How the Jacobins seized control of our universities
/From a professor who was there
Nan Miller, Diary of a Mad Emerita
During the years I taught college English, I had a ringside seat watching a new breed of Jacobins seize control of a university English department, then extend their reach throughout the humanities. Posing as the champions of “social justice,” they have built an empire cultivating “victims”—and silencing colleagues who oppose the new mission of the radical left. For four decades they have ruled universities nationwide, but my focus here is upon the hoodoo they have inflicted upon North Carolina’s Big Four universities.
My first exposure to the type came in August, 1984, when new department head John Bassett announced plans to take N.C. State’s English department in a “radically new direction” that would reinvent English studies as a “social science” and showcase faculty who impose “gender-deconstructionist,” “Marxo-constructivist,” or “post-structuralist” interpretations on classical literature. Dr. Bassett was simply following the nationwide trend that recast English professors as liberators of the oppressed and recast great writers as the enemies of women, people of color, and the underclass.
By 1988, Bassett’s acolytes were in charge—but only after a battle so fierce one reporter likened it to “an academic Beirut.” Their formula for success, hatched in the 70s, introduced here in the 80s, alive and well in 2022, goes something like this: take a crop of Ph.Ds who land jobs in Research I institutions and who know they must publish something original, something “cutting edge,” or perish. Now imagine a crop of upstarts competing to invent a new angle on Hamlet or Huck—then spotting the opening. If, prior to 1980, scholars had called classical literature the hallmark of our Western heritage, the neophytes would invert that premise and call great works the scourge of Western civilization—as the last refuge of racism, sexism, and all the other isms perpetrated by dead white males.
When the saboteurs arrived at Duke in 1986, the battle that ensued made national news because it involved renowned scholar Stanley Fish, whom Duke had landed to chair its English department. Backed by other hotshot recruits, Dr. Fish set about to make the department over in his own image—smug, despotic, and punitive when colleagues challenged his claim that “literature has no intrinsic merit.”
A Durham reporter was quick to note that Fish’s accomplices’ “real ambition is to empower the oppressed…and what they offer is cotton candy for the mind.” But it was African-American scholar Kenny Williams who, in 1990, made national news telling the Wall Street Journal that “teaching English means educating students in literature, history, and civilization—not doing social work or teaching oppression.”
For exposing the erosion of standards at Duke, Dr. Williams became the first known victim of “cancel culture,” when she found herself banned from teaching graduate students and from serving on committees.
At the same time the Fish plot was being reenacted in English departments nationwide, critics were mocking the inmates of the “Fish Tank” for their twisted reinterpretations of the classics—most famously, for Eve Sedgewick’s obsession with “homoeroticism” in Jane Austen’s novels. In 1991, Duke’s Stanley Hauerwas captured their view of the classics in one line: “The canon of great literature was created by high-Anglican ass—-s to underwrite their social class.”
But it was Duke’s Marxist professor Fredric Jameson who made international news for winning the worldwide “Bad Writing Contest”—twice—for writing prose so garbled reading it “was like swimming through cold porridge.” Despite the unintelligible prose, Jameson’s anti-capitalist stance has made him a hero to the American left, and more tellingly, to the Chinese Communist Party.
From his safe perch at Duke, Jameson has made Marxism a highly profitable enterprise in universities nationwide and spawned a network of Marxists who draw their income, then sneer at those who guarantee it—donors, grantors, and tuition-paying parents.
Shareholders in any other business would catch on quickly if foolish innovations had scuttled the product. Not so in higher education where the poor value shows up long after investors’ checks have been cashed.
Dissenting faculty had been heartened in 1987, when the University of Chicago’s Allan Bloom traced The Closing of the American Mind to the anti-Western bias of the radical left. Dr. Bloom was the first to expose a new breed of posers who professed a “moral truth” far superior to the truths students could find in Plato, Shakespeare, or Twain. Readers took note, but MIT professor Noam Chomsky spoke for academe’s ruling class when he dismissed Bloom’s best-seller as “mind bogglingly stupid.” A year later, protesters at Stanford University spoke for a new class of students when they marched, chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho. Western culture’s got to go!”
By 1990, insiders who dared challenge the ruling class could wreck whole careers—but were free to tell outsiders about scholars who had risen to stardom redefining, then weaponizing “virtue.”
Newsweek responded with a December, 1990, cover that spelled out THOUGHT POLICE in tall letters, chiseled in stone, with a subtitle that asked, “Is This the New Enlightenment—Or the New McCarthyism?” The answer, of course, is the latter—with a twist. While Senator McCarthy preyed on citizens suspected of engaging in “un-American activities,” the new McCarthyites preyed on professors caught engaging in an essentially American activity—expressing views that run counter to the ruling orthodoxy.
It was E.B. White who said, “One need only watch totalitarians at work to see that once men gain power over other men’s minds, that power is never used sparingly or wisely, but lavishly and brutally and with unspeakable results.” In 1998, when an external review exposed the unspeakable results of Fish’s reign at Duke, Fish and his band of despots bolted—but only after the Fish brand had caught on at other North Carolina universities.
I was in college from 1972 to 1976 and witnessed this degeneration firsthand as a student. It has metastasized since, of course.