Against The Grain

Most of these authors of course do not believe their own postmodern tenets. They criticize capitalism because it pays financial dividends [but] none wish to share their salary with the dispossessed or live among the muscular classes. They advocate multiculturalism [because] it promotes them out of the classroom and away from the lower undergraduates -- the very people their curriculum is supposed to liberate.

They say there are no facts, but are outraged when their research is criticized. They pile up the frequent-flier mileage on gravity-defying jets that whisk them to the latest conference on the social construction and relativism of the scientific method. They hate the West, but demand the freedom of speech, material prosperity, lack of religious interference, respect for diversity and competitive merit-based rewards that the West alone ensures. … They insist that nothing can be known, that knowledge is a mere construct of unreliable language, that linear thinking is phallocentric, imperialistic and oppressive, and then, without a hint of irony, write heavily-footnoted book after book to tell us so. They say that truth is relative, yet condemn opposing theories as being less valid than their own.

They reject "narrow" disciplines in favor of "inclusive" cultural studies -- and then rigorously exclude anything that does not support their tendentious political agenda. They denounce an imagined world governed exclusively by issues of power even as they spend their time handing out curriculum vitiate, applying for the next job, and running for office in professional organizations. They proclaim the death of the author, and then sign their names to their books and wear nametags at conventions. They advocate the overthrow of hierarchical privilege while clutching desperately an outdated system of tenure that guarantees their own power and privilege. […] They profess radical skepticism in their scholarship but use inductive logic to plan every second of their personal and professional lives: what car to buy, what neighborhood to live in, what schools to send their children to, what articles to write and classes to teach (or not to teach).

The contradictions of the medieval Church or eighteenth-century French letters to do not match the hypocrisy of contemporary American academic culture.

-- Introduction, Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath and Bruce S. Thornton.