Under the heading “Comedy and Tragedy: 2002-2003 School Year” the “Young America’s Foundation” (www.yaf.org) lists college courses at schools they variously deem “bizarre and ideological” or simply “ridiculous.” The schools are split up by category, with the Ivy League coming first.
As one who has written frequently about our current academic malaise and the grotesque decline in intellectual standards that has infected humanities departments in the past decades, I should perhaps be glad to see all the various “ideological” (there YAF has it dead-on) nonsense promulgated by Ivory Tower elites grouped together for everyone to see. I am not. There is a story here, but it requires far more than merely running through course bulletins, snickering, and copying and pasting the pernicious text. As it stands, the list is not argument – it is simply a replica ideology, and not much better than the one it hopes to expose, or perhaps even replace.
Any ideology – that is, any program with as clear political as intellectual ends – is anathema to what must be the values of the university. To not radically change the mess we now find ourselves in, while we still can, is to bestow hordes of mediocre and dolorous thinkers upon America, and to ensure that we will receive ever-diminishing returns on our ever-inflating investments in higher education. There is indeed a crisis in modern academia, but the YAF blacklist and the loud complaints of its neocon fellow travelers will not suffice for resistance. When they attack “ideology,” despite frequent invocations of nice things like “free speech” and “fair play,” they simply attack one specific ideology, and behind the veil of objective criticism, maneuver to replace it with their own.
Conservatives are correct that the ideology of the American campus is overwhelmingly skewed to the left. At that, it’s not even the good left, the left whose ideals I still somewhat share, the left that sought freedom from both Hitler and Stalin, the left that wanted equal rights and equal opportunities instead of racial politics, the left that could protest the Vietnam War without resorting to hanging NLF flags from their balconies. The contemporary American university inherits neither the left of the aesthete Bertold Brecht, nor that of the idealists making up the early Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), who marched in the south because they believed in their own name – it is instead heir to the left that metastasized at the end of that same decade, the left of Eldridge Cleaver instead of Dr. King, the left that shut down the college instead of debating within it, the left that abandoned Rousseau for Saint-Just and then, with shocking alacrity, Chairman Mao.
This is a serious problem, for millions are still being sorely miseducated, and simply “making room” for conservative viewpoints, though it would be an improvement upon the status quo, provides a thin Band-Aid for a gaping wound, indeed. The problem is ideology itself, under any guise. A viable critique of the current academic establishment needs to come from our generation, and to be effectual it must come from outside ideology. Now, the postmoderns ensconced in our humanities departments will insist that there “can be no critique outside of ideology,” that “there is nothing stable outside the play of language,” or something inane of the sort. Let them – that’s what they do. But do not believe, either, that to reject the “multicultural” fashions of our day implies a de facto right-wing outlook. Our fight to save the humanities from themselves can and in fact must be a broad, coalitional one. And I will gladly join hands with conservatives, liberals, socialists, Greens, gay rodeo cowboys and whoever else – all who insist that the university is a place for the impartial and open-minded study of the immense tapestry of past genius in the hope, not only that we may be sager about the future (that well-worn platitude), but that we may learn something about ourselves in the process, something about the deep and irreducible mystery that is humanity.
The YAF list is, so far as I can tell, simply an index of the courses that raised eyebrows at think tank headquarters. The Herald already ran a story and a short editorial about it, so to briefly reiterate some of the Brown courses pilloried will give the basic idea: “Education 143: The Psychology of Race, Class and Gender”; “American Civilization 190: U.S. Feminist Theories of Motherhood”; “Africana Studies 99: Black Lavender: A Study of Black gay and Lesbian Plays, and Dramatic Constructions in the American Theatre”; “Modern Culture and Media 150: Feminism/ Poststructuralism/Materialism”; “Modern Culture and Media 150: Seeing Queerly: Queer Theory, Film and Video”; “Sociology 187: He, She or It? Sociological Perspectives on Gender;”… and so forth.
