When I signed up for the course, I expected to learn all about the evils of consumerism, but by the end of the course I found myself coming to the conclusion that consumption isn’t all bad, and when done right it can be positively good. I felt that this was the conclusion I was supposed to reach from the readings and discussion, and that was the conclusion I reached in my final paper. I don’t think it would have affected my grade if I had reached the opposite conclusion, although accepting Schorr’s arguments against consumerism wholesale might have betrayed some shortage of critical thinking.

Ultimately I felt that the fact that I perceived the course to have a message and a direction made me more interested in and engaged with the material, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Similarly, if we were going to get Timothy Burke’s curriculum and pedagogy reforms, I could be persuaded to report it. But from the look of things, we are going to get ACTA’s or Horowitz’s or somebody similar’s, and those are reforms I cannot support. Mainly because the drive I see is to impose a new orthodoxy to replace the one that they (ACTA, etc) perceive to exist at present.

I’m mostly an interested spectator in this discussion. Friends are academics, and I work with a reasonable number of people in the think-tank world–political scientists and international relations specialists, mostly. So elite US universities are something of a nearby neighborhood. It’s not close enough to really repay extensive involvement, but it is worth keeping half an eye on. I hope that my outsider’s perspective is occasionally useful.

In short, are things left-of-center bias, while things right-of-center are not?

Burke is a paid-up member of the Angry Left that is destroying the civility of the Internet.

made me laugh out loud.

One of these days, you would think that these bloggers might wonder why they need to mischaracterize other people’s arguments to make their own seem superior. If they are so right and everyone else is so wrong, it should be possible to make this evident without lying quite so much.

For me, the best possibilities of academic life are realized in an appreciation of nuance, complexity, subtlety, depth.

I mostly agree with you; my tastes certainly run toward liking complexity. However, sometimes it is important to look at systems and patterns, not at details. To take a fairly egregious example, look at slavery in the American South. There is lots of nuance and complexity possible; there were plenty of slaves who were well treated, loved their masters, continued to work for the same people after emancipation, etc. There were plenty of slaves who were punished brutally whose punishments were fully deserved. But to look at slavery and say, ‘Well, each case is different—you have to look at each case in context,” is not a good response. At some point, you have to say, “This system is a bad system; here are 10 egregiously bad examples.” The point is not to examine any of the 10 examples carefully; the point is to say that this system is a problem.

To me, criticism of academia and academic responses to that criticism seem to be making the same mistake. They are arguing over details, when the question is, “Is there a systematic problem?” To that question, I’m inclined to answer yes—but I don’t know for sure.