On Our Self-Lobotomising Universities
What’s the problem with politicisation? First of all, as Runciman intuited, it is partly responsible for the precipitous decline in standing of what you might call the book-based disciplines. The share of students applying to study humanities and social sciences has plummeted. The principal causes are economic, for sure, but the decline is also self-inflicted. Academics have always been dismissed by right-wing politicians as crazed lefties out to brainwash the youth. I’m not sure the wise response to this charge was to lean into it.
Second, and more fundamentally, it destroys academic standards of integrity and quality. This is not just a by-product of politicisation but a structural feature of it. A political theorist at an elite university told me recently, in mild despair, that her discipline and others have been corrupted by identity-based epistemology: the idea that to criticise a claim on the basis of evidence or reasoning is to perpetuate an oppressive system of power-knowledge that has excluded certain groups.
The point of scholarship and teaching, on this view, is not the pursuit or production of such knowledge at all, but rather the elevation of “marginalized” voices.1 The question is always one of identity, and the answer is always an evaluation of the claimant, not the claim. Is this claim being made by the right kind of knower? Are the students citing the right kinds of knowers? Degrees of marginalisation are directly proportional with epistemic authority.2 (Unless, of course, a putatively marginalized person is saying something that undermines this whole way of thinking, in which case you rip their character to pieces).
It’s not just that some academics are too tired to keep standards up; it’s that an increasingly number of them are opposed to standards on principle. Soon there will be no disciplines, just one grey uni-discipline comprising identity maths and personal experience (“auto-ethnography”). It’s a stupefying approach but an attractive one to many, not least because it is easy, requiring minimal reading or intellectual effort. Few students, and increasingly few academics, have read any thinkers before Judith Butler or Edward Said, and most aren’t very interested in doing so.3
