UCLA Prof Admits Conservatives Were Right to be Concerned About Leftist Influence on Culture
“the dawning takeover of the public sphere by campus denizens and lingo”
The professor notes the way that progressive campus culture has now spilled over into the workforce.
The Daily Wire reports:
UCLA Professor Admits Conservatives’ Fears Were Justified About Leftist Academics In The Workforce
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.
“In 1987 I published ‘The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe’ which elicited heated responses,” said Jacoby. “Only now do I see I got something wrong — as did my critics.”
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.
“I argued that the conservatives should awake from their nightmare of radical scholars destroying America and relax; academic revolutionaries preoccupied themselves with their careers and perks,” said Jacoby. “If they made waves, they were confined to the campus pool.”
At the time Jacoby believed that these academics were too consumed with advancing their careers within the campus walls to concern themselves with public discourse.
“They penned unreadable articles and books for colleagues,” said Jacoby. “They were less subversive than submissive.”
Now Jacoby realizes he “missed something” that was not obvious to him at the time he wrote the book: “the dawning takeover of the public sphere by campus denizens and lingo.”…
“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.”
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Comments
“wrote a book in 1987 dismissing conservatives’ fears that students of postmodernism and critical pedagogy would wreak havoc on American culture”
I’d say, “are you tired of winning yet,” but all our winning seems to consist of being right about the ways they were cheating to steal the substantive wins we should have had.
Thirty-four years late for an “I-told-you-so,” isn’t it?
Depends on how you look at things.
These days, we’re getting used to government lies and conspiracies taking only six to 18 months to be exposed and debunked. But that’s just a recent acceleration. The swamp used to be much, much more talented at their conspiracies. Look at the JFK assassination — that one’s resisted proof-positive exposure for going on 60 years now.
34 years ago conservatives still thought that leftists stealing elections was a joke. “Oh yeah, in Chicago all the dead people vote Democrat. Yuk yuk.”
It didn’t matter that they had already stolen a presidential election in 1960, because nobody liked Nixon (or that they staged a coup via assassination shortly thereafter). It’s finally sinking in: If you don’t stop it when you can, sooner or later it reaches a tipping point where you can’t stop it. We already passed that point.
The term 5th columnist comes to mind.