Ever since its founding in 1883, the Modern Language Association has been considered the leading professional group for college faculty in language and literature. Each year, it holds a meeting — this year virtual, but 分词featuring the same weary dissection of liberal issues as in all recent years.
Last year’s meeting in Seattle was filled with hundreds of presentations on radical topics. To name just a few, 分词taken almost at random: “Resexualizing Necrophiliac Desire in William Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily'”; “Denise Ferreira da Silva, Martin Heidegger, and the (Black Feminist) Thing: or, How Blackness Thinks”; “Age, Disability, and Desexualization in Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories”; “Literature of the Caravan: 动名词Reading United States Foreign Policy through Central American Literature of Migration”; and “Media Circulation and Erotic Economy in Tennessee Williams’ ‘One Arm.'” These and other presentations ran morning to night, 分词状语relieved only by cash bars and lunch. Just the kind of intellectual stimulation 定语从句I’d seek on a gray winter’s day in Seattle.
形式主语It’s unlikely 主语从句that the 2021 meeting (January 7 to 10) will vary that much. There will be the usual accusations of systemic racism, gay complaints of an oppressive straight culture, Marxist assaults on capitalist inequality, postcolonial readings 定语从句that show 宾语从句how unjust colonizers were and 宾语从句how blameless postcolonial rulers (like Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, Mobuto Sese Seco, and Charles Taylor) have been, and 与宾语从句并列作show 宾语 a slew of feminists 动名词assailing the patriarchy. 主语从句What’s missing is reason, judgment, and common sense.
Any ordinary, sane individual 分词定语stepping into an MLA meeting would think 宾语从句he had wandered into an asylum for disturbed intellectuals. He wouldn’t know 不定式宾语whether to laugh or cry, but he would soon flee the proceedings and wipe what he’d heard from his mind.
Unfortunately, the students of these professors have a harder time 分词fleeing or disregarding the message of race, class, and sex 定语从句that dominates MLA proceedings. At the very least, they must sit through months of indoctrination in required humanities courses. Most will accept 宾语从句what they’re hearing on faith, and they will carry some of it with them after graduation, 分词状语causing them to orient toward the left.
Or, 状语从句if they aspire to be humanities teachers themselves, they’ll enjoy four years devoted to just this sort of nonsense. 分词状语Checking the fall semester 2020 course list at U.C. Berkeley, I find a course entitled “动名词Reading Marx Now”; another on “American Hustle: Race, Ethnicity, and Dreams of Getting Ahead”; one on “Eco-Crisis and Climate Refugeeism”; and one 分词定语entitled “Is It Useless to Revolt?” (Answer: no.) And 状语从句while many traditional period and genre courses are still offered at Berkeley, the presentation is often slanted toward identity politics and Marxist analysis.
Students may be lucky enough to encounter a few professors 定语从句who don’t subscribe to the left’s ideology, but that would be rare, indeed. In one survey of college history professors, liberals outnumbered conservatives 33 to 1. And only 2% of literature professors identify as Republicans.
As one of that 2%, I suffered a great deal of abuse. I was careful to conceal my political orientation 状语从句until I had received tenure, but even so, I found my career 分词宾补slowing down 状语从句after I “came out.” The worst thing was 不定式谓语to see faculty 定语从句whom I had respected and befriended suddenly putting politics ahead of professionalism. Articles were chosen for publication 分词状语based on their political agenda — submissions 定语从句that offended the prevailing ideology did not find their way into leading journals, and university presses were just as bad. 状语从句If I’d come out before receiving tenure, I’d have been driven out of the profession.
That, I suspect, is the state of affairs in the university today: fanatical professors at the helm, radicalized young professors 动名词waiting for tenure, demoralized or embittered students, and a handful of conservative professors just 动名词hanging on until retirement. Nothing is changing 状语从句because college faculty seem to lack the imagination to think beyond race, class, and sex — that unholy trinity of critical approaches 分词定语fueled by the fantasies of professors 定语从句who think 宾语从句they’re battling for social justice.
It’s not just a matter of 名词从句what English professors are teaching these days; it’s 名词从句在谓语what is left out because of their exclusive focus on identity politics. By definition, the study of ethnicity, sex, and class comes down to a focus on power, and 状语从句while power is a part of human existence, the assumption 定语从句that power or wealth or privilege is the most important element of existence is false.
Literature has not always been read as the record of “man’s inhumanity to man,” to quote Robert Burns. For most of human history, literature was studied as a guide to “truth and beauty.” It was viewed as a record of the thoughts and feelings of the wisest, most compassionate, and most sensitive of human beings 分词定语stretching all the way back to Homer. Much of literature, in fact, is devoted to the expression of such values as courage, ambition, excellence, loyalty, and chaste love. How often does a discussion of these positive values find its way into the college classroom today?
主语从句What’s missing, in a word, is the humanity of the authors 定语从句that we study. Identity politics reduces human beings to one-dimensional figures 分词定语defined by their race, sex, or class. But the real question is 名词从句作谓语whether one has lived nobly, with kindness and decency and strength. And the study of literature displays human beings in situations of struggle and crisis 定语从句who display these positive characteristics, and negative ones as well. Ironically, the “villains” of the past — Iago, Big Brother, and Lady Macbeth — are precisely those 定语从句who behave as lit professors do today, 分词定语focused 状语从句as they are on race, power, and sex.
Faculty members in the humanities need to consider宾语从句 what they are withholding from their students, and just 宾语从句how destructive their focus on power actually is. What is the point of 动名词teaching white students 直接宾语从句that they are guilty, because of their race, of racial oppression — or that blacks are victims of systemic racism? Or that men are invariably, unless they are gay, members of the patriarchy and that women are victims of men? Or that gays are victims, migrants are victims, the poor are victims, and all will remain victims? Isn’t there a more hopeful and honest truth to be taught?
The annual meeting of the Modern Language Association is open to any person, college faculty or not, 定语从句who wishes to attend. Simply join the MLA and pay your conference registration fee and, this year, attend hundreds of MLA presentations online without ever traveling to the conference site.
If you wish to see what your children or grandchildren are learning in college, 动名词attending the MLA meeting would be an effective, 状语从句if painfully tedious and thankless, way to find out. It would also be a way to find out宾语从句 what your taxpayer dollars are supporting.
状语从句If you are a conservative, you won’t be happy with 名词从句what you discover. And I suspect 宾语从句that you will see the connection between the mischievous behavior of college faculty and the drift of America’s young toward the left. College faculty may be entrenched in the Ivory Tower, but their radicalism has a harmful effect in the real world. In many cases, young people have already been radicalized in high school, but college is 谓语从句where they receive their advanced training in anger and alienation. It’s also where they miss out on the true nature of literature, history, philosophy, and so many other disciplines.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).
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