Intelleftuals

How an academic discipline transmits ideology to students

A rhetoric is a set of rules that attempts to naturalize – an ideology – to make one particular arrangement of economic, social, and political conditions appear to be inevitable and ineluctable, inscribed in the very nature of things

-James Berlin (Rhetoric Review, 1988)

If you’ve noticed leftist rhetoric in academia and media seeking to naturalize certain concepts, like ignoring sexual biology in favor of transgenderism in K-12 schools or using the antiracist term whiteness to describe racial disparities, then you have stumbled upon what rhetoric and writing scholar James Berlin (1942-1994) referred to as rhetoric and ideology - words (CRT and media) and behavior (DEI and ESG officers) - to make obscure academic concepts seem inevitable and part of the very nature of reality: top-down, trickle-down superimposition of the highly theorized version of reality that overwhelmingly skews from reality.

For example, my discipline supposedly speaks for minorities, yet it excoriates or ignores black conservatives while Pew research and Gallup surveys repeatedly show only 3-4% of Hispanics would use the ‘emancipating’ academic term Latinx to initiate their supposed liberation from oppression. It claims to promote ethnic diversity yet lacks a theory and gauge for assessing the ethical impact of its theories on minority students and white people who don’t conform to or express their socially just cultural white roles. This dehumanizing drama often comes off as cultural cosplay as we all try on, and are compelled to try on, reductivist guilt-induced versions of ourselves that bear no resemblance to our lived realities.

In Intelleftuals, I will also discuss their debilitating impact on me personally because no one in my courses approached our theories with an approach to disconfirm the theories or simply question their premises and justifications…or their effects on people. Being gaslit and derided for my physical appearance as a white male, as the villain of all the problems the scholarship identified in society, was an ostracizing, mind-forged manacle that depressed my motivation and spirit for research and being enrolled in my Ph.D.. Not only did students and professors not question the theories, they berated my attempts to offer alternate explanations and disconfirming data for racial and gender disparities other than systemic discrimination in society, for instance.

The common social justice, intersectional, queer, antiracist approach to reality and scholarship I observed does not welcome or permit disconfirmation. In fact, inasmuch as disconfirmation is associated with objectivity, and objectivity with dominant colonial and patriarchal narratives about American society, disconfirmation and objectivity are considered to be manifestations of whiteness. According to Berlin’s definition of ideology, my peers argued their narratives were not just liberating but speaking to the very nature of things. Naturalizing. If anything was oppressive, emotionally and intellectually, it was their guilt-based narratives of me.

Their racially essentialized definitions of me lowered my sense of self-worth and efficacy, decreased my motivation to research at an R1 institution, weakened my desire to be in academia, and made me incredibly cynical about the discipline. I had to silence myself on a daily basis, scrub my arguments of any hint of dissension, reconfigure myself in order to make it through any discussion because I couldn’t challenge a theory without epithets being thrown at me. As close to doublethink and Newspeak as I have ever come in my life. Who would willingly invite verbal harassment on a daily basis? How was I to learn how to teach rhetoric and writing when ad hominem fallacies were how my arguments were to be engaged with by doctoral students and professors? Everything we read could only prove social justice in their minds. Could only conclude the antiracist way. I could not identify as the Latter-day Saint Christian I was my whole life but as a culpable caucasian - that’s how I was to center my identity during the Ph.D. never mind having done so over several years at other campuses and found the theory wanting.

If you know anyone who might resonate with what I am describing, and if they are attending university this Fall, then please share this post with them. I’m about to begin my dissertation after two grueling years of courses on top of 2 previous years of grad courses at CSUSB. Having been a graduate student in 3 degrees since 2012 until now, this project is something of a graduate student’s guide to surviving the stifling nature of campus culture in the Humanities at least. As a parent of 4 K-12 girls, this will also serve as a parent’s guide to understanding what your kids and undergraduate students are exposed to in school.

Intellectual as Occupation

In Intellectuals and Society (2011), Thomas Sowell defines an intellectual as an occupational description rather than a label or title (6). Seeing intellectuals as an occupation opens a discussion of their impact on broader society in addition to campus culture and distinguishes between obscure intellectuals and public intellectuals, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Noam Chomsky, or Robin DeAngelo. While easier to discuss the historical and current public intellectuals and the impacts of their specific ideas and societal solutions, I will discuss the work of the unread everyday intellectual that often escapes public scrutiny because no one reads their work unless you’re like me and you’re in the discipline reading articles behind journal database paywalls. It is in the work of the everyday scholar that we will see how the ‘naturalizing’ intelleftual rhetoric took shape over decades in my discipline, students’ minds, and campus culture.

What is an Intelleftual?

Intelleftuals is my portmanteau of ‘left’ and ‘intellectual’ to describe the impact of the established ideology that emerged from the imbalanced ratio of liberals and progressive faculty to conservative faculty in English (48:1) and other humanities disciplines (Langbert 2018) - and that many university students are exposed to and invariably absorb. That’s Berlin’s naturalizing effect at scale of the everyday intellectual as opposed to the effect of the public or famous intellectual.

This Intelleftual subproject will explore the decades-long attempts to naturalize academic rhetoric and ideology within my English Studies discipline and American society. I will also narrate my ongoing experience within this setting beginning with my version of an English Studies research method known as counterstory methodology and an academic poem in the next post.