Note: The following is the full text of my letter to The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscriber site), of which a heavily excised portion appeared in the August 13 edition.
To the editor:
Donald Lazere writes in the July 2 Chronicle Review that “the only way for you to find out who is telling the truth is to become a scholar, tracing the authenticity of these claims back to primary sources.” This he demonstrates by inventing an absurd claim, then arguing that his opponents won’t admit that claim because it exposes their true agenda.
For example, Lazere writes that conservative “culture warriors … dare not admit that the greatest detriment to humanistic education is the commercial pressure imposed by corporations.” Later, they “evade admitting that all of the branches of universities devoted to serving corporations, the lucrative professions, and the military through job training and research … also indoctrinate students in pro-management, anti-labor, anti-government (but pro-military) ideology.”
What Lazere seems to practice is that if a scholar can allege that his primary sources deliberately evade the truth about themselves, then he need not base the authenticity of his claims upon their own words. It’s part ad hominem (my opponent is a liar) and part straw man (actually, my opponent instead holds this easily collapsible belief). Such thinking is common among those who rely on grand conspiracies to explain world events. They know a member of the conspiracy can never admit its true nature, and anyone who won’t admit the conspiracy’s true nature is a member.
The grand conspiracy according to Lazere is the one responsible for “most students hav[ing] been saturated in corporate ideology.” It’s a cabal comprising large corporations along with the coy conservatives, university administrators and trustees, wider pop culture (even “pop songs, TV shows and movies [that] have ostensibly liberal themes”), and parents, especially the fundamentalist Christian ones. Truly a pervasive conspiracy in which the Ford Foundation, “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” and Ma and Pa Baptist move in concert! Indeed, even Ockham’s Razor appears to be a tool of the hegemon.
Having denuded the conspiracy’s membership and agenda, Lazere recounts their beliefs — largely secondhand, of course, given their untrustworthiness in speaking for themselves. He does allow a quotation of David Horowitz, although apparently only to bolster the predictable reductio ad Hitleram upon which the campus socialist’s guide to argumentative rhetoric relies so heavily: “Horowitz’s advice to conservative politicians … could have come out of Mein Kampf.”
Lazere then spends several passages on his Everystudent, Richard, the Limbaugh listener whom he rescued by teaching him the scholastic value of investigating primary sources. That’s a mere three paragraphs before he again discards them, specifically “the pious avowals by conservatives of Horowitz’s ilk that they are concerned to preserve academic freedom for liberals and conservatives alike,” in favor of his own suspicion that the conservatives’ unstated, “cynical intent [is] to unleash the most ignorant forces of the right in hounding liberal academics to death.” (Say, who’s being cynical?)
An optimist would surmise from Lazere’s anecdote about Richard and the news of Lazere’s forthcoming book on argumentative rhetoric that perhaps the old chestnut holds here: Those who can’t do, teach.