Academic Snobbery in the Times

Last week, the Times had a quite good piece on the ways in which western authors of color are rethinking myths of the West and how this intersects with the academic conversations around these things. But the Times can never not go full academic snobbery. Which is why this has stuck in my craw ever since I read it.

In academia, historians — Philip Deloria at Harvard, Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin at Stanford, Beth Lew-Williams at Princeton, Ned Blackhawk at Yale, among others — have produced scholarship that speaks to what the journalist and cultural critic Michelle García said had been “the efforts of generations of artists and writers to rewrite an American West that was the invention of the imperialist gaze.”

These are all very good historians and I highly recommend their work. But…..why does it matter that they are at Stanford and Yale and Harvard and not Rhode Island and New Mexico and Colorado State? Why do people continue to pay attention to these institutions as if they are what matters in academia? I’ve long said that for any story on Yale in a national newspaper, there needs to be one on Southern Connecticut State, also in New Haven. But for Times writers, who come almost exclusively from this level of school, it is all that matters. Meanwhile, we at Rhode Island and New Mexico and Colorado State are also working just as hard at reshaping western narratives and at least in the case of the latter two, plus so many other western public schools, with students actually impacted by these issues. But that kind of thing is never worth the Times’ attention.