Maybe you have taken one of these classes, or have a friend who has, or know the professor from somewhere else. Maybe you wholeheartedly agree with the implied YAF slur: BU
To get away from the personal passions aroused by having one’s own alma mater attacked by distant ideologues who know little of our university or its functioning, let’s turn to a sister institution, and view the blacklist in a calmer light. Yale does considerably better than Brown (only four citations!), but its supposed offenses exhibit similar trends. Take a look at this one:
History of Science, History of Medicine 420a Gender, Science, and Sexuality: Examination of the history of the scientific study of sexuality. Primary and secondary sources, covering the Middle Ages to the present, are used in considering theological, taxonomic, psychoanalytic, ethnological, and molecular approaches to the study of sexual practice. Special attention paid to how these studies both reflect and construct gender ideology.
Heed in particular the last line, because it’s a common BOCA refrain (“special attention paid,” usually to some unholy mix of gender, race, class, sexuality, etc.) and exhibits a key bit of postmodern duplicity. By claiming initially to question “gender ideology” – for surely these scientists were mostly male and misogynist, not having yet read Kate Millet trounce Freud, still trying to keep a female down – we sedulously skirt the topic of, which new “gender ideology” might this course itself be?
I’ll offer the caveat YAF does not: I don’t go to Yale, I haven’t taken the class, it could be unmitigated brilliance, revelation, etc. At the very least, I do not doubt that a comparative historical analysis of sexology would constitute useful collegiate, or even high school, education. But taking a hard look at the last line and to what is paid our valuable “special attention,” does anyone really believe the professor will offer a balanced view of how and why deep biological/hormonal differences between men and women could lead to different psychology, different sociology, different history? Maybe bearing years of witness to academic feminism (at the sniff of which real feminists, the ones who got the vote for example, would roll over in their graves) has made me cynical, but even if a sociobiological perspective were offered, I doubt it would be presented as anything except a roadblock for right-thinking people on their road to paradise. Gender is a “construct,” you see, and thus, like all the misused notions of the past, we rectify things by ensuring it will be misused well into the future. j
Here’s another Yale indictment:
English 359b Feminist Perspectives on Literature – Examination of the sexual politics of literature, criticism, and literary history in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on how feminist writers have negotiated the relationship between politics and eroticism. Topics include women’s fantasy literature (from fairy tales to science fiction), popular romance, coming out stories, novels exploring race in relation to sexuality, men in feminism, and pornography. Readings include a variety of feminist literary theories. Same as Women’s and Gender Studies 352b, a
“Sexual politics” – there’s Kate Millet again, that bilious windbag who deemed Sigmund Freud-easily one of the most brilliant thinkers of the modern era-a misogynist and thus condemned a generation of academic feminism to hysterical blindness. This blurb gets more to the heart of the problem than the previous. Everything that can go wrong, does.
So, how have feminist writers negotiated the relationship between politics and eroticism? Who are these “feminist” writers? Do we read anyone before the 1960’s? Virginia Woolf? Flannery O’Connor? Gertrude Stein? Does the professor commune with these dead souls and ask them if they, in fact, approve of her “feminist” appellation? Ah, but then, there’s the rub. Probably not much Virginia Woolf here – we have (women’s) fantasy literature, fairy tales, popular romance, “coming out” stories (evidently a genre in itself now, like comedy or tragedy), “novels exploring race in relation to sexuality” (ditto) and even, for good measure, pornography. Harold Bloom, Yale professor emeritus, and recent defender of quaint notions like “The Western Canon” and “Genius” against the barbaria has been devalued is learning as such, as though erudition were irrelevant in the realms of judgment and misjudgment.
