived in Vienna, frequenting its cafes.)

* Yet a thick-skinned approach that dismisses the quotidian as irrelevant is hardly superior. The rhythm of the lives of intellectuals permeates their writings. This is not surprising. If telephoning supplants letters and cafes yield to conferences, thinking itself-its density and parameters-may echo the shifts. The decline of bohemia may entail not simply the decline of urban intellectuals and their audience, but of urban intelligence as well. To vary an old proposition, cafe society gives rise to the aphorism and essay; the college campus yields the monograph and lecture-and the grant application.

* Founded in 1872, the Bohemian Club was associated with numerous West Coast writers and poets, including Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, and Mark Twain. Within a few years, however, it ran up against the common fate of bohemians: lack of money. Many could not afford to chip in for the rent; others took action. “It was soon apparent,” recalled one well-heeled member, “that the possession of talent, without money, would not support the club.” The logic was simple: “It was decided that we should invite an element to join the club which the majority of the members held in contempt, namely men who had money as well as brains, but who were not, strictly speaking, Bohemians.” With this decision “the problem of our permanent success was solved.”

* …gentrification undercuts urban bohemias; the dependence of writers and artists’ communities on cheap housing cannot be overemphasized.

* Intellectuals of the 1950s, when they reflected on the “death of bohemia,” regularly indicted the refurbished housing and onerous rents. “The past always lingers on,” wrote William Phillips in 1952, but the cold-water flat is gone, taking with it the wandering, jobless writers and artists.72 Higher rents obviously do not spell the end of artistic life; but they do require more income, more commissions, more connections. For the young or unestablished the rents simply are not possible.

* Ten years earlier, at the war’s end, Partisan Review had already raised an alarm: professionals and academics were replacing unaffiliated intellectuals. A new “American academic type,” a by-product of the “Managerial Revolution,” was “everywhere ascendant,” announced Newton Arvin in 1945. This new breed discarded “wide-ranging, curious, adventurous, and humane study” for “results” and office management. With fields and subfields, committees and organizations, the new academics were preparing to put “our literary heritage on a firm fiduciary basis.”6 Another critic concurred; college teachers who lived conventional lives and thought conventional thoughts were phasing out free-lance, bohemian, and avant-garde intellectuals. “The academic hierarchy … enforces caution on the imaginative or adventurous thinkers”; even in their personal lives, professors could not afford to be “conspicuously out of line.”‘

* For intellectuals coming of age in the sixties and after, life outside universities was not even a memory. However, intellectuals like Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe became professors only after years as free-lance writers and editors.
Others, such as Lewis Mumford, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, or Dwight Macdonald, never made the transition. All, however, were aware of the migration and its consequences. In the early part of the century, recalled Malcolm Cowley, teaching and writing had been “separate worlds”; but today, no longer “independent craftsmen,” writers assume roles as professors or as well-paid employees in government or magazine bureaus.
The evidence of change seemed everywhere; universities and national magazines eagerly hired intellectuals; either Luce publications or The New Yorker sent checks to Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, John Kenneth Galbraith, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Bell, and many others. Major publishing houses launched “little” magazines for young and avant-garde writers. Pocket Books founded discovery; Avon offered New Voices, Doubleday put out New Writers, and New American Library, the paperback publisher of Mickey Spillane, established the most successful series, New World Writing. One issue ran “Jazz of the Beat Generation” by a “Jean-Louis,” an excerpt from Kerouac’s unpublished On the Road.”
To Isaac Rosenfeld (1918-56), a Chicago essayist, these developments signified that an intellectual life of poverty and protest belonged to the past. “The writer very seldom stands over against the world as he used to, and when he does, the danger is that he may be attitudinizing.” Even the bohemia that sheltered poor writers and artists showed signs of renovation. “The garret still exists, but the rent has gone up.”

* IN PLOTTING cultural life often the less original thinkers register most faithfully the zeitgeist. In his evolution and politics, Norman Podhoretz exemplifies the trajectory of New York Jewish intellectuals. Like the others, he was first of all a publicist-a journalist, a book reviewer, and an essayist who wrote well and easily.

* If Jewish intellectuals gravitated toward radicalism in large numbers, they also hastily beat a retreat. By the 1950s not simply Glazer, Hook, Feuer, and Lipset but Irving Kristol, Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Leslie Fieldler, and scores of others traded in their red pasts for blue chip careers. In contrast non-Jewish (and usually non-New York) intellectuals seemed more willing or able to retain radicalism throughout their careers.

* The long view suggests not how many, but, compared to the non-Jews, how few Jewish intellectuals remained radicals and dissenters. This could almost be seen in pairs of kindred Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals: Lionel Trilling (1905-75) and Dwight Macdonald (1906-82); Daniel Bell (1919- and C. Wright Mills (1916-62); Norman Podhoretz (1930- and Michael Harrington (1928). Other non-Jews could be added: Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, Paul Sweezy, John Kenneth Galbraith, Christopher Lasch. But the list of Jewish public intellectuals who remained devoted to a radical vision seems shorter.

* Estrangement from a Christian civilization, runs the usual argument, edged Jews into reformism or revolution. Yet this argument can be reversed, or at least recast: personal alienation does not engender a hardy radicalism. The angst that expresses the pain of separation also craves union-or its substitute, recognition and acceptance. The social critique founded solely on alienation also founders on it.

* Moreover, for Jewish intellectuals to complete college or secure academic posts was especially sweet; compared to the Christians, it often marked firsts for their families.56
No dense Freudian theory is necessary to explain that economic deprivation and cultural estrangement often led to an identification, and overidentification, with the dominant cul- ture.57 Jewish intellectuals from Yiddish-speaking families Trilling, Fiedler, Howe, Kazin-often fell in love with American and English literature. The phenomenon is familiar, but its relevance for American intellectuals has not been noticed. The “foreigner”-the Jewish intellectual-embraced his new cultural home, sometimes dispatching critical acumen for recognition and approval. The native son, lacking a similar estrangement, kept a distance, often turning to foreign sources. While Trilling drenched himself in American and English literature, Wilson studied Russian. Sidney Hook stuck to John Dewey, while C. Wright Mills wandered into the thicket of German neoMarxism.
Is it possible that solid American backgrounds allowed-obviously did not compel-a distancing that sustained radicalism for the long haul? That the anxiety of illegitimacy, or persecution, did not haunt the all-American intellectuals? That their sometimes more monied or aristocratic background gave them better footing? Did more principles and less angst infuse the radicalism of non-Jewish intellectuals? Did the radicalism steeped in anxiety slide into conservatism, while the Texan, Puritan, or Scottish identities of Mills or Wilson or Vidal or Galbraith gave rise to a bony radicalism more resistant to economic and social blandishments?
Trilling and Mills exemplify the contrasts between Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals. Trilling typifies the successful and moderate Jewish professor with a radical past; Mills, the American rebel suspicious of compromise and adjustment. Trilling’s Yiddish-speaking parents (his father was a tailor and an unsuccessful furrier) encouraged his studies; it was assumed that he would attend college, and like other Jewish intellectuals, he commenced a lifelong commitment to English literature. His talent and devotion paid off: Trilling, who entered Columbia University as an undergraduate, was the first Jew tenured in its English department.
Everything about Trilling, from his name to his demeanor, implied a successful adjustment to Anglo-American culture. As his wife later wrote, “in appearance and name” Trilling made a “good gamble” for an English department looking for its first Jew. “Had his name been that of his maternal grandfather, Israel Cohen, it is highly questionable whether the offer would have been made.”” As a polished and judicious commentator on humanism and literature, Trilling earned an endowed chair, showers of awards, honorary titles, national recognition. For intellectuals caught between a leftist, often ethnic, past and cold-war prosperity, Trilling struck the right tone; he contributed to “reconciling a depoliticized intelligentsia to itself and the social status quo.”

