Response to Ellmers

 
I am grateful to Glenn Ellmers for his thoughtful remarks on my short piece, “How to Be an Elitist.” I had attempted there to encourage young people to demand more of themselves than our regime typically expects, and Ellmers helpfully supplemented this encouragement with a sober warning about “the deranged moral fervor animating America’s knowledge class.” I therefore agree with him that my brief essay “ignores the ways in which our country has become not more lax, but more repressive”—that it “says almost nothing about these developments.”  Even the word “almost” seems too charitable of him. At any rate, he is quite right.

But Ellmers might have attended a bit more to the circumstances of this little essay, as discussed in its fourth paragraph. There I mention how this snippet of writing emerged from an afternoon of conversations with high school students interested in attending the University of Austin. The piece means to address such young people and their parents.  Students and parents are well aware of the repressive tendency Ellmers identifies, of the ideological literati littering our college campuses.  

They want a less ideological alternative, to be sure, yet they are also attracted to our merit-based admissions and rigorous fight against grade inflation. I wanted to articulate the role our Great Books curriculum plays in countering the ubiquitous lowering of standards.

I also had very little space. I cut the piece down from roughly 1,800 words to about 1,500, still well above the 1,200 requested.  An even shorter version will be published as an advertisement in an issue of The New Criterion this fall. It will omit even more. So these things go. But Ellmers will be happy to know that I offer a much longer and more thorough treatment of these issues in my forthcoming book, Bare Ruin’d Choirs, due to be published in January with Political Animal Press.

There I devote a whole chapter to the current state of the academy, followed by a chapter that articulates how a Great Books education can counter not just the moral flattening but also the ideological zeal of our time. I offer in closing a brief excerpt that speaks to the concerns Ellmers raises:

Think of what a faculty member today is, how she is made. At a minimum, her education comprises a decade of training and habituation to interpret every experience—past, present, and future, but especially past—through an ideological lens, with ever-greater inventiveness and ever-finer granularity, so that no fact, no matter how contrary to her thesis, escapes explanation under the framework of her ideology. It is impossible to surprise such a human being. A decade of training, followed by many more of employment in an actual university, during which tenure she produces reams of “scholarship,” and what sort of person emerges? The most sophisticated, conspiratorial asset any regime could ever hope for, skilled at usurping, yes, but when that fails also ready to inform on the student who resists submission. Faculty were once students, of course, young and disaffected, also curious, misdirected and now misdirecting their likes. I cannot help but have some sympathy for how foolishly they’ve squandered their lives. But our sympathy should certainly stop short of subsidizing their corruption of that precious treasure, the souls of our aspiring youth.

Here as elsewhere Ellmers will find much to his mind. I look forward to his glowing review.