The real tragedy here is, that even if a serious modern female master were read in the above classroom (anywhere from Woolf to the deliciously gothic Joyce Carol Oates), she would there be ruined. She would be an ideology and not an artist, a feminist and not a humanist, all in the name of a politics she has probably never accepted, and all whether she likes it or not. I prefer to think that when Virginia Woolf wrote of Shakespeare s sister she was not only making a rather banal social observation, but hinting that, should posterity bestow its kindness on her, Ms. Woolf, she would be looked upon as a descendant of the Bard, as an explorer in his same tradition. Not as a suffragette, not as a lesbian; neither as coming out nor staying in; not as a crusader for anything except the only real tenet of the humanist canon worth remembering, at this belated date in culture:
Great art is uncanny; it is life and nature with infinite value-added tax; it is primitive magic, unknowable and inexhaustible, vast and cosmic and frightening and sublime; it is the transcendent in man; it is what has created us, and what will remain long after we are dead; it is the power that outstrips all the shifting ground-level concerns of society, whether they are black against white, female against male, laborer against capitalist, or African against colonizer.
When Salman Rushdie or Toni Morrison write their masterworks, they are writing in this vein, though their insipid interlocutors perform not even the slight service of attempting to read them thus. They become black or postcolonial or some other variety of the rebellious periphery, just more Molotov cocktails to toss from the barricades. Instead of feasting upon intimations of the sublime, upon what can only be described as secular Godhead, students read a variety of feminist literary theories. This probably means they do not read far and away the most brilliant, challenging academic of any gender in our time, Camille Paglia (a Yale alum, and Harold Bloom s prot g, incidentally), who is not yet considered a feminist by the smart set; they more likely read that Gender Trouble establishment darling Judith Butler, who has never written anything resembling a coherent paragraph.
Let s get down to brass tacks: it is absurd that at Brown – as, I suspect, at many other elite English departments – one can concentrate in, or is even required to tolerate, theory. My argument does not even need to point to the fact that ninety-nine percent of literary theory produced in the last thirty years has been bloated, soggy, pretentious, semi-literate garbage, the bleak and unemotional fawning of acolytes toward their French masters, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, who in turn had spent their careers sifting through the garbage of much better European thinkers – troubled men, yes, like Nietzsche or Heidegger (the latter a Nazi sympathizer; Yale deconstructionist guru Paul de Man, incidentally, was recently revealed to have been a Vichy collaborator), but formidable intellects nonetheless.
The French poststructuralist wave, coming depressingly soon after the totemic cosmic struggles of Sartre and Camus, is quite simply Nietzsche, Freud, Marx and Heidegger whittled down to a tiny little nub. It is intellect divorced from any sense of spirituality or emotion, mind divorced from body, matter divorced from soul. Its currency is the linguistic parlor game, ephemeral and vacuous. It is nihilism, anomie, nothingness. It has lasted too long to be dismissed as a passing fad; it is now more an extended, morose humiliation, rather like Bob Dylan s born-again period writ large. It has merged, oddly, with the political programmatics of feminism, Fanonism, Marxism and now Queer theory to subject the wisdom and school of the ages to modern ideologies, suspect contemporary morals, and a general postwar European gloom.
There are very simple things YAF does not say to qualify and bring meaning to their enemies list. Perhaps they think it obvious or inferable -1 regret that it is not, and thus will make a simple, representative observation: at Brown University, one can receive a B.A. in English, having concentrated in “theory,” and not having taken a single class in Shakespeare. There is a distribution requirement – one class, aside from the survey sequence – for the pre-Enlightenment period, but rest assured we will find, in any given semester, something like “Female Narrative in Early Modern England.” Thus can we circumvent serious, prolonged study of John Milton, John Donne, Edmund Spenser, Geoffrey Chaucer, and even the moor of Venice and the melancholy Dane; and somehow, when the smoke has cleared, years of male oppression have been rebutted, and our female students, apparently considered helpless before the plain fact that the vast majority of great literature is Western and male, have been empowered.
