Episode Details

Peter Berkowitz reflects on the 30th anniversary of Alan Sokal's famous academic hoax, which exposed the intellectual decline within higher education humanities. Berkowitz critiques contemporary humanities departments for their ideological hypocrisy: professors claim objective truth is subjective while simultaneously insisting that their own political claims are absolute truths. He references a report from Vanderbilt and Washington University confirming that significant contingents of humanities faculty in core disciplines subordinate scholarship to political activism. Finally, Berkowitz notes that this progressive ideological capture is concentrated among college-educated voters in elite university towns, warning that treating education as political indoctrination severely perverts liberal education. (2)