Professor John Ellis Deconstructs

by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

The Dartmouth Review: What do you think of the Ethnic Studies agenda?

Professor John Ellis: Totally cowardly. Those people supporting it, many of them know what a disaster it will be. They’re just completely cowardly about it.

TDR: You’ve been a professor in the University of California system for several decades now. That system has been in the vanguard in terms of advancing ethnic studies and deconstructionist philosophies. How do these ideologies and curricular programs effect campus life?

Ellis: Ethnic Studies programs affect campus life in every way. Universities are fragile institutions. They should be serving truth and knowledge and if everybody is doing their best to do that they just about manage to do it. You can get one scholar so personally commited to a thesis that he’s blind to any faults it has because he’s so personal prestigious commited to himself. Or you can get a student who’s the favorite student of a particular professor being forgiven for rather weak performance just because he’s the favorite student. If you put into a fragile situation like that a brand new very large motive, that motive being what’s conducive to the advantage of women or the advantage of a particular ethnic group, that’s it. The balance just suppenly swings out of control and the intellectual motive, the persuit of truth and knowledge, is just in practice, we know now, just swamped. It loses out. Students are no longer taught to think and reason, they’re taught to feel good about themselves and to feel good about how moral they are.

TDR: How widely spread is the support for ethnic studies amongst academics?

Ellis: I wonder what would happen if you had a secret ballot of faculty. I really think the intimidation factor is most important in these situations. People are terrified that if they vote against ethnic studies, they will be perceived as being against that group of faculty or they will be perceived as being hostile to the interests of minorities. In fact, my own feeling is, that if one votes for those things one is short-changing minorities, and short-changing them horribly. The present climate on the university campus is so inhibited that people do not want to get up and say “Look, I think this is a bad idea for minorities and a bad idea for everybody else. I’m against it for those reasons.” They know that people are going to get up and attack them for being conservatives, for being bigoted, for being anti-minority. This is a very bad situation.

TDR: What is the best argument that can be made for the Western Canon?

Ellis: Briefly, the world since the European enlightenment of the 18th century the world has made tremendous progress in all kinds of ways. It’s made progress in abolishing slavery and the almost eradicating torture. It’s made tremendous progress in stopping one tribe from trying to wipe another tribe out. Europeans have almost stopped doing that. It took them a long time. The one place where this wonderful current thinking comes from is the West. All of the protest movements on campus against the West use the language of the West, the style of the West, and the content of the West. The dumb thing about these people who argue against the West is how Western they are. No-one outside the west would even understand what they’re talking about. They are pushing Western values.

TDR: If the politically correct impulse is counterintuitive, and, as you say, unworthy of intellectual discourse, why does it have such a hold over academics and intellectuals?

Ellis: Well the events of the sixties had a great deal in them that was conducive to the development of this ideology. The dishonesty of Lyndon Johnson provided a massive encouragement for Americans to mistrust their own tradition and their own government. All politicians are a little bit dishonest, but in my book Lyndon Johnson will rank as the very worst president. He was not only very destructive in going massively into the Great Society which poured money into creating dependancy (and we’ve seen the result of that now), but he also at the same time undermined confidence and faith in the government by lying about the war so blatantly and so horribly so whatever that war was to do was fatally undermined by his conduct of it. I think his effect in turning off a generation of young people, making them think their whole society was completely corrupt, was incalculate.

TDR: You were talking about ethnic studies and the politically correct impulse. How does deconstruction play into all of this? Does it just lend some measure of intellectual sanction to the ethnic studies agenda or is it an intellectual force on its own?

Ellis: Deconstruction was in its origins an intellectual game, a game played by ivory-tower intellectuals. It was a million miles away from protest. After all, the basic thesis was, there’s no such thing as stable meaning, there’s no such thing as truth, so obviously there could not be such a thing as truth about politics either. The movement got very popular with intellectuals because it really was a game with no costs. All kinds of graduate students learned the vocabulary and spouted it though it meant nothing. But there came a point when the affirmative action movement on campus produced more and more political militants among students and faculty. Deconstruction no longer played to that crowd. They wanted something different. It then became part of Marxism. Deconstruction became not a general prohibition on truth and meaning, but instead a way of deconstructing other people’s ideas. In fact it became traditional Marxist notion of the underlying ideology of simple beurgois structures. That’s not new, in other words, that’s orthodox Marxism. People say that deconstruction was tied up with Marxism, that’s sort of wrong. What the deconstructionists did was they found a home in Marxism after it became no longer palatable on campus to completely trash all fixed meaning.

TDR: There’s a piece in the introduction to your book where you talk about how you yourself originally supported, early on, a greater emphasis on theory and literary criticism. Obviously what you meant by that has somehow been changed. How did that happen? What did you originally think would happen if scholars took a greater emphasis on theory into their work and why didn’t that happen?

Ellis: Well, theory just meant theory in those days. Theory just meant any kind of general reflection on a situation with a view to trying to understand its shape and outline. And so for example period literature meant a collection of arugments about what was meter and how did it work and what was the relevance of the poet’s intention to the meaning of the poem and what is the relevance of the knowledge of the social context. All those general questions, because they are general, we call them theoretical. They are questions of very broad socpe and questions which are fairly large and abstract questions arising from a particular study, that’s the way any other field uses it. Theory for these people is something quite different. It is a body of dogmas. Traditional theory is questioning process. Theoretical analysis is reanalyzing large bodies of material to see what in fact you don’t wind up with a different sense of the general shape than the one people have had up to that point. Theory is never mentioned in doctrine. People who call themselves interested in literary theory these days don’t even understand what the word theory means.