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Roger Kimball is the managing editor and most prolific writer of a US based journal called "The New Criterion". He is a graduate of Bennington College and holds two masters degrees from Yale University. One in Philosophy and the other in Classical Greek. The following are some extracts from his papers.
"With a few notable exceptions, our most prestigious liberal arts colleges and universities have installed the entire radical menu at the center of their humanities curriculum at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels. Every special interest- women's studies, black studies, gay studies, and the like - and every modish interpretive gambit- deconstruction, post-structuralism, new historicism, and other postmodernist varieties of what the literary critic Frederick Crews aptly dubbed "Left-Eclecticism"-has found a welcome roost in the academy, while the traditional curriculum and modes of intellectual inquiry are excoriated as sexist, racist or just plain reactionary." - [Tenured Radicals. R Kimball (1990)]
"It is a peculiar moment in academia. In many ways, things have never been worse. All those radical trends that got going in the 1960s and gained steam in the 1970s and 1980s are now so thoroughly entrenched that they are simply taken for granted. Consider, for example, the case of "transgender" students at Smith College. As the Financial Times reported last month, the whole issue of "transgender" is a growth industry at Smith- as indeed it is at many colleges and universities around the country." -['Retaking the University, A battle plan by Roger Kimball' -The New Criterion, May 2005]
The use and abuse of academic freedom to indemnify not the expression of unpopular opinions but political incitement of various kinds is one symptom of the degradation of American academic life.
Academics have an unspoken compact with society. As scholars, their charge is to pursue the truth in their chosen discipline, as teachers their charge is to help preserve and transmit the truth by encouraging thoughtful study and candid discussion….
Is that realm governed by what British jurist John Fletcher Moulton writing in the early 1920s called "obedience to the unenforceable". It is a realm in which not law, not caprice, but virtues such as duty, fairness, judgment and taste whole sway… The abuse of free speech in political debate "We have unrestricted freedom to debate, say the radicals; we will use it to destroy debate.
The contradiction of the domain of manners creates a vacuum that is filled on one side by increasing regulation. Speech codes, rules for all aspects of social life, efforts to determine by legislation (from the right as well as from the left) what should follow freely from responsible behaviour- and on the other side, increased license. More and more it seems academia (like other aspects of the elite cultural life) have reneged on its compact with society. -['Retaking the University, A battle plan by Roger Kimball' -The New Criterion, May 2005]
First, accurate diagnosis then effective treatment. One of the chief tasks for critics of what has happened to academic life in this country is to show the extent to which……deformations are not exceptions but the predictable result of institutions that have gradually abandoned their commitment to education for the sake of radical posturing. The academic culture that breeds and rewards such figures [Ward Churchill Affair] must be exposed for what it is. A thoroughly politicized rejection of the principles that inform liberal learning. The sea is far from full but the current still can serve. The tide ebbing for decades has begun to flow. -['Retaking the University, A battle plan by Roger Kimball' -The New Criterion, May 2005]
In pre-democratic societies, Tocqueville noted, despotism tyrannized. In modern democracies it infantilizes. Democratic despotism is both "more extensive and more mild" than its pre-cursors. It "degrades men without tormenting them". In this sense Tocqueville continued "the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world… It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered but softened, bent and guided. Such a power does not destroy…But it enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies the people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which government is the shepherd. -['Retaking the University, A battle plan by Roger Kimball' -The New Criterion, May 2005]
"The political correct of our day seek to bring about a moral revolution by changing the way we speak and write about the world….The secret hope is by refusing to speak the truth, we can change the truth."
There is also the fact that the odor of malignity, of thuggishness, is never far from the lairs of political correctness. [Political Correctness, or, the Perils of benevolence by Roger Kimball, (winter, 2003)]
One of the points of 'The Joke' (a novel by Milan Kunderas) is that totalitarian societies cannot abide a joke, humor is anathema. Politically correctness is a kind of Geiger counter that registers deviations from the norm of earnestness. Any deviation is suspect, any humorous deviation is culpable. [Political Correctness, or, the Perils of benevolence by Roger Kimball, (winter, 2003)]
Contemporary political correctness, though it may have originated and matured in the academy, is not only an academic product. It thrives in the academy, true, as bacteria thrives in rotting flesh, but political correctness has metastasized.
Perhaps the most stultifying characteristic of political correctness: Its addiction to displays of benevolence, to the emotion of virtue.
"In their pursuit of a better, more enlightened world, PC types let an abstract moralism triumph over realism, benevolence over prudence, earnest humourlessness over patience."
At its centre, [PC] is a union of abstract benevolence which takes mankind as a whole for its object with rigid moralism. This is a toxic, misery producing, gruel.
(According to) Australian philosopher David Stove "Persons convinced both of the supremacy of benevolence among moral obligations and of the supremacy of morality among all things it is this combination which is infallibly and enormously destructive to human happiness.
They mean well, they seek to boost all mankind up to their own plain of enlightenment; inequality outrages their sense of justice. They regard conventional habits of behaviour as so many obstacles to overcome on the path to perfection. They see tradition as the enemy of innovation, which they embrace as a lifelong moral process. They cannot encounter a wrong without seeking to right it. The idea that some evils may be ineradicable is anathema to them. Likewise, the notion that the best is the enemy of the good, that many choices are to some extent choices among evils- such proverbial, conservative wisdom outrages their sense of moral perfectibility. Alas, the result is not paradise but a campaign to legislate virtue, to curtail eccentricity, to smother individuality, to barter truth for the current moral or political enthusiasm.
FOR CENTURIES POLITICAL PHILOSPHERS HAVE UNDERSTOOD THAT THE LUST FOR EQUALITY IS THE ENEMY OF FREEDOM. That species of benevolence underwrote the tragedy of communist tyranny. The rise of political correctness has redistributed that lust over a new roster of issues. It looks in Marx's famous mot like history repeating itself not as tragedy but as farce. -[Political Correctness, or, the Perils of benevolence by Roger Kimball, (winter, (2003)]
When we speak of 'the culture war', we mean a conflict with multiple fronts, different and sometimes opposing goals and shifting allegiances. The dumming down of higher education is part of 'the culture war'. So is the institution of political correctness and the activist judicial culture that imposes the values of liberal elite on more and more areas of life. The culture war embraces what has happened to institutions like the New York Times, which has long since subordinated reporting the news in order to shill for all things trendy; The culture war also embraces the degradation of popular culture, The proletarianization of public taste and the failure of manners.
There has been a steady loss of cultural capital as one educational institution after the next schools, colleges, museums, and so forth waters down its offerings in the name of diversity or popularism. There is some irony in the fact that as education rhetoric proliferates, the content of the education becomes even more anemic. -[The Highest Criterion: An interview with Roger Kimball by Bernard Chapin (2003)]
"I believe one should be forthright in ones criticism. If something is garbage, there is no reason to describe it as discarded domestic food stuffs in an odiferous state of dissolution. It is garbage."
There is a place for dispassionate analysis, even handed enquiry, careful intellectual pluralism. There is also such a thing as the perversion of those ideals. A perversion that is sometimes due to cowardice, sometimes to a desire to obfuscate, sometimes to both. The New York Times is a master of the genre. It prints a highly tendecious piece about some controversial issue but pretends to maintain its even handedness by a token quotation from someone on the other side of the issue. -[The Highest Criterion: An interview with Roger Kimball by Bernard Chapin (2003)]
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