College Guide
Blog
Camille Paglia treks merrily ahead in her years-long quest to be as wrong as possible.
Here’s Camille Paglia, writing in Salon (via Phi Beta Cons):
But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the US has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote “critical thinking,” which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (“racism, sexism, homophobia”) when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those cliches that it’s positively pickled.
It’s tempting to not respond to this, since it’s simply a sloppy, ignorant, trite rehashing of long-discredited conservative tropes that have been around since the sixties. There is nothing more boring than someone who graduated colleges decades ago more or less copying and pasting random bits of David Horowitz’s work.
But, for the record: No, Camille, that’s not what happens on college campuses. I should know, as I spent two years on two of the most liberal campuses in the country: Brandeis University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. A solid proportion of my classes featured vibrant discussions, wide-ranging disagreement, and students openly arguing with professors.
Were there some professors who were too self-assured? Yes. Were some ideas and themes not granted enough critical scrutiny? Certainly. But the idea that liberals have a monopoly on either of these problems, which have arisen in every high-pressure intellectual and pedagogical environment that has ever existed, is dumb. And the idea that an “assembly line” has led to a generation of young people unwilling to question Democratic authority—this when many of Obama’s most vociferous left-leaning critics come from the very campuses Paglia’s bashing!—is beyond dumb. It’s careless and stupid and thoughtless, and the five minutes I’ve spent rebutting it are probably five minutes too many.
Facebook
Twitter
Bdop4 on September 11, 2009 5:51 PM:
Camille Paglia is a wart on Salon's website. I wince every time I see her ugly mug and immediately proceed to areas that contribute to my general knowledge and understanding (Greenwald, Leonard, Conason, Reich, Koppelman).
I honestly don't see what Joan Walsh perceives in Paglia that contributes to the website's content, other than to piss readers off.
PQuincy on September 11, 2009 6:37 PM:
The statement cited above is sad: intellectual laziness not even attempting to disguise itself, motivated only by trying to recover that warm glow that used to come from being 'controversial' and 'transgressive'-- only now with the ideological blinkers exchanged. Like many who played that game, turning to reactionary 'transgression' seems to be the only way left Paglia can imagine to titillate herself by trying to annoy others.
Bruno on September 11, 2009 10:20 PM:
Remember Colmes? The one from Hannity & Colmes? Colmes representing the so-called 'liberal' aspect of a discussion; allowing Fox to claim they are 'fair and balanced'
That's what Camille represents on Salon. The sad part is that Colmes at least knew that he was a patsy. Camilla actually believes that she has something serious to add to the conversation.
Donald from Hawaii on September 11, 2009 11:07 PM:
I'm only to proud to say that I quit reading Camille Paglia's pseudo-intellectual tripe last century, having long ago determined that the woman couldn't find her own rear end in broad daylight with both her hands, a full-length mirror and illustrated directions.
Keith M Ellis on September 12, 2009 6:18 AM:
In my opinion, the silliest thing about this conservative assertion is the assumption that university instructors and coursework have an extreme influence on students' political beliefs, or even a moderate influence on students' beliefs.
What's obvious is that it's not instructors and coursework which strongly influence students' political beliefs, but peer-pressure.
While high-school age students are extremely influenced by peer-pressure, among the few things in which they are more resistant is politics—they are still very strongly influenced by their parents. However, when they go to college, they are famously willing to establish independent from their parents with regard to politics and thus they are very influenced by the politics of their peers. No doubt that instructors and coursework play a part in this, but mostly in specifics and not orientation.
A good counter-example to these conservative claims would be found at a certain type of conservative university. The larger and more academically respectable the school—BYU and Texas A&M come to mind—the more liberal the faculty will be relative to the students. If it were the instructors defining the students' politics, and not the students' peers, then this wouldn't be the case.
mars on September 12, 2009 9:22 AM:
I have a hard time believing that anyone takes Paglia seriously anymore. She should just don a clown costume or try to land a role on a reality TV show, since this seems to be more or less what she's doing in print over at Salon.
Texas Aggie on September 12, 2009 5:46 PM:
Mr. Ellis pretty much nailed it down. TAMU certainly does have a regressive student body, but they used to (20 years ago) have a fairly decent student paper. I believe that may have changed. I can't say, however, that the faculty is particularly more progressive than the students. Some are, but they tend to move on to greener pastures.
That said, it is certainly true that at the college/university level peer pressure has a lot more influence on a person than a professor who has no idea of who you are other than one of several hundred students in the class. As for Paglia, I read her column twice and decided her mother had been hitting the absinthe too much during the time she was pregnant with Camille causing significant brain misdevelopment.