Corrupting Youth

The issue of corrupting youth is part of the current debate over the nature and purpose of public education. At stake in that debate is the definition of a national identity and the possibilities of American democracy. What is different, even distinctive to the current debate dubbed the “Culture Wars” by conservative public intellectuals, is the apocalyptic rhetoric of Armageddon and battle. It is as if, having lived so long and found such moral comfort in the bipolarity of the cold war, we could not do without it, even if that meant shifting the battle lines from the international to the national arena, as of course it had partly been in the McCarthy era.¹

The new war is being fought over many issues and on many fronts: over affirmative action, prayer in the schools, and immigration policy; over the relationship between race and IQ, textbooks and standardized tests; over levels of public support for public education and multicultural curriculum. The battles go on in local school boards, in Congress and the Supreme Court, by those who have removed their children from public schools, those who would like to but cannot, and those who remain committed either by default or in principle to public schooling. Whatever their respective politics and diagnoses of our educational ills, almost all participants agree that the public school system as now conceived and functioning is failing, whether because of the skills and values it has failed to inculcate or the ones it has, because it has been asked to do too much or cannot do even the rudiments. Either in despair or with relief people are coming to regard schools as places of discipline and confinement.²

Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of the disaffection with the public school system as now constituted is the proposal for a voucher system. The one rejected by California voters in 1993 (and which has reappeared in modified form in 1996) would have given each child a $2,600 voucher from the state public education budget toward tuition at participating private and religious schools with at least twenty-five students. Proponents argued that only drastic action could reverse a decade or more of miserable failure by the public school bureaucracy, which seemed capable of turning out drug-ridden, violent, promiscuous youth without any respect for authority or America.

With typical hyperbole William Buckley likened the disease infecting our educational system to AIDS. Just as people refuse to accept the cure of a blanket prohibition against certain kinds of sex and dirty needle use to control that horrifying disease, so people refuse to accept the voucher system.³ The “cure” for an “ungovernable” educational system ruled by heavy-handed bureaucracies mired in regulations that discourage change and risk, buffeted about by politics and dominated by special interests, is privatization, the market, and an entrepreneurial government.⁴ Unrestricted school choice would force fundamental restructuring of a school system that is “monopolistic, archaic, inefficient, prevents competition and is bereft of incentive for improvement” because it would restore performance and accountability. Those schools that were insufficiently entrepreneurial, that is, “flexible, adaptive and innovative,”⁵ schools that were not meeting the needs of their students, were not delivering a quality educational “product,” and did not “offer the best deal” and the highest “return on investments” would simply lose students to the competition and “go out of business.”⁶ The campaign manager for the California voucher proposition compared the situation of public schools to the condition of the U.S. Postal Service. Before competition from Federal Express there was no next-day delivery service. The same for schools.

There is much that could be said about voucher plans in practice (as they are in Minnesota and Milwaukee) and as proposed, as in California.⁷ One could, for instance, provide some historical perspective insofar as the present debate echoes that in the late nineteenth century when the movement to make education more efficient and businesslike culminated in Taylorism.⁸ Then too the impetus for reform was the influx of immigrants and fear of multiculturalism. Scientists and social scientists, together with the “culture of professionalism”⁹ they imitated and certified, presented themselves as providing a nonpartisan standard for public behavior and citizen “training” that would “make” foreigners over into Americans, or at least keep them from polluting America.

One could also point to evidence that parents do not seem particularly concerned with the academic content of their children’s education and to the likelihood that as economically poor students or those with average academic ability come to be “at the mercy of schools of last resort” there will be a further inscription of class divisions and radical inequalities of power, all sanctified by the “natural” workings of the market and in the name of freedom.¹⁰

Or, finally, one could point out the curious symmetry between the probable consequences of the voucher system and identity politics, even though many of the supporters of the voucher system are implacably hostile to multiculturalism on the grounds that it fragments American society. If one is worried about the “balkanization” of American culture, then the voucher system is part of the disease, not the cure. To the extent that the force of the market rationalizes parental distrust of “the other,” that is, of different races, ethnicities, classes, or religions, we can look forward to a resegregation of American society that will make identity politics look like nationalism.

Given the concerns of this book, perhaps the most striking aspect of the voucher debate is the questions and issues that are not asked or raised, namely those having to do with the civic function of education. To blame Reagan (and perhaps Bush) for showing contempt for democracy by ridiculing politics as they practiced it, corrupting public discourse, assimilating politics to the market, fostering privatization of public tasks, and refusing to provide funds to reform the conditions under which schools are now forced to operate is too easy. It ignores the fact that not all supporters of the voucher system are laissez-faire conservatives and it misses what may be the most disconcerting aspect of the debate as a whole: that critics of the voucher initiatives do little more than gesture in the direction of the antidemocratic consequences of the system. Somehow questions about the role of public schooling in the educating of democratic citizens have become marginalized.

A similar conclusion emerges from the polemics between multiculturalists and canonists. Here again the issue of politically educating democratic citizens is largely peripheral, buried under an avalanche of charges by conservatives that multiculturalists and their allies are politicizing higher education and countercharges by the latter that they are merely responding to a situation that is already politicized.¹¹In the remainder of this chapter I want to cast the two debates in a way that focuses on the issue of political education, connect the rhetoric of reform with that of the culture wars, implode the canon in ways that skew the usual battle lines, and make a distinction between a political and a politicized education that might, at the very least, give depth to what often degenerates into name-calling. My point of reference in this endeavor is democratic Athens and Socrates.

“Our nation is at risk” begins the report that set the tone and terms for the educational reform debate of the past decade. 12 The report, addressed to Secretary of Education Bell and “to the American people” by the Reagan-appointed National Commission on Excellence in Education chaired by David P. Gardner, then president-elect of the University of California, was anointed by the New York Times as a founding document, analogous in its “singular economy of language and thought” to the Constitution itself. The Times called the report “one of the most significant documents in the history of American public education” and saw it as “the most visible symbol of the need to improve primary and high schools since the Russians put Sputnik into space.”¹³

Our nation was at risk because we were losing our once “unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science and technological innovation.” This was due to a “rising tide of mediocrity”¹⁴ in our schools that was corroding the educational foundations of our society, threatening our “prosperity, security and civility” and so “our very future as a nation and a people.” If a foreign power attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves and so have, in effect, “been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament,” thereby squandering all the achievements in the wake of the “Sputnik challenge.”

Instead of moving forward, we have been standing still and “History is not kind to idlers” in the competition for “international standing and markets” in products and ideas. Thus the risk is not only that the Japanese make more efficient automobiles, that the South Koreans built the world’s most efficient steel mill, or that American machine tools are being displaced by German products, but that these developments “signify a redistribution of trained capability through the globe. Knowledge, learning, information and skilled intelligence are the new raw materials in international commerce” and so for us even to keep our “slim” competitive edge in world markets requires that “we dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system for the benefit of all.” Learning is “the indispensable investment required for success in the ‘information age’ we are entering” (p. 7).

But the report is concerned with more than matters of commerce and industry. It worries about “the intellectual, moral and spiritual strengths of our people which knit together the very fabric of our society,” about individuals who, lacking appropriate kinds of skill and literacy, will be effectively disenfranchised from participating “in our national life,” and about an equivocal commitment not only to excellence but to equal educational opportunity as well (pp. 7-8). What can the dissipation of a shared national vision portend for an educational system that has been a part of that vision and the means for realizing it? Unless “we” are willing to reaffirm our commitment to educational excellence, our ideals will be transformed: individual freedom will become self-indulgence or egotism, pluralism will become indifference, and equality will mean mediocrity. Especially American education must be committed both to unity and diversity. Without shared values, sentiments, and experience, cultural and individual differences will cease to be disagreements about what is shared. When and if that happens, we will simply be unable to talk to each other.

The ideal they admire was enunciated by Thomas Jefferson: “I know of no safe repository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.”¹⁵ And the commission is clear that this means all the people. “We do not believe that a public commitment to excellence and educational reform must be made at the expense of a strong public commitment to the equitable treatment of our diverse population.” They are committed to the twin goals of equality and quality “in principle and in practice.” Anything less would deny young people their chance to learn and live “according to their aspirations and abilities” and lead “either to an accommodation to mediocrity or the creation of an undemocratic elitism” (p. 13).

To remedy and reverse this educational decline and to implement Jefferson’s vision, they propose a “Learning Society” where all would have a chance for an education that enhanced career goals as it improved the overall quality of life. In this society education would go beyond traditional institutional sites and designated times. Diplomas and universities would be the beginning, not the end of learning, which would go on in homes and workplaces, in libraries and museums, in “every place where the individual can develop and mature in work and life” (p. 14).

These are noble sentiments. Given the president to whom they were addressed and the general political climate, they are courageous ones as well. Thus the report’s reliance on military and economic language may be part of a strategy aimed at achieving humane ends in an inhumane time, when the president of the nation was himself a man of limited education. If defense receives attention and funding, then it is a good idea to make education part of the defense effort. If what matters most is winning the cold war, then make education a weapon in it. If economic growth, reindustrialization, and beating the Japanese are endorsed by the entire political spectrum, then remind everyone how essential education is to those aims. If businessmen are the sages of the time, then it is sagacious to present schools as a business or as preparing people for it. To be heard by the powerful, one must speak their language and to their concerns.

