Theory is moribund everywhere, but Harvard, which sacrificed scholarly standards for expedience, has condemned itself to at least two generations of mediocrity in the humanities, since these people are certain to hire only those who will prop up their decaying reputations.
Harvard students are sadly mistaken if they think the literature faculty currently in their thirties and forties are the best America has to offer. Not one was chosen strictly for scholarly accomplishment. Not one came to Harvard through honest means. They are without exception products of the cliquish conference circuit, a crassly commercial phenomenon that arose in the Seventies, as a result of the recession. Their work, under its hip varnish, is shoddy and shallow.
When will Ivy League students wake up to the corruption that is all around them? The leftist press in America has been grossly negligent in not identifying and attacking the slick career system that has made deception, pretension and manipulation business-as-usual in the humanities for 20 years.
Economic analysis should be the first principle of authentic leftism. Phony, obfuscatory, elitist French theory became the ticket to ride for an amoral, overpaid, overpraised coterie that is incestuously interconnected from Berkeley and Duke to Princeton and Harvard. These days, its pashas pretend to be doing "cultural studies," an amateurish mishmash of this and that, without scholarly command of any area.
Student newspapers, which used to question authority and attack the establishment, have been lazily oblivious to a national scandal equal to that of the Wall Street Junk-bond crash.
The solution is in your hands. You can bring learning back to the center of the university. You can end the era of gimmicky theory. You can demand that quality of scholarship, rather than slick wordplay, be the standard for employment at Harvard.
How? First make the library your teacher. Rediscover the now neglected works of the major scholars of the last 150 years, who worked blessedly free of the mental pollutants of poststructuralism. Mine the reference collection, and master chronology and etymology. Immerse yourself religiously in great art. Refuse to cooperate with the coercive ersatz humanitarianism that insultingly defines women and African-Americans as victims.
Insist on free thought and free speech. Offensiveness is a democratic right. The university should be organized around vigorous intellectual inquiry, not therapy or cozy creature comforts.. Harvard has become a nursing home for kids.
I have elsewhere detailed my proposals for massive reform of the university: an end to departmentalization of literature by nationalities; sex studies, rather than the overideological and unscientific women's studies and gay studies; and a world plan for a truly scholarly and depoliticized multiculturalism, based on comparative religion, archaeology, art history and anthropology.
The liberal versus conservative argument is pointless and passe. Its rhetoric has simply concealed the venality and sycophancy of the academic marketplace, which has in actuality driven the conflicts of the past 15 years.
In the twenty-first century, we will want something new. But there has to be a balance between tradition and innovation. it is my secret hope that the students of the Nineties, in finding their own way, may fulfill the broken dreams of the Sixties.
Camille Paglia is Professor of Humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She is author of Sexual Personae (1990) and Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992).