Going pro with the whining game

The first half of this Yglesias post concerns the lack of fun at Harvard and how we wished they'd serve more popcorn chicken. If I hadn't found the good folk of HRSFA, I might be with him on lack of fun, and back in my carnivorous days, I was definitely with him on popcorn chicken.

But what this old Perspective editor really wants to do is pick a fight with former Harvard Salient editor Ross Douthat for going pro with the campus conservative game of whining about how awful academia is. I haven't read Ross' book, which hasn't come out yet, but the blurb about "the trumping of intellectual rigor by political correctness and personal ambition" raises my suspicions.

The blurb is only a minor datum here. Ross' attack on lefty academic blog Left2Right in the Weekly Standard a few weeks ago gave me a picture of how his career is taking shape. Consider this ridiculous bit about Left2Right's contributors:

These are thinkers, after all, who have given their lives to left-liberalism in its purest, most theoretical form, in which all the significant questions have been settled and the only remaining difficulty is determining how many sexual identities can dance on the head of a Rawlsian pin.

Ross willfully misleads his readers about what these people have spent their lives doing. I know the published work of four L2R contributors -- Velleman, Deigh, Darwall, and Railton. They're all famous for their work on practical reason -- they spend their time arguing about things like whether all practical rationality is means/end rationality, and whether thinking A is the morally right thing to do implies having some motivation to do A. There are huge disagreements between the four of them on these issues, which are at a level of abstraction so utterly removed from contemporary politics as to support no particular ideological stance. (Substantive doctrines about morality do appear at the end of Railton's 1986 paper "Moral Realism", but you'd have to do a lot of extra argument to turn Railton's conclusion into an endorsement of any particular political view.) This stuff about sexual identities is utterly disconnected from any of their work. You only write garbage like this if you're trying to earn the wages of hackery by slandering intelligent liberal professors.

Maybe Ross' book will be accurate in its criticisms of Harvard -- as I said, I haven't read it, and there are plenty of things at Harvard worth criticizing. The rest of the publisher's introduction gives some reason for hope that the book will deal with many aspects of life at Harvard, not just those that lend themselves to cheap shots against academia. But I'm suspicious. The Right is very good at promoting conservative members of generally liberal groups and using them to discredit the institutions associated with those groups. Taste the crocodile tears at the end of this Armstrong Williams column that makes an internal NAACP strategy dispute into a reason to say, "This is a crime. This is a shame. This is the sad state of the nation's most storied civil rights organization." I'm sure there's lots to be gained in being the Harvard man who finds any excuse that exists (and some that don't) to bash Harvard. It keeps the right-wing troops marching and you probably don't even need to be as pathetic a creature as David Horowitz. But it's not a proud way to make a living.