Read the Guardian article by Nick Cohen, I posted the link in post 3.
The cuts in arts, humanities and social science courses can be seen as a self-inflicted wound
Sun 30 Jan 2011 00.07 GMT
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony is bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
Easy. The author of the fog-bound prose could only have been a professor in a humanities department of a rich-world university writing after 1968. Judith Butler, to be precise, whose "anxiety-inducing obscurity" led the editors of Philosophy and Literature to declare her the runaway winner of 1998 Bad Writing Contest. Far from joining the judges in laughing her to scorn, however, Butler's colleagues have garlanded her with prizes and acclaimed her as one of the most profound thinkers of our age.
The respect universities accord her is not an isolated mistake. In a justly celebrated essay, Perry Anderson, an intellectual no critic would dare accuse of populism, looked back on the decades he spent at the Marxist theoretical journal New Left Review and bewailed a generation of academics who stuck with "standards of writing that would have left Marx or Morris speechless", and littered their work "with needless apparatuses, more for credential than intellectual purposes, circular references to authorities [and] complaisant self-citations".
No one denies that some branches of the humanities can be explained only in technical language – econometrics, logic and linguistics come to mind. The rest need not be, but no one who glances at the efforts of specialist journals or university publishing houses believes that the majority of academics are interested in making the literary effort a conversation with the public requires. John Carey told me that the overwhelming majority of his colleagues in English departments found the idea of addressing the ordinary, intelligent reader repugnant. They wrote for each other and did not take pains to make their writing attractive. On the contrary: "They tend to use obscure theoretical terms as if to signal their membership of an enclosed order, unconnected with the ordinary world. So the ordinary world wisely ignores them."
The comparison with the medieval church is too good to miss. A clerisy inhabits the arts, humanities and social science departments of the modern university as it inhabited the monasteries of Christendom. It speaks a language the laity cannot understand and cloaks its thought in obscurantist prose for fear that plain speaking will provoke accusations of heresy. Like the 16th-century defenders of the Latin liturgy, it is also wide open to attack.
Civil society is fighting with heartening gusto to protect British culture from the assault from the right. The defence of the few wild spaces on our overcrowded islands has stirred the romantic streak in the national character and propelled citizens who have never protested before to oppose government plans to privatise the forests. When this newspaper revealed that the Conservatives and Liberals were planning to stop the Booktrust charity giving free books to children and to cut school sports, public opinion forced the coalition to retreat from both policies. Philip Pullman's magnificent speech in support of public libraries has gone viral on the net. In the Commons, opposition MPs have accused David Cameron of aiming to succeed where Hitler failed by slashing the output of the BBC World Service, a far more valuable gift from Britain to the oppressed peoples of the planet than half the aid programmes the coalition funnels to dictatorships.
Everywhere you can feel the struggle for public space and public learning hardening, except in the one place where you would expect the battle to be at its fiercest. The government plans to remove state support from all university arts, humanities and social science courses. If they are to survive, they must persuade students to pay £7,000 to £8,000 a year, a task that may be beyond many of them. It tells you all you need to know about the political class's commitment to culture that the Department for Business rather than the Department for Education is in charge of universities.
When I asked how many courses ministers expected to close, its spokesman replied that they didn't have a clue. As with so many other "reforms", the coalition intends to smash up the old system, throw the pieces in the air and then look around to see where they land. Geoffrey Crossick, vice-chancellor of the University of London was a more informed guide. He guessed that expensive creative schools such as the Royal College of Art, Royal Academy of Music and Rada will be in trouble as will many departments in the old polytechnics. Yet there is no public outcry or polemics from artists of Pullman's stature about the threat to art, literature, sociology and cultural studies courses.
By this point, I imagine that readers with books on their shelves will be complaining that they know for a fact that academia produces many fine writers, who might never have been published if the universities had not nurtured them. I am not disputing it, merely saying that those who struggle to communicate what they think and know are outside the prevailing academic culture. To quote the best example of unwarranted superiority I have come across, Dominic Sandbrook tells me that private conversations with academics have left him in no doubt that he could not get a university job in Britain. His potential colleagues would blackball him as a crowd-pleasing vulgarian because he writes histories readers want to buy. Managers would worry that he would not churn out the "narrow and faintly incestuous research papers" government target setters demand.
For all the leftish positioning of "transgressive" academics they have been naive to the point of stupidity about the right. They assumed that Conservatives did not mean what they said and would not take money from institutions which have gone out of their way to alienate the intellectually curious. People write well when they have something say. The willingness of too many academics to write badly has told their fellow citizens that they are not worth listening to or fighting for.
