Claire Lehmann: evaluation

Transcript context

…How did at least some parts of American higher education get so screwed up in the first place? Structurally, what went wrong? Is it that campus life is somehow toxic? Is it the intersection of the university and some new technologies? What’s your take? I think the setting up of women’s studies departments in the 1970s was a big mistake because, if you look at other humanities disciplines, they’ve been developed over hundreds of years, and they developed scholarly foundations. History has its scholarly foundations in things like the dialectic, and then you’ve got philosophy, and even English literature had a solid grounding in a very long history. If you create departments virtually overnight, as they did with women’s studies, when theories become popularized by the departments, and the departments don’t have a very strong, solid grounding in scholarly principles, then these faddish theories such as poststructuralism and deconstruction are going to be able to take root much more quickly and easily than they would in some of the older disciplines such as history or philosophy. But do those actually influence anyone? On your list of worries about the United States or the world, how high should they be? “Well, too many people believe in poststructuralism or postmodernism.” Young people vote at pretty low rates in the US, as you probably know, and maybe they’ll vote Democratic to a disproportionate degree, but that possibly would be the case anyway. Why does it matter so much?…

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