Not only is there no conceivable English department without Shakespeare – for god’s sake, there is practically no English language without Shakespeare! The canon, whose study should form the basis of any solid liberal education, is the struggle across centuries and within psyches between a small, elite group of geniuses. Yes, genius. Yes, elite. Absolutely, irrevocably, and wonderfully. They are overwhelmingly white and male, and unfortunate as that may be for some people’s self-esteem, nothing can be done to rewrite the story now. Ironically, in recent decades, when previously marginalized groups like blacks and women have been granted equal access (even preferential access) to higher education, we should have rejoiced in paving the way for future masters of all cultures, precisely by educating them in that great tradition of dead white males. Instead, our commissars of identity politics failed their students. They cut off their own purported foundlings at the knees. They took a hatchet to the idea of “greatness” altogether, and by assuring the newly emancipated minds that all this time they had simply been swallowing a construct of the dominant race/class/gender, they ensured that those who took them at their word would never try to emulate it. They told blacks that they could only ever write black literature and only ever be black sociologists; they told the children of hardworking, assimilation-minded immigrants that wherever they went, they were forever “postcolonial”; they told women that they think and write for future Gender Studies (or, when they’re more honest about it, Women’s Studies) departments. They taught students of all stripes to distrust truth, but not to seek it. Their injurious ideologies wear many names, but the most telling of all is “deconstruction.” I submit to left and right alike that what we need, more than the YAF enemies list and additional layers of political gamesmanship, is reconstruction.
It is a gigantic project, bigger than any one person, but for my part, I will say that it requires the spreading of certain uncomfortable concepts. I submit: Racial preference in university admission must be phased out. I am not so rash as to think this may all happen at once. I do not even doubt that affirmative action has had positive effects since its inception, and that it was initially based upon noble principles. But as much as any academic program, race preference is a festering wound that promulgates distrust and tension between blacks and whites, and remains a (if not the) key factor in the internalized system of academic apartheid that cordons off blacks not only to a separate orientation here at Brown, but everywhere to demarcated “black literature,” “black theater,” and even “black feminism.” Sects beget sects. Indeed, few now at Brown realize that the origins of the controversial TWTP lay within the dictates of affirmative action – in the 1970s, many black students admitted under the new quotas needed a summer remedial program to bring them up to the level of their peers, and convened, not illogically, a few days before the rest of the students in August to discuss their feelings about the matter. The remedial program itself was dropped, perhaps due to obsolescence, perhaps due to embarrassment, but ideologues seized on the separate orientation aspect, invited other nonwhites in for better intellectual imprimatur, and TWTP was born.
Affirmative action does no one any favors by admitting under-qualified blacks, least of all the blacks themselves. It has morphed from well meaning to grotesquely demeaning, in that it demands of its defenders that they insist time and again that blacks simply cannot compete on the level of their peers, and that they cannot overcome society’s obstacles without soliciting help from those who purportedly set said obstacles in the first place. It now serves solely to allay white guilt, not to counter white racism; in 2002, the two are no longer even remotely congruent. Pointing to “structural racism” or some such ethereal concept is a shameless cop-out when parroted by any race; even compassionate liberals must accept the fact that there are no institutionally disadvantaged races in contemporary America, only disadvantaged individuals, and that the social pathologies infecting pockets of urban America can no longer be plausibly blamed on racism. In that vein, affirmative action stigmatizes the many black students who deserve to be at their institutions, who entered on their own toil and merit like everyone else. And yes, I realize there are similar preferences that are fundamentally unfair – legacy, for example. It too should go, but in the meantime, there is nothing today as quietly pernicious as affirmative action in assuring that relations between the races will languish in mistrust and resentment; and thus that the Fanonist brigadiers who wish to perpetually Mau-Mau black art and thought will forever be given a bully pulpit.
