"Pedagogy is the last refuge of scoundrels"

Over at Cliopatria, Robert KC Johnson comments on the David Project flap and whitewash at Columbia University.

Here is his conclusion:

Over the past few years at Brooklyn, I’ve been struck by how often an administration committed to reorienting the curriculum around a quite explicit ideological agenda has defended itself from criticism not by discussing the content of the courses it’s championing but by trying to obscure the issue through points about pedagogy. This pattern seems to have spread to defenders of MEALAC as well. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, it seems now as if, in the academy, pedagogy is the last refuge of scoundrels.

Professor's Johnson's observations about the sleight of hand by which some in the professoriate divert our attention from content to issues of "pedagogy" reminds me -- vaguely, and probably unfairly -- of Robert Warshow's great essay on the Rosenbergs (in The Immediate Experience). In the essay, Warshow dissects some of the Rosenbergs' private correspondence, remarking on the way that even seemingly irrelevant idiosyncracies (like their love of the Brooklyn Dodgers) get sapped of particularity and content. Warshow contends that the Rosenbergs were so steeped in ideology that almost all relationships became, for them, merely formal, like variously shaped molds into which they could pour the most recent Party-approved orthodoxy.

This kind of extreme ideological distortion happens on both ends of the political spectrum, but wherever it happens, it's troubling.