I came across an interesting and provocative piece by Mark Bauerlein at Inside Higher Ed yesterday, “The Selective Critique.” It is actually more like two short pieces rolled into one fairly long column. The first part is essentially that the rise of linguistic theory in the humanities went too far and beyond its proper stopping point. The second is that those who used linguistic theory to critique the academy in the past are now inconsistent in turning the same tools on the language of the academy in the present.
An excerpt from the first part:
The theory provided no guidelines as to where it did and did not apply, and so it was stretched too thin. It provided no means for distinguishing between content that was invisible from content that actually wasn’t there. The professors saw implicit meaning everywhere, much of it political or identity-oriented. Persons outside the academy looked at the whole of their exchanges and found most of them uncomplicated and transitory. The surface was all.
From the second part:
One can understand the professors’ defensiveness, but to let it squelch the exercise of a practice that they have at other times wielded so boldly is a breach of their own ideals. Have they lived so long and so closely to “social justice,” “social change,” “queer,” “whiteness,” and “gender equality” that they do not recognize them as loaded terms? Have they imbibed the political currents of the campus so thoroughly that they regard a polemical phrasing in a course description as merely a lively description? By their own instruction, we should regard the widespread attention to race, gender, and their social construction as emanating from a world view and signaling an ideological commitment. When Ward Churchill’s notorious speech made headlines, the professors were correct to cite his First Amendment rights and reprove those calling for his job. But as more information came to light, and his political attitudes seemed to bear a closer relation to his scholarship, academic doctrine demanded that the institution that rewarded him be reviewed. Roger Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, has assured the Commission on the Future of Higher Education that “Faculty members are accountable for their work in many ways,” including peer review of scholarship and grant applications and annual departmental review for salary and promotion. What, then, is the relationship between Churchill’s high ascent in the profession and his discredited writings? Humanities and social science professors work backward from institutional statements to the culture of the institution itself all the time. Why exempt academic language from the process?
His punchline is that this failure to use linguistic theory responsibly and consistently has spawned intellectual errors within the academy (he calls them “intellecutal blunders”) and has undermined the credibility of academics by exposing their uses of theory as being political and opportunistic rather than intellectually consistent.
There is a lot going on in this piece and I haven’t immersed myself in the theory or practice of linguistic theory to judge whether Bauerlein’s critique is sound. Nonetheless, it struck me as a provocative piece that I thought VC readers might find interesting, and I suspect that there are readers out there who are probably more expert on linguistic theory and its application in the humanities to comment on Bauerlein’s critique. Some of the comments at Inside Higher Ed are interesting as well.