Academia Follow-up

Many thanks to Helen and Marc for their insightful comments on the last post (What Liberals Think About Academia). A Starbucks buddy mentioned that not everyone is familiar with my two poster children for academic excess, Noam Chomsky and Cornel West. For those fortunate ones, I'll risk spoiling your mood by providing these briefs.

Noam Chomsky is professor of linguistics at MIT. For the last four decades he has blamed the United States for all the world's problems: "war, famine, genocide, even infectious disease." He has called the United States the world's number one terror state, and said that America got what it deserved on 9/11. For this sort of anti-American rhetoric the New York Times has called him "arguably the most important intellectual alive."

Chomsky has been a celebrated radical since the 1960s when he not only protested against the Vietnam war but also defended the atrocities of Pol Pot the genocidal Cambodian. In his book American Power and the New Mandarins Chomsky said that what America needed was "a kind of denazification." He is especially fanatical about America's foreign policy: "The United States has become the most aggressive power in the world, the greatest threat to peace, to national self-determination and to international cooperation." He did, however, like the Communists.

This is the guy teaching your kids if they take linguistics at MIT. And his linguistic theories are just as crazy.

Cornel West is a whole other kettle of spoiled fish. West has elevated the African-American victims-studies program to a political propaganda art form. At Harvard he was one of only 14 elite "University Professors" out of 2,000 members of the faculty. How did he achieve such exaulted status? By producing "hilariously unreadable" books that were given glowing reviews by elite book reviewers. Here is a sample of his writing.

"Following the model of the black diasporan traditions of music, athletics, and rhetoric, black cultural workers must constitute and sustain discursive and institutional networks that deconstruct earlier modern black strategies for identity-formation, demystify power relations that incorporate class, patriarchal and homophobic biases, and construct more multivalent and multidimensional responses that articulate the complexity and diversity of black practices in the modern and post-modern world." AMEN.

Try deconstructing that drivel! Yet West's literary genius pales in comparison to his musical talent as a hip-hopper. In 2001 he produced Sketches of My Culture wherein Cornel recites his antiwhite lectures over a hip-hop loop. Clear thinking Harvard president Larry Summers did not see the value of West's literary drivel and "music" and told him so. The Harvard faculty and the New York Times were outraged that Summers would dare question West's seriousness as a scholar. Summers apologized, yet an unhappy West "flounced off to Princeton, which jumped at the chance to add such a brilliant star to it's academic firmament."

MIT, Harvard, Princeton......save your money, save your children.