Academia

Academia

A

cademics, even radical ones, are traditionally regarded as harmless eccentrics. Yet I have met successful and popular academics who were undoubtedly psychopaths, all the more dangerous because of their intelligence. Two of them attained international notoriety. In 1964, I had as my colleague in the University of Malaya a visiting Marxist lecturer named Malcolm Caldwell. He seemed amiable enough at first, though his outspoken Trotskyite views were surprising in a country that was still fighting the last stragglers of a defeated Communist insurrection. I always wondered how he had managed to escape the attention of the Special Branch. Then one evening I invited him round for a drink. He drank a lot and talked volubly, becoming more and more vehement and unpleasant as the evening wore on. In vino veritas. By the time he staggered home, I was convinced that his jocular manner was but the screen for a disturbingly hate-filled personality, in urgent need of psychiatric assessment. Yet the late Dr Caldwell was highly regarded by most of his colleagues in the London School of Economics, as well as in my in my own department, where nobody else appeared to notice anything amiss. I was not wrong, however, for some ten years later he became a fervent supporter of the Khmer Rouge and trusted advisor to the psychopathic killer, Pol Pot. Eventually, while visiting Pol Pot, along with two other less fanatical supporters of the regime, he was gunned down by a Cambodian swat team, who obviously considered him too dangerous to be allowed to live. His two companions were untouched.

            “Kill them all!”

            Mad Marxist Malcolm shrieked.

            They began with him.

The same considerations apply to Walter Rodney, a West Indian Marxist who was, unfortunately, my colleague in the University of Dar es Salaam in the early seventies. Dr. Rodney, a university lecturer in history, had been forced to flee from Jamaica after instigating the so-called ‘Rodney Riots’, which left Kingston in flames. Hugely popular in the university, he won rapturous support from all sides as an exiled revolutionary. I once crossed him in a seminar, in which he was talking nonsense about the Tai-ping revolution – a subject about which he knew nothing – but had the good sense to back down quickly in the face of his frenzied vituperation. He was much further gone than Caldwell; one did not have to be a psychiatrist to realise he was a paranoid psychotic. Eventually, the Nyerere government came to realise the menace they were harbouring and bundled him out of Tanzania. He sought refuge in Georgetown, Guyana (the country that gave us Jonestown), where he soon proved so dangerous that somebody in power had him killed, as one would scotch a taipan. In an orderly society, both Caldwell and Rodney could perhaps have passed for harmless, eccentric far-leftists. Unfortunately, they managed to make their way to countries where they were able to put their theories into practice. As a result, a lot of people died violent deaths. Harmless academics? Not always. Academics traffic in ideas. And ideas have consequences, sometimes terrible ones.

The Rodney Riots

Led ineluctably

To Rodney’s rotting.

Intellectual fashions rule the world. Poststructuralism came into fashion about thirty years ago and has dominated our universities ever since. Luckily, there are signs people are beginning to get a little tired of it. A philosophy that tells you that reality does not exist is intolerable in a world of terrorism and recession. People hate being told that their very real fears are imaginary, especially when the news is imparted to them by smugly tenured academics.

“Hamlet undoubtedly held special significance for Shakespeare. Firstly, he had a son whom he named Hamnet. Secondly, he played the part of Hamlet’s dead father in a production at The Globe, thus presenting us with the problematic of how the mirroring of the return of the repressed as the departed Other could resolve the Oedipal crisis which he as only begetter in the cellarage had projected onto the dead lover-son.”  Poststructuralist literary criticism abounds in pretentiously verbose sentences like the above, which are then succeeded by a few pages of Lacanian pseudo-analysis, topped up with Derridean quasi-profundities and questionable Foucaultean history. In the passages quoted, note the blustering use of “undoubtedly”, which actually means “at a wild guess”. As Dr Johnson remarked in quite another context, “Sir, a man could write like this forever if he abandoned his mind to it”.

            Living in Australia is not conducive to scholarly achievement. This has little do with the well know ‘sea and sunshine’ syndrome. Rather it has to do with the high price of labour, especially when compared with the low salaries (a 60% drop in real salaries in the last twenty years) of Australian academics. Either one lives in squalor, like so many academics, or else one spends one’s spare time doing exhausting household chores. My most productive days, intellectually, were made so by our then being able to afford household helpers who came in seven days a week, or even lived in – unthinkable now, except for the very rich. American scholars are advantaged because they have comparatively high salaries, cheap servants (Hispanics or Afro-Americans, mostly) and even cheaper labour-saving devices.

