The author of a Doublethink article claiming that conservatives don’t criticize academia well has responded to the reactions of Travis and me. She dances around our arguments, though, rather than engaging with them — much as she danced around the best conservative arguments in her article.

For example, Travis had pointed out that “fill-in-the-blank studies” majors often couldn’t get into more-demanding fields. There is hard evidence on this — for example, read Thomas Sowell’s essays on the effects of affirmative action; one is that it drives under-qualified minorities into “studies” majors, where they have an easier time. Her only response to this is that, well, she’s in a “studies” department, she’s really smart, and she thinks her department is pretty rigorous.

And never mind that when conservatives bash “studies,” they generally mean “ethnic studies,” not the author’s French Studies department. In addition to the rigor criticism, conservatives often charge that these fields are bogged down in political correctness, racial solidarity, and leftist indoctrination. Of course that applies to some “studies” more than others. Travis specifically made this qualification: “when you use the lens of ‘women’ or ‘Latinos’ to hold together a jumble of disciplines …”

Likewise, responding to my allegations that she (A) picked very few examples, giving no evidence that they were representative and (B) didn’t even show convincingly that those examples were bad, she can only make an excuse that her article was short. In reply to me pointing out that she dismissed an entire issue of The New Criterion with a single quote from the editor, and that the one essay I’ve seen from that issue was terrific, she doesn’t bother explaining why the others were bad. She only says that the essay I suggested is about lower education. Therefore her unsubstantiated attack on the entire magazine must be right.

I especially liked this passage:

For what it’s worth, while I have seen the occasional decent critique of academia from the right, such as the discussion of academics’ tendency to “problematize” rather than answer a question, these are rare, so rare that this is the only one that immediately comes to mind.
I’m still left unsure as to what a conservative critique of academia would even be.

She’s seen conservative critiques of academia, even ones she’s liked. But she’s not sure what a conservative critique of academia is.

She claims she’s read quite a bit in the field (one wonders why, if it’s so bad), but for some reason, the top critics — Roger Kimball doing anything beyond introducing a special issue of his magazine, FIRE or David Horowitz compiling examples of how hostile some radical professors can be to open discourse, Dinesh D’Souza arguing for a “true multiculturalism,” Thomas Sowell on pretty much every aspect of college — never seem to come up. There are many whole books, by these writers and others, on the problems in the academy, but she can only reference a few articles and blog posts. It’s like she says: “Plucking the most absurd examples of behavior in any field and examining them out of context fails to tell you anything substantive about what’s going on.” Except in her case, she doesn’t even show that the examples are absurd.

And again, I’d like to recommend to her John Hood’s piece in the current NR.