] Academics such as the next secretary of state still
] decorate Washington, but academia is less listened to
] than it was. It has marginalized itself, partly by
] political shrillness and silliness that have something to
] do with the parochialism produced by what George Orwell
] called "smelly little orthodoxies."

[ There's some truth in this article, to be sure. Liberals do suffer from a certain amount of that "consensus effect", which explains, I think, why we say things like "I just don't understand the way people think in rural america."

That being said, I have trouble listening George Will talk about all the institutional barriers to conservative thought in academia, and crying about how marginalized academics have become without once mentioning the crusade of anti-intellecualism propagated by the far right for the past 30 years. You want an orthodoxy to parade around, consider looking to your right, where you'll find the most tightly knit and well organized message machine in modern history.* Message discipline is definitionally orthodox, a subscription to talking about issues only in one way. I'm not saying liberals don't fall into echo chamber mode somewhat, but for fucks sake, "intellectual" didn't become a dirty word by itself.

It must have been hell for Mr. Will, all those years at Trinity College, Oxford and Princeon, surrounded by liberals.

-k

* Will even telegraphs a bit of that message consistency in this article : I see the word "shrill" more often in conservatives' references to liberals than vice versa. It's a keyword perfectly suited to simultaneously discredit the oppositions viewpoint as unreasoning and childish and paint them an irritation, making it difficult to work.]

Academia, Stuck To the Left