            When I was an agnostic undergraduate at Cambridge in the early fifties, I was a lone rock in a sea of pious Christians. Even my scientist friends were mostly practising Anglicans or Methodists, though seldom Roman Catholic. Now, fifty years later, my colleagues are all howling heathens (Marxists and poststructuralists) and I am undenominationally religious. Is this merely because I insist on shunning conformity? Or am I ahead of my time, as I was in Cambridge? Will our universities fifty years from now be Christian again? I do not think so. But they might perhaps be less materialistic, dogmatic, ideologically partisan and utilitarian.

            Orwell said of Marxism: “Only intellectuals would be stupid enough to believe such rubbish. Ordinary people have far too much common sense”. I keep thinking of this when I read the poststructuralists, as I did when I used to read the Marxists. Of the two doctrines, poststructuralism is marginally the intellectually superior. I can think of nothing harsher to say of Marxism than this, except that it is always potentially murderous.

            Poststructuralism has never killed anyone, while Marxism has murdered a hundred million or so. “You mean Communism, not Marxism,” I can hear you object. No. I mean Marxism. Communism is simply Marxism in praxis.

            There is often an endearingly batty quality about poststructuralism. At its best – or worst – it reminds me of the theatre of the absurd. Marxism, however, is both darkly prophetic and deeply sinister. One may laugh at Baudrillard but never at Althusser. And Baudrillard would never have murdered his wife, as that Stalinist did. Marxism has an affinity with murder, through long and constant practice.

            Poststructuralist academics tell us that it is true there is no truth and that they know there is no knowledge. Though this is plainly absurd, one will jeopardise one’s career by pointing this out to one’s colleagues. One might as well point out absurdities in Genesis to a fundamentalist or deconstruct the Koran in a Taliban madrasa.

            I was scapegoated for so many years I thought I would one day grow a pair of horns and a tail. My crime? I had been openly anti-Communist in a university where the only political posture allowed was to be vehemently anti anti-Communist. After the fall of Communism, everything changed overnight. The unforgivable sin now was to be anti-poststructuralist, unless one was an unreconstructed Marxist, in which case one transformed oneself into a specialist in ‘Cultural Studies’, a new discipline seraphically free from the taint of Communism, though uncompromisingly Marxist. Alas! Once again, I refused to conform and was scapegoated as before. Will I never learn? And yet the public is duped into believing our universities are both tolerant and innovative. How do I feel about most of my academic colleagues? The way a lamp-post feels about dogs.

            Even Idi Amin, a cannibal who ate his own wife and devoured his son’s heart, had his staunch defenders among academics who believed that black Africans could do no wrong. When I pointed out to an exceptionally naïve university Dean, who was singing Amin’s praises, that his idol was currently massacring the Langi and Acholi tribes, he replied, glibly, “Mass killing is necessary sometimes”, as though he were an experienced Einsatzgruppenfuhrer in a Nazi extermination unit. Academic support of this nature, particularly from British academics, impressed the UN and the OAU, as well as the blundering Callaghan Labour government, and so helped to prolong Amin’s murderous regime.

            Even Oxbridge was not immune from Marxist political conformity and stupidity. When twelve-year old Ruth Lawrence sharply criticized her fellow undergraduates at Oxford, where she was by far the youngest student, for sending a telegram of commiseration to the Soviet people on the death of the brutish Andropov, a former head of the KGB, they attacked her as a ‘reactionary’. This confirmed the aphorism that Oxford is not only the traditional ‘home of lost causes’, but also of many lost intellects, ideologues unable to see even at that late date, that Communism was in ruins and that Andropov, like his predecessors, had been an incompetent, Stalinist bureaucratic killer. Still, one must not be too hard on these befuddled undergraduates. After all, the youthful Miss Lawrence was far more intelligent than they were. And, as Valéry remarked: “L’intelligence ne gâte rien”.

            The Chair of English at Oxford, not surprisingly, is currently held by a leading Marxist theoretician. So was the Chair of English at Edinburgh, till recently. Is Edinburgh now the Scottish home of lost causes, as it was when it housed Jacobites, who passed their wine glasses over their water goblets as they drank the loyal toast, to show their adherence to ‘the king over the water’? Perhaps we could now adapt this quaint custom to Marxism, passing one’s glass over a rapidly falling barometer while drinking to ‘the creed under the weather’. We could also adapt it to poststructuralism, passing one’s glass over an empty goblet while not drinking to an endless chain of sliding signifiers. I should not be surprised to learn that both universities also contained flourishing branches of the Flat Earth Society.

            In academia, to excel at putting forward and extending the views of the prevailing orthodoxy is the only certain road to fame and favour. To question or challenge this orthodoxy is to court disaster, if only because one will find oneself prevented from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. This applies to all disciplines, but is particularly marked in some areas of the Humanities.

