On Feb 12, 2007, at 7:11 AM, bitch at pulpculture.org wrote:
> But Chomsky gets a lot nastier, I think. In a passage Tayssir quoted
> approvingly, he paints intellectuals as engaged in mutual circle
> jerks. I'm
> sure people are like this, but I can't imagine it's all of them. Is
> he just
> talking the Ivies and the big three? Because the intelligent people at
> universities and colleges across the country don't act like this.
And a lot of them at the Ivies don't either. Noam is way too scornful of mainstream intellectuals for my taste; Henry Kissinger's crimes were committed when he had state power, not when he was a Harvard professor - and he's hardly representative of the lot. A lot of smart people teach at Harvard and write interesting books and essays; a lot of the stuff in the New York Review of Books, which he dismisses, is thoughtful and enlightening, too. Yeah, there's tedious crap in the NYRB, too, and the LRB is a lot more fun to read, but you can just skip the crap. And sure there are a lot of hacks and timeservers in the American university system, but that's true of any profession.
Doug