Thank you for your read and thoughtful response, Luke. As the article indicates—and countless others of my blog reinforce—I agree with your assessment of the anti-science FOX RT and GOPP (Grand Old Putin Party). Gross and Levitt were, however, early to the revelation of our leftist anti-science movement and paramount in driving the examination of this Western illness (China doesn’t have this problem). Gross and Levitt’s 1997 text led to a slightly later conference and resulting book, The Flight from Science and Reason, written by 42 multidisciplinary university scholars; then to the hilarious book Fashionable Nonsense about the even funnier New York University’s Sokal hoax, and Professor Alan Sokal’s later treatment of the anti-science left in his 2008 Beyond the Hoax; then to The Diversity Delusion (2018), and Cynical Theories (2020) to name a few. The relevance of Gross and Levitt’s work seems ironclad by now. Of course, there are right-wing hit pieces about the academy—and Gross and Levitt are a favorite reference for a cherry-picking right—but none of those on the right that I’ve surveyed appear to have a clue about what’s going on in the humanities or why. For the right, it’s merely that “universities are where the libs are born,” hence their defunding of universities across the U.S. by GOPP state legislatures. The problem for me is that the entire university is defunded, not only the postmodern propagandists.

All texts noted above are in the pipeline for discussion here, so I hope you’ll come back for a read when they appear.

Thanks again for your response

Brett