It’s rare to hear it all said so explicitly. What if elite academia is exactly as radicalized and ideologically captured and fundamentally no longer fit for purpose as its critics say? What then? The tragedy isn’t that the patients are running the asylum. Academia itself isn’t the victim here. It’s that the academy has failed Americans just when they needed it most. I’ve had millions of Americans watch or listen to my history lessons over the past two years. And I’m a nobody, just some random foreign journalist who moonlights as a part-time history teacher. I produce decently competent history lessons, but that’s not why my stuff goes viral. It goes viral because there’s a vast hunger out there to learn, to understand what’s happening and where the pain and failures and anxieties of this moment come from. And Ivy League humanities departments are too busy tiptoeing around anti-colonial radicals dismantling the hetero-patriarchy (or whatever) to rise to the occasion. Where are the scholars? Where did they go? If you don’t start teaching, really and truly teaching, if you don’t return to believing in history and knowledge rather than ideological grift, then the vacuum will be filled by others. And while I’m enjoying the sudden attention of a curious and grateful audience, the dream of any teacher, it still represents a failure of America’s great institutions.
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