* For an immigrant family, a university career-status, salary, and security-signified unalloyed advance. Herein lies a critical difference between an American and an immigrant experience. Mills recalled a family past-his grandparents-of independent ranchers. Whether this was fact or fiction hardly matters, for it shaped a vision of self and world: life as an employee in an office-university, government, or publishing-did not measure up no matter the title, money, or respect. The same could be said of other venerable intellectual radicals, such as Wilson or Vidal or Galbraith; they looked back to families of independent farmers, statesmen, or rebels that seemed to provide a secure base for a radical life.

* Jews became intellectuals for the same reasons they became shopkeepers: they were not automatically excluded, and they commanded the prerequisities, wits and gumption.

* By quality alone, it is simply not possible to sharply distinguish the oeuvre of New York intellectuals from that of non-New Yorkers. Essay by essay, book by book, the collective work of New York intellectuals is neither so brilliant nor so scintillating that all else pales. It is almost more feasible to reverse the common opinion: the significant books of the fifties were authored by non-New Yorkers. The books by C. Wright Mills or Jane Jacobs or Rachel Carson possessed an energy and originality that the New Yorkers’ books rarely matched.SB
If this is true, then New York intellectuals receive the lion’s share of attention less by reason of genius than by sociological luck: their New York location and their personal and physical proximity to the publishing industry. In addition, their tireless monitoring of themselves lays the groundwork for further studies (and myths). For those padding cultural histories with reports on what writer X said to editor Y at Z’s party, the New York scene is a motherlode. It would be more difficult to fluff up a study of Norman 0. Brown or Kenneth Burke, around whom there were no circles and little gossip.
Cultural attention and intrinsic merit rarely tally, but even within the rarified universe of Freud studies, New Yorkers tend to edge out non-New Yorkers; for instance, the writings of Lionel Trilling and Norman 0. Brown on Freud belong to approximately the same period. For concentrated intellectual probing Brown’s Life Against Death may have no match in American studies of psychoanalysis; compared to this book Trilling’s Freud writings are casual and familiar.

* A cool appraisal of New York intellectuals reverses Bell’s judgment: they are best-most convincing, articulate, observant-when they are discussing their own lives, but the compelling theoretical works by New York intellectuals are in very short supply. Bell got it exactly wrong: precisely because of their immigrant past and fragile situation, New York intellectuals specialize in the self; theirs is the home of psychoanalysis, the personal essay, the memoir, the letter to the editor. In style and subject matter their writings are generally highly subjective. Of course, this is not a failing. An intensely personal voice permeates their most brilliant writings, for instance Kazin’s work including, obviously, his autobiography.

* In Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Murray calls in his colleague, Jack, for advice. Murray bursts with praise and admiration. Jack invented Hitler Studies, which has become a small industry in the academic world. Everyone honors, defers, and toadies to Jack; he is invited to numerous conferences. “You’ve evolved an entire system around this figure [Hitler], a structure with countless substructures…. I marvel at the effort. It was masterful, shrewd and stunningly preemptive. It’s what I want to do with Elvis [Presley].”
A reviewer of a recent satiric academic novel summed up the situation:
“Once upon a time, if you wanted to get people to laugh at professors, you would portray them as goggle-eyed intellectuals so disoriented from the practical world that they wore unmatched shoes and spoke in Sid Caesarian German about incomprehensible nonsense. Today … the figure of the absent-minded professor has been replaced by a pack of smoothies…. Instead of retiring from the world of events, the new comic professor has the world too much with him. He craves big money, drives sporty cars, covets endowed chairs, and hops from conference to conference in pursuit of love, luxury and fame.”

* As they obtained university slots, New Left intellectuals acquired the benefits: regular salaries, long vacations, and the freedom to write, and sometimes teach, what they wanted. Of course, it was not this simple. Vast insecurities beset the academic enterprise. One’s future depended on a complex set of judgments made by colleagues and administrators. Academic freedom itself was fragile, its principles often ignored. Nor were these violations confined to meddling trustees and outside investigators. The threat emerged, perhaps increasingly, from within; academic careers undermined academic freedom. This may be a paradox, but it recalls an inner contradiction of academic freedom-the institution neutralizes the freedom it guarantees. For many professors in many universities academic freedom meant nothing more than the freedom to be academic.

* What is often obscure in the history of academic freedom is its almost inverse relationship to professionalization. Not classroom teaching but public statements or political affiliations have provoked hostility to professors. When threatened they have withdrawn, naturally, into their speciality. Professionalization has served as a refuge; it has also entailed a privatization that eviscerates academic freedom.

* Conservative periodicals, such as Commentary or American Scholar or Modem Age, print articles almost monthly lamenting that left academics have seized the universities. “Those of us who received graduate degrees in the humanities from American universities in the 1960s,” begins a typical piece, “know that a major change took place in the academy about that time.” This change is what the author calls “an invasion and conquest” by left professors espousing “dialectical methodologies.

