COLUMN RIGHT/ ROGER SCRUTON : Art of Making Sense Is a Thing of the Past : The only function of today’s barbarous academic writing is to disguise banality.

The politicization of higher education in America is regarded by conservatives with mixed emotions. On the one hand, conservatives are alarmed by codes of conduct that threaten to prevent us from expressing our views on campus; on the other, we are glad to see the universities making such evident fools of themselves.

It is hard to know which to prefer: a university that clings to the authority of objective scholarship while busily promoting left-wing causes, or one that places “political correctness” before truthful inquiry, and thereby ceases to be credible.

By a small margin I favor the second development. For although it spells the end of our scholarly traditions, it causes young people to apply themselves to serious pursuits like horse-breaking and lumberjacking, and to dispense with those years when, instead of learning to read books, they are taught that books are all unreadable. At least, that is what they are taught by the advocates of “deconstruction.”

In fact, the deconstructionists have a point. Books written by university apparatchiks (in particular those written by deconstructionists) are unreadable. Modern humanities departments have developed two strategies: to render meaningless the cultural heritage of which they are custodians, and to create a wholly new kind of literature, whose meaning is permanently hidden. In these two ways they fulfill their supreme goal, which is to bring the art of reading to an end.

I recently returned to some of the modern classics of philosophy. Gottlob Frege’s “Foundations of Arithmetic,” Bertrand Russell’s “Principles of Mathematics” and Gilbert Ryle’s “The Concept of Mind.” I was startled by the clarity and simplicity of their language. These abstruse philosophical discussions are written in the natural idiom of human speech and form part of a thriving literary culture. Russell, for instance, uses words with the same delicacy and alertness as A. C. Bradley, E. F. Benson, T. S. Eliot or E. M. Forster, and his prose is every bit as readable as theirs.

Turning to the “latest advances” in what my colleagues absurdly call “philosophical research,” I find a completely different style of writing, of which this is typical:

If “S” thinks that a certain pain-type is (tenselessly) horrible, he must present it in a conceptual mode, but he may descriptively identify the type via an indexical reference to a token of that type.

It is in such (tenselessly) horrible prose that contemporary Anglo-American philosophy is written. For years, I have wrestled with it; but my considered response today is that life is too short.

Even if the author of that sentence has something true and useful to tell me, the time taken to discover it could have been used to read the whole of Immanuel Kant or William Shakespeare.

Of course, there are reasons why academics write in this barbarous way. If they were to use the language that is natural to them, and to express the thoughts and feelings that are really theirs, the result would be so stunningly banal that no one would dream of employing them in a university. It has become necessary to write gibberish to gain promotion.

Moreover, the would-be professor must show that he is not going to question the system of academic privileges, or display any true independence of mind. The campus ideology provides a useful test that must be passed by anyone hoping to enjoy the fruits of scholarship. The aspirant must therefore use the feminine pronoun whenever he can; he must pepper his abominable prose with sideswipes at Reagan or Thatcher; he must labor to imply his correct posture toward “racism,” “sexism” and “homophobia,” and his impeccably liberal sentiments concerning the issues of the day. His constricted style thereby acquires a second set of shackles and clanks disconsolately down the darkened passages of his intellect, lifeless itself and resentful of life in others.

The worst of it is that academics are judged by the quantity of their publications. The more wagon loads you can tip onto Mt. Unreadable the higher you will rise. Scarcely a month passes without a new journal entering circulation, promising “feminist philosophy,” “postmodernist literary theory” or whatever other pseudo-subject that has taken root in the fertile ground of ignorance. Careers are built, universities colonized and young minds destroyed in the building of this Tower of Babel. Like its predecessor, the tower will soon collapse in ruins. But this time, God will not need to confound the language of the culprits, since they have already lost the art of making sense.