That many scholars are harder to convince, I attribute to a professionally induced prejudice against commonsensical observation in favor of more sophisticated, abstract modes of representation, and this in spite of the demonstrable fact that the modern university owes less to the doctors of the Sorbonne than to the devastating mockery of their learned vernaculars by the likes of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Swift.
-Andrew J. McKenna, Great Books (From the For Rene Girard collection)
Ph.D. types without common sense? Say it isn’t so! This is something that Girard mentions often when discussing the resistance by academics in accepting his ideas. Often one of the biggest problems is that they seem too simple. If your day job is to work with really big words and long sentences you may develop an allergic reaction to simple words and ideas, however true or superior they may be.
Another writer in the For Rene Girard collection also brings this up.
In general, the major pedagogical challenge in teaching Girard is to dramatize the discover and fuel interest in further research. However, often mimetic interpretations are so “obvious” that their nature – or importance – is hard to see. Or, if the insights are not obvious, it is difficult to show why they are believable.
-Tyler Graham, Rene Girard’s Hermeneutic (From the For Rene Girard collection)