* This conservative nightmare lifts with any daytime inspection of universities. What happened to the swarms of academic leftists? The answer is surprising: Nothing surprising. The ordinary realities of bureaucratization and employment took over. The New Left that stayed on the campus proved industrious and well behaved. Often without missing a beat, they moved from being undergraduates and graduate students to junior faculty positions and tenured appointments.
The ordinary realities comprise the usual pressures and threats; the final danger in a liberal society is unemployment: denial of tenure or unrenewed contract. In a tight market this might spell the end of an academic career. The years of academic plenty were long enough to attract droves of would-be professors; they were brief enough to ensure that all saw the “No Vacancy” sign. Professionalization proceeded under the threat of unemployment. The lessons of the near and far past, from McCarthyism to the first stone thrown at the first outsider, were clear to anyone: blend in; use the time allotted to establish scholarly credentials; hide in the mainstream.
Nor does it take much to intimidate professors; news travels fast and well. All know cases of teachers forced out, not because they were imperfect professionals but because they were something more: public intellectuals and radicals. Inevitably the cases reported in the news are those that take place in the elite and Ivy League schools; and simply by virtue of the publicity they are often “happily” resolved.

* Sociologists and more sober conservatives concede that leftwing professors are less left-wing than they are professors.

* Radicals in the University, a study published by the Hoover Institution, the conservative think tank, allows that since radicals captured the Modern Language Association (MLA) in 1968, nothing has changed. “In retrospect, the spectacular 1968 successes of the radicals have proven to be ephemeral. MLA is little different from what it was before 1968.” A conservative who wandered into the American Philosophical Association convention was pleasantly surprised: radicals had made hardly any impression.

* By establishing a credible body of radical, feminist, Marxist, or neo-Marxist scholarship, they assailed the venerable, sometimes almost official, interpretations dominant in their fields. The extent of this literature, the outpouring of left academics, is extraordinary, without precedent in American letters. In several areas the accomplishments of New Left intellectuals are irrevocable.
Yet it is also extraordinary for another reason; it is largely technical, unreadable and-except by specialists-unread. While New Left intellectuals obtain secure positions in central institutions, the deepest irony marks their achievement. Their scholarship looks more and more like the work it sought to subvert. A great surprise of the last twenty-five years is both the appearance of New Left professors and their virtual disappearance. In the end it was not the New Left intellectuals who invaded the universities but the reverse: the academic idiom, concepts, and concerns occupied, and finally preoccupied, young left intellectuals.

* Max Weber, very much a successful professor, once suggested that all prospective academics should answer the following question: “Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief?” He added, “I have found that only a few men could endure this situation.”

* One survey of American professors dryly states that initially “it is much more the prestige of one’s terminal degree and one’s graduate sponsor than one’s scholarly productivity which will lead to a good academic appointment.” Later professional achievement, however, does not correct but reinforces this imbalance; early success ensures future success. “Once having secured the right initial appointment, which is more a function of prestige than demonstrated competence … subsequent appointments are determined by the prestige of that first appointment.” University success, Martin Finkelstein concludes, summarizing studies of academic careers, depends more on “the prestige and visibility afforded by institutional affiliation” or “the prominence and power of contacts” or “the prestige of one’s doctoral institution” than on “either the quality or the number of one’s scholarly publications.”

* professionalization leads to privatization or depoliticization, a withdrawal of intellectual energy from a larger domain to a narrower discipline.

* Who are the important political scientists? Ricci asks. There seem to be none. He suggests that “the declining number of great thinkers and the growing prominence of universities” are related. Moreover, the eclipse of general intellectuals means that American citizens now rely on the professionals for information. Yet the work of these specialists reflects their own university situations, not the needs of the public.

* That it is difficult for an educated adult American to name a single political scientist or sociologist or philosopher is not wholly his or her fault; the professionals have abandoned the public arena. The influx of left scholars has not changed the picture; reluctantly or enthusiastically they gain respectability at the cost of identity. The slogan that was borrowed from the German left to justify a professional career-“the long march through the institutions”-has had an unexpected outcome: at least so far, the institutions are winning.

* Exposes and denunciations of academic sophistry and careerism can often be found in conservative journals, such as The New Criterion, Commentary, American Scholar, but rarely in left and liberal ones. Conservatives honor men of letters, regularly attacking professors and academic hustlers. Why?
In principle, conservatives have been less tempted by institutional or government solutions to social ills. At least since Edmund Burke, they have objected to experts, lawyers, or professors meddling in government or society; this is the crux of the conservative critique of the Enlightenment. They have prized the man of letters devoted to letters, not politics.

* This commitment to the aristocratic man of letters fires a critique of the university that has no left counterpart. The titles alone of books by conservatives index their concerns: The Degradation of the Academic Dogma by Robert Nisbet, The Fall of the American University by Adam Ulam, Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning by Russell Kirk, The Decline of the Intellectual by Thomas S. Molnar. These works all indict the endemic careerism and corruption of bloated universities. The authors’ loyalty to the obsolete man of letters enables them to condemn academics swarming for grants and advancements. Russell Kirk, a central figure of post-World War II conservatism, resigned from his university post in the early fifties, already protesting automatic growth and academic bureaucratization.
The intensity of the conservative attack on the university al most transcends political labels. Nisbet, in The Degradation of the Academic Dogma, occasionally sounds like a wide-eyed radical unmasking colleagues as capitalist tools. He deplores the conquest of the university by capitalism: “The first million dollars given to a university” was a million too much. “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of the university, bethought himself of saying, `This is my institute’ and found members of the faculty simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of the university’s higher capitalism.” 14
Entrepreneurs and hucksters have replaced disinterested scholars and researchers. An “academic bourgeoisie” complete with shoddy goods and conspicuous research has sprung up. “Scratch a faculty member today,” Nisbet reports, “and you almost always find a businessman.” “The entrepreneurial spirit” spreads throughout the university, corrupting everything and everyone.

* Unlike left academics, more easily seduced by professional journals, jargon, and life, the conservatives are committed to lucid prose; for this reason they are readable and are read. While several periodicals of the left devoted to the general reader have appeared in recent years, for instance Salmagundi or Grand Street, the proliferating radical journals are geared to sympathizers in various disciplines; the uninitiated could hardly plow through Enclitic or Social Text. The conservative journals, however, adopt a public idiom; an outsider can pick up and read The New Criterion.
Moreover, the conservative journals seem willing not only to challenge new academic wisdom but to highlight its function, shoring up insecure professors. A typical essay in Commentary questions the mania for theory by literature departments. “The terms that now cause pulses to race-deconstruction, disseminations, epistemes, the mirror stage, and the like-are so undescriptive of literary detail that they tend not so much to explain literature as to replace it.” Geoffrey H. Hartman, a Yale literary critic whom Frederick Crews quotes, states that he and his colleagues resist the attitude that “condemns the writer of criticism or commentary to nonliterary status and a service function.” The literary critics respond by the cult of high Theory, including the cult of the high Theorists-themselves. 16 Another Commentary piece judges, “this eagerness for a whole new set of terms that can be maneuvered around and behind and beyond literature has the look of a program of system-wide retooling in an industry that has discovered it is antiquated. 1117
The conservative critique comes alive, sniffing academic wheeling and dealing and its debased prose, where the left often slumbers. However, the vigorous right-wing attack soon flags. Conservatives’ opposition to professionals founders on their suspicion of all intellectuals, at least of all those who do not know their place.’s They inch toward anti-intellectualism, praising the experts they sometimes challenge. Their man of letters stays out of trouble by staying in a specialty.
From the Dreyfus affair to the Vietnam War, conservatives howled that intellectuals meddled in matters outside their training.

