The Genteel Touchiness of Academics
by Christopher DeGroot
December 14, 2018
The Genteel Touchiness of Academics
The dubious value academics assign to cultural diversity, I argued in one of my earliest columns, stems from their own peculiar and highly competitive experiences in academe. Although cultural diversity produces nothing so much as strife, like children on the playground, academics feel obliged to pretend everyone else’s toys are cool too, for how else could so many egos tolerate one another? “Pretense is the heart and soul of literature,†my beloved Leopardi said long ago, and the cynical belief is true of intellectual life generally.
Interpersonal pretense easily carries over to group pretense. Just as some trite and derivative scholarship on how Mansfield Park is really just a mask for class interests is supposed to be of equal value to Marjorie Perloff’s brilliant close readings of T.S. Eliot and other poets, so academics are supposed to believe all groups have equal abilities. Thus, lack of “racial parity†becomes ipso facto evidence of discrimination. After all, what else could account for the unequal states of affairs that we find, well, everywhere?
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