I agree with a lot of this Joseph Rago column in the Wall Street Journal (now there's something I don't say often), which details the story of Priya Venkatesan, a professor at Dartmouth. Venkatesan left the school for Northwestern and threatened to sue her students (along with her bosses) for violating her civil rights due to their "anti-intellectualism" after they were less than receptive to her ideas.

While I'm not familiar enough with the story to be able to tell whether Rago's slanted (though entertaining) telling is accurate, I'm more interested in what he says near the end of the piece:

That said, even at – or especially at – putatively superior schools, students are spoiled for choice when it comes to professors who share ideologies like Ms. Venkatesan's. The main result is to make coursework pathetically easy. Like filling in a Mad Libs, just patch something together about "interrogating heteronormativity," or whatever, and wait for the returns to start rolling in.

I once wrote a term paper for a lit-crit course where I "deconstructed" the MTV program "Pimp My Ride." A typical passage: "Each episode is a text of inescapable complexity . . . Our received notions of what constitutes a ride are constantly subverted and undermined." It received an A.

Where the standards are always minimum, most kids simply float along with the academic drafts, avoid as much work as possible and accept the inflated grade. Why not? It's effortless, and there are better ways to spend time than thinking deeply about ecofeminism.

Rago does brush off "interrogating heteronormativity" rather obnoxiously, but I have to say the Mad Libs analogy resonated with me. I loved the lit theory seminars I took at Michigan, but there is absolutely a tendency—or at least there was in my experience and in a lot of the lit theory I've read—for theorists to demand less than they should from theory-based arguments.

What I mean is this: Obviously, arguments about literature are of a different sort than arguments about science. You can’t make empirical observations about literature in quite the same way, nor can you run experiments to test hypotheses. Things aren’t “proved” or “disproved” (some scientists would probably get pissed off at my terminology here, as science never claims to “prove” anything in as permanent) in quite the same way. But this shouldn’t absolve theory of the requirement that those practicing it (or “doing” it, as theory folks like to say) adhere to basic logic in their arguments. I’ve read a lot of theory (and engaged in many discussions in my seminars) that simply doesn’t make logical sense, but is given a pass because it addresses a very real point. There seems to be the idea that if you’re talking about something that clearly exists and should be addressed, like chauvinism in literature or heteronormativity, any ideas you have about it are right because your ultimate conclusion is agreed-upon. This is annoying and unhelpful. You can’t address these extremely important issues if you don’t attack them with due intellectual rigor, but theory (or, again, the theorists, theory students, and theory literature I’ve read—I’m only talking here about my experiences and not looking to make blank statements) seems very much against the notion that an idea can be “wrong” or “unsupported,” because that’s something science does. And if there’s one thing lit theory doesn’t want to be, it’s a science.

Isn’t there a middle ground here? Can’t there be some way to acknowledge that lit theory is different from science, and fills in many of the gaps that sciences leaves out, while accepting that an idea can be wrongheaded or even nonsensical even if its anchored to something worthy? Shouldn’t logic apply to all areas of academia?