* Ironically, the conservative critique of professions turns into its opposite, a defense of special interests and fields. They object to the poets or plumbers speaking about foreign policy, instead of poems and sinks, as if the divisions of labor were cast in heaven. Herein lies a critical difference with the sometimes overlapping anarchist critique of professions.

* Hilton Kramer’s The New Criterion and Joseph Epstein’s American Scholar persistently accuse the left of injecting politics into culture. “The intrusion of politics into culture,” states Epstein, is “one of the major motifs” of the last twenty-five years.21 Not only do they imagine that at some point culture was uncontaminated by politics; but for them politics can only mean left-wing politics. Their own politics is not politics. Yet rarely have general periodicals devoted to the arts and schol arship been as emphatically political as The New Criterion and American Scholar. Alfred Kazin remarks that American Scholar, the journal of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, was never associated with any particular politics-until a neoconservative began saving it from politics.” The same might be said of Commentary. It may have once been liberal and tolerant of radicals, but it was never so relentlessly political until it became conservative.

* Certain topics are taboo; it is difficult to discuss the possibility that “some group differences in performance on IQ tests might have a genetic component”…

* From vague allusions we are to conclude that Marxists “dominate” departments and fields, but nothing is said of the conservatives who control most departments of economics or philosophy or political science or psychology. Radicals, we are told, try to hire radicals-as if conservatives for years, decades, or centuries have not staffed universities with conservatives. We are to presume that conservative ideas have difficulty getting a hearing-as if the entire structure of government, from the American president to most college presidents, does not emphatically lean to the right.

* The conservatives’ critique of big universities and big bucks is also more than a bit compromised by their embrace of big universities and big bucks. Few have resigned like Russell Kirk. They attack the noxious impact of the dollar from cool corporate offices. If left-wing academics appear sweaty, clamoring for positions and appointments, perhaps it is because they have traditionally been blacklisted, locked out in the street. It looks rather un seemly-from the top floors where the conservatives lament the decline of scholarship. No academic left can tap funds of the magnitude available to conservative intellectuals. No slick and expensive left journal has ever appeared like The New Criterion, handsomely funded by a conservative foundation, an arm of the Olin Corporation, which originally provided Park Avenue office space for Kramer’s periodical.35 Nor does the left include individuals like Richard Mellon Scaife, a great-grandson of the founder of the Mellon bank fortune, with millions available to fund conservative projects and journals.36
American corporations increasingly spread their political views by supporting or paying conservative intellectuals.

* The transformation of the traditional intellectual habitat is not instantaneous; it parallels the decay of the cities, the growth of the suburbs, and the expansion of the universities. There is no need to announce the collapse of civilization when fast food outlets nudge out greasy spoons, vending machines replace newspaper stands, or green campuses supplant vandalized city parks; but there is little reason to ignore its impact on the rhythm of cultural life. It matters whether people grow up on city streets or in suburban malls; whether intellectuals obsess about a single editor who judges their work or three “referees,” ten colleagues, several committees, and various deans.
Universities encourage a definite intellectual form. They do not shoot, they simply do not hire those who are unable or unwilling to fit in. Even Henry Luce of the Time magazine empire, often denounced as a master propagandist, employed and even liked mavericks and dissenters. Universities, on the other hand, hire by committees: one needs degrees, references, the proper deference, a pleasant demeanor. To win over a committee that recommends to a department which counsels a chairman who advises a dean who suggests to a college president takes a talent very different from gaining the assent of a single individual. It is almost ludicrous to imagine “Professor Edmund Wilson” or “Professor H. L. Mencken.”
It is even possible to chart a cultural shift in the unlikely quarter of book acknowledgments and dedications. Early Elizabethan books were usually graced by flowery prefaces dedicated to a patron who supported the writer and who, it was hoped, would be instructed and edified by the work.

* There is no doubt that the demise of public intellectuals reflects the recomposition of the public itself; it coincides with the wild success of television, the expansion of the suburbs, the corrosion of the cities, the fattening of the universities. The eclipse of the big general magazines, such as Look and Life, itself registers a parcellation of a once more homogeneous public; they have been replaced by “special interest” magazines-tennis, computer, travel, sports. In view of these developments, the disappearance of general intellectuals into professions seems completely understandable, inevitable, and perhaps desirable.

This is a work in progress and the third of Rony Guldman’s trilogy. He writes: “I originally intended the content of this manuscript to form the second part of The Star Chamber of Stanford but later decided to make it a separate volume, given its more theoretical nature and The Star Chamber’s already long page count. For this and other reasons, it remains a work in progress, and so parts of it are still somewhat rough. Even so, this text can help draw out the connections between The Star Chamber and Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression.”

Here are some highlights:

* Let us recall that Joe and Barbara had both gone out of their way to urge an academic career upon me. Barbara [Fried] anticipated that I would be easily competitive for a position in a top law school. In a similar vein, Joe [Bankman] believed that I was poised to put together a writing package that would secure me a “top flight” job in a law school. He and Larry [Kramer] both agreed that I could one day become a leading luminary of legal academia. This was why they offered me Stanford Law School’s most prestigious and remunerative fellowship in the judgment that it would advance my academic career and in the process redound to Stanford’s own prestige and prominence. Yet in the end, I failed to secure a position, not only at a top law school, but at any law school whatsoever. The mystery, then, is what could explain this astonishing failure of prediction among these otherwise competent diviners of academic career prospects. Their judgment, which we have every reason to believe is generally sound, proved to be wildly off the mark in my particular case. So where exactly did they go wrong?

