'The Angry Genius of Les Murray'

"Though he has at various times held university fellowships, Murray has little good to say about what goes on in the literature classroom. Academic literary critics are, to him, heirs of an Enlightenment hostile to the creative spirit. Behind its mask of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, he sees the Enlightenment itself as a cabal of rootless, disaffected clercs scheming to grasp power, usually by controlling the fashion for what may or may not be said in public ('political correctness'). Universities have been turned by the Enlightenment into 'humiliation mills' that grind out generations of students ashamed of their social origins, alienated from their native culture, recruits to a new metropolitan class whose Australian manifestation Murray dubs 'the Ascendancy.' The term is meant to capture both the 'foreign-derived oppressiveness' of the new class and its 'arriviste, first-generation flavour.' The Ascendancy is 'the natural upper class of a socialist world order'; holding a university degree is the modern equivalent of being a landowner."
p. 139
The Best Australian Essays 2012, Black Inc.
J. M. Coetzee, 'Les Murray and the Black Dog'
first appeared as 'The Angry Genius of Les Murray' in New York Review of Books, 29 September 2011