Consequences of Leftist Academics in the Workforce

This explains a lot to what happened to the military and the service academies:

An academic critic admitted that he was wrong about the influence leftist scholars would have in mainstream culture.

Russell Jacoby, author and professor emeritus of history at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), wrote a book in 1987 dismissing conservatives’ fears that students of postmodernism and critical pedagogy would wreak havoc on American culture. Now, 35 years later in an article for Tablet, he admits that conservatives were right.

Jacoby said he wrote the book in response to a number of bestselling books in the eighties that speculated that various offshoots of Marxist-derived Critical Theories taught in universities would produce leftist activists that would bring chaos to Western civilization.

“The hordes who took courses in critical pedagogy, insurgent sociology, gender studies, radical anthropology, Marxist cinema theory, and postmodernism could no longer hope for university careers,” he added.

As a result, the leftists who would have become university professors had to join the workforce, bringing with them the “sensibilities and jargon they learned on campus.”

“It is the exodus from the universities that explains what is happening in the larger culture,” said Jacoby. “The leftists who would have vanished as assistant professors in conferences on narratology and gender fluidity or disappeared as law professors with unreadable essays on misogynist hegemony and intersectionality have been pushed out into the larger culture.”

“They staff the ballooning diversity and inclusion commissariats that assault us with vapid statements and inane programs couched in the language they learned in school,” Jacoby continued.

“We are witnessing the invasion of the public square by the campus, an intrusion of academic terms and sensibilities that has leaped the ivy-covered walls aided by social media.”

“The buzz words of the campus — diversity, inclusion, microaggression, power differential, white privilege, group safety — have become the buzz words in public life. Already confusing on campus, they become noxious off campus,” he added.

Jacoby went on to describe the various manifestations of activist-capture in our trusted institutions in recent years, including when the New York Times published an op-ed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton advocating for military intervention during the George Floyd riots in 2020, and the paper’s staffers said they felt that the piece put them “in danger.” The article caused such public outrage that the op-ed editor, James Bennett, was forced to apologize and resign.

“When employees protest that they feel unsafe because their company is publishing an offensive article or book, we know what university courses they have taken,” said Jacoby.

“When the ACLU drops any mention of the First Amendment from its annual reports; when one of its directors declares, ‘First Amendment protections are disproportionately enjoyed by people of power and privilege’; and when its [sic] counsels its own lawyers to balance free speech and ‘offense to marginalized groups,’ we know they studied critical race theory,” he continued. . . . (Read More)

The Takeover (Tablet, 19 DEC 22)
Self-righteous professors have spawned self-righteous students and unleashed them into the public square