* The most obvious alternative to the bad luck hypothesis may be dubbed the “dereliction hypothesis,” and it goes something like this: Here was a guy with obvious ability. But he repeatedly ignored his mentors’ advice about how to translate that ability into an actual job. Both the substance of his research and his general attitude was characterized by a career-killing aloofness from both his colleagues and the milieu in which he would have to operate.
Hoping to remedy this problem, his advisors offered various counsels the purpose of which was to better integrate him with his colleagues and their ways—e.g., apprenticing himself to Jane Schacter, writing a book review for Barbara, auditing [Mitchell] Polinsky’s law and economics seminar, posting work on SSRN, and so forth. Yet all this was disregarded in the name of some higher end. It does not appear, however, that this higher end ever really materialized.
The prodigious work ethic that defined his performance in Legal Theory and earned him the fellowship appeared to have disappeared entirely over the course of the fellowship. A mere 38 pages of fairly crude draft had been submitted after an entire year. Whether this was because his work ethic actually faltered or because he lost his way after disregarding Barbara’s warning about the futility of writing on and on in the absence of a clear thesis, the end result was the same.
He was, moreover, little to be seen around the law school notwithstanding Barbara’s express request that he show his face more. What contact he did make was generally filled with hopeful promises about progress which was always anticipated to be just around the corner but never actually materialized. Given all this, it should have come as no great surprise that he was furthermore late in plunging into the 2009-2010 faculty hiring season, and that upon actually doing so he could offer nothing beyond a set of rather lengthy and grandiloquent summarizations of work most of which his advisors had never seen. These pretensions stood in sharp contrast with his lack of documented productivity over the preceding year, during which he had ample time to produce.

* I had to be “let alone” over the course of the fellowship, not because I disdained my Stanford colleagues as people, but because this was the only avenue of resistance left open to me given the cultural pathologies of liberalism, which they were seeking to foist upon me.

* In expecting me to follow up on all or most or at least some of their advice, Joe and Barbara were expecting the concessions of politeness. They had generously offered me the fellowship, allowing me to pursue my passion and sparing me the travails of sweatshop hours in a big law firm. In exchange, they were expecting at least a modicum of deference to their superior experience, wisdom, and expertise. And this deference was indeed withheld. But it was withheld for political reasons, because such deference would have involved a political concession to the cultural pathologies of liberalism. Writing a book review and attending a seminar might not have been all that time-consuming. But they would have sufficed to instill in me a “respect for forms,” a respect for the intellectual magistrature of the sacred college of masters. By progressively immersing me in an ethos of scholarly gravitas, my advisors’ advice would have by imperceptible increments effected my subordination to the established order.

* Larry [Kramer] had asked “what’s the story?” in inquiring about my failure to submit my CV to the Stanford resume book. And the story was, as neither of us could have anticipated at the time, the story of a term paper that came to life and became three-dimensional, the story of a term paper that was first written for Joe and Larry before it had to become about them as well.
Joe described the very first draft of Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression as “lovely, in its way.” And that caveat was appropriate indeed, because the conspirators’ ideological dispositions placed them in inexorable opposition to the existential spirit of the project even as they were intrigued by it theoretically. This contradiction was the reason why Joe’s and Barbara’s frustration with me grew and grew over the first year of the fellowship, eating away at them, eventually transmuting into resentment, suspicion, and vengefulness. Their cultural parochialism compelled them perceive my conduct through categories indigenous to their habitus, rendering it ever more difficult for them to process me accurately with the passage of time. With one misinterpretation laying the foundations for the next, some kind of snowball effect was inevitable, which was what finally took hold in September 2009. The project was therefore a ticking time-bomb from the outset. Only the timing and other details of the explosion were ever indeterminate. And this is why all the seeming accidents detailed in The Star Chamber are held together by a consistent logic, the logic of my struggle against the liberal culture of which my advisors happened to be a part.

* The political hypothesis is a secular theodicy insofar as it seeks to discover a deeper meaning in the evil which befell me and to thereby redeem that evil within the unfolding of a higher good.

* An acquaintance of mine who sat as an editor at the Ohio State Law Review once explained to me that the mere ratio of footnotes to text plays a crucial role in their publication decisions. For a minimally footnoted article is likely to get cut off early on in the selection process, and without any specific determination that it actually needed to be better referenced. I also learned from one Stanford Law professor that some law schools (not Stanford) attach great significance to the footnote counts of published articles in their tenure decisions.
Certainly, anyone on the Stanford faculty would be aghast at such shallowness. But this shallowness is merely the most vulgar, undisguised, and unashamed manifestations of a more general cultural dysfunction that expresses itself with greater subtlety elsewhere. This dysfunction was the subject of my first, eventually abandoned dissertation topic at Indiana University, On Rigor: Against the Rationalization of Intellectual Life, where I intended to argue that the ideal of sober, chastened academic professionalism disguises a primordial self-mistrust and that this self-mistrust originates in a misbegotten paradigm of intellectual rigor.

* We need only consider the contrast between the uniqueness of handwriting and the mass standardization of type—to take only the most obvious, and perhaps most trivial, among them. If we accept the sacrifice of subjective culture to objective culture as a reasonable trade-off, this is because subjective culture seems to get in the way of the productivity that now assumes a preeminent value for us. Modern machine production may not “afford the personality the widest scope for releasing all its capacities.” But this is understood to be a mere luxury in relation to the essential. Subjective culture retains a place, to be sure, but this is in leisure, religion, family, and so forth, where it will not get in the way of more serious business.

* This accumulated intellectuality or “objectification of the mind,”4 as Simmel also calls it, is easily discernible in the standardization of tone, style, and concern that now defines “serious” or “professional” academic exchange. Academic life as it has come to exist is undergirded by an extensive conceptual scaffolding known as “the field” or ‘the debate” or the “literature. Carefully crafted by known and respected experts, this scaffolding is expected to channel our mental energy more prudently and efficiently than would be possible were we to proceed in an ostensibly more autonomous fashion. This is the sense in which intellectual life has become rationalized. It has become increasingly subject to methods, procedures, and precedents that ever more narrowly circumscribe the role of individual instinct and intuition. In the life of mind as in the life of the wider society, this rationalization seems like the sine qua non of efficiency and productivity.

* It is platitudinous that we ought to think independently within this inherited scaffolding. But thinking independently of it is disdained as idle, self-indulgent, and downright unprofessional. Whereas the former is heralded as the mark of professionalism and intellectual maturity, the latter is decried as an impatient and importunate amateurism that heedlessly sacrifices circumspectness and reliability to personal expressiveness and idiosyncrasy.

* This suspicion was first brought home to me during my graduate school days by the stark discrepancy between the impressively high level of analytical sophistication that moral philosophers bring to bear on their subject matter and the often pedestrian character of their basic quandaries—for instance, whether are we morally justified in ejecting one passenger from a life raft in order to save the lives of everyone else. The banality of these examples contrasted sharply with the evocativeness of the great novelists, and seemed to bespeak a certain lack of worldliness.

