Re: Noam on intellectuals
On Feb 12, 2007, at 7:11 AM, bitch@pulpculture.org wrote:
But Chomsky gets a lot nastier, I think. In a passage Tayssir quoted approvingly, he paints intellectuals as engaged in mutual circle
jerks. I’m sure people are like this, but I can’t imagine it’s all of them. Is
he just talking the Ivies and the big three? Because the intelligent people at universities and colleges across the country don’t act like this.
And a lot of them at the Ivies don’t either. Noam is way too scornful
of mainstream intellectuals for my taste; Henry Kissinger’s crimes
were committed when he had state power, not when he was a Harvard
professor - and he’s hardly representative of the lot. A lot of smart
people teach at Harvard and write interesting books and essays; a lot
of the stuff in the New York Review of Books, which he dismisses, is
thoughtful and enlightening, too. Yeah, there’s tedious crap in the
NYRB, too, and the LRB is a lot more fun to read, but you can just
skip the crap. And sure there are a lot of hacks and timeservers in
the American university system, but that’s true of any profession.
Doug