That such strategic considerations may have been present is indicated by what the report did not say, but which was said by virtually everyone else. The report does not blame teachers for the educational decline and, in fact, recognized the need to make teaching a more rewarding and respected profession. Nor does it conclude that better management and more “efficient productivity” in the schools can solve the crisis. Still more impressively, it avoids blaming the decline of the economy on the failures of our educational system as do other reports¹⁶ and it recognizes the fact that students are part of a larger culture which shapes what schools are asked to do and their capacity to do it.¹⁷ And while the report does not endorse a Freirean project of literacy as a liberatory process, it understands literacy in a less positivistic way than, say, E. D. Hirsch does. Finally, it does not blame everything wrong with American education on 1960s radicals, Marxists, and feminists, as do later litanies of lament.

But there is a danger in speaking the language of power to get the ear of the powerful.¹⁸ Cooperation can slide into co-optation, and respectability is too often purchased at the price of principle. Then diagnosticians may become part of the disease, their reports part of the risk rather than an adequate response to it. Something like that happens with the Gardner Report.

The report speaks in two voices: one material, technological, military, and quantitative; the other cultural, spiritual, and political, which it reconciles abstractly without fully recognizing the tensions between them. And the voices are not equal. For all its virtues, the Gardner Commission’s language is dominated by metaphors drawn from battle and commerce, cold war ideology, and the technological ethic of efficiency. Thus it is not surprising that the report conceives of education in instrumental terms. In contrast, the democratic sentiments tend to become somewhat perfunctory and largely decorative.

If it is the military, business, and technological voice that defines why our nation is at risk, then what sort of vision of education becomes appropriate? If we are losing the war for economic supremacy because we have become a nation of idlers, and if we are engaging in “unilateral educational disarmament” by squandering the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge when all efforts were concentrated on science and technology with military potential, then the solution is clear. We must rearm¹⁹ ourselves by reviving the coordination of science, engineers, government, and private enterprise that marked the post-Sputnik era. National security requires nothing less. If our survival is at stake, then all academic pursuits must be judged by their contribution to that end. If we do not speed up our educational productivity in the same way that we need to speed up our industrial productivity, we will be left behind by the Japanese, pushed aside by the Germans, and left defenseless by the Russians. If education is “one of the chief engines of society’s material well-being” (p. 17), we need to build bigger, more efficient engines to keep or improve our slim competitive edge in world markets.²⁰

In these terms the primary role of the humanities (outside of their decorative function) is to help in those adaptations necessary to create a more efficient fighting force to combat the decline in education and of America in the world. This is most evident when the report seems to be endorsing the opposite sentiment.

The report quotes “some” people as concerned that an overemphasis on technical and occupational skills as the aim of education will leave little time “for studying the arts and humanities that so enrich daily life, help maintain civility and develop a sense of community.” These same people believe that the “humanities must be harnessed to science and technology if the latter are to remain creative and humane, just as the humanities need to be informed by science and technology if they are to remain relevant to the human condition” (pp. 10-11). This formulation contains an instructive asymmetry. It suggests not an equality between the humanities and science/technology, but a hierarchy in which the purposes of the former serve those of the latter. In these terms and given the military metaphors, “civility” can only mean politeness and good form rather than an active, informed, and critical citizenry. And a sense of community is unlikely to be established by humanists or in humanistic terms, if the humanities and “softer” social sciences exist primarily to serve technological, commercial, and scientific imperatives. Power within the academy will follow those imperatives and devolve to those disciplines and scholars who contribute most to the educational war effort, and be taken from those who criticize or repudiate it.²¹

The commercial/technological/business emphasis in the Gardner Commission Report helped legitimate more aggressive claims by business to set the educational agenda of the 1980s. The Hunt Report, Action for Excellence,²² argued that “businessmen, in their role as employers, should be much more deeply involved in the process of setting goals for education in America, and in helping our schools realize those goals.” Examples of this were the $22 million grant Monsanto Corporation gave Washington University Medical School to fund research leading to marketable biomedical discoveries, a faculty member turning over patent rights of an invention to Allied Chemicals for $2.5 million following which the corporation bought two million dollars of stock in the firm founded by the professor,²³ and the Whittle Corporation’s commercials for Burger King and Snickers on Channel One shown to eight million students daily, as part of what has been admiringly termed “the commercial penetration of a student market worth 80 billion dollars annually.”²⁴ And, finally, there is the New American Schools Development Corporation’s plans to replace teachers with Electronic Teaching Centers.²⁵

Given all this, what can one say about the call for “higher academic standards”? No one advocates lowering standards. The issue is what vision of the schooling and education animates the demand? Whose standards for whom, for what ends? How diverse and qualitative will the criteria be by which “success” is measured? Quantitative emphasis on attendance, dropout rates, and test scores, and prescriptions for longer school hours, more days in school, and more uniform national standards of measurement is not promising.

Much of the Gardner Report’s sense of urgency and rhetorical power depended on the existence of the cold war. The reference to Sputnik, allusions to unnamed enemies (who could they be?), and the overall military language in a period of bellicose international posturing linked the call for educational excellence to national security imperatives. But now that the cold war is over, those imperatives are no longer so imperative. Neither is an educational agenda justified in its name.

The ending of the cold war not only removed an important rationale for educational reform, it also exacerbated the educational crisis by removing an admittedly pallid and negative but still useful construction of national identity. We were not the Soviet Union, not tyrannical, not godless, and not undemocratic and could, whatever else was wrong with us, take common comfort from those facts. But if, as Hannah Arendt argues, national identity and education are inextricably mixed here as nowhere else in the world,²⁶ then the crisis in education is a crisis of national identity and the “problematizing” of such identity intensifies the crisis, which is one reason why already present conflicts, such as those over multiculturalism, the canon, and the politicization of the university, have become so polemical and so public.

If Arendt is right in arguing that the present educational crisis affords an opportunity to see through what have become inadequate answers to questions we have forgotten were ones, then we have a chance to rethink what is involved in the education of democratic citizens. This rethinking might begin with the Jeffersonian sentiments quoted but then marginalized by the Gardner Commission. If the people possess the animating and limiting power in our nation, how can we inform their discretion without the informers assuming that power for themselves? If we are responsible for educating the people, who is the “we” and by what authority is the responsibility “ours”? Are there forms of political education that honor both the authority implied by education and the political equality demanded of a vigorous democracy? If public education is “the great means of forming an American identity,” then these questions about political education are also questions about American self-fashioning in the late twentieth century.

The Gardner Commission speaks about “our” common literary heritage, about “our” nation at risk and about “we” Americans. The presumption is that all benefit from an inheritance that belongs to us all, perhaps even that we all have somehow contributed to it and are responsible for it. It also presumes that we are nearly equal members of the nation that is at risk such that we all have roughly equal amounts to lose if it is unable to meet the challenges detailed by the commission. Finally, it assumes that the story of our heritage is the same for us all and that it is one story: of progress, enlightenment and reason, of increasing liberty, equality, and abundance, of the triumph of civilization and culture over primitivism and barbarism. But this story is now vigorously contested, characterized, and chastised as a “functionalizing history,” which obscures the deformations within the form, the violent suppressions erased by the victors, and the barbarism done in the name of civilization. Contesting the story means challenging groups whose power is legitimated by it and the vision of education they endorse. The counternarrative reminds us of slavery and genocide, of Chinese laborers and battered women, of silent presences and subjugated knowledges. If “we” are to celebrate “our” literary heritage and the achievements of Western culture by pointing to the French and American revolutions, to the Parthenon and King Lear, to democracy and philosophy, we cannot point past Auschwitz, the Gulag, and the Inquisition.

The purported danger of these counternarratives and the identity politics they legitimate or represent is the encouragement of a fragmentation that threatens paralysis and civil war. “If we repudiate the quite marvelous inheritance that history bestows upon us,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warns, “we invite the fragmentation of the national community into a quarrelsome spatter of enclaves, ghettoes and tribes.” The “cult of ethnicity” is exaggerating our differences and intensifying racial and national antagonisms.²⁷ James Atlas regards multiculturalism as “a harbinger of anarchy.”²⁸

At stake is the existence of the Union. But this civil war is not between North and South, but between the whole and its parts, between our identities as citizens and our particular ethnic, racial, and sexual identities. If we permit the social fabric to unravel, as it will if our particularities dominate our politics, we will, so these critics aver, become Eastern Europe, thus reversing the self-defined historical trajectory of American exceptionalism. Tom Paine thought that we “had it in our power to begin the world all over again”; Noah Webster, that for America to “adopt the maxims of the Old World would be to stamp the wrinkles of old age upon the bloom of youth, and to plant the seed of decay in a vigorous constitution.”²⁹

This “problematizing” of the “we” has become one battle in the culture wars. While the Gardner Commission had relied on military analogies and on a cold war mentality to provide urgency to its analyses and legitimacy for its prescriptions, much of this reliance was rhetorical and strategic. But the language of war in the debate over the canon is something else and something more. The “new barbarians,” we are told by Dinesh D’Souza, “have captured the humanities, law and social science departments” of many of our universities. The “unholy alliance” of “multiculturalists, feminists, radicals, poststructuralists, new historians and other varieties of leftism” have breached the gates and stand triumphant in the citadel.³⁰ “The Barbarians are in our midst,” Alan Kors warns. “We must fight them a good long time. Show them you are not afraid; they crumble.”³¹ “Resistance on campus,” D’Souza warns, “is outgunned and sorely needs outside reinforcement.”³² William Bennett sees great books as part of the “arsenal of the West”;³³ George Will calls Lynne Cheney, past director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the “secretary of domestic defense.”³⁴ “The foreign adversaries her husband Dick must keep at bay,” Will assures us, “are less dangerous, in the long run, than domestic forces with which she must deal.” Kors exhorted those of his colleagues committed to reason and civilization to “become the monasteries of the new Dark Ages, preserving what is worth preserving amid the barbarian ravages of the countryside and the towns of academe.”³⁵ Civilization itself is at stake. If we let the domestic barbarians win and permit the destruction of Western values such as the family, reason, morality, and discipline, we will be unable to confront foreign barbarians, which will leave us, William Lind argues, besieged by Islam now as the Viennese were by the Turks in 1683.³⁶

What is so astonishing as well as suspect about all this is how decisions about (usually first-year) curriculum became the subject of heated public debate. Why did decisions that are usually the issue of desultory compromises reached in the relative anonymity of faculty committee meetings suddenly become the center of such apocalyptic posturing, wild historical analogies, and extravagant prophecies? 37 Such excess invites a symptomatic as well as a substantive reading of the multiculturalism-canon debate.

