How Academics Destroyed Academia

A fed-up Marxist humanities professor is sick of what the Left has done

Tyler Austin Harper, humanities scholar at Bates College

I’m coming at you with an extra post today because I’ve just read an extraordinary thread by Tyler Austin Harper, a young black Marxist humanities professor at Bates College in Maine. I met Tyler earlier this month at an event in Vienna, and we got on well. Went to dinner, and had a grand time. He’s from small town Pennsylvania, and though he’s an actual Marxist, and I ain’t, we had a lot in common. I’d rather spend the evening drinking beer with him than with a lot of other dudes who share my politics.

I think with this thread, you’ll see why:

Standing and cheering. And he really does believe this, because he shared a version of this with me over dinner a few weeks back. It turns out that he had a lot more in common with a right-wing white guy from a small town in the Deep South than with many of his colleagues in academia who share his politics, but who have a deep aversion to people as they actually are. For my part, I had more in common with a nice young black teacher who believes in Karl Marx, but who loved talking about the stuff of daily life, like how much he was looking forward to becoming a dad in a few weeks, than I would with keyboard warriors of the Right who demonize all people on the Left.

Anyway, Tyler Austin Harper is profoundly right about all this. I’m someone who loves the humanities, and might have made a decent professor of history once upon a time, but who am now so very, very glad that I did not enter academia. It’s not just America, either. Here in Hungary, the Left grumbles about the Orban government having contributed a big chunk of change to creating Matthias Corvinus Collegium, an educational institution that is generally center right, but not ideological (I know this, because I do events with them). They brought over the anti-woke secular leftist professor Peter Boghossian a year and a half ago, because they believe he’s an interesting thinker, and wanted the students to learn from him. Peter traveled to MCC branches all over Hungary, talking about whatever he wanted to talk about. He told me nobody ever told him what he could and couldn’t say. He found he was far more free to teach and speak at Hungary’s MCC than at his woke state university in Oregon.

Well, leftists in Hungary hate Orban for MCC. Whenever I find myself around them having these discussions, I point out that there are something like eight other universities in Hungary, all publicly funded, and all on the Left. This, even though about 60 percent of the country — that is, taxpayers — supports the conservative government. Why is it unjust to have an educational institution (which isn’t even a full university) that is not wholly dominated by the Left? The answer seems to be that there is a tacit understanding that academia belongs to the Left, and any questioning of that is intolerable.

Well, if that’s how you want it, don’t be surprised if you lose the people. I’m reminded of this passage from Peter Turchin’s book End Times, which Rob Henderson posted tonight. It’s about how the elites who wrecked the institutions that kept their societies grounded, and then were shocked when it all fell apart:

This is what Tyler Austin Harper is talking about with regard to the humanities. But you know, it applies to entire societies too. I’ve been startled by the reaction I’ve had in the past week when I tell smart friends in Europe, the UK, and the US, about the recent poll showing that 60 percent of Americans surveyed assign negative connotations to the word “democracy.” It’s all like, “Yeah, me too.” I’m not kidding. And then I hear intelligent explanations for why democracy is on its last legs — all of them having to do (whether or not my interlocutors know it or not, though most seem to) with the fact that the elites who are in charge of things run everything to suit their interests alone, and denounce as “undemocratic” (and bigoted) beliefs and policy preferences that they dislike. What I’ve been hearing from folks this week is that classical liberalism only really works when most people are committed to trying to maintain some kind of neutral public square. That’s over.

For me, watching how quickly so many young people, as well as educated elites, jumped on the Gaza train, and dismissed the mass murder of Jewish civilians, was the most blackpilled I’ve ever been about the future of our democracy. It’s not that people sympathize with Palestinians. It’s not that at all. It’s that the deliberate targeting of 1,400 defenseless civilians, including children and babies, for up-close-and-personal torture and murder, has been easily and swiftly justified by a hell of a lot of people, all for the sake of political ideology. It’s how we have been harangued and fiercely catechized for years and years about the evil of racism, including anti-Semitism, but boom, progressives have embraced full-throated Jew hatred of the sort that if a peep of it was heard from right-wingers, our liberal media would have had a grand mal seizure. Young progressives have been trained to believe that bigotry is just fine when it’s for the Left.

Conservatives have been banging on pointlessly about left-wing hypocrisy for years. Woody Allen made fun of this in Annie Hall. But now it’s real, and it’s justifying mass murder of defenseless people, including children, by Jew-hating fanatics.

Is this the point to which liberal democracy has brought us? Does “progress” for the progressives mean legitimizing ethnic slaughter for political reasons? The fact that Germany, in its day the most technologically and culturally sophisticated nation on earth, succumbed to the most vicious barbarism imaginable on an industrial scale, just shows how easy it is to abandon civilization. I’ve said it here many times before, but it can’t be said often enough: the Final Solution did not just arise overnight in Germany. Long before Hitler came on the scene, the German media, and German elites, were seeding the people with ideas and themes that would find ultimate expression in the Shoah.

For example, the key Nazi concept of “life unworthy of life” first appeared in print in 1920, in a book by two distinguished medical academics. Nineteen years later, Hitler began involuntary euthanasia. The death camps soon followed. In the pre-Nazi years, German pop culture became obsessed with hygiene. It was easy to piggyback references to Jews as vermin who infested the body politic. You see where I’m going with this, and why all this hateful rhetoric demonizing “whiteness” (for example), which found common currency on campus and in our media, has been so unsettling. They are preparing themselves for something evil. You will recall that some years back, when I publicized the fact that Tommy Curry, a black radical on the philosophy faculty at Texas A&M, openly hated whites and speculated publicly that many might need to die for the cause of black liberation, the Chronicle Of Higher Education wrote a big piece about it painting me as the bad guy for noticing and objecting. Now “higher education” has given birth to a generation that took the teachings of dirtbags like Tommy Curry to heart — and are pleased as punch to see Jews get their heads chopped off and Jewish babies turned to ash, for the sake of “liberating” Palestine. Chronicle that, you assholes. You own this. You did this.

I cannot shake the belief that if these horrible cretins — that is, my fellow Americans of progressive persuasion — are willing to cheer for the mass murder of Jews by Palestinian terrorists who want to create a global Islamic state, then it wouldn’t take much for them to be persuaded to cheer for the mass murder of people like me.

This is what the ruling class of the West has done, especially the left-wing accelerationists, but also the right-wing gradualists. They have both actively and passively wrecked our democracy. When whatever horrible thing that comes next swallows them up, they’re going to be shocked. They meant well!

New Yorkers Who Have Had Enough

Strong 9/12/2001 energy here from these working-class New Yorkers — none of whom are Jewish — laying into a Muslim-looking guy who was tearing down posters commemorating the hostages taken by Hamas. Watch and listen to it here. Warning: f-bombs, but brilliantly and justifiably deployed. But these guys are the best. The bald guy tells the Muslim guy that this is America, and he’s free to wave the Palestinian flag, say he hates America, and whatnot — but he has no right to tear down the signs. When the Muslim guy gets lippy, the bald guy says, “I’m dyin’ to put you in da f—kin’ hospital.”

These men telling that scumbag tearing down posters of kidnapped children to hit the road are reason to update Bill Buckley’s well-known aphorism: I would rather be governed by those guys than by the faculties of Harvard, Yale, Penn, and other leading American universities. I could be wrong, but I bet Tyler Austin Harper would be too, or at least he would have to think about it.