* Nietzsche is asking whether it is possible to reconcile the ancient claims of philosophy, the quest a comprehensive vision of human life, with the massive proliferation of specialized knowledge—and therefore with the kind of conceptual sophistication, capacity for nuance, and sense of humility that specialized learning inculcates. Long gone are the days when a philosopher could, in the fashion of an Aristotle, make sweeping pronouncements about politics, the natural world, and literature on the strength of his observations alone. To proceed in this manner would be to risk instant embarrassment at the hands of a long procession of experts each of whom was perfectly poised to expose one or another form of ignorance, glibness, or superficiality.

* This was why I remained convinced that thinking for oneself—rather than for the purpose of “advancing” the field—possesses an inherent value that will never be rendered obsolete by the cumulative achievements of the experts and will never be outweighed by its various dangers and inefficiencies, such as the concededly real risks of dilettantism, redundancy, and so forth. The dominant paradigm of intellectual rigor cannot recognize this inherent value because it operates atop the hidden, technocratic premise that we can make valuable use of accumulated intellectuality—of the cumulative achievements of experts as embodied in the academic literature—without expending the intellectual effort of thinking for ourselves, of following a thought to wherever it is leading us.

* the cultural prestige of the natural sciences and the desire of envious humanists to adopt their trappings through their own analogues of what they supposed is scientific rigor. The dominant paradigm of rigor was being motivated by certain identitarian imperatives that precluded any rational inquiry into their own foundations. The rationalization of intellectual life pretends to endow law and the humanities with scientificity, but it actually provides them with only the social simulacrum of scientificity, a set of undeclared social understandings the function of which is to help scholars feel like scientists.

* Emerson’s intellectual romanticism may fail to deliver on its promises most of the time. But is this because of the ideal’s intrinsic bankruptcy, because an anachronistic amateurism has by now been superseded by a sophisticated, reflective professionalism? Or is it rather because those whose identities are invested in that sophisticated, reflective professionalism have a vested interest in maintaining cultural conditions under which an opposing paradigm could never come to its own and would be discredited in the very attempt?

* The operating premise is that fealty to the experts, the state of the field, and so forth is necessary to inculcate the intellectual self-discipline required for thinking for oneself…

* [Russell] Jacoby explains why:

For political science, Ricci offers a strategy, which unfortunately testifies to the power of the profession. He knows that any young academic who frontally challenges the discipline will be shown the door. “At the outset of one’s teaching career,” he counsels, “it is advisable to display unexceptional qualities of professional competence, expressing sound opinions and publishing unremarkable writings. This tactic will help young scholars get tenure.” Once the academic is established, “boldness becomes more feasible”; it might even be possible to write up “some” thoughts in “plain English.” Unfortunately, Ricci does not realize, or has forgotten, that his strategy smacks of age-old advice—and suffers from the age-old failing: nothing changes. When finally the requisite rank and security have been attained, the talent, even the desire, for bold thinking has long since atrophied.

* The CASBS [at Stanford] Ideology is ideological in the same way that Horatio Alger novels are ideological. Both instill resignation to an oppressive status quo by offering the individual an illusory assessment of their future mobility. In the one case, the mobility is financial. In the other, it is intellectual. But the function is the same.

* Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression argued that If liberals feel justified in elevating what they uphold as their own more “tangible” priorities above the merely “symbolic” or “cultural” preoccupations of conservatives, this is because they accept a certain Enlightenment narrative according to which the modern liberal identity constitutes the achievement of a special level of self-possession, self-control, and self-transparency that was unavailable to its predecessors. This is a special lucidity that, having transcended the shunted horizons of the pre-modern world, permits a mode of human satisfaction that transcends the merely symbolic. Charles Taylor writes:

“Fulfillment” is a natural term which comes often to our lips in this connection [in defining the humanly successful life for moderns]. But in the context of the pre-modern identity, to make something of one’s life is to realize in one’s own person a place in the pattern, well, fully, with éclat.
This by no means implies unselfishness. That is to see it in a modern perspective which distorts. It is rather a matter of a wholly different way of conceiving human satisfaction, including the most egoistic. On one side this can be seen as the fulfillment of desires which inhere in me; on the other, it comes from establishing my position in the order of things. Since the order occupies what is, to occupy a place in it firmly, fully, is to live a full life, one might say; to fail to do so is to sink toward the status of a shadow. A limpid everyday image of one kind of satisfaction is the fulfillment of a felt desire for an object, like hunger or thirst; an image for the other would be rather that of approaching a source of light or warmth, for example getting close to a fire.

* If moderns are by contrast occupied with “fulfillment,” this is because they view themselves as liberated from the teleological illusions that informed pre-moderns’ commitment to some all-encompassing normative cosmology. Modern fulfillment can be analogized to the satisfaction of hunger or thirst because it is premised on attunement to the needs within rather than loyalty to the order without, in which we no longer believe.

* Pre-moderns did not merely possess different religious beliefs than do we, but were, one could say, differently possessed by those beliefs. These beliefs informed, not only their decisions and deliberations, but, more profoundly, their very sense of themselves as agents. And this was their sense of themselves as “opened up” to forces that could, for good or ill, penetrate and mold their own affect-structure, sweeping them into realms of meaning from which they could not extricate themselves. Hence the notion of demonic possession, which is merely one manifestation of this pre-modern “porousness.” The sense of being “filled” with God’s spirit is another, and in fact remains with us on some level. The teleologies of pre-moderns weren’t just convictions, but rather the very substrate of human agency as they experienced it. The order of things, and so the significance of particular things, was not merely believed in, but inhabited, impinging on individuals more like the temperature or humidity than as an object of visual perception…

* This naturalistic disengagement of the modern liberal identity, or buffered identity, has become understood as the sine qua non, not only of individual autonomy, but also of a properly enlightened social morality, which thinkers of the Enlightenment thinkers viewed as just two sides of the same coin. For it is only by coming to understand ourselves as operating in a “neutral,” teleologically barren environment that we can recognize others as doing the same, and so recognize that their rights on this front are equal to our own. This, in turn, is the prerequisite for a rational social order predicated on mutual human benefit, an order that will no longer sacrifice bona fide human fulfillment on the altar of unreflective teleological illusion. To this end, we have come to embrace what Taylor describes as the quintessentially modern ethic of “of independence, self-control, self-responsibility… a disengagement which brings control; a stance which requires courage, the refusal of the easy comforts of conformity to authority, of the consolations of an enchanted world, of the surrender to the promptings of the senses.”4 I will refer to this as this ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity for short.

* On the mutation counter-narrative, modernity develops, not simply through the casting off of superstition in favor of reason and empiricism, but because church and state colluded to engineer the habits, attitudes, and emotional lives of populations away from their earlier, default porousness in order to create a disciplined social order…

* As European kingdoms became more centralized and internally secure, a previously autonomous aristocracy became absorbed into the life of the great monarchic courts, where these erstwhile warriors would become transformed into courtiers.