For all their complaints (to be considered here) that the left has politicized the university, the complaint itself is often motivated by a politics of a fairly cynical kind. From Spiro Agnew’s vice-presidential candidacy and Reagan’s gubernatorial campaigns in California to Dan Quayle’s and Newt Gingrich’s imprecations against the cultural elite, university bashing has been a politically profitable strategy. But while this strategy has been effective in gaining power over the university, it has not necessarily been effective in gaining power inside it. In these terms the conservative “attacks” on the university may be a concerted effort to achieve the kind of dominance over higher education they have achieved in other domains.

In saying this I am not dismissing “conservative” criticisms of higher education, many of which are not distinctive to conservatives, and some of which I share. There are indeed serious problems with higher education. They include faddism, presentism, impatience (which leads to the Koran being read in a week as part of a survey course), self-righteous and ignorant dismissal of texts not read or read hastily, and a failure to recognize what the critics owe to what they are criticizing. But the seriousness of these criticisms is compromised by the critics’ own self-righteousness, their denial that there is any such thing as cultural power or that if there is it comes to them “naturally” as the transmitters of what is best and highest, and by defensive reiteration of what may be outworn pieties.

This said, I have no desire to perpetuate either the tone or terms of the polemic over the canon. Indeed, I want to recast the terms of the debate in ways that make room for the articulation of views that defy the labeling polarities that have too often forced people into alliances they do not want and positions they do not respect.³⁸ To this end I will defend the canon against some of its critics and use it against some of its defenders. I want to defend “the” canon because, from one perspective, dismissing it is too easy and American, too congenial to too many cultural prejudices. Alexis de Tocqueville argued that it was the tradition of Americans to be antitraditional, which implies that those who wish to overthrow all canons may be reenacting an American ritual even as they suppose themselves contesting American identity. And if his claim that the rejection of all authority and tradition leaves men and women isolated and powerless individualists susceptible to the quiet despotism of the administrative state and majority opinion, then we should be somewhat skeptical of arguments intended to liberate us from cultural authority and traditions, especially if the rich associational life Tocqueville thought would mitigate this susceptibility is now less strong. As this suggests, authority is not the opposite of freedom and tradition is not necessarily opposed to liberty. We need to distinguish between traditions like those analyzed by E. P. Thompson and Lawrence Goodwyn that sustain democratic practices and empower the poor and those that do not, and between canons that enhance political freedom and democratic authority and those that do not.

But I also want to implode the canon against some of its defenders since I believe that their reading of canonical texts often misses the way those texts warn us against what canonizers do to and with them. Too often “great books” are seen as texts which must be read “rightly” if “we” are to reclaim our “cultural inheritance,” which, on this assumption, flows like an electrical current or is passed on like genes.³⁹ Those who fail to teach the right lessons or read canonical texts as giving contradictory lessons are relativists, inattentive readers, or perverts⁴⁰ who distort the canon and undermine the reason for having one in the first place. As I noted in the preface, at times there seems to be a peculiar alliance between canonists who insist on one true reading and multiculturalists who dislike that reading and dismiss the text because of it. Something like that is present in Carolyn Heilbrun’s otherwise appropriately skeptical review of James Atlas’s Battle of the Books when she quotes “someone” who, with only a slight exaggeration, claims that “great books courses teach young men to be warriors the first semester, priests the second.”⁴¹

One reason canonical texts such as the Bible or Iliad are “great” is that they stimulate the kinds of moral and political controversies some canonists seek to minimize. If politicizing something (such as gender roles or racial classifications) means regarding them as “man”-made and so subject to human design rather than inscribed in nature, then the “greatness” of canonical texts and even the reason they become canonical may lie in their politicalness—in the kinds of interpretative controversies they stimulate and the conflicting view of human nature, action, or goodness they perpetuate. If true, then one cannot reduce these texts to a single meaning without destroying their capacity to provoke thought and stay alive, still less control their meaning for various audiences. Indeed many of the controversies prominent in the canon debate may be already inscribed in the plots, themes, arguments, and dramatic settings of the texts being celebrated or criticized.⁴² That means two things: that conservative canonists who lament the politicizing of higher education ignore the way the texts they venerate create an educational atmosphere they deplore; and that radical anticanonists may not recognize the degree to which the texts they excoriate are as much allies as antagonists in their fight against the master canon or the democratization of cultural authority.

Although there are plenty of antecedents and previous examples of culture wars in American history, perhaps the first “salvo” in the present one was Bennett’s To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education, published in 1984 when he was director of the National Endowment for the Humanities.⁴³ Bennett presented his report as complementary to that of the Gardner Commission. What they did for elementary and secondary education he would do for higher education (particularly the humanities): bring about “a number of longoverdue changes” and put “higher education in the public eye” (p. ii). As he described it, the fundamental task was to provide (or rather restore) a “vision and a philosophy of education” that could be a guide and standard for changes that would respect the specific missions of different kinds of educational institutions. Fortunately the roots, substance, and inspiration for that vision were located in the same place: in the words of Walter Lippman that prefaces the report, “the central, continuous and perennial culture of the Western world.” Unfortunately almost no students have “even the most rudimentary knowledge about the history, literature, art, and philosophical foundations of their nation and their civilization.” The result is intellectual drift and moral confusion. Unless we teach students that we are all “part and product of Western civilization,” that our principles of justice, liberty, consent of the governed, equality under the law” are “directly descended from the great epochs of Western civilization” and are “the glue that binds together our pluralistic nation” and the nations of the West, our students cannot be “participants in a common culture, shareholders in our civilization.”

This is our past. As such it must form the core of a college curriculum. It is the legacy to be recovered and reclaimed so we can understand “America and all of its people.” “If their past is hidden from them,” Bennett concludes without a trace of irony, “they will become aliens to their own culture, strangers in their own land.”

Because we have ignored this legacy or dismissed it on ideological grounds, we have become confused about what is worth caring for and cultivating, which lives and actions are worth emulating, and which books and ideas are worth studying. The legacy teaches both that there are standards of judgment independent of time, place, and circumstance and what those standards are. In the absence of such teaching we are left with a destructive dialectic of moral relativism and ideological absolutism. “To subordinate” texts and courses to “particular prejudices,” to choose the latter or shape the former “on the basis of their relation to a certain social stance” as was done in the 1960s and continues to be done by those who would reclaim that legacy, is to pervert the vision and aims of education to a political rather than a cultural agenda, to fragment rather than unite our nation and the West and dissociate us from the wellsprings of civilization.

Many of the concerns and themes presented sotto voce here become the declamations by conservative polemicists like Kimball, D’Souza, Allan Bloom,⁴⁴ and Bennett himself. Here, for example, is Roger Kimball:

What we are facing is nothing less than the destruction of the fundamental premises that underlie both our conception of liberal education and a liberal democratic polity. Respect for rationality and the rights of the individual, a commitment to the ideals of disinterested criticism, color-blind justice, and advancement according to merit, not according to sex, race, or ethnic origin; these quintessentially Western ideas are bedrocks of our political as well as our educational system.⁴⁵

Multiculturalism rejects or undermines every one of these principles and commitments. It “wag(es) war against Western culture,” “assaults the mind,” and trumpets a “politically motivated betrayal of literature.”⁴⁶ Indeed the very idea of literature as a distinct realm of experience is rejected in the name of a “radically egalitarian conception of culture,” which fosters “ideological separatism” and irrationalism at the expense of reason and objectivity. In fact, multiculturalism relentlessly and monotonously politicizes all aspects of education and culture leading to a crippling divisiveness within the nation and university.⁴⁷ Here the historical trajectory of the eighteenth century will be reversed and the new world will mimic the old or the new one coming to be in the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

For Kimball and his fellow soldiers, universities and colleges are the citadels that need defending and great books are the threatened treasures within them. Institutions of higher learning are places where the achievements of Western culture are celebrated, taught, and exemplified, where enlightenment and civilization are spread, and where the disinterested search for truth finds a singular home and support. To choose inferior works like The Color Purple on the basis of intellectual affirmative action or because special interest groups push them is to deny oneself the depth and variety of experience and profound insights into the human condition a well-educated person gets by reading the Republic, The City of God, The Inferno, or Lear. Not to choose books for their intrinsic merit, their self-evident virtues, and their capacity to reveal truths about human nature, or to pervert those texts by writing an essay on the masturbatory girl in Jane Austen or to discuss the Godfather as a metaphor for American business is to compromise Western civilization at precisely a time when it is threatened by the dominance of electronic media, the equalization of all values, and pervasive moral drift. Some canonists are cultural Darwinists: great works have selected themselves because of their aesthetic qualities, their power of imagination and language, their craftsmanship and reasoning capacity. Though they have not been selected for political reasons (since that would imply politicizing the university), they have salutary political and moral teachings.

