This, I think, is extremely important. Very nice and very intelligent people are not only passively supporting (as these two are) the neoliberalising dynamic, equally intelligent and nice people are at the core of carrying it out, even planning it, in various contexts and at various levels. The person who initiated the anti-war group here, a Quaker, a strong liberal, and an all-round wonderful person, supports Obama strongly AND, here's the key, he is the director of freshman composition, and the book that got him his promotion some years ago was a book on how to grade themes. This shit stared in the mid-70s, one of its banners being to rescue comp teachers from the academic ghetto, which required lots of high-powered "theorists" of composition but also a regularization of teaching comp -- somehow all classes had to be taught in the same way, the way taught by the dominant theory. We have here the same fallacy we have in those Marxists who think that a "Theory of Revolution" or "Revolutionary Strategy" may be crafted in advance; also the same fallacy as those socialists who think that a socialist movement needs a "Theory of Socialism" in advance. In any case, I am convinced that "writing" has no relationship whatever to "intelligence" (whatever that is), and that it is a crime against the national intellect to require "passing" a composition course or test in order to obtain a college degree. (I like to image this by suggesting that it is wholly possible _in principle_ that the author of the Iliad, or someone with his linguistic and imaginative power, might just not be able to pass a freshman comp class.
Thanks for your remark on my previous post. It could be of course pure nonsense -- but it does, in a way, make sense of a great deal of what has happened in the last 40 yearsd.
Carrol