Marxism & the young
To the Editors:
I am prompted by your latest example of mind-numbing, stomach-turning academic prose (that of the amazing Professor Drucilla Cornell [“Notes & Comments,” December 1991]) and your quote from Professor Stanley “Piranha” Fish in praise of this tripe, as well as by Bruce Bawer’s wonderfully scathing review of the awful Columbia History of the American Novel, to offer a new analysis of the reasons behind the rise of Marxists in the American academy.
The usual cause cited, by Roger Kimball and others, is true enough: the ascent of Sixties and Seventies radicals to tenured positions. This argument does not take account, however, of the prevalence of Marxists among new professors and graduate students, who of course are the Tenured Radicals of tomorrow. Nor does it take account of the astonishing popularity of these radicals among undergraduates, who swell enrollments in the latest Claptrap 101 courses hammering away at their Holy Trinity of Race, Class, and Gender.
What those of us sickened by these developments, and by the accompanying decline in standards of aesthetic judgment, prose style, and so on, have failed to note is that Marxism sells briskly to the young and ignorant. It appeals to their traditional and inevitable rebelliousness against their parents; it satisfies their adolescent sense of victimization; and it soothes, if they are white, their adolescent burden of guilt. It is simple, requiring very little intellectual effort and absolutely no subtlety. Like aerobics or