Maybe This Explains Conservative Anti-Intellectualism

2014-01-13 W F Buckley Jr

The stereotype is that conservatives are dumb. Anti-science. Anti-intellectual.

Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton —the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing. (Wall Street Journal)

 

Well if this is intellectualism, it’s cyanide for our society, and the only reasonable course when you have swallowed poison is to vomit it out again. Thus: the repugnance with which the Ivory Tower has come to be seen by large swathes of the American people is justified. They are right. The intellectuals, if this is any benchmark, are wrong. This is less directly applicable outside the humanities, but the politicization of the sciences means that they are not immune either.