            Nowhere is workplace bullying and browbeating more assiduously practiced than in academia. It is done with a  clear conscience, being justified on the noblest, purest, most sacred ideological grounds, like Storm Troopers (Sturmabsteilungsmann), replete with Blut und Boden, beating up Jews.

            Literary criticism used to be well aware of the modest place it occupied in a culture dominated by science. For the last thirty years, however, since the rise of poststructuralism, literary critics with hyper-inflated egos have become convinced they are the Masters of the Universe and Saviours of the World. Megalomania, often combined with pathological narcissism, is now considered not only normal but also the sign of a truly great intellect.

            Aristotle observed that the mark of a wise man was his ability to express complex and subtle truths in clear, simple language. Presumably, he had Socrates in mind. The mark of a fool was to express platitudes in long-winded, pedantic jargon. This neatly places many poststructuralist literary theorists and Cultural Studies specialists.

            Political correctness is so advanced in some Australian universities that Unit Readers come with lengthy Guides attached, warning students about what they must and must not say. As with Communism, everything that is not forbidden is now becoming compulsory. My students habitually write ‘s/he’ where they would once have put ‘he’ or ‘she’. Nobody has told them that they can almost always avoid this ungainly and unpronounceable neologism by simply writing ‘they’. Many of them automatically write ‘sic!’ after every use of the term ‘man’. One even quoted the opening lines of Paradise Lost as: ‘Of man’s (sic!) first disobedience…’ Presumably, she was anxious to draw attention to Eve’s part in the debacle.

            Certain politically correct neologisms (PC-Speak) have been rejected even by sychophantic students anxious to appease their lecturers. I have only once or twice come across verbal atrocities like ‘personhole’ and ‘personhunt’, though some feminist students still write ‘herstory’ for ‘history’. A New York editor – New York is the home of political correctness – once criticised me for using ‘girl’, when I should have said ‘young woman,’ even though I was referring to a four-year-old child. These absurdities remind me of an ephemeral fashion among late eighteenth-century writers for adding vowels to the end of English words ending in a consonant to make the language more ‘musical’. “Thena he leda me to the topo of a rocko”, begins one text. Twenty years from now, we may find PC-Speak equally ridiculous.

            Theory has dominated literary studies for the last thirty years or so. The tail has been wagging the dog. At one time, almost every honours student in the literature programme in my university was writing a thesis on a literary theorist or a French poststructuralist. The bias was just as apparent at the doctoral level, where graduate students concentrated almost exclusively on theory. The problem was that these students had read almost nothing outside theory. For example, it is still disgracefully possible for a student to receive a PhD in English without having read a line of Shakespeare, though at least the latter’s plays are no longer leprously excluded from the curriculum because of his ‘reactionary and patriarchal’ bias. Slowly, however, the situation is changing for the better, with students increasingly moving away from theory. Nevertheless, the damage done to English studies remains and will take many years to repair, for we have staffed many of our secondary schools with barbarous English graduates, heavily oriented towards theory, who have no love for literature, have read few novels and  are ignorant of poetry. Products of an image-dominated culture, nurtured on TV and DVDs, they find reading irksome and thinking difficult.  When they do write, it is with all the grace of hippopotami struggling through quicksand.

            I once knew a mature-age student who obtained her B.A. through baking rich cakes for a greedy but penurious graduate student, who then wrote her essays for her. (Slyly, she never chose a course which involved examination). She was thus effectively awarded a degree in Social Sciences for her skill as a pastry cook. Acquiring a B.A. she told me, was “a piece of cake”. She planned to become a social worker, specializing, one assumes, in counselling tarts and unmarried girls ‘with a bun in the oven.’

            Sex in exchange for good grades – the ‘A for a lay’ system – used to be not uncommon in Australian universities. In modern language departments, it often lent new meaning to the terms ‘oral examination’ and ‘foreign tongue’.

            “I don’t just read,” a poststructuralist colleague of mine informed me, disdainfully. “I interrogate texts”. He was right. Interrogation is generally violent, brutal, disfiguring, elicits half-truths and lies, has no regard for human rights or decency and often results in the death of its victims and their elimination from the canon of suspects.

            Until quite recently, Australian universities were largely run by the faculty, as had been customary since the Middle Ages. Since the advent of the Dawkins ‘universities’ (sic!) in the late eighties [1], the Administration has increasingly taken over, effectively reducing faculty to a subsidiary role. This revolution took place almost overnight, with only a modicum of protest from academics. Top-down management now holds sway in many Australian universities, very much on the American model, thus reducing academics to second rate citizens in their former domain. It is surprising that academics, who are such vociferously impassioned defenders of democracy and liberty elsewhere, should tamely surrender their own democratic practices and freedom almost without struggle. ‘Paper tigers’ is the Chinese term for such people.