* Whereas the subtraction account sees modernity as a gradual expansion of individual liberty, the mutation counter-narrative sees it as a gradual expansion of social control. For the new elites erected a new police state to ensure that the lower orders be “not left as they are, but badgered bullied, pushed, preached at, drilled, and organized to abandon their lax and disorganized folkways and conform to one or another feature of civil behavior.” The medieval world involved a lot of live and let live despite the official strictures of Christian theology.

* We now associate the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity with science and secularism. But it developed historically as a religious imperative, as a form of submission before a particular conception of divinity, a way of affirming the de-sacralized understanding of nature that was the corollary of that conception. Who we presently are cannot be comprehended apart from this religious history. For it was this history that provided the basic materials that later became subject to secularization. The “secular” is not the bare elimination of the religious, but rather the secularization of what was formerly religious.

* What liberals understand to be their superior “civility” is a modernized and politicized reconstitution of courtly politeness, which permits liberals to dismiss conservatism as the eruption of a rude and crude animality that is incompatible with the higher refinement of liberal sensibilities.

* Whereas older, traditionalist forms of social hierarchy revolved around perceived differences in such things as moral cleanliness, work ethic, as well as religious affiliation and ethnic bona fides, the new social hierarchy entrenched by liberalism is grounded in “cognitive elitism” and centers around a morally charged dichotomy between those who have realized the buffered distance and those who have not, between those who have achieved “awareness” and those still mired in a barbarian past of less fortunate peoples, the conservatives who remain subject to the “promptings of the senses” and the “consolations of the enchanted world.” This is what liberals ultimately detest in the “bitter-clingers,” as the National Review says, who are viewed, not simply as mistaken, but as occupying a lower moral and cognitive plane. If liberals can claim to reject elitism, intimidation, and intolerance, this is only because impulses which were once acknowledged openly by an earlier generation of modern elites have simply faded into the invisible, taken-for-granted background of things, covered over by a veneer of pragmatism and moral common sense—like concern about mass shootings.

* But given the buffered distance’s status as an original spiritual vision, the liberal identity can only perpetuate itself by discovering irrational prejudice as the basis for its own self-affirmation. To this end, liberals must continually posit novel forms of social oppression and blindness which it is their singular privilege to perceive. Since the buffered distance can be maintained in existence only by replacing the oppression and blindness which has recently been eliminated by novel iterations thereof, the gap between the sensibilities of the “ordinary American” celebrated by conservatives and liberals’ presumptions to moral and epistemic superiority must be continually maintained irrespective of whatever social changes have already been effected. Hence conservatives’ complaints that the liberal goal post is always being moved regardless of what they concede to the Left. The more greatly liberalism realizes itself in action, the further removed must these novel forms of oppression and blindness be from traditional understandings of these terms. It is this interminable chasm that lies at the root of what we have come to know as the “culture wars.”

* The professional scholar is buffered because he possesses a ready framework and a network of colleagues through which to shield himself from unruly passions. This social embeddedness provides whim with an “inner base area” through which to disengage from his own first, second, and third impressions. By contrast, the mind of the dilettante is comparatively “porous.” Lacking a vantage point from which to coolly assess his thoughts’ actual clarity, cogency, and persuasiveness, he can find himself overcome by them, unable to distance himself from their subjective pull. We observed that pre-modern medievals gave way to their impulses “more freely, more directly, more openly,” than moderns, “in whom everything is more subdued, moderate and calculated.” And this is also the contrast between the dilettante and the scholar in their relationship to their intellectual impulses, which are freely vented by the dilettante but carefully vetted by the serious scholar. The emotional lives of pre-moderns were “less evenly regulated,” so that “slight impressions, uncontrollable associations are often enough to induce these immense fluctuations.” And this also describes the intellectual life of the dilettante, whose inquires go unregulated by the experts, the literature, and the state of the field, leaving him liable to oscillate wildly between different, often conflicting, lines of argument and inquiry.

* The rationalization of intellectual life is but one instance of the rationalization—which is to say, mechanization, regimentation, and routinization—of life in general that grows out of the ordering impulses of the buffered identity. Thus understood, the rationalization of intellectual life is, like other facets of rationalization, an ambiguous admixture of rational and irrational elements, of practices and ideals that, while admitting of some rational applications, were originally brought into being through the collusion of impulses that developed independently of any rational considerations.

* Liberals will usually have a superior command of language, but the claimants have a superior command of the other side of language, of the unstated understandings toward which our words “point” but which they do not encapsulate.

* what these elites mistake for an “education gap” between themselves and conservatives is in fact an “indoctrination gap.” The “wide consensus among the better educated on different questions is not proof that they have been taught to think for themselves, but irrefutable evidence that they have been programmed to think alike.”

* The elites cannot recognize that the liberal virtues are not free standing, but rather bound up with a thicker identity that must be upheld socially through all the unstated or understated mores of the liberal culture. The children of light may see themselves as liberated souls who have cast off the confining illusions and horizons of the past. But underneath this self-image likes a distinct culture, an indigenous “traditionalism” outside of which they refuse to think.

* In urging that I show my face around the law school more, Barbara were urging that I take up residence at “court,” so that I might, as Elias says, “live surrounded by people” and become subject to “new ties of interdependence.” Joe was already urging these ties upon me at our August 2008 meeting, when he conveyed his concern that prospective employers would be left uncertain about what exactly I had to offer them as colleagues. In stressing that this problem would have to be solved over the course of the fellowship, he was requesting that I undertake what Taylor calls the “self-refashioning” of “polished elites.” I wanted to become a law professor after all, and law professors are among the most polished of modern elites. But no such self-refashioning was forthcoming over the following months, which was why this once again became an issue at our December 2008 meeting. Time was slipping away, and it was clear that I had yet to adopt the peculiarly courtly rationality needed to operate in modern social structures marked by complex ties of interdependence. Hoping to correct this problem, Joe and Barbara urged a series of courtship rituals upon me—impressing Polinsky with my law and economics acumen, dispatching sycophantic feedback to our Wednesday afternoon speakers in the hopes of catching their attention. Joe and Barbara’s advice could promote the peculiarly courtly rationality because that rationality had been sedimented in the academic habitus, where it exists as the invisible taken-for-granted background of things.

