In my graduate student days I took a class from a junior faculty member, Alan Lightman. He was a smart, friendly guy with whom one could have a pleasant conversation. His teaching skills were mediocre but I put that down to inexperience. At around the same time, I had a subscription to The Atlantic Monthly (now just The Atlantic), which was principally a literary magazine with poems, short stories, and book reviews. I remember fondly the one-paragraph book reviews by Phoebe Lou Adams.
I forgot about Lightman until years later after he’d transitioned (not what you’re thinking) into writing fiction. One of his books, Einstein’s Dreams, became a bestseller. It was quirky but not awful. Next thing you know, he turns up in The (now infamous) Atlantic inveighing against academic censorship and defending academic freedom. So far, so good. But it turns out to be an Orange-Man-Bad rant, while ignoring the real threats to academic freedom in the human sciences. Guys like Charles Murray (The Bell Curve)* have been systematically attacked for decades. As Nathan Cofnas wrote, “…imagine if there were taboos in America that limited open inquiry in the social sciences and humanities.”
Mr Lightman complains of “…the unprecedented interference of the Trump administration into higher education, interference that included external oversight of admissions criteria, faculty hiring, accreditation, ideological capture, and, in some cases, curriculum.” perhaps forgetting the massively intrusive role of the government in any federally-funded projects, as if there weren’t already all kinds of government involvement concerning admissions & hiring (Affirmative Action) and accreditation. For better or worse, he who pays the piper calls the tune. There’s a reason Hillsdale College accepts no federal funds.
Mr. Lightman asks the rhetorical question, “Are we now descending from light into dark?” The answer is, “Yes, and it happened several decades ago.” Coincident with that was the descent of the Western intelligentsia into madness. It’s sad to see this cheerful, bright young man transformed into a demented, crotchety old man: in short, a shitlib. Likewise, it’s sad to see a respectable literary magazine turn into a leftist propaganda vehicle.
The full text of the article is behind a paywall but there are no paywalls for me: archived Atlantic article.
*Can you believe it’s been over thirty years since it was published?