We blog much on academia and the banality of its idiosyncratic and nutball ideas.  That includes posts every now and then on the language of the academy and how it can be so far removed from the necessities of lived experience that many people unfamiliar with higher education think we are making it up.  A case in point is that of Judith Butler: “[A] Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, admired as perhaps ‘one of the ten smartest people on the planet’ [...]“  She was also the first winner of the Bad Writing Contest for writing academic prose that only makes sense to the senseless. In the spirit of the Bad Writing Contest, legal scholar Rick Hills made a call, on the Web, for nominations for similar awards:

(1) The Hegel Award: Given to the author whose books’ citations in conversation or footnotes most greatly exceed the number of people who have actually read the author’s books.

(2) The Derrida Award: Given to the author whose IQ most greatly exceeds that of his or her followers.

(3) The Judith Butler Award: Given to the author whose works require effort to comprehend most greatly in excess of the payoff from comprehending them.

As you might imagine, this posting drew ire from the academic mob, who began claiming that Hills was “anti-intellectual.”  And Hill’s response, which was really the point of this equally incoherent post, was perfect.  He says, Absolutely, I’m an anti-intellectual.

In my experience, intellectuals (as a class) are ideologically intolerant, easily offended by ordinary humor, and pretentious in their prejudices, which they disguise as universal truths [...] It takes the convoluted abstractions of a Carl Schmitt or a Heidegger to offer apologetics for Hitler; a Sartre, to temporize about Stalin; a Foucault, to defend Khomeini. In this respect, I stand with George Orwell who spent the 1930s and 1940s denouncing the obscurity of intellectuals’ prose as a cloak for tyranny (and, incidentally, who was also accused of being an anti-intellectual). Intellectuals spray polysyllables like squid ink, to evade the democratic decencies of conversation. I’d like not to be one of their number.

He’s anti-intellectual, not anti-intelligence. 

HT: Phi Beta Cons