Sarah Skwire:

So the outrage machine would like you to be outraged that Marx's Communist Manifesto is being taught more often than other texts on economics, and that it is being taught by non-economists. (Economists generally assign Das Kapital when they assign Marx.)

You will forgive me for declining to be outraged about that. You will also understand if I decline to assume that the many philosophy, history, literature, political theory and other professors who are assigning Marx are doing so because they want to indoctrinate their students into Marxism.

I have a lot of reasons for declining to be outraged and declining to make assumptions. They include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. Like it or not, Marx is a major figure during the period in which he was writing, and for long afterwards. It would be irresponsible to teach, say, the Bloomsbury group without talking about the influence of Marx on the thinking of those authors. The same is true for any of a number of other literary movements, historical events, philosophical discussions and so on.

2. I never taught Marx, but I taught plenty of other political theories that I despise, and lots of theologies that I found odious as well. You can't and shouldn't teach Renaissance/Reformation without teaching texts that support Divine Right theory, texts that favor political assassinations, and texts that call for the mass slaughter of civilians based entirely on their theology. Only a fool would claim--without even setting foot in my classroom and based only on its appearance on my syllabus--that teaching "Killing Noe Murder" means that I'm advocating assassinations, or that teaching Luther means I'm an anti semite. Could YOUR syllabus pass a purity test? Would you want it to?

3. The outrage has not yet, at least on my Facebook wall, come from economists. BUT let me note that a field (and friends of that field) that is justifiably irate over their treatment by the "Unkoch my Campus" crowd and their misrepresentations of what happens in economics classrooms would be wise not to replicate those techniques when looking at the work done by other fields.

4. Marxist literary theory is not a thing that I like. It's a thing I think is wrong. It is, however, a legitimate thing. Smart scholars work on it. Smart scholars teach it. I don't agree with them, but they're smart.

5. Lots of people whom I like and respect and agree with politically use Marx in their classrooms often. I'm pretty sure they're not indoctrinating anyone.

6. I went to the leftiest possible undergraduate English department--Wesleyan University. We never talked contemporary politics in the classroom--only politics that related directly to the literary texts, historical documents, philosophers, etc. who were our immediate objects of study. The same was true for 6 years in the English department at Chicago, EVEN THOUGH my dissertation director is a Marxist. If any of that was an attempt at Marxist indoctrination, it was a dismal failure.

7. The best IHS lecture I ever heard was by Brandon Turner, on the importance of taking Marx seriously.