Perhaps the most repeated canonist charge is that an unholy alliance of postmodernists, Marxists, feminists, and multiculturalists are “politicizing” the university. They have made race, class, and gender the litmus test for who should be hired and what should be taught, by whom and in what way, and made membership in “an oppressed” group determine the legitimacy of what is said, leaving white males to defend their right to speak on such issues as race or gender instead of having to defend the cogency of what they say. That this amounts to a strategy of silencing from groups that complain about being silenced just adds a little irony to the process. But universities and colleges are distinctive as places where people give reasons and make arguments, the legitimacy of which are at least potentially independent of race, class, gender, sexual preference, or ethnicity. The unholy alliance politicizes the university in another way: using it as an instrument of social transformation. For canonists, no university can be part of a political movement, and no serious intellectual endeavor can honor prejudice and partisanship above truth and impartiality.

Nor should colleges and universities mirror the social divisions of society, what Kimball terms “ideological separatism.” In fact, they must not do so, but rather provide a place for rational nonideological discussion of them. What distinguishes universities from political institutions is precisely their ability to stand back from the demagoguery and vituperation characteristic of political conflict. To bring such conflicts into the university, as happened at City College of New York, is to substitute competing indoctrinations for education. It follows that the university is not a representative assembly where different interests compete for power and influence, but a place for reasoned debate. It is a community of scholars, not a community of power brokers.

Canonists tend to posit the 1950s as an idealized moment before the deluge of the 1960s when universities became politicized.⁴⁸ The 1950s are described as a time when applicants were selected on the basis of academic merit rather than affirmative action, where faculty were teachers committed to the search for truth and students respected authority in the family (which exemplified family values), the schools, and the nation, in contrast to the 1960s, whose explosion of democratic activism is demonologized even by those who present themselves as mediators in the culture wars. “In their attempts to redress injustice,” James Atlas writes, “the radicals of the 1960s unwittingly helped to perpetuate it; the assault on the curriculum has undermined the foundation of learning on which our society rests.”⁴⁹

Posed less polemically, there is substance to these worries. Canonists are right to regard those multiculturalists who wish to discard the canon as presently constituted or those who think there should be no canons at all as reenacting an American ritual even as they contest “American” identity. They are also right to warn about the dangers of a suffocating presentism as in David Harlan’s promise that “poststructuralist culture will force texts to answer our questions, derive from our needs, be couched in our terms.” 50

And they are right to argue that “great” works cannot be reduced to political usefulness (even if such “usefulness” covertly legitimates their canonization) and that the “greatness” of texts lies in their aesthetic qualities and generative imagination, the brilliance of their craft, and their capacity to make other worlds or points of view so vivid that “our” life seems, for the moment at least, foreign, unnatural, or absurd.⁵¹ Works like the Iliad and Oresteia give voice to silence. They save expression from slipping beyond the reach of memory and provide solace in wisdom against the heart’s oppressions and evasions.⁵² Finding space for action against the invasiveness of paralyzing grief, they make it possible for humans to accept responsibility for a world they did not make and inspiration to remake the parts they can less cruel, more free, and more just. If one wanted to maintain hierarchies of cultural power, Antigone and Lear, Plato’s Republic and Exodus, Augustine’s Confessions or Dante’s Inferno are unlikely candidates for the job. Thomas Hobbes complained that the reading of Aristotle and Cicero caused the English Civil War. As usual he exaggerated. But he did know something both canonists and their critics sometimes forget.

Additionally, canonists are right to warn us about using race, class, and gender to legitimate who can teach in what way and about what. Not only does it stereotype “people of color” constricting them to certain fields (such as Afro-American Studies), and presume that those who have undergone oppression can speak about it with unchallengeable authority so that skeptical questions are themselves labeled oppressive;⁵³ it also leads to cases like that of The Education of Little Tree⁵⁴ and the confirmation of Clarence Thomas. The Education of Little Tree was presented as the autobiography of an eighteen-year-old Cherokee. Selling more than 600,000 copies and receiving numerous accolades, which praised its “natural approach to life” and ability to “capture the unique vision of Native American culture,” it was in fact written by a member of the KKK. And the mere fact of Clarence Thomas’s race paralyzed liberal opposition within the black and liberal white communities.

Furthermore, fragmentation can be an educational and political threat. Within the universities specialization increases, as does suspicion of any theoretical integration that might lessen it. Interdisciplinary work usually defines a new specialization rather than lessens it. Within the nation wedges between races and nationalities seem to be deepening with a growing promotion of “self-pity and self-ghettoization” as well as a “patronizing calculus of victimization, a formulaic demand for reversibility, and a clannish standard of political correctness.”⁵⁵ The politics of identity sometimes paralyzes not only attempts at a coherent curriculum, but at concerted action on issues like poverty, the debt, industrial stagnation, meaningless work, racial and sexual discrimination, environmental degradation, violence, the emotional and financial havoc created by an increasingly older population, and, not least, the crisis in our public school system.

Canonists are right again when they argue that without a common language conversation would be a babble and differences would remain unrecognized and unheard; that without a common culture diverse people would be unable to talk to each other; and that without a sense of a shared fate in the future they would have no need to do so. This does not, as some canonists insist, preclude such a culture or language from being contested. Nor does it mean one must be blind to the structural inequalities of gender, race, and class that turn ostensive dialogues into covert monologues or to the differences between a common and a hegemonic culture. It does mean that diversity depends on a prior unity that constructs differences as related to each other rather than random expressions; that even the most intense disagreements are only so within a particular discourse. “But what is original about Machiavelli,” the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote, “is that, having laid down the source of struggle, he goes beyond it without ever forgetting it. He finds something other than antagonism in struggle itself.”⁵⁶ What he finds are the grounds that make the struggle possible and worth having; the recognition that if the antagonism crosses some vague but certain boundary, there will be nothing left to struggle for, just as there are lines lovers cross at the risk of destroying their relationship. Similarly, if critics push beyond some limit (a limit those in power are only too ready to define as a challenge to them), either in the university or society, they will destroy the whole they are trying to reform. (This is not to deny that there may be times and places where the whole should be destroyed.)

Moreover, canonists have a point when they insist that the university’s common language is one of reason, evidence, and argument. Education is premised on a shared commitment to impartiality and thinking, though if Jacques Derrida is right, our commitment to such an enterprise must include acknowledging its limits of the discourse in which both commitment and critique take place.⁵⁷ Penultimately those canonists who object to speaking of “the West” as “a” culture or “a” tradition rightly point to the amalgam of Greek, Roman, Judaic, and Christian traditions as already a diverse culture. That is why cultures can be used against themselves, why the beginning, if not the end, of radicalism is so often using the master’s tools, if not to destroy the master’s house, then to substantially remodel it. If all this is true, then critics of the West may be drawing on the resources of the culture they criticize, as I will argue Socrates was doing. Emerson’s insistence that “the past has baked your loaf” and “in the strength of its bread you would break the oven”⁵⁸ is echoed in Irving Howe’s warning⁵⁹ that criticism must “maintain connection with its heritage or it becomes weightless, a mere compendium of momentary complaints.”⁶⁰ Finally, canonists are right to insist that the crisis in education is a contest over American identity as represented in “our” history and as a part of Western civilization.

But instead of seeing the crisis as providing an opportunity to confront fundamental questions about the grounds, origins, and practices of education and the university, conservative canonists simply draw up the wagons. Like Antigone's Creon, they respond to the presence of plurality and the desire for shared power with the imposition of singularity, structure, and hierarchy, and impugn the motives of those who challenge them. As he becomes more and more incensed by Antigone, Haemon, the people and Tiresias, Creon aggressively asserts that he will not be ruled by women or the young or those who lack sense. Like him, D’Souza and Kimball posit Manichaean polarities that escalate the conflict they purport to deplore but which justify their call for the imposition of rule.

As Creon destroys the legitimate concerns he has and so disables himself from adequately responding to them, so do some canonists vitiate their own best points. Suspicious of dogmatic historicism, they ignore historical precedents and complexities. Impatient with the reduction of great works to being part of a conspiracy of white male power, they simply dismiss the very possibility that the canon is a form of cultural power and historical artifact. Rightly concerned with political indoctrination and preaching in the classroom, their own definition of what politicizing is and who is doing it is so vague and self-serving that only those who already agree with them will be persuaded. In appropriately honoring classic texts, their reading of those texts is too often constricted by a moralistic didacticism that transforms the legacy of “the West” into castor oil. The more general point, which applies to both sides, is made by Katha Pollitt: “Books are not pills that produce health when ingested in measured doses. Books do not shape character in any simple way, if indeed they do so at all, or the most literate would be the most virtuous instead of just the ordinary run of humanity with larger vocabularies.”⁶¹

What is astonishing about many participants in the culture wars but particularly disconcerting in the case of conservative canonists is the indifference to the history of higher education in the United States.⁶² The litany of complaints by canonists as well as their allies in the educational reform movement echoes disputes of previous generations.⁶³ The fears they express and the language they use to express them are similar to those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when cultural elites worried about the influx of “barbarian hordes” from Eastern and Southern Europe,⁶⁴ many of whose children and grandchildren are well represented among canonists. It was to socialize these heterogeneous masses that the canon was abruptly changed from one grounded in Greek and Latin Classics to one based on English. It was not that English works were deemed of a higher intellectual or aesthetic order; they weren’t. But they were regarded as more efficient in disciplining unruly immigrants by initiating them into the superior culture of the English-speaking races.⁶⁵

There is something like “we lost China” syndrome operating in this ahistoricism. Conservative canonists sometimes look for scapegoats and traitors instead of recognizing that the world has been changed by forces and developments— such as the decolonization movements in the third world countries where emergent national identities positively value histories and practices previously demeaned by the colonizers—beyond their control.⁶⁶ Nor, for the same reasons, are they much better at acknowledging that the engine of the domestic changes they despise, such as the fact that commercialization of culture that agitates Hilton Kramer and the contributors to the New Criterion, is driven by mechanisms and ideologies such as free-market capitalism promoted by their political allies. Indeed, for all the fulminations against popular culture and predictions of the collapse of civilization once the rigid line between high and low culture is breached, conservative canonists know astonishingly little about such popular culture or who, why, and when distinction between high and low culture emerged.⁶⁷ Perhaps the battle over what books to read is to intense because, in Pollitt’s words, “while we have been arguing so fiercely about which books make the best medicine, the patient has been slipping deeper and deeper into a coma.”⁶⁸ If so, then we need an analysis that helps us understand the phenomena, not ignorant diatribes against its existence.

Because they identify historicism with relativism and politicization, canonists tend to ignore the historical dimensions of canon formation. But since the canon changes over time, it cannot be irrelevant to ask why. How and when were the texts that presently constitute the canon chosen? Why these and not others? What were the political imperatives and cultural circumstances that once led people to denounce Melville as a trivial hack but now lead them to celebrate Moby Dick as perhaps the greatest American novel ever written? Why was Nietzsche dismissed as a fascist crank just decades before achieving canonical status as the theorist of modernity and saint of postmodernity? And why do readings of texts seem to change over time? If great texts speak to us all, why don’t they say the same things? Prior to the Vietnam War, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War was read as providing lessons that would enable future statesmen to prevent or at least mitigate the excesses to which all regimes, but especially democratic ones, were prone. But after Vietnam, Thucydides became a pessimistic writer for whom the lesson of history was that there were no lessons; that statesmen were helpless in the face of the implacable logic of war and civil war and the dynamism of democratic power, which achieved unprecedented greatness at the cost of unprecedented suffering. Or worse: people did learn from the brutality of the Corcyraean civil war. But what they learned was how to be ever more brutal. This reinterpretation of Thucydides was not a matter of better translations or new historical evidence, but of a new generation of readers chastened by the experience of a brutal and futile war.⁶⁹

But if judgments of a text’s value varies over time as do the readings favored by the most relevant interpretative communities, then any canon is necessarily local, and standards, academic or otherwise, exist in history where they define the obligations and responsibilities of historically situated actors. If, in Stanley Fish’s words, values are “fashioned and refashioned in the crucible of discussion and debate then there is no danger of their being subverted because they are always and already being transformed.”⁷⁰ From this perspective one cause of the recurrent crisis in the academy is the resistance of an old orthodoxy to an emerging one and the consequent dispute between generations about what constitutes common culture, eternal verities, and common sense. In blaming others for what the culture itself has failed to preserve, they recall Aristophanes’ Clouds where Old Education accuses New Education of abandoning standards and ruining civilization. Like Old Education, conservative canonists would arrest the play of democratic forces in order to reify an uncommon stage in cultural and political history and to elevate a set of tastes to a position of privilege from which they can castigate all other tastes as vulgar and inessential.⁷¹

To the extent standards and values are renegotiated historical categories, they are already politicized, which means that the complaints by both conservative canonists that radicals are politicizing the university and the call by some multiculturalists, feminists, and “radicals” to politicize it, are beside the point: education is already politicized. If the common is always a particular conception of what is common, Diane Ravitch’s argument that the spread of particularism throws into question the very idea of American public education, that public schools “exist to teach children the general skills and knowledge that they need to succeed in American society” and to “function as American citizens” begs part of the question.⁷²

But Fish’s definition is too sweeping and abstract.⁷³ At least since Max Weber, academics have rightly worried about sanctioning partisan agendas and pontificating in the classroom.⁷⁴ But the charge by conservative canonists that the “left” is politicizing the university is suspect, not only for the reasons Fish gives but for those which underlie Henry Louis Gates’s complaint that people who can “with a straight face” protest the eruption of politics into something that has always been political “says something about how remarkably successful official literary histories have been in presenting themselves as natural objects, untainted by worldly interests.”⁷⁵

So intense is the conservative canonists’ fear of politicization⁷⁶ that they are willing to risk instrumentalizing education and proscribing the texts they admire as medicinal. Both sides in the debate try “to produce a desirable kind of person and a desirable kind of society—a respectful, high-minded citizen of a unified society for the conservatives, an up-to-date and flexible sort for the liberals, a subgroup-identified robustly confident one for the radicals.”⁷⁷

As I have already argued and will illustrate in subsequent chapters, this is a very peculiar view of texts and how they work in the world, as well of an education based upon them.⁷⁸ It is especially peculiar if the texts are Greek drama and Platonic dialogues with their extraordinary capacity to portray and generate conflicting views of the human condition, of goodness, action, and wisdom. For instance, as the initially decorous struggle between Socrates and Gorgias (in the dialogue that bears his name) over the relative merits of rhetoric and dialogue becomes a battle between Socrates and Callicles over who will have power in the dialogic community within the text and in the political one outside it, the idea that truth is derived politically rather than epistemologically is presented with a dramatic power that is not erased by Socrates’ victory, which can, to complicate matters further, also be regarded as a defeat.

If the presence of such conflicts helps explain the abiding value of classic texts, then the legacy William Bennett would have us reclaim is one of struggle and paradox, of difficult, even impossible choices great souls confront and about which they can be terribly mistaken despite or because of their extraordinary gifts. The controversies between the interlocutors in a Platonic dialogue, between the dialogue’s text and subtext or argument and drama, and between the various interpretative communities reading it, mean that such texts are ineluctably multivocal and dialogic.

Lost in the polemics over politicization is the fact that education in America has traditionally had, as one of its primary purposes, the political education of democratic citizens. The question then is not whether to educate such citizens but how. The answer depends, first of all, on how one understands politics, democracy, and citizenship. If, as with both sides in the culture wars, politics is seen as an essentially corrupting activity or as it is by some liberals as “a remote, alien and unrewarding activity,”⁷⁹ then a “political” education is either an oxymoron or peripheral to the larger, more pressing concerns of private individual lives. If citizenship is construed as a legal status defined by rights and the rule of law and negative rather than positive liberty, then a political education must be appropriately circumscribed by these limited aims. Finally, insofar as the dominant theoretical tradition follows Joseph Schumpeter in regarding democracy as the least bad mechanism for assuring a minimum of accountability of rulers to the ruled, so that what matters is not what rulers do with the power they get through periodic elections but the way they acquire power in the first place,⁸⁰ then political education becomes a pallid civics course like the ones most of us had in high school. The fact that everyone claims to be a democrat and every nation claims to be a democracy—John Dunn calls democracy “the moral Esperanto of the present nation-state system”⁸¹—does not amount to much if democracy is devalued in practice or so attenuated in theory as to be unrecognizable as a distinctive form of politics and culture.

The answer also depends on whether there is a distinctively democratic way of educating democratic citizens. What, by way of pedagogy and content, does a “democratic” education entail? Should a classroom be treated as a microcosm of the larger culture so that process as well as substance is “democratic”? Is democratic education necessarily reciprocal in ways that the political education in other regimes is not? Or must such education principally rely, as it does in other regimes, on habit and socialization?

The answer also relies on a distinction between a political and a politicized education. As I have so far used the term, to “politicize” something is to “denaturalize” it in the sense of presenting it as something contingent and thus subject to human design. Something of this meaning echoes in the current controversies over politicizing the university. But the primary meaning in the various accusations is indoctrination. In these terms to politicize the university is to transform teachers into preachers, literature into ideology, and searchers for truth into partisans. If one can establish at least the lineaments of such a distinction, it might be possible to get all sides to agree that A purpose of higher education is the education of democratic citizens.⁸² This would hardly resolve the issues at stake, but it might clarify them.

Lying behind the charge of politicization is a claim that politics effaces reason and that the life of the mind is compromised if not debased by the imperatives of public life. (In the next chapter I shall look at the argument that philosophy is necessarily antipolitical.) There is much to be said for the idea that universities should be committed to reason and impartiality. But to say it requires acknowledging the frequently partisan nature of the claim as revealed, for instance, by the irrational polemics surrounding the claim to reason by conservative canonists and by Creon in his response to Antigone and Haemon in Antigone. Thus defenses of reason must observe a diligent solicitude for what is elided or silenced in its name, what is made faint and/or obscure by its light, and what the cost of the achievements may be, including the sense of reflection itself. A commitment to reason and reasonableness must at least countenance the possibility that we are mistaken in supposing that the universe as a history or structure of reason can, when rightly understood, yield a pattern that makes sense of human life and capacities.⁸³

Toni Morrison makes a similar point when she speaks of “unspeakable things unspoken.” Examining Moby Dick, she argues that the African American presence in America has shaped the language, structure, and meaning of much of our literature and that the fundamental fact of slavery is there as conscience and moral, as a frame and in the center of our experience as a people. Invisible things are not necessarily not there, and absences can call attention to themselves, just as neighborhoods are often defined by the populations excluded from them.⁸⁴ To these omissions attention must be paid.⁸⁵

If the university is the preeminent place for reasoned debate, then it matters who constitutes the terms of debate, and thus who and what is reasonable. If it is a place for impartiality, then it matters who takes part given how often protestations of impartiality mask special pleading, how frequently truth is pinned to power, and how often a particular form of cultural power appears within a universal claim.

Consider in this regard the argument made by Martin Bernal in volume 1 of his Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Greek Culture that the Greek selfunderstanding of the Asian and African influences on Greek culture was replaced by a nineteenth-century German scholars’ “Aryan Model,” which excised those contributions as part of a racialist agenda.⁸⁶ For all the criticisms leveled against the book by classical philologists and historians, and all the misleading use of it made by Afro-centrists, Bernal’s point that highly educated, extraordinarily erudite scholars committed to what they took to be the truth co-opted classical Greece for anti-Semitic diatribes remains unrefuted. This was not a case of scholars changing their views in the light of new evidence as Mary Lefkowitz implies in her review of Bernal in the New Republic. Nor is the claim she makes “that the open discussion of scholarly research has made it rather difficult to conceal or to manufacture facts without arousing the skepticism or the scorn of colleagues” persuasive given how long it took the scholarly community to repudiate them.⁸⁷ How long and at what cost did “anthropologists” insist on the smaller size of “the Negroid” brain, versions of which continue in the IQ debates?⁸⁸ With what consequences did psychiatrists, neurologists, and gynecologists attribute middle class women’s “hysteria” to a malfunction of the womb? Here is the “scientific” conclusion of a male gynecologist in 1875:

We have been studying woman ... as a sexual being; and ... we must arrive at the conclusion that marriage is not an optional matter with her. On the contrary, it is a prime necessity to her normal, physical and intellectual life. . . . The end and aim of women’s sexual life is perfected by maternity. . . . Physically, children are necessary to the married woman. The sterile wife is constantly exposed to diseases that the fecund wife is comparatively exempt from. The sterile wife is not a normal woman, and sooner or later this physical abnormality finds expression in intellectual peculiarities.⁸⁹

The point is not to repudiate reason. Nor is it to identify the life of the mind with public life or philosophy with politics. It is rather to resist any polarization and acknowledge their mutual “contamination” while honoring what their differences make possible. Here as with the previous questions about democracy, politics, and citizenship and how to educate democratic citizens democratically, Plato’s Socrates can become a significant interlocutor and teacher. His elaboration, dependence upon, and critique of a radical democratic tradition provides a way of seeing the risk to our nation in a different light from that offered by the Gardner Commission or, more generously, building upon their subtext as a way of criticizing the educational economism of their text. Socrates can also help us delineate a vision of democratic political education while warning us of the pitfalls of such an enterprise. Finally, what (my) Socrates says and does may lead us to think of our common heritage differently, perhaps make it more common than we suppose in a way analogous to Gloria Naylor’s story of a young black girl who, returning from a performance, asks: “Mama, Shakespeare’s black?” to which her mother replies, “Not yet . . .”⁹⁰

¹ McCarthyism itself has become a contested mythology. Conservatives either say it wasn’t so bad or that it was bad but not as bad as the McCarthyism of the left as represented by political correctness.

² The ideal citizen is literate, drug free, and disciplined in schools that emphasize the basics and authority. (See the discussion of this in David M. Steiner, Rethinking Democratic Education: The Politics of Reform [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994], chap. 1) In The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994), Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray equate citizenship with civility by which they mean “deference or allegiance to the social order befitting a citizen” (p. 254, emphasis supplied). Examples of civility vary from mowing the lawn and personal hygiene to generally being neighborly and law abiding. They too invoke Greek political thought (especially that of Aristotle). See their chaps. 12 and 22.

³ William Buckley in the National Review 26 (March 18, 1988): 65.

⁴ See David Osborne, “Government That Means Business,” New York Times Sunday Magazine (March 1, 1992): 20; and John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe, Politics, Markets and America's Schools (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1990), and David Kearns and Denis Doyle, Winning the Brain Drain (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1988), who argue for business aggressively setting the new educational agenda so that reform can be driven by competition and “market discipline.”

⁵ See Laura A. Locke, “The Issue of ‘Choice’: A Voucher Initiative Goes to the Voters,” California Journal 24, no. 6 (June 1993): 13-15.

⁶ See John Hood, “What’s Wrong with Head Start?,” Wall Street Journal (Feb. 19, 1993): A14.

⁷ See the succinct analysis in “Markets Can’t Fix Schools’ Problems,” in a “Counterpoint” column by Robert H. Carr in the Wall Street Journal (Thursday, May 2, 1991): A17.

⁸ See Raymond Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

⁹ Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism, The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton, 1978).

¹⁰ Steiner, Rethinking Democratic Education, p. 8.

¹¹ Both sides feel themselves besieged because their points of reference are different. Conservative canonists look at elite universities and see political correctness silencing their friends. Multiculturalists and their allies look at the Republican-dominated polity (to which Clinton has adapted) and feel themselves surrounded by an aggressively self-righteous moralism. Insofar as Patrick Buchanan’s speech at the 1992 Republican Convention signaled the closing down of public discourse, the university remained one of the few venues for political views that were no longer legitimately presented elsewhere. David Bromwich discusses what happens in the academy when political discourse implodes. See his Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

¹² David P. Gardner, National Commission on Excellence in Education (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1983). The Gardner Report was the impetus for over a hundred commissions established to work on school reform. For a discussion of these commissions, see Ira Shor, Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), chap. 4.

¹³ New York Times (April 27, 1988): B10. According to the Times, the government sold or gave away 220,000 copies and 5 to 6 million more were distributed through newspapers and periodicals. President Bush was not so congratulatory when, in April 1991, he declared that “Eight years after the National Commission on Excellence in Education declared us a ‘nation at risk’ we haven’t turned things around in education. Almost all our education trends are flat.” Echoing the language of the report, he complained that we were still “idling our engines” and went on to blame poor education and undereducated workers for our economic woes. On the impact of the report see Ernest Boyer, “Reflections on the Great Debate of 1983,” in Phi Delta Kappan 65, no. 8 (April 1984): 525-30, and “A Nation Still at Risk,” Newsweek (April 19, 1993): 46-49.

¹⁴ Bromwich points out the irony of a report lamenting intellectual mediocrity being presented to a president “whose every unprompted utterance was a testimony to the amiability of thoughtlessness, and who, at the end of two terms characterized by immense popularity and an abuse of constitutional power, narrowly averted impeachment by a profession of total incompetence and memory loss” (Politics by Other Means, p. 224).

¹⁵ Letter to William Charles Jarvis, September 28, 1820, in Paul Ford, ed., The Collected Works of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Putnam, 1905), 12:1630.

¹⁶ In 1983, The Business-Higher Education Forum Report (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1983) argued that the decline of schools was the major cause of the decline of American industry. As Ira Shor suggests, this explanation ignores the flight of capital, multinational corporations evacuating the unionized northeast for cheap labor, the huge military budget, and low level of social investment in roads, bridges, transport, housing, and services, and the refusal of industries to modernize. (See Culture Wars, pp. 122-30.)

¹⁷ As Alan Ryan has noted, even the failures of the American educational system imply ambitions that few other societies have ever entertained (New York Review of Books [February 11, 1993]: 13). Indeed such utopian ambitions cannot help but lead to disappointment and disillusion.

¹⁸ Perhaps the most subtle discussion of the issue can be found in Thomas More’s Utopia.

¹⁹ Since the language of war had been used before in the “War on Poverty,” the commission was able to use a rhetoric recognizable by liberals and conservatives alike.

²⁰ Whether they were aware of it or not, the image of a machine echoes Benjamin Rush who argued for a national university, which would be an efficient machine for “melting” the “youth of all the states” into a unity (quoted in Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860 [New York: Hill and Wang, 1983]).

²¹ In The Degradation of Academic Dogma: The University in America, 1945-1970 (New York: Basic Books, 1971), Robert Nisbet argued that since World War II American universities were dominated by roles which destroyed the idea of a community of scholars “founded upon the rock of dispassionate reason.” By the late 1940s and early 1950s universities were expected to play the role of “higher capitalist, chief of research establishment, super-humanitarian, benign therapist, adjunct government, and loyal revolutionary opposition” (p. 8).

²² Action for Excellence: A Comprehensive Plan to Improve Our Nation's Schools, Task Force on Education for Economic Growth, Education Commission of the States, Washington, D.C., 1983. Despite the collapse of the nation’s largest experiment in private management of public schools (in Hartford at the beginning of 1996), public education is becoming, in the words of the New York Times, “an enticing market for private businesses.” The CEO of Eduventures regards public schools as “a very big industry with enormous potential for growth.” (See Peter Applerome, “Lure of Education Market Remains Strong for Business,” New York Times [January 31, 1996]): 1.) In a later essay in the Times (March 24, 1996): sec. 4, p. 4, Applerome reports that the Second National Education Summit included more chief executives than educators, which no doubt encouraged Colorado’s Governor Roy Romer to speak of students as products and corporations as customers who should have something to say about the sort of products graduates should be.

²³ See the discussion in Benjamin Barber, An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and the Future of America (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), pp. 198-206.

²⁴ When the Whittle Corporation enters the schools, Jonathan Kozol argues, “it is selling something more important than the brand names of its products. It sells a way of looking at the world and at oneself. It sells predictability instead of critical capacities. It sells a circumscribed job-specific utility” and develops a mind to be receptive to a market mentality. (See his “Whittle and the Privateers,” Nation 255 [September 21, 1992]: 272.)

²⁵ If Socrates is right in supposing that we teach our character as much as a subject matter, what is one to make of replacing teachers with electronic teaching centers?

²⁶ Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1968), pp. 173-96.

²⁷ Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: Whittle Communications, 1991), pp. 137-38.

²⁸ James Atlas, The Battle of the Books: The Curriculum Debate in America (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 135.

²⁹ Quoted by Kaestle in Pillars of the Republic, p. 6.

³⁰ Denesh D’Souza, “The Visigoths in Tweed,” in Patricia Aufderheide, ed. and introd., Beyond PC: Towards a Politics of Understanding (St. Paul: Gray Wolf Press, 1992), p. 11.

³¹ Quoted by Joseph Berger in “Scholars Attack Campus ‘Radicals,’ ” New York Times (November 13, 1988): A22. As Berger notes Kors’s remarks and others like them sounded more like calls to battle than the measured evaluations of a scholar, and the applause he received was more typical of a political rally than of an academic conference.

³² D’Souza, “Visigoths,” p. 22.

³³ See William J. Bennett, “Education for Democracy,” in Our Children and Our Country: Improving America’s Schools and Affirming the Common Culture (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).

³⁴ In his review of John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses, Ian Hamilton discusses how the English cultural elites, resentful that the new literacy was controlled not by them but by new vehicles of popular entertainment which they saw as degrading the human spirit, “affected disdain for the mob and evoked apocalyptic visions of the imminent deluge of barbarism.” By castigating the “malodorous rabble” unappreciative of their leadership, they “recaptured a notion of their own centrality. They would become warriors on behalf of an imperiled life of the imagination” (London Review of Books [July 23, 1992]: 14).

³⁵ Quoted by Jacob Weisberg, “NAS—Who Are These Guys Anyway?,” in Aufderheide, Beyond PC, p. 85.

³⁶ William Lind, “Defending Western Culture,” Foreign Policy, no. 84 (Fall 1991): 40-50. Lind interprets the cold war as a civil war within the West. Its end allows a united front against external enemies. But this front requires that we vanquish the enemies within who are not communists but those intent on destroying Western culture as the basis of Western power. (For a theoretical articulation of the argument see Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” in The Clash of Civilizations?: A Debate: A Foreign Affairs Reader [New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1993], pp. 22-49.)

³⁷ “In this war against Western culture, the one chief object of attack within the academy is the traditional literary canon and the pedagogical values it embodies. The notion that some works are better than and more important than others, that some works exert a special claim on our attention . . . is an anathema to the forces arrayed against the traditional understanding of the humanities.” Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), p. xii.

³⁸ Though I use “multiculturalists” and “canonists,” I do so uneasily since I know that they misdescribe, sometimes perversely so, the various points of view within what is posited as a single position. Thus multiculturalism has become an epithet and an abstraction, reified beyond the strategic purposes for which it was initially and contentiously embraced by its proponents. The term underestimates the diverse positions within particular ethnic groups (say the disagreement over “cultural skinning” among Asian Americans), blurs differences of experience, cultural position, and arguments about what multiculturalism means and what the canon should be that goes on both within the various “hyphenated” groups (Asian, African, Native, and Latino-Americans) and between them, and lumps together these groups with feminists, postmodernists and radicals who have distinct if sometimes overlapping agendas, arguments, and proposals. The problem of misdescription becomes more formidable insofar as multiculturalists insist on a multicultural way of talking and “thinking” about multiculturalism and find the sometimes smug insistence on reasoning a way of begging the question.

A similar diversity exists among canonists. Some are perfectly comfortable acknowledging the historical dimensions of canonicity and the fact that it is a form of social power. Others emphasize the transhistorical truths the canon purportedly embodies, claiming that, as the best that has been thought and written, canonical texts are the foundation of Western civilization. Here again familiar categories of left and right, liberal and conservative, democratic and elitist have been straitjackets and stereotypes. (Their inadequacy is suggested by the inclusion of Marxists and socialists as opponents of the canon despite the fact that Gramsci and Lukacs had extraordinary respect for classical education, as Irving Howe has reminded us, and that the newly renamed Socialist Review has recently run articles critical of political correctness and multiculturalism.) (See Irving Howe, “The Value of the Canon,” New Republic 88, no. 7 [February 19, 1991]: 40-47.)

³⁹ Frederick Crews, “Whose American Renaissance,” New York Review of Books (October 27, 1988): 68. Given this image of education Joan Wallach Scott’s question (in her “The Campaign against Political Correctness: What’s Really at Stake,” Change 23, no. 6 [November-December 1991]), about whether elites really want critical thinking for the masses of students rather than a prescribed education passively received, is apt. See Bromwich’s discussion of George Will’s sentiments on this matter in Politics by Other Means, pp. 68-70.

⁴⁰ Gerald Graff in Beyond the Culture Wars tells the story of how Eve Sidgwick’s not yet written conference paper on “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” was criticized by Roger Kimball in the New Criterion. The critique was picked up by the popular press and became a cause célèbre before it existed (see pp. 156-57).

⁴¹ In the New York Times (December 25, 1992): B3.

⁴² See Kenneth R. Johnston, “The NEH and the Battle of the Books,” Raritan 12, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 118-32.

⁴³ In To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1984), p. 32. (Hereafter, page references will be given in text.) It is astonishing how many of the phrases used in the Report are repeated verbatim in thesubsequent controversies over higher education, the humanities, and curriculum reform at both the secondary and university levels. What was an argument has become an incantation, repeated even by those who have little respect for humanistic learning. Indeed, one of the ironies of the call for reform of education is that the humanities have been losing enrollments and that departments, such as philosophy and classics, have been or are in jeopardy of being closed down. Even if some of the blame can be placed on the aridity of much analytic philosophy and philology, the decline amidst the celebration should give us pause.

⁴⁴ Bloom seems to me a special case. His view of the canon and great books is more skeptical and subtle than that of most others who see him as an ally. Furthermore, his polemicism has a different aim from theirs, and he puts his argument in a theoretical framework while they do not.

⁴⁵ “The Periphery of the Center,” in Paul Berman, ed., Debating PC (New York: Dell, 1992), p. 65.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 82.

⁴⁷ Kimball, Tenured Radicals, and “The Periphery V. The Center: The MLA in Chicago,” in Berman, Debating PC, pp. 61-84.

⁴⁸ Neil Jumonville argues that contrary to the later interpretation of themselves, the New York critics “were not committed political and cultural radicals in the 1930s who were pushed into neoconservatism by the antinomian uprising of the young in the ’60s. . . . Instead, even in the 1930s these intellectuals had clear tendencies toward what later became neoconservatism” (Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991], p. xiii).

⁴⁹ Atlas, Battle of the Books, p. 135. Throughout the debate there is an assumption that at some time and some place things were very different—more harmonious, purer, and better. But one could argue that precisely because education has been so important in forging a national identity and that in America the idea of a nation has itself been so contested from our very beginning that education has always been a volatile issue. Or if not from the very beginning, certainly since the waves of immigration in the nineteenth century as ethnic “enclaves” sought to have schools that sustained their cultures. One would have thought that contemporary multiculturalists were the first to make such claims, but in fact they are doing what previous generations of immigrants did (as detailed studies of the urban public schooling attest).

⁵⁰ Quoted in Stephen Watts, “The Idiocy of American Studies: Poststructuralism, Language, and Politics in the Age of Self-Fulfillment,” American Quarterly 43, no. 4 (December 1991): 654.

⁵¹ Bromwich, Politics by Other Means, p. 95.

⁵² See Adrian Poole, “War and Grace: The Force of Simone Weil on Homer,” Arion, n.s., 2 (Winter 1992): 1-16.

⁵³ The situation is complicated. On the one hand, we know that people are sometimes wrong about their own experience and that the oppressed do not automatically have the deepest understanding of the culture that oppressed them. On the other hand, their experiences have always been interpreted for them and their views consistently subjugated to restatement or dismissal. Indeed, that is one thing we mean by a people being oppressed. So the question is how to honor the self-interpretation of their experience without essentializing that representation.

⁵⁴ Henry Louis Gates discusses the incident in “Authenticity or the Lesson of Little Tree,” New York Times Book Review (November 24, 1991), p. 1.

⁵⁵ Watts, “Idiocy of American Studies,” p. 653.

⁵⁶ Merleau Ponty, “A Note on Machiavelli,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 211-23.

⁵⁷ “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its People,” Diacritics 13 (Fall 1983): 3-20. See also Adrienne Rich’s essay “Toward a Woman-Centered University,” which suggests how the sociology of the university, its political position, epistemological commitments, curriculum, and classroom dynamics create a disciplinary structure in which the subordination of women is overdetermined. (Her essay appears in On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 [New York: W. W. Norton, 1979].)

⁵⁸ Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Conservative,” in The Works (London: George Bell, 1894), 2: 268.

⁵⁹ Irving Howe, “The Value of the Canon,” in Berman, Debating PC, p. 162.

⁶⁰ In “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy” (in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], pp. 86-88), Cornelius Castoriadis argues that the reasoned investigation of other cultures and the reflection upon them, the keen interest in other states, the commitment to impartiality that the ethnographer, historian, or philosopher brings to her reflection upon societies other than her own (and perhaps her own as well) “is a reality only within the Greco-Western tradition.” In An Aristocracy of Everyone (p. 144), Benjamin Barber argues that because pluralist tolerance of multiculturalism has distinctly Eurocentric roots, the special place of Western civilization in a multicultural curriculum is justified. Similarly, Schlesinger insists that “whatever the particular crimes of Europe, that continent is also the source—the unique source—of those liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom that constitute our most precious legacy and to which most of the world today aspires” (Disuniting of America, p. 127). The problem with these arguments is not that they are false, but that they are too easily made; that they may be true by definition, and may rest on suppressed empirical claims having to do with knowledge of other non-Western claimants.

⁶¹ Katha Pollit, “Why Do We Read?,” in Berman, Debating PC, p. 210. She goes on: “Books cannot mold a common national purpose when, in fact, people are honestly divided about what kind of country they want—and are divided, moreover, for the very good and practical reasons as they always have been.”

⁶² This is Francis Oakley’s argument in “Against Nostalgia: Reflections on Our Present Condition,” in Darryl J. Gless and Barbara Hermstein Smith, eds., The Politics of Liberal Education (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), pp. 267-90.

⁶³ For an acute analysis of the evolving discourse about educational reform, see David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

⁶⁴ See Lawrence Cremin’s discussion of education as the central mode for “stamping a mass of heterogeneous elements with the hall-mark of American citizenship.” He is quoting Reverend T. L. Papillon, a member of the Mosely Education Commission. Lawrence Cremin, The Genius of American Education (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1965), p. 65.

⁶⁵ See the discussion in Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars, pp. 149-56.

⁶⁶ See Joan Wallach Scott, “The Campaign against Political Correctness: What’s Really at Stake?,” Change 23, no. 6 (November-December 1991): 213.

⁶⁷ See, for instance, Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), and Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

⁶⁸ Pollitt, “Why Do We Read?,” p. 206.

⁶⁹ Similar stories can be told about Popper’s “totalitarian” Plato and Barker’s “liberal” Aristotle.

⁷⁰ Stanley Fish, “The Common Touch, or, One Size Fits All,” in Gless and Smith, The Politics of Liberal Education, p. 264.

⁷¹ Ibid., p. 260.

⁷² “Multiculturalism: E Pluribus Plures,” in Berman, Debating PC, p. 294.

⁷³ John Searle argues (in “The Storm over the University,” New York Review of Books [December 6, 1990]: 18.) that because the humanities have a political dimension in the sense that they, like everything else, have political consequences, it does not follow that the only or even principal criteria for assessing them should be political.

⁷⁴ See his “Politics As a Vocation” and “Science As a Vocation” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). For a number of historical institutional and cultural reasons Weber’s worry about the impact of German professors on students has much greater warrant than a comparable worry about American professors’ impact on their students.

⁷⁵ “Whose Canon Is It Anyway?,” in Berman, Debating PC, p. 195.

⁷⁶ Of course, some conservatives are delighted that the university is becoming politicized because they now have the power. Thus Norman Podhoretz boasts that since neoconservatives “are the dominant faction within the world of ideas—the most influential—the most powerful,” liberal culture “must appease us,” while Irving Kristol argues that corporations should fund ideological ventures that support capitalism as against “the unreasonable demands” made by “the undisciplined poor” and their intellectual allies. With them as with others less honest the objection is not that the university is politicized but that it has had the wrong politics. (Podhoretz and Kristol are quoted in Jumonville, Critical Crossings, pp. 31-32.)

⁷⁷ Pollitt, “Why Do We Read?,” pp. 211-12.

⁷⁸ As Henry Louis Gates reminds us, it is not obvious that the fate of the Republic will be decided by what students read in classrooms or that those who control literature departments or the MLA control the world. There is a substantial gap between the classroom and the streets and the connection between them is, to say the least, highly contingent. Gates is right to be skeptical that paying homage to the marginalized through deconstructive readings of texts “ameliorates a real world wrong.” See his Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 17-19.

⁷⁹ Robert Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), p. 279.

⁸⁰ See John Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 26. This “democratic revisionism” points to something that is truer today than it was when Schumpeter wrote Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy in 1943, or even in the early 1960s when a number of American political scientists took over some of his specific arguments and much of his attitude toward democratic politics: that the very nature of the modern state precludes more than token accountability, has a minimalist commitment to political equality, and is often actively opposed to the dispersal of power and responsibility. But, of course, one need not identify politics with the state, either historically, analytically, or politically.

⁸¹ Ibid., p. 2.

⁸² In focusing on political education, I want to avoid two exaggerations: that political education is the only thing colleges and universities do; and that political education happens primarily in the classroom. Institutions of higher learning have many more tasks than political ones, even if in some important sense they are institutions of social reproduction. Moreover, an exclusive emphasis on the political education of citizens runs the risk of making learning purely instrumental and legitimating the demand for relevance that too often translates into teaching students elaborations of what they already know. In addition, an overemphasis on the university’s role in cultivating a sense of political judgment and thoughtfulness is likely to underestimate how much cultivation of those traits is independent of academic learning or, more positively, how much they depend on experience that occurs outside the confines of academic institutions. I share with radical democrats the belief that the active and persistent sharing of power is a necessary condition for enhancing a sense of responsibility and political thoughtfulness.

⁸³ The language is taken from Bernard Williams’s Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

⁸⁴ Toni Morrison, “On Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 1-34.

⁸⁵ Many multiculturalists, feminists, and postmodernists would respect the ideal of a university or college as a community of scholars more if it was less hypocritical and incomplete. Many (but not all) of them value institutions of higher learning as a place for reflection in which students can develop their capacities for independent judgment and critical reflection by having the chance to analyze those long-range, large-scale developments that shape their lives. Some even regard the university as a repository for the accumulated wisdom of generations. And for all their critique of the claims to objectivity, neutrality, and universality, for all the repudiation of Enlightenment ideals, their hope that higher education can alleviate sexism, racism, and homophobia by providing a more impartial comparatively and theoretically more informed view of contemporary practices than is available in more parochial settings presupposes it. What some of them object to is that membership in the “community” and even what counts as scholarship has been narrowly and sometimes self-servingly defined. It was not very long ago that Jews (not to mention women and people of color) were thought to lack the “gentlemanly deportment” (as one professor put it in my company) appropriate for membership in this community.

⁸⁶ Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Western Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), and “Black Athena Denied: The Tyranny of Germany over Greece and the Rejection of the Afro-Asiatic Roots of Europe, 1780-1980,” Comparative Criticism 8 (1986): 3-70. See also the special issue of Arethusa: The Challenge of Black Athena 20 (Fall 1989).

⁸⁷ “Not Out of Africa,” New Republic 79, no. 6 (February 10, 1992): 29-36.

⁸⁸ The most obvious recent case of this is The Bell Curve. For critiques see Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman, eds., The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions (New York: Random House, 1995). As the editors rightly insist, we need to read the book symptomatically as well as substantively. But The Bell Curve is hardly the only book in which one could argue that racism influenced academic scholarship. See, for example, Michael Coe’s argument in Breaking the Mayan Code (New York: Thames and Hodson, 1992). In “Postscript: The Categories of Professorial Judgment,” in Homo Academicus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 194-225, Pierre Bourdieu argues that there is a clearly visible relation between a “hierarchy of epithets,” that is, the adverbs and adjectives used to evaluate student work, and a hierarchy of social origins. Technical aptitudes such as the ability to construct an argument and understand a specialized vocabulary and personal and physical qualities made up the grounds of professorial judgment. This is not a case of purposeful action or conspiracy but of the fact that the academic field itself is structured in a way that makes it unthinkable for teachers and students to recognize the social significance of the judgments. It is because they think that they are operating in a purely academic or even a specifically “philosophical classification . . . that the system is able to perform a genuine distortion of meaning of their practices, persuading them to do what they would not do deliberately.” Bourdieu calls this transmutation of social truth into academic truth “an operation of social alchemy which confers on words their symbolic efficiency, their power to have a lasting effect on practice” (pp. 207-8).

⁸⁹ Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism, pp. 109-110.

⁹⁰ Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), p. 127.