...Jacoby easily skewers disgruntled conservative critics of social change, such as Allan Bloom, who couldn't even get his facts straight, but she recognizes the left-wing *anti-*intellectualism that appeared to justify his wrath: While campus protests of the late ’60s were generally motivated less by concerns about the curriculum than outrage over higher education’s military and corporate ties, she stresses, a “vocal, vulgar, and stupid” minority of activists busied themselves categorically denouncing the works of Dead White European Males. Their demands partly reflected what Jacoby condemns as “resistance to the idea of aesthetic hierarchy,” which she regards as a regrettably powerful leg*acy that helped shape the proud *anti-*intellec*tualism of celebrity culture *today.
...Opposition to hierarchy, aesthetic and otherwise, which flourished among multiculturalists and other “progressive” descendents of this influential decade, focused much more on rearranging hierarchies than on destroying them. Identity politics and repressive codes regarding speech, civility, and harassment on college campuses exemplify the unthinking moral dogmatism of these putative relativists....
In fact, identity politics, enforced by speech codes, creates highly irrational, unsafe environ*ments for people who violate its strictures, as the three Duke University lacrosse players famously and shamefully indicted for a rape that obviously never occurred might testify. Their accusers assumed their guilt, ignoring the facts of the case and focusing instead on the students’ identity as relatively affluent white athletes, who insensi*tively hired a black female stripper for a team *party.
Unaccountably, Jacoby does not address the virulent unreason of identity politics on Amer*ican campuses today or the pervasive liberal academic embrace of censorship, both of which pose obvious threats to free inquiry and the knowledge of civics for which she longs....