Specialization has got to go. This is a hard one, as it is so ingrained, and also not specifically caused by any of the ideologies discussed above. But as a backdrop to the carnage, it is deeply implicated. Let me explain: “specialization” is fine, indeed valuable and important, in the hard sciences. One can make a living and serve humanity by dedicating one’s life to mitochondria, or crop genetics, or igneous rock, or what have you. As those students will be the ones who cure our diseases and solve our environmental crises (hopefully) of the future, I admit I don’t particularly care whether they get out of college having read King Lear. Those that I know, for the most part, would do it on their own and for themselves, and yearn to take courses in the Humanities when their schedules permit, something many shame-faced Humanities people, myself included, rarely reciprocate. But specialization in the humanities is overwhelmingly a lie. The closer one gets toward the realms of hard science – anthropology, say, or psychology – the more specialization can be rationalized, but most of the time, it is dead wrong. The humanities are a vast interconnected web across time and space, across method and subject, and I know that while indulging a whole semester in “Queer Cinema” (for example) may be fun and even somewhat enlightening, it is at bottom a waste of time and mental energy, a pursuit better engaged on one’s own schedule. Everyone will eventually focus, of course – but this can only be done in addition to the proper background and intellectual framework, which requires a broad study of history, sociology, psychology, biology, literature, art, philosophy, politics, classics and religion; a framework emphasizing the deep interconnectedness of all with all. That one can hold a Brown degree in “Modern Cultures and Media” is somewhat absurd, and not only because of what is taught in that particular department. One cannot hope to understand the past century without understanding the 10,000 years that led up to it. This New Historicist “everyone is trapped in externalities” nonsense has to stop. Thucydides and Shakespeare can teach us far more about modern culture than can Judith Butler or Jacques Derrida. I must admit to having become something of a stodgy old reactionary on this point lo these recent years, and thus proposition three:
The core curriculum must return. I admit to enjoying the latitude offered by Brown’s open curriculum -1 have taken full advantage of it, and have dabbled in plenty of pleasant esoterica while here. But deep down I know that it does us more harm than good. We train experts in the parsing obits and pieces of text, experts in “theory” or in a specific half-century of national literature, but we no longer train students in the Longview, the big thoughts, the grand narratives. We teach them to take apart where they should be putting together, to destroy where they should be building, merging, and producing – producing grand theories, rather than studying mediocre ones. It is not just a matter of distribution requirements, wherein a class or two can be picked out of each discipline. Only a true core curriculum along the Columbia/U. of Chicago lines, providing a strictly canonical education, from the Greeks through to Joyce and Proust, will save the humanities. Without the canon, we are ruined, and without the core there will soon be no canon left, except in the sanctuaries of private libraries.
Luckily we live in an age where grand narratives are, after forty years wandering the desert, coming back, mainly in political science but elsewhere as well. Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Benjamin Barber, Robert Wright, Camille Paglia, Jared Diamond and others can re-teach students what it means to think on a grand scale, the awe and inspiration of it. Sure, they may overreach sometimes, and they may get some details wrong along the way, but as for inspiring young minds, they are a collective ray of hope that the civilization of Gibbon, Milton and Freud may not be as moribund as some think. I cannot put it better than master travel-writer Robert Kaplan (The Coming Anarchy), who says of Gibbon:
Our academic clerisy, I’m sure, could point out factual inadequacies, along with examples of cultural bias, throughout the Decline and Fall. Yet nothing on the shelves today will give readers as awe-inspiring a sense of spectacle as the Decline and Fall: of how onrushing events almost everywhere – Europe, Africa, the Near East, Asia – so seamlessly weave together. At a time of sound bites on one hand and five-hundred page yawns about a single issue on the other, here, blessedly, is something for the general reader.
Amen, brother. Kaplan very well may be a model for the type of thinker whose presence will make or break the future of the academy – distrustful of all ideology, cynical toward left and right alike, well traveled, hyper-educated, incorporating the minute sensory inputs of his everyday life and work into bold, encompassing, theoretical analysis. The likes of Kaplan and Paglia may not always be correct, but they’ll make your heart pound and your body squirm in its seat, and after a dark ages of dry, insular, and meaningless prose written by academics, with academics, for academics, that is surely cause for celebration. Read them, and recognize that it is not only your option but your duty to live up to their example, not to mention that of Sigmund Freud, Edward Gibbon, and Hamlet himself, staring into the hollowed eyes of Yorick’s skull, pondering the deepest and most eternal questions of life.
