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David Pancost's avatar

Except for military service, I spent my whole life in higher ed, student, prof, administrator, & trustee, retiring nine years ago. Higher ed is organized around disciplines, not political groups or even ideas. In my experience, a few disciplines are explicitly political, especially in professional & graduate programs, but all the rest follow the imperatives of their disciplines. The politicized disciplines & subdisciplines do, too, but in ways which also reflect political/partisan developments. When I began studying Am Lit, we studied great works by great, mostly male, writers. As the canon expanded and as the study of how technology, politics, and business practices impact literature became more prominent, the discipline changed. By the time I retired, race, class, & gender were its major focuses, making the discipline look much more political & partisan than it really was. That said, there's no doubt that Am Lit has attracted people who are interested in race, gender, & class, rather than those who are interested in great lit. So it looks liberal, even though no one's more conservative than your typical Eng prof, no matter how they vote. I believe the same can be said about the humanities in general.

Another development I've seen is that partisans have begun to treat some disciplines as political: climate science & evolutionary biology are the prime examples, but, god help us, gynecology & endocrinology are now political, too. All this reflects, I believe, that waging of culture war (there was a real one in the 90s in Eng depts) in order to exploit the fears & resentment of people who feel alienated from our broad economic/political culture and what passes for our high culture.

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Smeltz, Dina's avatar

The Ideas Industry's chapter on the disproportionate prestige attached to economists was interesting, (and irksome) and I see examples of it all the time. Thank you for drawing more attention to DeSantis' eviscerating New College -- an important example of how far this anti-woke fever can go.

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