I spent the last quarter of a century of my academic career in an English Department that was increasingly hiring women–can’t say no, that’s discrimination–and for the pains of our hiring committees these people began to revise the syllabi of the department’s American and English Lit programs so that they would include more female authors. Most of these people were second- and third-rate writers (the best were already in the syllabus, like the best of the males). The pressure point was the continual barrage of anti-heterosexual hate speech that said in essence “You guys need to get your faces shoved in piles of various noxious stuff because, you see, your patriarchy has dominated us females since the dawn of time. This is payback time.”
From that point the tone and professional quality of the department, which was a Ph.D-granting unit, BTW, steadily disintegrated into political infighting and snark.
I mention this particular experience to give some three-dimension to the presence of Ayers on the faculty of the University of Illinois-Chicago (not to be confused with the University of Chicago, which does have a significant reputation unlike UIC). The simple fact of the matter is that the whole program of humanistic education in the liberal arts which has been in the process of being born and flourishing ever since the 15th century, is simply dead. There is left only the exploitation of literary texts as platforms for repetitious attacks on people who are heterosexual, white, male, middle-class. (That department BTW after I left elected one of the worst of these people as chair. I voted against her tenure but got nowhere–the rest of the male faculty was astounded at my temerity, so it’s no surprise that they put her in her feminist spike heels and gave her the whip.)
Ayers’ politics is simply business-as-usual in American colleges and universities in America. Michelle Obama is such a cliche as a product of this sort of education as hardly to be worth the comment. That is arguably the single most dire set of circumstances threatening America’s continual intellectual and political well-being. By the time the general public recognizes the thorough trashing these people are in the business of doing, it may well be too late to recover. Academic professionalism is a slow-growing plant, but without protection, it can wither with astounding speed.
The problem, among other things, is that your typical college professor is a timid soul, and has no taste for a fight. That’s why he went into academe in the first place. It’s still possible to save this biz, but it will take a willingness to endure screaming matches with feminist harridans and the Ayers types of intellectuals. And David Horowitz’ experience on American campuses give us a taste of what that sort of thing is capable of.
