Yale Daily News published a opinion piece--anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war, accusing him of becoming a tyrant, and gets a distinctive Texas locution wrong--by Yale history Professor Glenda Gilmore (11 Oct. 2002). See "Variations on Iraq: Glenda Gilmore" here: <http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=20098"> A Yale history grad student responds to it, via andrewsullivan.com, revealing much much more about Yale intellectual life than one might imagine: "Daily Dish Readers: Welcome to American Studies at Yale---check your brain at the door Posted at: 10/12/02 5:18:29 AM Posted by: HGS Dissident (as entered by poster) What you have seen on display here in this article [Gilmore's linked above] are the consequences of letting race-and-gender airheads infiltrate and then eventually take over a once a stellar department. Can you imagine what it is like for a graduate student like myself, who labored for seven years in a remote part of the world to learn a non-Indo-European language, to find himself under the thumb of parochial know-nothings like Glenda Gilmore? Yale History has unfortunately become the province of such America Studies apparatchiks and their partisan agendas. These so-called scholars are a profoundly petty, unworldly and intellectually average lot. Though they preen themselves with a fashionable thirdworldism, few if any have seriously ventured beyond the confines of comfy academic settings in America and Western Europe. They have risen to where they are by figuring out, way back during their undergraduate days, that honors and riches are available to those who can make themselves adept at uncovering yet more evidence confirming how our dastardly American society at one time in its past failed to live up to the standards of egaliltarian utopianism (that no society from time immemorial has ever lived up to these unrealizable ideals is not up for discussion...). This ongoing activity of unearthing fresh layers of American evil sets the boundaries of their intellectual universe. They are absolutely unable and unwilling to entertain the possibility that there have been or could be non-white, non-male, non-homosexual perpetrators of violence and oppression. When they are confronted with scholarship like my own, which concentrates on the imperial history of a non-Western power, their response is either knee-jerk moral equivalence which changes the topic to American crimes against underprivileged groups, or the contrivance of contorted causal chains which attempt to blame anything and everything that goes wrong in any part of the world on Washington or corporate America. They simply will not acknowledge that someone like Saddam or Bin Laden is possible. The only truly bad people on this planet are Christian Conservatives---and oil men. Gilmore's article is the worst example I have seen yet of this moral and intellectual myopia at Yale. The news is not all bad however. For the past several semesters I have worked as a teacher's assistant and, what do you know, but the message is not taking. Most undergrads are savvy enough to have figured out that their profs are people who could not handle life in the real world---and they are simply waiting them out. It comes as a profound shock to these students when, after a few weeks in my section, they discover that I share their contempt for the naive, hyperbolic posturings of the faculty. The fact that Gilmore included in her piece a plea to Yalies to stand up to Bush shows how out of touch many professors are with the student body. Sorry, Glenda, but your students actually approve of the job the president is doing (wish I could say the same for your teaching....). They prefer his sober reckoning with geopolitical realities to your melodramatic verbage. The only way in which this situation resembles your vaunted sixties is that the young people are rebelling against authority---which at today's Yale means rejecting the nihilistic rantings of tenured hyenas in favor of a level-headed appreciation of America's security needs."
Only if one has a very limited imagination. I doubt that political infighting or disgruntled graduate students are uncommon in any given department of a major university. Does it really surprise you? Gee, it's really admirable to anonymously backstab a peer in your department, rather than having the cajones to openly debate the issue. He/she also seems to have trouble telling the difference between the words "homosexual" and "heterosexual," as I doubt that many people in the department would openly suggest that most "perpetrators of violence and oppression" are homosexual.
BUT Gary, to diminish this as mere departmental "backstabing" is to miss the larger point about systemic, ideological, institutional change, and the hypocrisies of PC within Academe. Many many sources can be cited on his or her behalf, including on this board--including personal experience.
More about the "naive, hyperbolic posturings of the faculty" I think I have mentioned this article before, but it's worth repeating here, as long as we're on the subject. The Professors Profess
