Duke faculty, et al.

Why would anyone pay to have their son or daughter at Duke?

Try to read the all-too-typical paranoid diatribe (linked here) by a highly-paid Duke faculty member, who fully represents the mode of thinking of the Academic Left that now firmly controls most of the liberal arts (aka "cultural studies") departments of our major universities.

In reading this kind of stuff, it is important to know that for these people there is no such thing as objective truth, but merely context-dependent meanings that arise from one or another construction of the world. The idea of appealing to an independent reality is rejected as absurd, a notion long ago deconstructed -- there is no such thing, you see, only perspectives. The only possible reality are texts and our varying interpretations of them. If you and I disagree, that can only reflect a disagreement about which signifiers (words, symbols) we accept. Disagreements about signifiers, in turn, result from differences in political ideology, ethnicity, race, gender, and class, which means that the signifiers themselves can have no fixed, agreed-upon meanings, but are free to slide around unanchored from any objective set of factual referents.

What the previous paragraph means in practice is that rational discourse and dialog with these people is virtually impossible. They do not engage in argument; for them, rationality, far from being privileged, is merely another power play. An appeal to logic is just another hegemonic move, an illegitimate attempt to impose stipulation. Conversation is impossible because what's being spoken is a nonsense tongue, destroying language as it goes.

If the universe is defined by subjective perspective, then we each create our own universe, and ours is as "true" as anybody else's. The predictable result is the narcissism of the Postmodernist, an escapist self-absorption that exalts the non-rational -- the mystical, the emotive pseudo-aesthetic, and the romantically idealized primitive. (Ask me why I was so happy to get the hell out of Santa Fe.)

The control of university departments and academic disciplines, by the way, is exercised in the hiring and promotion-and-tenure processes, as well as in the editorial functions of academic journals and the peer review process for grant applications. (Notice that this buddy system has our lunatic professor sojourning at Williams this year instead of Duke, the circulation of a crazed elite.) What this all means is that no matter what, by some miracle, might be done starting right now this morning, it still would take decades for this situation to change.

Byron