“The silence of the academic establishment about the corruption of Western universities by postmodernism and post-structuralism has been an absolute disgrace.
I thought Derrida and DeMan and the rest of that crew were arrant nonsense from the start, a pedantic diversion from direct engagement with art.
Fancy-pants post-structuralism was the ticket to ride for ambitious, beady-eyed young careerists on the make. Its coy, showy gestures and clotted lingo were insiders’ badges of claimed intellectual superiority. But the whole lot of them were mediocrities from the start.
Helped along by a swelling horde of officious, overpaid administrators, North American universities became.
the poisons of post-structuralism have now spread throughout academe and have done enormous damage to basic scholarly standards and disastrously undermined belief even in the possibility of knowledge.
The headlong rush to judgment by so many well-educated, middle-class women in the #MeToo movement has been startling and dismaying. Their elevation of emotion and group solidarity over fact and logic has resurrected damaging stereotypes of women’s irrationality that were once used to deny us the vote.
The #MeToo movement has gone seriously off track in encouraging uncorroborated accusations dating from ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. No democracy can survive in such a paranoid climate of ambush and summary execution. This is Stalinism, a nadir of politics.
What I see spreading among professional middle-class women is a bitter resentment toward men that is in many cases unjust and misplaced.”
https://quillette.com/2018/11/10/camille-paglia-its-time-for-a-new-map-of-the-gender-world/