In this essay from 2001, Dennis Dutton (the man who puts together Arts & Letters Daily) responds to Toni Morrison, who suggested that colleges and universities should stop pretending to be dispassionate and disinterested and instead start inculcating their students with values and ethics (the link is to the Morrison lecture).  Now, this is a complicated issue where we can easily forget what side we’re supposed to be on.  The question at issue, I think, is: What kind of values and ethics do students learn in college, and at different colleges?  The answer is complicated, but Dutton offers some nice thoughts on how many colleges are already inculcating values and how those values are, well, dogmatic and forced (this link is the Dutton response to Morrison).

In fact, the most mandarin and exclusionary departments in the modern university are not the sciences or disciplines that traditionally claim some measure of objectivity. They are rather the very departments where denunciations of “objectivity” and disinterestedness are most frequently voiced: humanities departments that traffic in literary theory and Marxified cultural studies. Here obfuscation and jargon reign, normally used to give the dazzle of science to political agendas: theorists mimic rigor and profundity, often to enshroud in verbal fog the banality of what is actually being said.

Consider a recent winning sentence from the Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest: “The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

A better instance of the typically exclusionary strategy of self-aggrandizing scholarship would be hard to find. Whatever the sentence (by literary theorist Judith Butler) means, it certainly is not intended clearly to communicate anything at all. Personally, I get the feeling that we are supposed to lie prostrate before it, as though in the presence of a profound bearer of truth which we, simple souls, are not meant to understand.

There’s no easy solution to this problem of the humanities, except maybe for people who believe in clarity and truth to send their children to colleges who don’t teach and write that kind of nutball prose.