Why Postmoderns Train—Not Educate—Activists

At the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, my article “Why Postmoderns Train—Not Educate—Activists.”

Teasers: Who said this?

We cannot escape our ethnocentric predicament. We must, in practice, privilege our own group.

And this?

You don’t want to build up your opponent’s arguments; you want to squelch them.

This?

Renounce all philosophical speculation and invest philosophical activity in behavior that is political.

Or this?

Teachers should only exercise power for the purpose of social change. The postmodern educator’s task is to train students to spot, confront, and work against the political horrors of one’s time.

That’s how postmodernism uproots liberal education and replaces it with something else. The full article is here.

Update: The editor published the article without the accompanying sources for the quotations, so here they are:

Sources:

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), Chapter 2.

Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 29.

Michel Foucault, Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984). Edited by Sylvère Lotringer. Translated by Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989, p. 51.

Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marxism. Routledge Publishing, 2006, p. 115.

Stanley Fish, quoted by Columbia University law professor Vincent Blasi, who co-taught a course with Fish.

Frank Lentricchia, Criticism & Social Change, University of Chicago Press, 1983, p. 12.

Jean-Francois Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, Translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele. University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 69-70.

Breanne Fahs and Michael Karger. (2016). “Women’s Studies as Virus: Institutional Feminism and the Projection of Danger.” Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender Studies, 5(1), 929-957. doi: 10.4471/generos.2016.1683. See the abstract on p. 929 and the comparison to Ebola and HIV starting on p. 938.