Introduction
1. David Konstan (1999 president of the American Philogical Association) in Classical World 89.1 (1995) 32–33; quoted in Who Killed Homer?, 148, 151, 161.
1. Cultivating Sophistry
1. Martha C. Nussbaum. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, Mass. and London 1997). For the whole story of Nussbaum’s testimony in the Colorado Amendment 2 case, see John Finnis, “Shameless Acts in Colorado: Abuse of Scholarship in Constitutional Cases,” Academic Questions (Fall 1994), and Robert P. George, ‘“Shameless Acts’ Revisited,” Academic Questions (Winter 1995–96).
2. In addition to the “conservative” studies by Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza, see especially the essays collected in Partisan Review, 60.4 (1993); Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint (Oxford 1993), 83–151; Russell Jacoby, Dogmatic Wisdom (New York 1994), passim.
3. David Theo Goldberg, “Introduction: Multicultural Conditions,” in Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Cambridge, Mass. 1994), 7. This collection, most of the essays in which are riddled with postmodern and/or leftist assumptions, should disabuse anyone inclined to believe Nussbaum’s assertion that multiculturalism is actually an expression of Enlightenment liberalism.
4. Peter McLaren, “White Terror and Oppositional Agency: Towards a Critical Multiculturalism,” (note 3), 51.
5. Dogmatic Wisdom, 157–58.
6. “Critical Multiculturalism,” (note 3), 123.
7. Note 3, 82; rpt from (nota bene!) Multiculturalism and the “Politics of Recognition” (Princeton, N.J. 1992).
8. Taylor, 85.
9. The Defeat of the Mind (1987), trans. Judith Friedlander (New York 1995), 79.
10. See Finkielkraut, The Defeat of the Mind, and Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York 1997), 364–99. Cf. 388: “So while the multicultural revolution in America is unmistakably a revolution on the Left, its dominant images of change still come from the earlier revolution on the Right. Vital Kultur will reemerge from the ruins of Civilization as new multicultural identities replace the old.”
11. Allan Bloom, “Western Civ,” 1988; rpt. in Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960–1990 (New York 1990), 26.
12. I say “partially” because very few students of any race are being introduced to the Western tradition anymore, since education is driven by social engineering and job-training imperatives—that unsavory alliance of Democratic therapeutic mush with Republican corporate pork.
13. Nussbaum’s complaint about the dearth of minority students at the tony universities where she has worked strikes me as rank hypocrisy. After all, if she’s genuinely concerned about minority students, then she should teach some place where there are minority students. Is it a coincidence that such places tend not to be that useful for furthering academic ambitions?
14. In Isaiah Berlin, “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism,” The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (New York 1991), 100.
15. A point made by Victor Hanson and John Heath on page 256.
16. See Balkrishna Govind Gokhale, Asoka Maurya (New York 1966), 109. Nussbaum’s attempt to deal with the question of Western influence (140) is little more than a lame tu quoque argument. No one argues that the Greeks, for example, weren’t influenced by other Mediterranean cultures. It’s what they did with those influences that is important. As Hanson and Heath ask, “from what part of the East did the West brilliantly derive democracy, free inquiry, the idea of a middle class, political freedom, literature apart from religion, citizen militias, words like ‘parody,’ ‘cynicism,’ and ‘skepticism,’ and a language of abstraction and rationalism?” In Who Killed Homer? 117.
17. Jacques Ellul, The Betrayal of the West, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York 1978), 21.
18. The falseness of the widely accepted view that the presixties literary establishment fostered an exclusive, monolithic canon reflecting the professors’ own race and class is pointed out in terms of American literature by Richard B. Schwartz, After the Death of Literature (Carbondale, 111. 1997), 3–6.
19. The idea that the presixties professoriate was somehow “conservative” is another self-serving myth of contemporary academics who define themselves as sixties-style progressives. As Robert Nisbet pointed out, “among faculties at least in this country [1945–60] was a period of constantly growing political commitment, political zeal, and political ideology. Not only was the faculty of the 1950s much stronger in these qualities than had been the faculty of the 1930s, there was also…far greater readiness to extend this commitment, zeal, and ideology, drawn from national and international politics, to the traditional academic matters that faculty members dealt with.” In The Degradation of the Academic Dogma: The University in America, 1945–70 (New York and London 1971), 141-42.
20. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Selected Prose, ed. P. J. Keating (Harmondsworth 1970), 141, 155.
21. George Payne, “Education and Cultural Pluralism,” in Our Racial and National Minorities, ed. F. J. Brown and J. S. Roucek (New York 1937), 762.
22. William E. Vickery and Stewart G. Cole, Intercultural Education in American Schools (New York 1943), ix, xiv.
23. Note 22, 13.
24. Note 22, 35.
25. Paglia describes the course in “East and West: An Experiment in Multiculturalism,” in Sex, Art, and American Culture (New York 1992). Quotes on 136, 139.
26. “The Democratization of the University,” 1969; rpt. in Giants and Dwarfs, 374.
27. The Closing of the American Mind (New York 1987), 21.
28. Bloom (note 27), 253.
29. Bloom (note 27), 36.
30. Bloom (note 27), 36.
31. “The Crisis of Liberal Education,” 1966; rpt. in Giants and Dwarfs, 359.
32. Bloom (note 27), 249.
33. “Western Civ,” 1988; rpt. in Giants and Dwarfs, 29.
34. “The Crisis of Liberal Education,” 359.
35. Bloom (note 27), 267, 268, 272, 312.
36. The Defeat of the Mind, 105.
37. Nussbaum tries to answer the charge of politicization by indulging the either-or fallacy: “It is frequently claimed that it is inappropriate to approach literature with a ‘political agenda.’ Yet it is hard to justify such a claim without embracing an extreme kind of aesthetic formalism that is sterile and unappealing” (89). But of course there are alternatives other than “aesthetic formalism” to a “political agenda.” And as John Ellis notes, it is the crudity of the “political agenda” that is the problem, not the recognition of politics as one aspect of literature: “What they [race-gender-class critics] do to politics is in fact analogous to what they do to literature: just as they narrow the content of literature to politics, they also reduce the content of politics to oppression and victimology. Thus they not only reduce all of literature to one issue but handle even that issue reductively.” In Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (New Haven, Conn. and London 1997), 63.
38. Remember that Texaco spent $115 million on diversity training because on a tape it sounded like an executive had used a racial epithet. See Hanna Rosin, “Cultural Revolution at Texaco,” The New Republic, 218.5 (2 February, 1998), 15–18.
39. A stroll through any college bookstore will demonstrate the triumph of multiculturalism in the curriculum. I just reviewed the syllabuses for a couple of philosophy courses at my school: One, an Introduction to Philosophy course, has the following primary texts assigned, with one day on each: Socrates/Plato, Buddha, Video: The Razor’s Edge, Bhagavad-Gita, Eagle Man, Marx and Engels, Martin Luther King, and Paulo Freire. The other course, entitled Self, Religion, and Society, spends two class periods on Plato and ten on I…Rigoberta Menchtú, that psalter of the Sandalista.
40. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York 1995), 6.
41. Finkielkraut (note 9), 112.
42. See Closing, 246–56. Nussbaum’s false analogy works by distorting Socrates as well. Her statement that “he regards democracy as the best of the available forms of government, though not above criticism” (26) isn’t even a half-truth. She doesn’t discriminate, for example, between Athenian democracy and what a modern nonspecialist will understand by the feel-good term “democracy.” Cf. Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, Plato’s Socrates (Oxford 1994), 157–66, who survey all the evidence and conclude: “The sort of political structure Socrates favors—if it can be called a structure at all—is in a way oligarchic and in a way democratic..because each decision would require a different ‘few,’ a great many people, from all walks of life, will be called upon to make decisions for the state,” (165). That’s a far cry from Athenian democracy, which assumed all citizens were all the time capable of running the state, an idea Socrates derided.
2. Socrates Redux: Classics in the Multicultural University?
1. Martha C. Nussbaum. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, Mass, and London 1997).
2. See her remarks quoted by Robert P. George, “‘Shameless Acts’ revisited,” Academic Questions (Winter 1995–96) 40 n. 41.
3. See John Finnis, “‘Shameless Acts’ in Colorado: Abuse of scholarship in constitutional cases,” Academic Questions (Fall 1994), especially 19–35.
3. More Quarreling in the Muses’ Birdcage
1. John M. Ellis, Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (New Haven, Conn. and London 1997), and Alvin Kernan, ed., What Happened to the Humanities? (Princeton, N.J. 1997).
2. The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (New York 1996), 12.
3. It should be noted at the outset that the essay by Francis Oakley in WHTTH? stands as an exception to the general tone of despair. Here, as in many other similar articles penned in the shadow of his book (Community of Learning [New York 1992]), Oakley, former president of Williams College, presents a benign apologia for the current state of the liberal arts. A similarly unconvincing attempt to defend the status quo is Martha Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education; see chapters one and two. I examine Oakley’s methodology below.
4. University presses are famously liberal. While Bloom, D’Souza, Paglia, Kimball, Lefkowitz, and most other critics of the New Humanities are published by New York presses (perhaps because someone other than a handful of academics might be interested in their arguments), the university presses have been the prime sponsors of revisionist work, both its metadisciplinary scholarship and its self-defense (e.g., The Politics of Liberal Education, published by Duke U.P., 1992). In a recent article in The Nation, Phil Pochoda—himself editorial director of University Press of New England—laments that no “alternative radical political theory has emerged [since the collapse of Marxist scholarship], ..that might frame responses to the right-wing assaults on civil liberties in general and on women, racial and ethnic minorities, and labor in particular” (“Universities Press On,” December 29, 1997, 14). He does not specify what these assaults might be. Apparently it does not occur to Pochoda that Marxist academic scholarship has had to try to change its spots because the theory was proven to be intellectually untenable in light of events in the real world. Are we really supposed to long for another errant vision of human nature in order to keep his university press in business?
5. See the amusing and thoughtful essay by Mark Edmundson, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education I. As Lite Entertainment,” Harper’s Magazine (September 1997) 39–49.
6. See the discussion of A. Kernan, 5.
7. J. Engell and A. Dangerfield, “The Market-Model University: Humanities in the Age of Money,” Harvard Magazine (May-June 1998) 48–55, III. They find the primary cause of this deterioration in the increasing importance of money (that is, the promise, knowledge, and source of money) in education. I have recently been accused of being selective in my choice of statistics in a separate but related discussion of the decline in classical studies. I suppose it depends whether one, to paraphrase Chesterton, uses statistics as a drunkard uses a lamppost, for support rather than for illumination. I’ll leave it to others to decide who is tipsy. But even Professor Nussbaum, who works so hard to defend the New Humanities, concedes that the “shortage of jobs in the humanities and social sciences has led to hardships; many have left the professions they love” (note 3), 3.
8. San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, Jan. 26, 1998, D4.
9. Pochoda (note 4), 11–16. University presses alone still turn out over 160 books each week; J. Shapiro, “There Has to Be an Easier Way to Find Worthy Scholarly Books,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 30, 1998, B9. On the opacity of modern scholarly writing, see the discussion of Windschuttle (note 1), p. 6 with footnote 6. Clear writing, after all, according to Derrida, is the sign of a reactionary. As usual, the French themselves have been among the first to reject the antihumanism of their own theory. See especially L. Ferry and A. Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, trans. Mary S. Cattani (Amherst, Mass. 1990).
10. The New York Times, Monday, Jan. 12, 1998, A14.
11. Note 7, 50.
12. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (New York 1992), 285, quoted in Windschuttle (note 2), 9.
13. WHTTH?, 90. Of course, some graduate departments are notoriously one sided. Ellis observes in a footnote that in the literature department at UC Santa Cruz a bitter conflict has split the faculty. On one side are the race-gender-class scholars who teach classic texts to denounce them; on the other side are the race-gender-class scholars who have dumped the classics and teach the “literature of the downtrodden” (254 n.8).
14. WHTTH?, 156. Francis Oakley (WHTTH?, 63–83) is the only contributor who finds minimal influence of the New Humanities on the current curriculum. He argues that the change in the humanities over the past twenty-five years is primarily in the increased number of courses offered, all for the better since the increasingly diverse student body now has interdisciplinary, globalized, and multicultural options in addition to more traditional fare. He reaches this conclusion by comparing course listings and descriptions of courses found in catalogues at a select group of institutions for the years 1969–1970 and 1994–1995. The naivete in this approach is as frightening as it is revealing: how many college presidents know what is going on in the classrooms of their own institutions? The model of thoughtful analysis of education by former presidents of universities set by Clark Kerr has given way to memoirs like that of Donald Kennedy of Stanford. Kennedy suggests that those in higher education have not adequately justified to the public why they deserve its trust. Could this be at least in part because the public has learned that government funds for research turn out to have been spent on the enlargement of the university president’s bed? I take it that the title of his book, Academic Duty, is not intentionally ironic.
Using Oakley’s approach, one might conclude, for example, from the recent introduction of a U.S. History core requirement at Santa Clara University, that we were experiencing a wave of Western culture nostalgia on campus, some primordial civic desire to have students explore the grand experiment of their country’s constitution. Only upon closer examination—the kind not available in course listings and descriptions—would one discover that of the fifty-nine courses meeting the requirement only two specifically cover the ideas of the Founding Fathers. On the other hand, twenty-nine explicitly deal with minority, feminist, and multicultural issues, and many others (e.g., American Novel II, The American West) frequently focus almost exclusively on the Other.
Titles of courses and programs are notoriously deceptive. There is no humanities requirement at Santa Clara University. Yet liberal arts students (the vast majority of our undergraduates) must take a very traditional three-quarter survey of Western culture in one of five humanistic disciplines—art, literature, history, philosophy, or music/theater—along with three courses in religious studies, one ethics course, three writing classes, and a variety of other general education requirements (such as two world culture courses) that can be fulfilled in the humanities. On the other hand, a glance at the catalogue of our neighbor up the road, Stanford, reveals an official Introduction to Humanities sequence that satisfies an area requirement. But there students are introduced to the humanities by one of two courses, meta-humanities really, either “Why Read It?” or “The Word and the World: Conversations Across Time and Space,” the latter of which teaches how the “two-faced” texts “are concerned with both power’s legitimation and its usurpation. These texts generate authority structures and authority figures, yet their own authority has regularly been called into question” (Guide to Choosing Area One Courses 1997–98, 15). Oakley’s approach cannot distinguish these two sequences.
More importantly, Oakley’s methodology can tell us nothing at all about the most important issue of all, that is, how these humanities courses are being taught. Shakespeare’s appearance in a curriculum is no sign that things have not changed. Denis Donoghue quotes Terry Eagleton’s analysis of Macbeth:
To any unprejudiced reader—which would seem to exclude Shakespeare himself, his contemporary audiences and almost all literary critics—it is surely clear that positive value in Macbeth lies with the three witches. The witches are the heroines of the piece, however little the play itself recognizes the fact, and however much the critics may have set out to defame them. It is they who, by releasing ambitious thoughts in Macbeth, expose a reverence for hierarchical social order for what it is, as the pious self-deception of a society based on routine oppression and incessant warfare. The witches are exiles from that violent order, inhabiting their own sisterly community on its shadowy border-lands, refusing all truck with its tribal bickerings and military honors. (quoted in WHTTW?, 129–30)
Like it or hate it, most would agree that this is not the same Shakespeare we studied thirty years ago. Topics and methodologies have changed.
15. Whereas the elite research universities (accepting students in the top eighth of their high school class) have tended to be placed in upscale locales—La Jolla, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Westwood, Santa Barbara (we are not so uncivilized out here as to expect renowned gender, race, and class scholars to live with the oppressed)—the Cal State system (accepting students in the top third of their high school class) have gone directly to the people—Bakersfield, Chico, Fullerton, Fresno, San Jose, Turlock, Hayward, and so on. Teaching loads at the research universities are generally from three to six; at the Cal States, eight (with no doctoral programs).
16. These quotations are taken from the University Learning Requirements as listed at the CSUMB website.
17. Literary Analysis Through Global Narratives; Literature, Film, and Culture; Auto/biographias; Ethnicity, Gender, Creative Writing: Writer as Witness; Women’s Literature: Re-Writing the Script/Taking Action; American Ethnic Literature and Cultures; Latina Life Stories in Comparative Context; Multicultural Poetry: Verse, Voice, and Video; Literary and Visual Witness Narratives: Poetry, Prose, Pictures and Empowerment; World Mythological Literature; Multicultural Children’s Literature; Japanese Literature in Translation; Survey of Jazz; Survey of World Music; Music for Children; Chicano Literature; Auto/Biographias: Oral Narrative and Life Writing in Spanish; The Chicano Novel; Latina Life Stories; La Literatura Mexicana; La Narrativa Hispanoamericana Contemporanea; Latin American Women Writers; La Literatura Afro-Latina; Introduction to Teledramatic Arts and Technology; World Film History: Film Festivals; World Theater History; Script Analysis: Deconstructing the Screenplay; Diverse Histories in Contemporary Art; Ways of Seeing: Seminar on Philosophy and Ethical Thinking in Public Art.
18. C. Irving, “No Bard by the Bay,” The California Higher Education Policy Center, Vol. 5.1 (Winter 1997), News.
19. Quoted in Irving (note 18).
20. “On the Uses of a Liberal Education II. As a Weapon in the Hands of the Restless Poor,” E. Shorris, Harper’s Magazine, Sept. 1997, 53.
21. Shorris (note 20), 59.
22. “A Short History of Liberal Guilt,” Critical Inquiry 22 no. 2 (1966), 370, quoted in Bromwich, WHTTH?, 235.
23. One classicist, for example, writing not about Penelope in particular but about the archetype of the “helpful princess,” for some reason even confesses to us that like “many women, I have found myself performing the role of the helpful princess too often. I read the ‘ruthless’ story very differently thirty years after I first encountered it…” J. de Luce, “Reading and re-reading the helpful princess,” in Compromising Traditions: The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship, J. P. Hallet and T. Van Nortwick, eds. (London and New York 1997), 26.
24. Can we doubt the crumbling state of humanities when this same antihumanist Professor Fish, apparently considered for a Dean of Humanities position here in California, decides to stay on in order to develop “something like The Duke Institute for the Study of the Humanities and Social Thought”? The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 25, 1997, AIO.
25. See Margaret Talbot, “Being White,” The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 30, 1997, 116–19.
26. Irving (note 18). In 1983, N. J. Smelser, “California: A Multisegment System,” 127–28 in A. Levine, ed., Higher Learning in America: 1980–2000 (Baltimore and London 1983/94), suggested that the California campuses would have to meet the needs of a diverse public in one of three ways: 1) “The program of assimilation of racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse groups to the existing values and roles of higher education…continuing traditional patterns of liberal education and occupational and professional training, with students being socialized in these patterns, accommodating to them, and preparing themselves for participation in the institutions of the larger society.” 2) “The program of altering the traditional missions of higher liberal education… to some mission that gives greater recognition to ‘nonmainstream’ groups.” 3) “The program of converting campuses into a microcosm of the pluralistic polity, with racial, ethnic, cultural, gender, and other groups competing…” Although the planning commission favored the first option, it is clearly the last that has been seized upon.
27. Irving (note 17); R. Ferrier, “Is This Really What We Want?” Ventura Star, Thursday, April 3, 1997.
28. This and the following quotations come from the Tenth Campus Academic Planning Committee Summary of Recommendations.
29. WHTTH?, 224. The core of Western culture and the humanities continues to be diluted at colleges and universities throughout the country; see, for example, the discussion of the “Brooklyn Connections” program at Brooklyn College, The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 8, 1997, A12.
30. Note 2, 4–5.
31. Sabin discusses two collaborative teaching ventures that she believes may point a way out of the impasse (WHTTH?, 96–101).
32. January 4, 1998, 33.
33. December 22, 1997, 96.
34. Quoted in C. J. Lucas, Crisis in the Academy: Rethinking Higher Education in America (New York 1996), 75.
35. Lucas (note 34), 172. Business executives were very interested in hiring liberally educated generalists, citing their excellent reading, writing, and oral communication abilities; foreign language proficiency and understanding of foreign cultures; critical judgment and problem-solving skills; flexibility in dealing with people, taking on new tasks, and switching gears quickly; and a highly developed sense of personal responsibility and ethics. In theory, at least.
36. It is unclear whether Professor Ricks helps or hurts his cause by then delivering the keynote address this January at the humanities symposium on Dylan—Bob Dylan—organized by a humanities doctoral student at Stanford.
37. Jacques Barzun made a similar argument several years ago in “A Future for the Liberal Arts, If…,” Academic Questions 7 (Fall 1994), 74–76.
38. The New York Times, Monday, Jan. 12, 1988, A14.
39. Here I mean good old vocationalism, not the philosophical pragmatism of Dewey and Rorty now advanced by Bruce Kimball, in which a sensible modernist awareness of fallibility can quickly devolve into political multiculturalism and the radical relativism of postmodernism; see The Condition of American Liberal Education: Pragmatism and a Changing Tradition, R. Orrill, ed. (New York 1995).
40. See the strange boast of G. M. Fredrickson, “America’s Caste System: Will It Change?” New York Review of Books (Oct. 23, 1997), 75 n. 13. As noted in the rejoinder by S. and A. Thernstrom, this episode also reveals the complete lack of diversity—or cowardice of the minority—in the modern academy: “Those who march behind the banner of diversity regard diversity of opinion on this subject as heretical.” New York Review of Books (Nov. 20, 1997), 65. Not a single member of the faculty voted the same as the majority of Californians? Clearly the elite academics out here are living in another world.
41. Irving (note 18).
42. Alexander to Actium (Berkeley, Calif. 1990). The lampoon is found at Athen. 1.22d. The translation is an adaptation of Green’s, 87.
43. Menand, WHTTH?, 213. Determining contact hours is virtually impossible beyond the notoriously unreliable self-reporting. According to the 1993 National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty by the National Center for Education Statistics (U.S. Department of Education), the mean for hours spent each week in class by faculty at research universities was 6.9.
44. Cited in The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 24, 1998, A12.
45. J. Amberg, “Higher (-Priced) Education,” The American Scholar 58 (1989) 572, cited in R. M. Huber, How Professors Play the Cat Guarding the Cream (Fairfax, Va. 1992), 193.
46. Higher Education Research Institute, cited in Lucas (note 34), 170. This was true even though at the same time another study revealed that 67 percent of all liberal arts faculty reported that they had never published a book, 38 percent had never published in a professional journal, and 49 percent were not engaged in research that was expected to lead to publication (cited in Lucas, 192).
47. “I’m History,” The American Scholar (Winter 1998), 16.
4. “Too Much Ego in Your Cosmos”
1. Judith P. Hallett and Thomas Van Nortwick (eds.), Compromising Traditions: The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship (London and New York 1997), vii + 196 pages, cloth.
2. “I would prefer to be wrong with Plato than to be right with people such as these.” Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 1.17.39.
3. “May all perish who should ever do these things again.” Homer, Odyssey, 1.47.
5. The Enemy Is Us: The “Betrayal of the Postmodern Clerks”
1. See page 205.
2. A point made as well by Jeanne N. O’Neill, “Rethinking the Cursus Honorum,” The Classical Journal 91.3 (1996), 297–307. See also Victor Davis Hanson, The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (New York 1995), 4I4-I9.
3. Even those in the profession aware of the problem look for its solution in changes in pedagogical technique or in better marketing, rather than making a case for the value of classics for society at large. See for example, Kenneth F. Kitchell, Jr., Edward Phinney, Susan Shelmerdine, and Marilyn Skinner, “Greek 2000—Crisis, Challenge, Deadline,” The Classical Journal 91.4 (1996), 393–420.
4. Obviously another article could be written about the pedantic bean-counting of some traditional philologists, which also does little to promote understanding of classics beyond the profession. But traditional philologists at least can fall back on the legitimate claim that no matter how technical and abstruse their work, it contributes a few bricks to the edifice of knowledge. The poststructuralist by definition cannot make that claim, since by his lights there is no “knowledge” or “facts,” only “interpretation” (actually, “misinterpretation”). Thus those “interpretations” have to find some other justification, and usually some liberationist goal is offered as legitimizing the poststructuralist “project.” Hence it is fair to judge their activity in terms of its impact beyond the profession.
5. Martin Classical Lectures, New Series Vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J. 1990). Subsequent references parenthetical.
6. For a critical discussion see Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism (1985); trans. Mary H. S. Cattani (Amherst, Mass. 1990), 26–32, 64–67, 97–121, 208–227. Despite the breathless enthusiasm of some literary critics for what they think is a “cutting-edge” postmodern idea like the “death of the subject,” delivered by Foucault descending from Paris like Moses from Sinai, the attack on the subject is an old idea. Cf. Isaiah Berlin, in an essay on the tradition of historical determinism delivered over forty years ago: “Individuals remain ‘abstract’ precisely because they are mere ‘elements’ or ‘aspects,’ ‘moments’ artificially abstracted for ad hoc purposes, and literally without reality (or, at any rate, ‘historical’ or ‘philosophical’ or ‘real’ being) apart from the whole of which they form a part….” In “Historical Inevitability,” 1953; rpt. Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford 1969), 41–117.
7. The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory (New York 1986), 50.
8. “Limited Inc: abc,” Glyph 2 (1977), 162–254.
9. See for example, Derrida’s defense of Paul de Man, “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War,” Critical Inquiry 14 (1988), 590–652.
10. As David Hirsch has pointed out, “[t]he quintessence of Nazism was precisely an assault on the concept of the existence of the self carried to its logical extreme.” In The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism after Auschwitz (London 1991), 95. Cf. also 165: “Purveyors of postmodern ideologies must consider whether it is possible to diminish human beings in theory, without, at the same time, making individual human lives worthless in the real world.”
11. Charles A. Moser points out, “it is not surprising that Yale’s Paul de Man, a pillar of deconstruction, should have been an adherent of Fascism in his native Belgium during the war years: he always believed in the political definition of meaning,” “Literary Theory, The University, and Society,” Modern Age 34.2 (1992), 121. For the whole de Man affair and the reaction of de Man’s defenders see Hirsch, 69–117.
12. Peradotto’s conceit of institutional intransigence noted as well by Jenny Strauss Clay in Classical Philology 82 (1992), 161.
13. Since none of the books under consideration here alert the reader to the nearly twenty-five years of critical examination of poststructuralist ideas, I will provide here a brief bibliography. In addition to Hirsch’s and Ferry and Renaut’s books mentioned above, and Merquior’s in the next note, see Rene Wellek, “The Attack on Literature,” The American Scholar 42 (1972), 27–42, rpt. in The Attack on Literature and Other Essays (Chapel Hill, N.C. 1982), 3–18; M. H. Abrams, “The Deconstructive Angel,” Critical Inquiry 3 (1977), 423–38, rpt. Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Fischer (New York and London 1989), 237–52; “How to Do Things with Texts,” Partisan Review 46 (1979), 566–88, rpt. in Attack, 269–96; “Construing and Deconstruing,” Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer (Ithaca 1986), rpt. in Attack, 297–332; Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis 1983), 127–50; Frederick Crews, “Deconstructing a Discipline” (1979), rpt. in Skeptical Engagements (Oxford 1986), 115–20; “Criticism without Constraint” (1982), rpt. in Skeptical, 122–36; “The Grand Academy of Theory” (1986), rpt. in Skeptical, 159–78; Alan Mcgill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley, Calif. and Los Angeles 1985); Cedric Watts, “Bottom’s Children: the Fallacies of Structuralist, Post-Structuralist, and Deconstructionist Literary Theory,” in Reconstructing Literature, ed. Laurence Lerner (Totowa, N.J. 1983), 20–35; Tzvetan Todorov, “All Against Humanity,” Times Literary Supplement no. 4, 305 (October 4, 1985), 1093–94; John Searle, “The World Turned Upside Down,” New York Review of Books 30.10 (October 27, 1983), 74–79; Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (New Haven, Conn. 1985); John Ellis, Against Deconstruction (Princeton, N.J. 1989).
14. In From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought (London 1986), 227.
15. A very brief refutation can be found in John Searle, “Is There a Crisis in Higher Education?” Partisan Review 60.4 (1993), 703–4. See also Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrel with Science (Baltimore and London 1994), esp. 42–70. More technically, Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry: Toward Reconstruction in Epistemology (Oxford 1993). Even intellectuals sympathetic to postmodernism have begun to see that epistemic nihilism leads to the dead-end of political quietism. See Reed Way Dasenbrock, “We’ve Done It to Ourselves: The Critique of Truth and the Attack on Theory,” in PC Wars: Politics and Theory in the Academy, ed. Jeffrey Williams (New York and London 1995), 172–83.
16. Hirsch, Deconstructing Literature, 18–19.
17. The reader should see, for example, J. G. Merquior, Foucault (London 1985), 56–76.
18. As Crews notes, “The same license to subscribe to a theory without actually believing what it says also permits the ideologically committed to combine two or more doctrines which look to be seriously incompatible,” “The Grand Academy of Theory,” Skeptical Engagements (note 13), 172.
19. Beyond Deconstruction: The Uses and Abuses of Literary Theory (Oxford 1985), 205.
20. “All Against Humanity” (note 13), 1093.
21. Rpt. in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago 1978), 278–93.
22. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, 134. Cf. also Merquior (note 14), 195: “The Derridean radicalization of the principle of difference entails two broad strategies:…dropping once and for all the ‘kaleidoscope’ idea that structure is an identical ground, a core beneath the multiple surfaces” and “sticking more than ever to the ‘mantic’ severance of signifier from signified.”
23. Merquior (note 14), 191. See also Howard Felperin, “Beyond Theory,” (note 19), 205.
24. Peradotto’s reading of Bakhtin oversimplifies into a crude dichotomy the political dimension of “centrifugal” and “centripetal” forces, as is evident in Peradotto’s feminist reading of Circe’s protest against letting Odysseus return home. Bakhtin, rather, is after much bigger philosophical game—the symbiotic and dialectic relationship of order and disorder. See Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Palo Alto, Calif. 1990), 30–31.
25. Cf. Merquior, on the appeal of structuralist jargon: “First the sacralization of Method and the lavish use of jargon seem to have become staple defense mechanisms to the soft-brained humanities, increasingly corroded by inner doubts about their cognitive validity in our science-shaped world,” (note 14), 212.
26. Innovations of Antiquity, ed. Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden (London and New York 1992). Subsequent references parenthetical.
27. Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago 1980), 185, 186. The charge that American deconstructionists water down Derrida is made by traditionalists as well. Cf. M. H. Abrams: “Critical followers of Derrida have…assimilated deconstruction to their pre-existing critical assumptions and procedures. The result has been in various degrees to domesticate, naturalize, and nationalize Derrida’s subversiveness-without-limit, by accommodating it to a closer reading of individual works,” in “Construing and Deconstruing,” Doing Things with Texts (note 13), 314.
28. Hirsch (note 10), 47.
29. Cf. Ferry and Renaut: “[I]t seems there is nothing intelligible or sayable in the contents of Derrida’s work that is not, purely and simply, a recapitulation of the Heideggerian problematics of ontological difference,” (note 6), 124. For Heidegger’s Nazism see Hirsch, The Deconstruction of Literature (note 10), passim; Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, ed. Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore, trans. Paul Barrell and Gabriel R. Ricci (Philadelphia 1989).
30. Harold Fromm, “Academic Capitalism and Literary Value,” in Academic Capitalism and Literary Value (Athens, Ga. 1991), 212. Fromm’s essay is a brilliant explosion of the sorts of pretensions Hexter and Selden’s collection displays and an exposure of their origins in academic careerism.
31. See page 217.
32. “Bottom’s Children” (note 13), 31–32. Ferry and Renault point out that “the cult of paradox and the insistent demand for complexity if not, in fact, for a rejection of clarity” are a stylistic feature of French philosophy of the sixties (note 6), 12; emphases in original.
33. Pluto’s Republic (Oxford and New York 1982), 50.
34. Heath and I both owe this point to Victor Davis Hanson.
35. “Politics and the English Language,” 1946; rpt. in A Collection of Essays (New York 1953), 170. If, as I suspect’, the real reason for this collection’s existence is academic careerism, the following remarks of Orwell are especially pertinent: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink,” 167.
36. Orwell (note 35), 159. Emphases in original.
37. Charles Segal, Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Cambridge, Mass. 1981), 14, 15.
38. Thomas Docherty, Postmodernism/Postmarxism (London 1990), 2.
39. Eagleton (note 13), 134. Emphases in original.
40. “Deconstruction Reconstructed,” in Beyond Deconstruction (note 19), 119.
41. See for example, The Pursuit of Signs (London 1981), 41; or On Deconstruction (Ithaca, N.Y. 1982), 86.
42. “Deconstruction Reconstructed,” 130.
43. Note 14, 228.
44. Denys Page, Sappho and Alcaeus: An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Lesbian Poetry (1955; rpt. Oxford 1979), 28 n.2.
45. Cf. Frederick Crews: “Such servility constitutes an ironic counterpart of positivism—a heaping up, not of factual nuggets, but of movement slogans treated as fact.” In “The Grand Academy of Theory” (note 13), 172.
46. Ferguson suspects she may be out of fashion, as evidenced by her claim in the notes that “Were I writing [the essay] today, I would no doubt attempt a more historicizing mode of analysis than did the author of what you are about to read” (87). She prints this essay anyway because it looks at Augustine “from a theoretical premise still relatively unusual in scholarly studies of Augustine” (89). In other words, “I may be out of style, but I’m still ahead of the traditionalists.” Ferguson’s apology confirms further that she thinks Derrida discovered some permanent truth about language and meaning.
47. John Ellis (note 13), 36–37. I quote Ellis’s definition because he formulates it after close examination of the vague and sometimes incoherent definitions of Derrida himself and his explicators (29–36).
48. Ellis (note 13), 37–38.
49. Ellis (note 13), 57. My necessarily brief summary of Ellis’s argument does not do justice to its thorough destruction of Derrida’s position. See 45–57.
50. Ellis (note 13), 55, 56.
51. This, however, is not Derrida’s problem but his epigones’. As Allan Megill reminds us, “To attempt to isolate a Derridean position or articulate a Derridean thesis is to misunderstand the character of Derrida’s enterprise,” Prophets of Extremity (note 13), 260. A criticism like Ellis’s becomes necessary when eager disciples, mostly Americans conditioned by graduate school to avoid original thinking and defer to intellectual authority, demand a positive doctrine or discovered truth which they can then use to elevate their own feeble ideas. Given the financial rewards and celebrity resulting from this phenomenon, one cannot blame Derrida for going along for the ride.
52. As pointed out by Norman Furman, “Deconstruction, de Man, and the Resistance to Evidence: David Lachman’s Signs of the Times,” Academic Questions 5.3 (1992), 38.
53. For example, in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis 1984).
54. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore 1965); Patricia Meyer Spacks, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (Chicago 1990).
55. Karl Popper’s phrase quoted in W. K. C. Guthrie, The History of Greek Philosophy: 5, The Later Plato and the Academy (Cambridge 1978), 268. See 262–69 for an overview of the varying interpretations of the “receptacle.” See also George S. Claghorn, Aristotle’s Criticism of Plato’s “Timaeus” (The Hague 1954), 5–19.
56. See Guthrie (note 55), 265 n. 5. Bergren could have strengthened her case considerably by referring to the arguments for “spatiality” of Anne Freire Ashbaugh, Plato’s Theory of Explanation: A Study of the Cosmological Account in the Timaeus (Albany, N. Y. 1988), 96–136.
57. For exposure of the silliness of deconstructive architecture, see Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (New York 1991), 116–41.
58. But Bergren herself lists in n. 67 all the various Platonic uses of dêmiourgos, none of which include “architect.” Thus in the same note she has to make a feeble attempt to argue for this meaning:
The particular craft of architecture is indicated here in the Timaeus by the use with the dêmiourgos of verbs of building: tektainô (cf. tektôn “builder,” and architektôn “architect”) and construction: sun—“together, with” + histémi “make stand, set up.” The Timaeus is not the only dialogue in which a dêmiourgos figures as architect of the cosmos: see also Republic 507c, 530a4b4, Politics 27Oa5, 273b!. (295, n.67)
The smoke-screen of etymology cannot hide the fact that the dêmiourgos more usually means “craftsman” or “artificer,” in other words, one who designs and executes, not, like a modern architect, one who merely designs: “[T]he word [dêmiourgos] reminds us that a craftsman works in a given material and to a pattern or form, either before his eyes or reflected in his mind,” (Guthrie [note 56], 254). Nor do verbs of building or construction necessarily imply an architect—they more accurately refer to a carpenter, who does the actual building and constructing, and who may or may not be also involved in the design. Finally, the references to the Republic and the Politics do not support Bergren’s case one bit, despite the dishonest phrase “figures as architect of the cosmos,” which implies that in those dialogues the word dêmiourgos more obviously means architect. But of course it does not—it means exactly what it means in the Timaeus, “artificer,” “craftsman,” “technician.”
59. See Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (Oxford 1991). Degler shows that disciplines such as psychology and anthropology dominated thinking about human nature in the earlier part of the century, but have had to come to terms with advances in the hard sciences that have shifted emphasis back to nature and biology. Moreover, Degler traces the way the political ideologies of individual researchers tilted their thinking in one direction or the other.
60. E. P. Thompson has explained how such intellectually shaky ideas as radical constructionism could gain so much credence among intellectuals with liberationist pretensions. Speaking of Althusserian-inspired skepticism about the “subject” and the possibility of empirical knowledge, Thompson writes:
This particular freak…has now lodged itself firmly in a particular social couche, the bourgeois lumpen-intelligentsia: aspirant intellectuals, whose amateurish intellectual preparation disarms them before manifest absurdities and elementary philosophical blunders, and whose innocence in intellectual practice leaves them paralysed in the first web of scholastic argument which they encounter; and bourgeois, because while many of them would like to be “revolutionaries,” they are themselves the products of a particular “conjuncture” which has broken the circuits between intellectuality and practical experience…and hence they are able to perform imaginary revolutionary psycho-dramas (in which each outbids the other in adopting ferocious verbal postures) while in fact falling back upon a very old tradition of bourgeois elitism…. The Poverty of Theory (New York 1978), 3.
Many other commentators have noted that the philosophical semi-literacy of literary critics has contributed to their enthusiastic endorsement of questionable ideas. Cf. Merquior: “Normally illiterate in philosophy, the latter [literary critics] are increasingly colonized by theoretical literary criticism in a frantic search for a weltanschauliche pedigree…. For deconstruction is acclaimed in philosophically unskilled quarters precisely because it got rid of argumentative rigour while providing the pathos of an apocalyptic Weltanschauung. The first thing liberated by the Liberation of the Signifier movement is the right to wild philosophizing,” (note 14), 218, cf. also 246, 256.
61. Bergren obviously never learned Sam Spade’s dictum that “the cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter” applies to academics as well as gunsels.
62. Lentricchia (note 27), 186.
63. Ed. by Barbara Goff (Austin, Tex. 1996). Subsequent references parenthetical.
64. I am reminded of Hirsch’s comment that “[l]iterary theorists play philosophers’ games with minimal skills, and they dabble in philosophical discourses they do not necessarily control,” The Deconstruction of Literature (note 10), 67.
65. In Beyond Deconstruction (note 19), 19.
66. Half-truth because the “object of historical inquiry” is very often not textual. It is rather something like ancient bones or pottery shards or ruins. But of course, “all the world’s a text” is another unexamined poststructuralist credo.
67. In “The Grand Academy of Theory” (note 13), 164.
68. Note 14, 253.
69. Note 6, 18–19. See also Hirsch (note 10), 255–68.
70. “Deconstructing a Discipline” (note 13), 118.
71. Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning: An Episodic History of American University and College Since 1953 (South Bend, Ind. 1978), 177.
72. “Literary Politics and Blue-Chip High-Mindedness,” in Academic Capitalism and Literary Value (Athens, Ga. and London 1991), 177. Many others, of course, have made the same point, including Camille Paglia in Arion.
73. “America’s Professoriate: Politicized, Yet Apolitical,” Chronicle of Higher Education 42.31 (April 12, 1996), B2.
74. The Degradation of the Academic Dogma: The University in America, 1945–1970 (New York and London 1971), 75: “conspicuous research” on 109, emphasis omitted. See also the remarks of Jacques Barzun, “The University as the Beloved Republic,” 1966; rpt. in Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, ed. Morris Philipson (Chicago and London 1991), 160: “We keep speaking of a company of scholars, but what we have in our new Babylons of higher learning is a scrimmage of self-seeking individuals and teams, the rugged age of gilded research. This commercial outlook, reinforcing professionalism, explains the absence of original ideas in almost every field of learning and will insure the continuance of that dearth for as long as the boom lasts.”
75. Frederick Crews, “Criticism Without Constraint” (note 13), 129. This problem of course is even more acute in classics, which unlike modern literatures has a finite number of texts, and which lacks the popular literature English criticism can exploit to keep itself going.
76. In “The Shame of the Graduate Schools,” 1966; rpt. in Arion, third series 2.2 & 3 (spring and fall, 1992), 174.
77. In The Theory of Education in the United States (New York 1932), 52, 53. See the defense of the character-forming power of classics by E. Christian Kopff, “The Classics and the Traditional Liberal Arts Curriculum,” Modern Age 34.2 (1992), 136–42.
6. Self-Promotion and the “Crisis” in Classics
1. Lanham, Md., New York, and London 1989; hereafter cited as Crisis.
2. Martin Bernal begins his essay, for example, by simply noting that his only quarrel with the title of the book “is with the final question mark” (“Classics in Crisis: An Outsider’s View In,” Crisis 67–74, quotation on p. 67).
3. Lewis Sussman, “The Research, Publication, Advancement Triangle and the Teaching of Classical Civilization Courses: A Modest Proposal,” Crisis 107–15, refers to the two groups as the CGRDs (Comprehensive Graduate Research Departments) and all the rest (ATRs). Edward Phinney, “The Classics in American Education,” Crisis 77–87 (esp. 77), draws the line in this two-tier system between high school and university/college teachers. There is no doubt that much important work has been done and needs to be done in helping to build the classical curriculum in the high schools, but my argument here concerns the structure of classics at the college/university level and will not examine this other division.
4. K. Galinsky, “Classics beyond Crisis,” CW 84.6 (1991) 441–53, quotation on p. 453; reprinted in Galinsky, Classical and Modern Interactions (Austin, Tex. 1992) 154–70.
5. See, for example, the factional debate between Richard Thomas, who would define himself as a traditional classical philologist, and two feminist classicists, Judith Hallett and Barbara McManus, over the APA elections in Lingua Franca (“Thomas Unbound,” 2.3 [Feb./March 1992] 3, 54; “Classical Feminism,” 2.5 [June/July 1992] 53). The press itself has a role in all this, choosing to emphasize this debate over any other issue, no doubt at least partially because it is a “better sell.” Thus it is all the more important for classicists to make a serious effort to redirect the discussion.
6. Some of what I have to say would be appropriate to a discussion of any discipline in the humanities. My belief is that classics is particularly vulnerable at this moment, but is also especially valuable. The strengths of the field have been obscured by the posturing of a few histrionic elitists for their own benefit.
7. “The Training of Classicists,” Crisis 89–98, quotation on 89.
8. Very good on this issue, in addition to Henderson, is Ronald Mellor’s discussion of the increasing irrelevance of a classical graduate education to undergraduate teaching: “Classics and the Teaching of Greek and Roman Civilization,” Crisis 99–105.
9. Henderson (above, n.7) 92.
10. Or worse; see the remarks by Sherill L. Spaar, “Veni, Vidi, Spent Abieci: A Report from the Provinces,” Crisis 155–62.
11. Henderson (above, n.7) 93.
12. The APA teaching award can be a mixed blessing. Dennis G. Glew, in addition to noting the likelihood that this award too must become a vehicle for self-promotion, asks, “Is it not a kind of bone being tossed to the little dogs who usually lose out in the scramble for the meat?” (“Some Reflections on Teaching Classics Alone,” Crisis 163–87, quotation on 166).
13. “Arthur Darby Nock: 1902–1963,” CO 70.1 (1992) 8–9, quotation on 8. Nock’s insufferable behavior might be excused given the truly tremendous contribution he made to our understanding of the ancient world (and with the hopes that someone else at Harvard bothered to teach undergraduates on occasion). But how many of us have his excuse? Far fewer than could make the claim, I fear.
14. R. J. Ball, The Classical Papers of Gilbert Highet (New York 1983), 6. Calder himself, some twenty years before his encomium of Nock’s pedagogy, wrote approvingly of (the still living) Highet, “For me Professor Highet will always represent the peaceful coexistence of popularization and specialization.” (“Gilbert Highet, Anthon Professor of Latin, Emeritus,” CW66.7 (1973) 385–87, quotation on 387). What I am really contrasting here, of course, is the image of these two scholars conjured up by their devoted students. Whether Nock was always so callous or Highet so generous may be left up to their colleagues and students to debate.
15. I thank Judith Hallett for sharing with me her paper summarizing the status of feminists in classics: “Ubi fuimus? Quo vadimus?: Feminist Challenges and the Profession of Classics,” delivered at the conference on Feminism and Classics, University of Cincinnati (Nov. 5, 1992). Feminists are not alone in laying claim to a more inclusive vision, for this is a standard call of the left. See, for example, David Konstan’s suggestions that “this resurgent version of the Old Humanities is often openly hostile to the ideals of radical egalitarianism that mark the New Humanities” (“What Is New in the New Approaches to Classical Literature,” Crisis 45–49, quotation on 48). Such egalitarianism is theoretical—all cultures and systems of values must be given equal consideration. But are the “New Humanities” demonstrably more open to the “Old Humanities” than the Old are to the New? Comments made by each extreme about the other would seem to suggest we have far to go.
16. I take these different “feminisms” from the discussions of J. Birkeland, “Ecofeminism: Linking Theory and Practice,” and L. Gruen, “Dismantling Oppression: An Analysis of the Connection Between Women and Animals,” in G. Gaard (ed.), Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (Philadelphia 1993), 17 and 25, respectively.
17. The connection between theories and the life of theorists has always been problematic. Political scientists who advocate Marxism or socialism in their publications live in big houses in the most exclusive neighborhoods of Palo Alto and La Jolla—I know one in Florida who boasted for weeks that his front lawn had won a neighborhood prize for “best-groomed.” Even if feminism in some of its forms can be shown to be communitarian, does this mean that feminist scholars will necessarily live that life?
18. The recent controversial APA elections were generally read as a “victory” for the Right over the Left, but they can just as easily be seen as a continued control by the top over the rest. The ironies multiply to the point of absurdity when Richard Thomas, accurately termed an “elitist” by the feminist contingent, attempts to call our attention to the fact that both female candidates “teach at elitist East coast colleges” ([above, n.5] 54).
19. See Henderson’s discussion of “serious” and “unserious” students ([above, n.7] 93) and Sussman’s (above, n.3) analogy of the major and minor leagues.
20. Galinsky (above, n.4) 445.
21. Galinsky apparently attempts to defuse any charges of possible elitism (after proudly listing his elitist credentials) by referring to his years on “the assembly line” during his college days ([above, n.4] 442). And Ronald Reagan was president of a union.
22. Galinsky (above, n.4) 448. Some, on ideological grounds, may object to Galinsky’s use of a Western economic model, but the better objection would be that anyone who argues for any general education requirement—and I know very few who do not—believes in some form of education protectionism. Indeed, many of us who have taught at liberal arts colleges chose that environment because by definition the students’ curricular choices are limited to areas we believe to be more important than others; see Hallett (above, n.15) 5–7 for a good critique of Galinsky’s ideas.
23. Galinsky, “The Challenge of Teaching the Ancient World,” in D. M. Astolfi (ed.), Teaching the Ancient World (Chico, Calif. 1983) 3.
24. David Halperin, “Normalizing Greek Desire,” Crisis 257–72.
25. Charles Segal, Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet (Baltimore and London 1989). And to be fair to all sides (examples are too easy to find), one can point to a recent book on Pindar by Mary Lefkowitz, the bete noire of feminist classicists, every single chapter of which has appeared over the past thirty years.
26. Martin Bernal, for example, (above, n.2) 72 comments on the “advent of the Reagan Administration and the ideologies of the Far Right that it put into power over academia.” David Halperin also discusses the 1980s, “when much of Western Europe and America seems to have sunk into a reactionary torpor, embracing with a hollow and cynical enthusiasm the comforts of conventional pieties and rushing to rediscover the demagogic possibilities of a self-serving obscurantism” (One Hundred Years of Homosexuality [New York 1990] 8). Surely the “reactionary” right is not the only side to have discovered “the demagogic possibilities of a self-serving obscurantism.” Camille Paglia rightly notes that the “French invasion of the Seventies had nothing to do with leftism or genuine politics but everything to do with good old-fashioned American capitalism, which liberal academics pretend to scorn” (“Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf,” Arion 3rd ser. 1.2 [1991] 139–212, quotation on 185). For Paglia’s own part in the debate, the words of Mary Lefkowitz (in general quite favorable) fit closely with my argument: “I can’t help noticing that she too is a product of the American academic world: quick to schematize, eager to promote herself, ready to jump on a theoretical bandwagon” (“Madonna’s Intellectual,” The Public Interest [Winter 1993] 93–97, quotation on 97). George H. Douglas also uses the analogy of what I term Reagademics in his discussion of the failure of the American university system to free itself from the Germanic graduate model: “What we have is a ‘trickle-down’ style of undergraduate education. Undergraduates get the drippings or leavings of the table from graduate schools. No idea that has ever taken hold in the American university has been more harmful and destructive than this one” (Chronicle of Higher Education 39.27 [March 10, 1993] B6).
27. Henderson (above, n.7) 90 notes that the sciences have overcome this dichotomy in such figures as Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking (and I might add Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins). Mellor (above, n.8) 103 observes that both British and French classical scholars write general works about the ancient world apparently without ruining their careers.
28. Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden, Innovations of Antiquity (New York and London 1992), xx.
29. More revealingly, the sentiment is merely a rehashing of archetypal remarks from the founding fathers of the Left, who themselves are the direct descendants of the Sophists; see D. Roochnik, The Tragedy of Reason (New York 1990). Note, for example, Marcel Detienne’s review of the ways classicists of the twentieth century had kept the study of Greek mythology to themselves (and away from anthropologists) in his “Myth of ‘Honeyed Orpheus’,” in R. L. Gordon (ed.), Myth, Religion and Society (Cambridge 1981) 95 (originally published as “Orphée au miel” in 1971):
But most effective of all was their third method, the handing over of mythical narrative to literary history. Ever since, classical scholars have used the written status of classical mythology to justify their prior claim to it, and until quite recently they did no more than select from it the elements compatible with the dominant ideology of the bourgeois society whose interests and aims so-called “classical” philology has always so faithfully served.
For a thorough discussion of the ironies of this introduction to a series of remarkably familiar and “tempered” articles, see Bruce Thornton’s analysis in chapter five of this volume. Victor Davis Hanson has pointed out to me that Daniel Selden can, in fact, when it serves his own purposes, praise “accommodating” prose, as in his blurb for Jack Winkler’s The Constraints of Desire: “Winkler writes with a precision and liveliness that are rare within the field.…consistently clear, logical, and persuasive, and one needs no Greek to follow his discussion” (first emphasis in blurb itself, second emphasis mine). Similar criticisms of clear prose from the ideological Left can be found in other fields of the humanities. In a Chronicle article examining the debate on accessible language in the feminist journal Signs, for example, the historian Joan Scott lumps together “simple language” and “personal experience,” which “to me suggest a kind of anti-intellectualism” (Chronicle of Higher Education 39.27 [March 10, 1993] A12).
30. This discussion takes place not only in such purely academic publications as the Chronicle of Higher Education but in the popular press as well. Camille Paglia’s Sex, Art and American Culture (New York 1992), the first essay of which is a reprint of her Arion review of Winkler, Halperin, and the state of classics, was a bestseller for many weeks.
31. For comments and bibliography on the demise of deconstruction, see Thornton (above, n.29).
32. See the indirect quotation from Amy Richlin in the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education cited at the beginning of this paper.
33. One should celebrate the efforts of Barbara McManus, for example, to gather members of small classics programs in various formats at the recent APA meetings; see her comments in the APA Newsletter 15.6 (1992) 19–20. Thanks may also be owed for the decision of the latest editor of the Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists (Greenwood Press 1993) to include “a third group, less distinguished, the laborers in the vineyard who kept classics alive in the small or more remote institutions of our country and achieved at least regional distinction for their work” (Ward W. Briggs, Jr., “Prolegomena to the Study of the History of Classical Scholarship in the United States,” CB 68.1 [1992] 7–12, quotation on 9). At least there is no attempt here to disguise who stomps on the grapes and who enjoys the vintage.
34. “Keynote Address to the Conference on Teaching the Ancient World,” Crisis 39- 43, quotation on 42. Lowell Edmunds presents a more realistic picture of the difficulties involved in attempting any change: “What is actually elitist in the situation I have described is not the two-tier system itself but the attitude of the upper toward the lower tier” (“Introduction,” Crisis ix-xxviii, quotation on xiv). But it is also the members of the “lower tier,” all of whom are products of the “upper tier,” who are accomplices in perpetuating the myth of graduate faculty as the ideal of the profession. Could the entire discipline have an inferiority complex? This would account for both the arrogance of the elites and the complicity of the rest.
35. Judith Hallett draws my attention to the promising efforts to “sketch an agenda for reform of graduate education” organized at the APA in December 1993, by the Department of Classical Studies of the University of Pennsylvania. This is an ongoing project, with results to be presented over the next few years.
36. A series of articles and letters in the Chronicle of Higher Education debating the relationship between teaching and research revealed the tensions quite clearly. Surprisingly neither side argued that teaching and research should not be combined (as I remember, one Stanford science faculty insisted, “If they want to teach, let them go to Williams”). Even Bryan Barnett’s “Teaching and Research Are Inescapably Incompatible” (38.39 [June 3, 1992] A40), which provoked the discussion, based the dichotomy primarily on the realities of publication requirements, not on an educational desideratum. The resulting letters (June 10, June 17, June 24, July 8) and the more formal response by Robert McCaughey, “Why Research and Teaching Can Coexist,” 38.48 (Aug. 5, 1992) A36, reflect the ideal of the teacher-scholar which is becoming more and more difficult to realize.
37. Sussman (above, n.3) 114–15. This sort of exchange program could be started immediately in parts of the country where Ph.D.-granting institutions are located near undergraduate colleges and universities. The graduate program might serve as a regional nexus for the faculty exchange (somewhat on the southern California model).
38. The protestations to such a plan, or similarly conceived consortia, ring very hollow. If, as is often the case, a young Ph.D. one year out of graduate school can conduct a graduate seminar (even though he or she has no record of peer review on the research), certainly a teacher-scholar with a record of publication on a topic, and a record of excellent teaching, can perform in a similar, if not superior fashion. The real problem might very well be the reverse. Would a graduate researcher be able to teach effectively a forty-student undergraduate course with students of average ability?
39. I have quite intentionally not attempted to define “good” teaching. There are many ways to be effective, rigorous, and inspiring in the classroom.
40. “After Smashing the Wedgwood,” American Scholar 58 (1989) 531–41, quotation on 537.
41. See, for example, John Leo’s review of this “Gong Show” in U.S. News and World Report (Jan. 18, 1993), 25. I found it both interesting and foreboding that this review ended with the comments of Professor Feroza Jussawalla, who “passionately supports multicultural studies.” She worries about intimidation and censorship in the MLA (in this case, from the Left) and “calls for freedom from both the old ‘scholarly humanist elites’ and the new ‘elitist hegemonic Marxists’.” The titles of the silly papers given each year at the MLA may present a skewed view of the priorities of all its members, but this has been encouraged and sponsored by its leadership. Is classics that far behind? Wasn’t there a cry for the APA to become more like the MLA in at least one of the candidates’ statements last year?
42. See the comments of Francis R. Bliss, “The APA and the Regional Associations,” TAPA 123 (1993) 411–13, with the reply by Jerry Clack (413–16), on the dismissal of regional organizations by the “big-wigs and careerists.”
43. E. Christian Kopff, “Home Thoughts on British and American Classicists,” Crisis 317–20, quotation on 319. For a quite different, but equally impassioned, view of the role of foreigners in American academics, see Thomas Figueira’s “The Prospects for Ancient History,” Crisis 369–81. The issue is not completely irrelevant to my argument. If undergraduate teaching and the training of undergraduate teachers should really become a high priority, one would have to make a very good case for hiring a classicist with absolutely no experience in our undergraduate world and no demonstrable ability to perform either of the desired tasks; see James W. Halporn, “Foreign Scholars and American Classical Education,” Crisis 305–315 (esp. 313–14). One has to question the thinking behind the hiring of foreign scholars at any time, but especially to head a department—some can barely speak English!
44. This paper began life as a frenetic and restive infant. The editors and referees recommended a nearly two-year course of surgical procedures and heavy medication. As a result of these efforts, for which I am genuinely grateful, it is now much better behaved and perhaps ready for company. I must admit, however, that I miss some of its youthful obstreperousness.
7. Who Killed Homer?: The Prequel
1. For discussions of the FBI and the so-called “Unabomber Maneuver,” see John Heath’s epilogue in this volume. Hours before going to press, James Clark, the director of the University of California Press, made a sudden list of non-negotiable demands aimed at eliminating our criticism of prominent classicists in the paperback edition of Who Killed Homer? that was scheduled for publication in Spring 2001—after a mysterious delay of nearly two years. For an account of the strange paperback odyssey of Who Killed Homer? with the University of California Press, see the Afterword in the new edition by Encounter (San Francisco 2001).
2. New York Times Magazine, Sunday, February 16 (1997), 38, 40, 42. Wills is not alone, of course, in his contention that classics is flourishing as never before. Some classicists agree. These cheerful souls base their optimism on a few heavily enrolled courses at those institutions where students can, for example, satisfy their “Gender Studies” requirement by taking a course in “Women in Antiquity.” Professor Judith Hallett of the University of Maryland, for example, claims that “[t]he study of classics thrives in the United States—though not necessarily in the form of undergraduate classics majors. Many students, though concentrating in other subjects, fill their requirements for a liberal arts degree by studying ancient languages, classical texts-in-translation, and other aspects of Greco-Roman civilization.” Lingua Franca Sept./Oct. (1995), 62–63. As we will make clear, a handful of courses like these is not indicative of the health of classics in America but rather provides the last narrow foothold for an academic discipline on the university curriculum, the final justification for jobs of a final generation of classicists.
3. These and the following numbers come from L’ Année Philologique, the official bibliographical guide to scholarship on the classical worlds. 1992 is the most recent year available—the bibliography itself cannot keep up with the volume of publication and is years behind. The 16, 168 publications do not include the thousands of book reviews published in professional journals.
4. Jean Susorvey Wellington, Dictionary of Bibliographic Abbreviations Found in the Scholarship of Classical Studies and Related Disciplines (Westpoint, Conn. 1983), xi.
5. Keith Stanley, The Shield of Homer: Narrative Structure in the Iliad (Princeton, N.J. 1993).
6. Celia McGee, in her supplementary article to Wills’s, claims without documentation that enrollment in Latin courses at the college and graduate school level increased twenty-five percent between 1992 and 1994 (“The Classic Moment: Signs that B.C. is P.C.” The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, February 16 [1997], 41). In reality, the numbers provided by the MLA tell a different story: Latin enrollments actually declined a further 8 per cent between 1990 and 1995; see CAMWS Newsletter 6.2 (1996), 7. The desperate attempts of supporters of the phantom “multicultural Greeks and Romans” to document their success hang on equally insubstantial evidence. McGee cites the publication of new translations of Greek authors (hardly a new phenomenon and unrelated to most recent scholarship), art exhibits (even less novel), and the Disney movie Hercules. The appearance of Hercules in an animated feature film has as much connection to classical studies as the success of The Little Mermaid had to the study of marine biology.
7. Marilyn Skinner et al., “Greek 2000—Crisis, Challenge, Deadline,” The Classical Journal 91.4 (1996), 406.
8. For these statistics on the demise of classics, we have drawn from Classics: A Discipline and Profession in Crisis? edited by Phyllis Culham and Lowell Edmunds (Lanham, Md. 1989), and David Damrosch, “Can Classics Die?” Lingua Franca Sept./Oct. (1995), 61–66. Despite the question mark in these titles, the consensus is that our ship is indeed sinking—even as the doomed point fingers at one another before we drown. The most recent data are particularly distressing. While Latin enrollments at the pre-college level have increased during the past few years (Latin is studied in fewer than 2 percent of America’s high schools), the number of students taking Latin and Greek continues to decline as a percentage of the total university population. That is, colleges and universities fail to sustain students’ incipient interest in the classical world. See Richard A. LaFleur, “Latina Resurgens: Classical Language Enrollments in American Schools and Colleges,” Classical Outlook 74.4 (1997), 125–30.
9. Classical World 65.8–9 (1972), 258.
10. D. Konstan, Classical World, 89.1 (1995), 33.
11. James O’Donnel, Lingua Franca Sept./Oct. (1995), 62.
12. Ian Morris, ed., Classical Greece: Ancient Histories and Modern Archaeologies (Cambridge 1994), 3.
13. Tina Passman, “Out of the Closet and into the Field: Matriculture, the Lesbian Perspective, and Feminist Classics,” Feminist Theory and the Classics, N.S. Rabinowitz and A. Richlin, eds. (New York and London 1993), 181.
14. M. Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, N.J. 1987), 2, 5.
15. Page Dubois, Sappho Is Burning (Chicago 1995), 147.
16. Eva C. Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (New York 1985), 1.
17. V. J. Wohl, “Standing by the Stathmos: The Creation of Sexual Ideology in the Odyssey,” Arethusa 26 (1993), 44.
18. I. E. Holmberg, “The Odyssey and Female Subjectivity,” Helios 22.2 (Fall 1995), 120.
19. N. S. Rabinowitz, “Introduction,” Feminist Theory and the Classics (note 12), 16.
20. “Black Feminist Thought and Classics: Re-membering, Re-claiming, Re-empowering,” Feminist Theory and the Classics (note 12), 29.
21. Barbara Goff, “Introduction” in History, Tragedy, Theory (Austin, Tex. 1996), 20.
22. Marilyn A. Katz, Penelope’s Renown: Meaning and Indeterminacy in the Odyssey, Princeton 1991.
23. Review by L. E. Doherty, Classical Journal 89 (1994), 205.
24. Saint Foucault (Oxford 1995), 12.
25. Quoted in Academic Questions 7.4 (1994), 33.
26. Classical World 89.1 (1995), 32.
27. Classical Outlook 70 (1992), 8.
28. Classical World 89.1 (1995), 33.
8. The Twilight of the Professors
1. The Treason of the Intellectuals, trans. Richard Aldington (New York, 1928), xi.
2. Peter W. Rose, “Historicizing Sophocles’ Ajax,” in History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama, ed. Barbara Goff (Austin, Tex. 1996), 75.
3. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Selected Prose, ed. P. J. Keating (Harmondsworth, 1970), 141–42.
4. Benda, 79, 103, 117.
5. The Poverty of Theory (New York, 1978), 3.
6. In “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf,” 1991; rpt. in Sex, Art, and American Culture (New York 1992), 210.
7. For a brief history see Russell Jacoby, Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Culture Wars Divert Education and Distract America (New York 1994), 92–119.
8. See George Roche, The Fall of the Ivory Tower: Government Funding and the Bankrupting of American Higher Education (Washington, D.C. 1994), 72.
9. See Impostors in the Temple (New York 1992), 32.
10. The Degradation of the Academic Dogma: The University in America, 1945–1970 (New York and London 1971), 75.
11. Proscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education (Washington, D.C. 1988), 4–5.
12. Nisbet, 109. Emphases omitted.
13. Radical multiculturalists understand this: cf. David Theo Goldberg, who identifies a “corporate multiculturalism” that is really the ideology “of a centrist academy and multinational corporations that take themselves to be committed to the broad tenets of philosophical liberalism.” In “Introduction: Multicultural Conditions,” Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Cambridge, Mass. 1994), 7.