* In seeking to encumber me with various projects and duties, they were attempting to rationalize, discipline, and professionalize my life, to extirpate what they judged to be my own lax and disorganized folkways and replace these with the ideals of the buffered distance—discipline, education, decorum, and good political order. Like modern elites before them, they hoped to produce what Taylor describes as a “tight, ordered time environment” that turns our time into “a precious resource, not to be ‘wasted’”—as they believed was already occurring in my case. Hence Barbara’s anxiety that the job-talk paper wouldn’t be completed soon enough to circulate, or her request that I provide her with a summary or outline of the religious neutrality project ASAP.

* I in pre-modern fashion adopt the life of the pre-courtierized nobility, usurping the fellowship as my own private fiefdom and remaining in the confines of my San Francisco studio, as a “relatively free man, the master of his own castle, whose castle is his homeland.” Having dispensed me the fellowship, Joe and Barbara remained my nominal liege lords. But my seclusion meant that their actual power over me was fairly limited, just as it was for feudal monarchs. This was not bare “dereliction,” but the sine qua non of my research agenda. For it was this lifestyle that propelled my gradual regression into a more pre-modern, pre-buffered consciousness.

* Joe’s and Barbara’s advice wasn’t harsh or abrasive. At every point, it aimed not to prevent but to invent, not to prohibit but to promote, not to negate but to affirm, not to annihilate but to create. Taken together, their counsels might well have led me to what Joe called a “top-flight job in a law school” as “surely and effortlessly” as “water [passes] through a ‘duct’ (ducere).” So Joe’s and Barbara’s good intentions were beyond dispute. But these good intentions were nevertheless structured by a disciplinary power the function of which was to progressively mold me into a highly intelligent, provocative, productive scholar.

* In determining whether I was indeed the best candidate, hiring committees would be asking themselves how many articles I was likely to publish and in what journals, and how frequently and favorably they would be cited and by whom.

* The “ways of the scholar” are a framework not only for thinking but also for identity, not just a set of disembodied principles but an embodied hero-system. And so liberals are just as beholden to a pre-modern “order of things” as are conservatives. Whereas this order is, for conservatives, embedded in public space, enforced by the precepts of religion and tradition, it is, for academic liberal elites, intellectualized and privatized within their professional enclaves, enforced by disciplinary power exercised through a lumbering machinery of argumentation. Hence the core of truth in Robert Bork’s observation that the left wields power through “mini-tyrannies”8 and that “[m]odern liberalism…is what fascism looks like when it has captured significant institutions, most notably the universities, but has no possibility of becoming mass movements or of gaining power over government or the broader society through force or the threat of force.”

* Jacoby observes:
Exposés and denunciations of academic sophistry and careerism can often be found in conservative journals, such as The New Criterion, Commentary, American Scholar, but rarely in left and liberal ones. Conservatives honor men of letters, regularly attacking professors and academic hustlers. Why?…In principle, conservatives have been less tempted by institutional or governmental solutions to social ills. At least since Edmunde Burke, they have objected to experts, lawyers, or professors meddling in government or society; this is the crux of the conservative critique of the Enlightenment. They have prized the man of letters devoted to letters, not politics…The same homage to the aristocratic man of letters explains some of the conservatives’ success and public presence; they object to academic entrepreneurialism and its language. Unlike left academics, more easily seduced by professional journals, jargon, and life, the conservatives are committed to lucid prose; for this reason they are readable and are read.”

* With their hero-systems rooted in God, Country, and Family, their identities are not invested in the rationalization of intellectual life. Conservatives can therefore recognize this rationalization for what it is, as a social structure that subserves the identities of liberals. This is why they aren’t so easily seduced by the professional journals and jargon that constitute a secular religion for some liberals.

* Just as gays’ supposed sexual license can, as Martha Nussbaum observes, provoke a disgust-based reaction in traditionalists, so my supposed intellectual license provoked a disgust-based reaction from Barbara.

* This arrogation could be seen in Nomi Stolzenberg’s reaction to my religious neutrality project. Her overall assessment was highly favorable, as I related. But her membership in a cultural bourgeoisie was betrayed by her admonition that I needed to be “giving credit where credit is due” when she discussed various scholarly writings that were relevant to my subject matter but hadn’t been cited in what she read. Obviously, I had an obligation to cite anyone who actually influenced my argument. But this obligation had in fact been fulfilled, as I cited these scholars in direct proportion to their influence. Stolzenberg’s concern wasn’t these individuals, but rather others who hadn’t actually influenced me but had already come upon some version of some of my ideas.

* Man’s meaning hangs by a ludicrously fragile thread because that meaning rests on the inherently unstable fiction that a socially constructed reality is a natural reality, and because it sometimes requires very little to expose that what had passed for the latter is in fact the former.

* my advisors and I were all along attuned to one another in ways that can only be described as uncanny. There was Joe’s decision to direct me toward the topic of religion, without which the August epiphany wouldn’t have been possible. Then there were his and Barbara’s many astonishing premonitions, their seemingly casual remarks that all anticipated the singular course of events that laid on the horizon—the thought of me as a “mad genius,” the observation that I operated “one level up” and had a tendency to “make specimens” of others.

* I may now, in retrospect and upon reflection, have to concede a possibility that I did not acknowledge in my original employment complaint to human resources. And this is that it was perhaps I, and not Stanford, who most egregiously transgressed the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. The declared purpose of the Gaither Fellowship is to “train law students for academic careers.” But I employed that opportunity to train myself against the entire scale of values implicit in that aspiration, to train myself to recognize its many contradictions, to educate myself against my age, as Nietzsche believes was the distinctive value of Schopenhauer.15 And this was most assuredly not the purpose of the Gaither fellowship. How, then, do I justify myself in my recalcitrance? Joe, Larry, and Barbara were under no moral obligation to offer me the fellowship. But rather than accepting the general ground rules which had been laid out, albeit tacitly, I exploited the inherent amorphousness of my role as a fellow in order to pursue my own agenda on Stanford’s dime. Whatever my achievements may have been, were they not purchased at the price of this enormous ingratitude?

* Janet E. Hale-Benson, for instance, believes that black children possess distinctively black cognitive traits that merit various kinds of institutional recognition and protection. In her Black Children: Their Roots, Culture, and Learning Styles, she argues that
1) “Afro-American people tend to respond to things in terms of the whole picture… [whereas] the Euro-American tends to believe that anything can be divided and subdivided into pieces.”
2) “Afro-American people tend to approximate space, numbers, and time rather than stick to strict accuracy.”
3) “Afro-American people in general tend not to be ‘word’ dependent. They tend [instead?] to be very proficient in nonverbal communications.”
4) “Black people think in terms of approximation of time, rather than punctuality. An ‘in house’ expression is ‘C.P.T.’—meaning ‘Colored People’s Time’!… Meetings that begin on C.P.Time usually begin about twenty minutes after the appointed time.”