            Richard Dawkins, the Harry Potter of Education, who converted nineteen lesser institutions into universities by merely declaring them to be so, had clearly studied J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, as set forth in How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, 1961). Oxford philosophy has a lot to answer for (e.g. T.H. Green, Gilbert Ryle and the egregious Austin himself), but probably nothing more heinous or mischievous than this act of an eleemosynary Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

            Some of Australia’s new universities, especially those established in the heady days of the sixties and seventies [2], remind me of Alan Bennet’s complaint in his play, Getting On: “We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules”.

The Ignoble Prize for intellectual charlatanism among poststructuralists indubitably belongs to Jacques Lacan, a man who was not only a bad, avaricious psychiatrist (he frequently gave his patients two-minute sessions, to maximise his earnings), but an intellectual charlatan of astonishing impudence. Ken Wilber once summarized this mountebank’s life’s work by saying “Lacan showed us that the unconscious is linguistically structured”. As if Freud had not demonstrated that already, a thousand times over! What Lacan really showed us was that if one combines effrontery with obscurity and verbosity, preferably in French, one can always command a following. Lacan is not even a pseudo-scientist, to employ Popper’s term; he is simply inspissatedly pseudo.  To adapt Dryden:

‘The rest to some faint meaning make pretence

But Lacan never deviates into sense.’ 

            Yeats knew that of all things “an intellectual hatred is the worst”, and that “the worst are full of passionate intensity”, especially if they “study hatred with great diligence”, for he had seen what such things had done to Ireland, where “great hatred, little room” prevailed then, as now. It would seem that many academics no longer read Yeats. One does not even have to openly disagree with them; it is enough that your opinions exist.  I note that this intellectual hatred has now been extended to the subject of climate change (once called ‘global warming’), where the vocabulary of the Inquisition has been extended to encompass the ‘Deniers” and “Heretics”, who dare to question the findings of the Holy Mother Church of IPCC. Proof? What need of it? O ye of little Faith! Hath not Hansen spoken?  Yea and Gore Himself! Doth not Consensus prevail?  Actually, it doesn’t, for there exists a petition signed by 32,000 scientists voicing their doubts about the True Faith.  But they are as voices crying in the wilderness.

            Nicholas-Sebastian Chamfort (1741-1794), who perished in the Terror, like so many other intellectuals, remarked wittily of metaphysicians that he was tempted to say of them what Scaliger (1540-1609) used to say of Basques, ‘On dit qu’ils s’entendent mais je n’en crois rien’. (They are said to understand one another, but I simply don’t believe it). One could say the same of many academics today.

            Dr Johnson once observed, acidly, that the learning of the Scots was “like bread in a besieged town; every man gets a little but no man gets a full meal”. This is a fair description of learning in most of our universities nowadays. The smorgasbord of courses offered to students all too often produces nothing but intellectual flatulence, for, like junk food, the dishes offered are based not on their intrinsic nutritional value, but upon their mass appeal. Courses which fail to attract the requisite number of students as determined by the Administration are simply discarded, on economic grounds.

            Zhuang-zi (3^rd century B.C.) said: “Human life is limited but knowledge is limitless. To drive the limited in pursuit of the limitless is fatal and to presume that one really knows is doubly so.” Here Zhuang-zi anticipates poststructuralism by over two thousand years. This is rank defeatism. Even though the first sentence is true, the second one is false. There can be no turning back, no regression to the false bliss of pre-lapsarian ignorance, no refusal to admit that reality exists independently of us and that through countless millennia of suffering and striving we have evolved true explanations of it. If our universities ever forget this, as the Humanities and Social Sciences appear to have done, they will decay.  As the Arabs say: ‘A fish always rots from the head down.’

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[1] Dawkins, when Minister of Education in the Hawke government, oversaw the overnight conversion of some nineteen teachers’ colleges into universities. This magical transformation doubled the number of Australian universities to thirty-eight, thus permitting the entry into tertiary education of large numbers of students who earlier would never have been able to gain admission, while elevating former college teachers with neither higher degrees or publications to University rank. To achieve this, standards had to be drastically lowered, except in the areas where they had to be maintained for fear of dire consequences, such as in medicine, dentistry, engineering and other subjects where the presence of ill-qualified practitioners would threaten the health and safety of the governing class itself.

[2] “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was to be very stoned” (Wordsworth, adapted).  Later, it was deemed inexpedient to keep up standards in medicine, since Australia was short of doctors.  The solution?  Base entry to medicine not on intellectual ability but on so-called psychological fitness, thus enabling universities to admit students who complied with fashionable, politically correct criteria.   Never trust a doctor under forty!

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM