Kevin MacDonald: Minnesota's German Studies Disaster

Kevin MacDonald: My fate in life is to work at a university. What that means right now is to be completely immersed in the culture of the left. Trudie Pert’s current TOO article shows that in the humanities right now it’s all about queer theory and the Frankfurt School, with supporting roles for psychoanalysis and Marxism. Prof. Ruth Joeres describes her course:

In this course the contributions of ‘German’ women of ethnic heritage such as Afro-German, Turkish-German, Japanese-German women are studied. What does it mean to be called, ‘German”? 

We can guess that it has nothing to do with being ethnically German. In the eyes of these people, Germany too has doubtless become yet another proposition society.

And then there’s professor Morris (Moskowitz) and her idea that fraudulent Holocaust memoirs are to be preferred to the real thing because they are more moving. (Why does a Jewish activist in a department of Jewish/German Studies use a non-Jewish sounding name? I can understand why Jewish communists did it in the 1930s or post-WWII Eastern Europe, but why now?) And Prof. Zipes and his campaign to  the minds of young children. My favorite title: “Down with Heidi, Down with Struwelpeter: Three Cheers for the Revolution: Towards A New Socialist Children’s Literature in West Germany.” In other words, down with every vestige of traditional German culture. 

The academic food chain is starkly obvious here. Pert notes that the professors at Minnesota received their doctorates at elite Eastern universities, and their students will staff the second-level colleges, universities, and K-12 schools throughout the mid-West. It’s a top-down system, with zombie-like grad students emerging to carry on the revolution of the left at the lower levels of the educational system.

What’s striking is that Jews and other non-Europeans wear their ethnic identity and sense of victimhood proudly and explicitly. The Whites typically have their own sense of victimhood — as gays or as women. In my experience, the heterosexual White males become adept at effusive expressions of guilt in order to be accepted into the system. In this culture of victimhood, all the rewards go to those who make alliances with other victims.

It’s easy enough intellectually to point out that gays and women have ethnic interests too, and that White identity and interests are entirely legitimate. But getting academics to think and act on that basis means disrupting mutually reinforcing networks where all the rewards come from allying oneself with the culture of victimhood.

And it means that real change must start at the top of the academic food chain. In the social sciences, one clings to a hope that this could happen because there is still a scientific tradition with some power. But in the humanities, it’s a lost cause. The triumvirate of the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis, and Marxism is impervious to scientific findings and is intensely political; it will strenuously resist significant change. The revolution will have to happen without a very large part of the educational system.