The Takeover – Tablet Magazine
Within 30 years, the timber and tone of faculties were refashioned. In the 1950s the number of public leftists teaching in American universities could be counted on two hands. By the 1980s, they filled airplanes and hotel conference rooms. In the 1980s a three-volume survey of the new Marxist scholarship appeared (The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses, vol. 1-3). Endless new journals, each with their own followings, popped up, such as Studies on the Left, Radical Teacher, Radical America, Insurgent Sociologist, Radical Economists. In the coming years leaders of the main scholarly organizations like the Modern Language Association or American Sociological Association elected self-professed leftists.
Herein the story gets tangled. In a series of bestselling books Tenured Radicals, Illiberal Education, The Closing of the American Mind conservatives raised the alarm: Radicals were taking over the university and destroying America, if not Western civilization. In The Last Intellectuals I differed. The new radical scholars were proving to be obliging colleagues and professionals. The proof? They penned unreadable articles and books for colleagues. They were less subversive than submissive. Earlier American intellectuals wrote for a public; the new radical ones did not. They were not public intellectuals, but narrow academics.
The famous Marxist literary professsor was famous only to graduate students in literature. From Homi K. Bhabha at Harvard to Gayatri Spivak at Columbia, Fredric Jameson at Duke and Judith Butler at Berkeley, the leftist politics of these scholars could not be doubted, but what was their impact inasmuch as they could not write? A half serious, bad-writing contest awarded a prize to professor Butler for this sentence: