Well, Andrew Hofer and Matt Yglesias have chimed in on the prevalence of an “academic left,” so to keep up, I’ll offer a few observations of my own (which I first posted as a comment on Andrew’s site):

As an undergrad, I didn’t notice much in the way of a liberal slant to my classes — but then, I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention in those years, busy as I was wondering how I could scrounge up the $2 I figured I’d need for dime draft night at Gator’s.

By the time I got to Hopkins I became more aware of a left tilt — but only in isolated cases (for instance, I remember taking a course on the fairytale that was profoundly politicized, with every bauble a sexual emblem, every forest creature an oppressor of some kind). It wasn’t until I came to Colorado to pursue my doctorate, though, that I really noticed the slant. My erstwhile (correct, Andrew?) blindness to the politicizing of literature (my field is lit. and writing) was a result, it turns out, of the way I believed language to work (I’m an intentionalist, a position reinforced by my fiction writer’s ego). Intentionalism, though, is a “position” (like formalism or structuralism) that I soon found was, uh, not favored (to kid glove it) by my peers, or by the faculty, or by most prominent theorists working in my field.

Still, by the time I was doing specialized work in interpretation theory at the Cornell Theory school, I was more convinced than ever that my intentionalism was theoretically solid, and so I trotted it out as a challenge to every half-baked interpretive paradigm offered up by some scholar hoping to cash in on an increasingly entrenched cultural materialism / new historicism. Not surprisingly, every discussion wended its way to politics, and not surprisingly, the cultural materialist paradigm was heavily leftist, while the intentionalist paradigm proved far more conservative, based as it is around the originary intent of an utterance (and so, by extension, personal responsibility).

Is it any surprise, really, that those who believe language does whatever they wish it to do would also believe that facts are constructs, and so any marshalling of “facts” is in and of itself a political act? It follows, then, that if a photograph of three firemen is a political act, then a competing political act is to replace those firemen with “revised” firemen fitting a “diversity” paradigm, say — with no loss in intellectual integrity.

From the perspective of lit studies, I’ve found that for the most part I can divine a person’s politics by his/her idea of how interpretation works.

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