Reader Edward Hamilton, a conservative and college professor, writes:

In the interest of avoiding epistemic closure, I made an intentional decision to work my way through this Aviva Chomsky piece on Salon today — and was surprised to find myself feeling like I was appreciating the institutional deterioration of campus culture in a much deeper way. (At Salon, mirabile dictu!) Obviously there’s a lot of Chomsky’s perspective that I find problematic, but I think that the central insight of her argument is one that I haven’t seen nearly as well-articulated elsewhere, including here.

Her argument, in effect, is that the economic and class-oriented aspects of academic experience are being concealed by the intense focus on race and gender as a sort of smokescreen that co-opts liberal thinkers into passively accepting the corporatization of higher education. In an ideal world, a more useful Left would be providing a powerful counterbalance against the transformation of college from an intellectually motivated culture into one that revolves around business concerns, at the expense of the traditional faculty-student relationship. But since modern liberals can’t help but intermingle their causes — c.f. how Occupy Wall Street protests inevitably attracted all kinds of weird cultural movementarians with no interest in financial regulation! — all of the pressure that could have been brought against the real threat of monetization of academic world can instead be trivially deflected by administrators into conceded protest demands that relate to symbolic cultural issues. By throwing tinder on the student anger surrounding how horrible right-wing Christians are oppressing sexual minorities (not really a problem on most college campuses to begin with), administrators redirect student protests toward these issues and make themselves look sympathetic and responsive. Then they can ignore the greater economic injustices associated with rising debt loads, replacing permanent faculty with desperate underpaid adjuncts, and creating massive layers of bureaucratic cruft that bleed away money from government-subsidized programs originally intended to improve the quality of the workforce.

The result is a double tragedy. The Left, instead of doing the good it ought to accomplish by critiquing the baser aspects of corporate greed (the original purpose of the OWS movement) has been neutered and transformed into a frenzied mob arguing over semiotic power and tribal purity. And all these new administrative positions required to monitor the fulfillment of student demands provide the university with one more excuse to fleece students (and their parents, and their future spouses/children) by hiring utterly superfluous staff members into lifelong sinecures.

Please, please, read through the Chomsky piece, choke past the more tendentious bits, and come away with a greater appreciation for how everyone involved in this contrived war between the cultural right and left is being abused in order to prop up the next financial crisis.

Honestly, I suspect that college administrators are thrilled to death to hear that students are refusing to read Marx because he fails to punch all the correct identity-politics tickets. The American left is swiftly being domesticated into an anodyne collection of useful idiots serving the self-interest of a class of shrewd economic elites. Ayn Rand couldn’t have planned it any better herself.

I’m really glad you brought this up, Edward. I did read the whole Chomsky piece, on your recommendation, and while it was worthwhile, your summary was much better, because it did away with the obscuring left-wing verbiage.

It is impossible to improve on your analysis, so I won’t try. I will say, though, that this has been around for a while in one form or another, though boy, are the stakes high now. You’ve probably heard me gripe before about how in newsrooms, the agonizing that management does over the “lack of diversity” there is real and never-ending (really, it is; I’ve been to professional conferences, read memos, heard newsroom discussions, etc.). But it’s a sham diversity, and always has been. Most of them, they do not want any kind of intellectual diversity. They want fifteen shades of the same kind of liberal. And here’s the thing: I am convinced that they honestly don’t know what they’re doing. 

But they’re doing it, and they believe it makes them virtuous. In my experience, most arguments don’t even matter. This is, for them — and in my experience, they are almost always white people — they want not to improve the quality of newsgathering (though that’s what they say they’re after), but rather to feel good about themselves, and to win the respect and affection of others within their professional circles by signaling their virtue.

You know, a real Marxist could probably see this. Any half-wit conservative could see this (and I’ll have you know, I’m not just any half-wit conservative, no sirree). But so very many within the professional journalism bubble are blind as bats.

OK, that’s the dead horse I keep beating. I know. But it’s of a piece with that other liberal-dominated institution, the university. It’s the way establishment liberals roll. Hillary can start as many small wars in brown-people countries as she wants, and shake her money maker in front of as many Wall Street bigs as makes her happy, but as long as she fights to let ladyboys into the girls’ locker room, all is forgiven by her crowd.