God, this is depressing. (Small point of information: does anyone know which states are the Fourth Circuit states?)
A great many scholars in the Humanities more or less have to argue -- and the more advanced their work, the more they would have to argue this -- that their "methods" and their discipline are very close to being the same thing.
If you are, eg, the great USian social historian Robert Darnton, what would you do if a rightist extremist walked into your seminar on C18 French social history and announced that he didn't want to study things from this suspect "social" perspective at all: he wants to study according to the Great Man theory of history?
What Darnton should be able to do (and I assume still is) is tell the guy he's got the wrong class -- no scholar is required to do everything, and quality of work would definitely suffer if scholars were.
I use Darnton as an example because his politics aren't, in fact, all that evident to me -- he could well be a Republican, for all I know. But it is true that he works at a level of sophistication that would make the righties automatically suspicious -- in other words, he's a serious scholar, and they are incapable of thinking in terms of anything but "bias."
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posted 23 August 2004 10:08 AM
