i just want to know how much time brooks actually spends in "the library reading room".
but really, the main issue isn't even the cheap swipe at academic leftism:
--- The information society is the only society in which false consciousness is at the top. For it is an iron rule of any university that the higher the tuition and more exclusive the admissions, the more loudly the denizens profess their solidarity with the oppressed. The more they objectively serve the right, the more they articulate the views of the left. ---
i mean, why should brooks be upset with academics who "articulate the views of the left" if they are "objectively serv[ing] the right"? speaking as someone with a phd from one of those elite universities, i beg to differ about how leftist all the profs are (two words: donald kagan), but i digress.
no, the central mistake brooks makes is failing to see that institutions like harvard are not at all about "education" when it comes to reproducing and extending the elite. they are about certification and, even more importantly, networking. here we can add the network aspects to brooks's pseudo-foucauldian knowledge/power analysis. if brooks had thought less about berkeley (because he's busy being fixated on his chimeric bete noir, the academic left) and more about the real elite finishing schools like yale, princeton, and stanford, he would have seen that people like W do not get to run businesses and be president because they got education. they get to do those things because they were properly finished. still worse, someone like W gets to go to yale in the first place precisely because he is a member of the elite.
so maybe instead of seeing corporations as a tool of the educated elite, he ought to see "education" (meaning the institutions, not learning) as a tool of the corporate elite, and education (no quotes, meaning training in discipline and certain skills) also as a tool of the corporate elite: training their fucking workforce.
the disingenuousness of it all is really striking, but maybe that's because i still retain some shred of naivete.
j
-- Among medieval and modern philosophers, anxious to establish the religious significance of God, an unfortunate habit has prevailed of paying to Him metaphysical compliments.
- Alfred North Whitehead