Suppose that you had been teaching a subject you loved for years and then you witness an invasion — an invasion of pseudo-scholars who have crazed notions about the discipline. You see them take over at school after school. You find it upsetting.

That’s exactly the story of English professor Nan Miller, who writes about the degradation of the teaching of English in today’s Martin Center article.

She begins, “During the years I taught college English, I had a ringside seat watching a new breed of Jacobins seize control of a university English department, then extend their reach throughout the humanities. Posing as the champions of ‘social justice,’ they have built an empire cultivating ‘victims’—and silencing colleagues who oppose the new mission of the radical left. For four decades they have ruled universities nationwide, but my focus here is upon the hoodoo they have inflicted upon North Carolina’s Big Four universities.”

The trouble erupted first at NC State in 1984, where a new departmental chairman announced a new direction — Marxist deconstructionism. Trendy, hip. Old ideas about teaching English were to be dumped in favor of “progressive” ones.

The contagion spread to Duke with the arrival of Stanley Fish. Miller writes, “Backed by other hotshot recruits, Dr. Fish set about to make the department over in his own image—smug, despotic, and punitive when colleagues challenged his claim that ‘literature has no intrinsic merit.’” Perhaps that has something to do with the steady decline in English majors over the years.

UNC and Wake Forest have similarly fallen to the deconstructivist hordes.

Nothing like this would be tolerated in a profit-seeking business. “Shareholders in any other business would catch on quickly if foolish innovations had scuttled the product. Not so in higher education where the poor value shows up long after investors’ checks have been cashed,” Miller observes.