{"id":1552,"date":"2026-08-18T08:37:17","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T08:37:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=1552"},"modified":"2026-08-18T08:37:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T08:37:17","slug":"diversity-fair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=1552","title":{"rendered":"Diversity Fair"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta, India, two hundred and fifteen years ago, the son of an English colonial official. He was sent back to England as a child and educated at English public schools and Trinity College, Cambridge.<\/p>\n

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After an unsteady start as a journalist, he settled down to a long and successful career as a novelist. The best-known of his works is Vanity Fair<\/em>, published in serial form in 1847\u201348. Consistently ranked as one of the best novels written in English, it is a funny but unsparing satirical take on the English ruling class\u2014known then simply as \u201cthe gentry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Set in the years leading up to Waterloo, it examines a representative cross-section of human types and chronicles their individual rises and falls.<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s title is borrowed from John Bunyan\u2019s 17th-century Christian allegorical tale, The Pilgrim\u2019s Progress<\/em>. The term Vanity Fair<\/em>\u00a0is used to describe a fanciful marketplace where all human vices are easily indulged and all temptations readily on offer.<\/p>\n

This is an apt metaphor for the fool\u2019s paradise of lust, greed, and snobbery that so often comprises life in the upper classes, in the 21st<\/sup> century as well as the 19th.<\/p>\n

The critic Seymour Betsky described Thackeray\u2019s central theme as \u201cdecent people almost hopelessly submerged by the corrupt world they inhabit and unable to draw upon intelligence that might at least enable them to comprehend the terms of their plight.\u201d1<\/sup><\/p>\n

With Tom Wolfe\u2019s death several years ago, there is only one contemporary American writer worthy of comparison to Thackeray.<\/p>\n

Scott Johnston is a former investment banker and venture capitalist who grew up on Manhattan\u2019s Upper East Side. He is, in other words, very familiar with the monied precincts inhabited by our present-day gentry.<\/p>\n

In his 2019 novel Campusland,<\/em> Johnston, like Thackeray, places a decent protagonist in a nightmare not of his own making.<\/p>\n

A promising young English professor at an Ivy League college gets caught up in the DEI wars. Up for tenure, he is falsely accused of racism by campus radicals looking for a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre. When that doesn\u2019t succeed, he is ultimately brought down by bogus sexual harassment charges, which lead to his dismissal. The truth eventually comes out, but not before the protagonist is completely disillusioned and embittered by the betrayal of an institution that he had loved and revered.<\/p>\n

Johnston captured the humorless zealotry of \u201cBias Response teams\u201d and Deans of Diversity and Inclusion, not to mention the Kafkaesque flavor of university Title IX proceedings. What\u2019s uncanny is how his book foreshadowed real-life events.<\/p>\n

The year after Campusland<\/em>\u00a0was published, a Classics professor at Princeton, Joshua Katz, had the temerity to criticize a campus radical group for threatening other students. At the same time, he dared to take issue with demands by black students and faculty that they make all decisions regarding the hiring, compensation, and tenure of black faculty.<\/p>\n

They also called for the right to investigate publications by the white faculty for racism and to mete out punishment to offenders.<\/p>\n

Professor Katz was fortunate that the Princeton administration had just signed off on an affirmation of academic freedom promulgated by the University of Chicago. Firing Katz at that point would have been awkward.<\/p>\n

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However, the Left never sleeps, so it wasn\u2019t long before a closed disciplinary charge against Katz was resurrected. Working with the campus newspaper, the administration contacted a number of Katz\u2019s former students, hoping to show that a relationship with an undergraduate he had already been punished for was not<\/em> consensual, contrary to prior findings. The case was reopened, with the most serious penalty\u2014dismissal\u2014imposed, something that had not happened to a tenured faculty member in living memory. In the meantime, the administration had not allowed Katz any graduate students to work with and had counseled undergraduates against taking his courses.<\/p>\n

The point man in the Princeton administration\u2019s assault on Katz\u2014one of the most popular professors on campus\u2014was a fellow Classics Department member, Dan-El Peralta Padilla, whom Katz had mentored when Peralta Padilla was an undergraduate there. I personally recall Katz asking the other members and me of the Princeton Classics Department Advisory Council for our assistance with young Peralta Padilla\u2019s passport problems. He had been brought here as an infant by his parents on a tourist visa, which had long since expired. We were able to help him out of this predicament. I wonder what the two of them felt when Peralta Padilla led the charge for Katz\u2019s firing. Life not only imitates art, but it often surpasses it, at least in the bitter irony department.<\/p>\n

The latest book by Scott Johnston is The Sandersons Fail Manhattan<\/em>. Another look at an elite institution, this time set\u00a0on Manhattan\u2019s Upper East Side. The plot revolves around a family whose two teenage daughters attend an exclusive private girls\u2019 school.<\/p>\n

The father, a hedge fund manager, is a Yale alumnus who would very much like his older daughter, a high school senior, to follow in his footsteps at his alma mater. His wife, the girl\u2019s mother, has a less elite background and is from the Midwest. She is struggling with learning all the social ins and outs of the rarefied world she has married into.<\/p>\n

The family gets sucked into a vortex of political correctness through the school and the husband\u2019s employer. Apparently, any breach of DEI shibboleths, however innocent, can destroy your career and even your family, as they find out to their horror.<\/p>\n

The villains this time are not just the woke Commissars of the educational world, though they\u2019re plentiful in this book as well. They also include the Sandersons\u2019 personal friends and professional colleagues, who these days will drop you the moment you are branded a racist or homophobe, no matter how baseless the charge.<\/p>\n

Just as in Thackeray, bogus moralistic rhetoric (\u201cinclusion,\u201d \u201cequity,\u201d etc.) is used in Scott Johnston\u2019s world to justify who gets all the glittering prizes. These include social standing, a prestigious occupation, and what in Thackeray\u2019s era was called \u201cinterest\u201d\u2014that is, clout, power, connections.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most striking resemblance the two authors share is a bemused tolerance for characters who are \u201cno better than they should be.\u201d These are the ones whose cynical view of the ambient corruption and hypocrisy produces not despair but a cool toughness and resilience.<\/p>\n

The most familiar of such characters in Thackeray is Becky Sharp, the demimonde heroine of Vanity Fair<\/em>. Becky uses her feminine wiles to claw her way upward socially in Regency England.<\/p>\n

Johnston\u2019s present-day counterpart is a material girl called Lulu Harris in Campusland<\/em>. An Ivy League coed who comes from a privileged background, she is ill-prepared for some of the hard knocks her own selfishness leads her into.<\/p>\n

Like Thackeray\u2019s Becky, however, Lulu in the end doesn\u2019t pretend to be anything she is not. In her newfound candor, she goes from being a leftist feminist icon to becoming a Sydney Sweeney-like sex symbol.<\/p>\n

Just as Lulu Harris in Campusland<\/em>\u00a0is a worthy contemporary successor to Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair<\/em>\u00a0as a fully realized fictional character, so Scott Johnston will be recognized as an equal to William Thackeray as a master of social satire if he sustains the quality of his work to date.<\/p>\n

1. Society in Thackeray and Trollope<\/em>, Vol. 6 of The Pelican Guide to English Literature<\/em>, ed. Boris Ford.<\/p>\n

Read more Hating Israel Fatigue<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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