Last week, I attended the talk on campus, “The Ecocritical Psyche,” put on by the Evolution Focus Group, an interdisciplinary post-graduate society. A professor of literature from England gave the lecture.
The lecture was a canonical example of the trendy post-modern leftism that dominates departments of literature on both sides of the pond.
It was replete with the buzzwords of extreme relativism: “canon,” “post-colonial,” “text,” etc. The professor thought C.S. Lewis was as significant as Shakespeare, and that you could reject a scientific hypothesis on the grounds that you don’t like it. She even incorporated quantum theory into her argument, apparently unaware of Sokal’s hilarious parody of post-modernism which did the same thing.
Though I know that at least one of the professors present is as dismissive of post-modernism as I am, he didn’t show it. Instead, he very gently tried to guide her into conceding that the laws of physics are real and external to our imaginations. He was out of luck, but that’s academic freedom. She is entitled to pursue her quixotic quest with our tax money. We don’t get to say whether academics study physics or Hello Kitty, nor should we.
Later the same day, I went to Esslinger Hall to see a movie of an interview with an evolutionary psychologist, Kevin MacDonald, arranged by the Pacifica Forum. The noise of protesters outside made it hard to hear, and after a few minutes of MacDonald’s moderate, well-sourced discussion of Jewish intellectual movements, protesters threw stink bombs and were thrown out by the police. Academic freedom survives, thanks to the efforts of a few individuals standing up to violence, slander and threats.
I didn’t dare ask the people at the Evolution Focus Group to come and listen to MacDonald, although he is a lot closer to the mainstream of their discipline than the literary professor. MacDonald is unpopular among academics because he criticizes Jewish organizations. Instead of trying to refute his well-researched arguments for applying Darwinian analysis to the behavior of human ethnic groups, they ignore him.
When organizations like the Anti-Defamation League try to get him fired from his tenured position, few academics leap to his defense.
They should.
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Hysteria clouds good judgement
Daily Emerald
May 11, 2010
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