<< Silas and Silas: that Mitchell and Wegg Look | Front Page | Dr. Virago - Inside the Humanities Classroom >>
Friday, November 03, 2006
Mark Bauerlein on Michael Bérubé - Canon Fodder
Former Valve author Mark Bauerlein has a review of Bérubé’s book at The New Criterion. He has granted permission for us to x-post it, so now it has a comment box. - the management
For many years, Michael Bérubé has been an outspoken and topical voice in the humanities professoriate. His books cover critical theory, academic employment, and the canon, and he weighs in on current events, academic and political, on a personal blog that has a steady and interactive readership. He’s an MLA insider but also a popular writer, contributing to The Nation, The Village Voice, and Dissent. He leapt into the Culture Wars in the early 1990s, and, with regular sallies into campus controversies, his career sets a different example of professorial labor. His writings don’t evince months and years spent poring over archives and assembling primary documents, and the focus on contemporary matters gives them a dated feel a few years after their publication. But, then, Bérubé’s practice exempts him from many of the vices that have bedeviled humanities professors for three decades.
For one thing, he writes well. Bérubé disdains the mushy, cutesy abstractions of critical theory as much as do traditionalists, and his paragraphs move with clarity and dispatch. His interest in public affairs contrasts well with the haughtiness of his colleagues, whose snide stance toward the man in the street corresponds to their degree of felt powerlessness in off-campus matters. Added to that, his experience in large universities sharpens him to the social and economic conditions of faculty life, for instance, the fact that campus egalitarianism coexists with acute status-consciousness.
For these reasons, What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? is a smooth and swift read. The opening sections cover the chorus of “conservative complaints” about liberal bias on campus, ranging from the national campaign of David Horowitz to the remarks of John, a “large white student” who interrupts Bérubé’s class discussions with obstreperous outbursts against identity politics. The center of the book details Bérubé’s teaching, with readings of novels (My Antonia, etc.) interspersed with class- room scenes. Finally, Bérubé outlines the principles of a liberal classroom, explaining how a Rorty-derived “solidarity” shields education from the hubris of believing that our beliefs stem from anything except human interests and inventions.
Along the way, Bérubé makes several admissions that please critics of academia. “It is a skewed notion of dissent to think that one’s classroom should be deployed as the counterweight to conservatism in the rest of the culture,” he asserts, dismissing one of the customary apologies for the leftist tilt of the professorate. He calls some versions of “diversity training” exercises in “hamhandedness,” and prefers not to know about the “hooking up” habits of undergrads. He notes how many of his liberal colleagues “have no trouble exploiting their teaching assistants,” and, in the interest of lively debate, he says, “I often wish I had more conservative colleagues in literary study.”
The chapters contain lively characterizations of students, careful expositions of American fiction, and, in contrast to the regret cited above, blithe vilifications of conservatives. Yes, conservatives are, to Bérubé, a more or less deranged and ignoble crew. Some thoughtful “arts-and-humanities” conservatives are out there, he observes, but their kind is fading. In their stead, we have angry, hypocritical figures unhinged by the presence of liberals in classrooms. Their criticisms have reached a “fever pitch,” and are “hysterically overblown.” Their “mind-bending charge[s]” strike the profs as “surreal.”
But these insults appear mainly in the opening chapters of the book and don’t advance the core issue, which is how the tenets of liberalism enhance education. For that, Bérubé relies on lengthy demonstrations of his classroom practice. He counsels students to read closely, gather evidence, consider counter-evidence, address claims that dispute their deepest beliefs, and treat opponents with respect. Open your minds, face verbal challenges, keep complacency at bay, and play fair, he presses. These are the protocols of John Stuart Mill, and one has no difficulty believing that Bérubé runs a stimulating, reasonable classroom.
The strengths of the presentation, however, point to a weakness in Bérubé’s argument and to contemporary liberalism in general (in educational contexts). The procedures he details are evenhanded and rousing, but the ensuing liberal tenets of liberal education are just that: all procedural. They lay out how to argue and how to disagree, how to relate to one’s own beliefs and how to relate to others’. True to Bérubé’s neopragmatist outlook, classroom liberalism bears upon attitude and conduct. It does not endorse a curriculum. The inculcation of tradition is barely hinted at. A student’s educational path may amble promiscuously through a smorgasbord of course offerings.
This is today’s fallback position for liberalism in higher education. It used to push curricular innovations such as “opening the canon,” but those enthusiasms faded years ago. Now, shying away from content, it emphasizes forensic ideals and content-less habits such as critical thinking. In doing so, it never really engages conservative educational thought, whose operative concepts (tradition, core curriculum, common culture, high art, etc.) are mostly about content. In truth, open-minded conservative teachers would agree to all of Bérubé’s procedural norms. Bérubé contrasts constructivists like himself, who know that history, social circumstance, and conversation are the primary ingredients of knowledge, to various fundamentalists who insist that knowledge comes from extra-human sources such as the Word of God, and who grade students accordingly. But these tyrants are a false comparison, a rarity in classrooms. The real debate lies not over debating tactics, but over course content. Disagreement arises over the texts assigned, the topics emphasized, and the angles of interpretation taken. Bérubé barely touches upon these, leaving What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? with a hole at the center.
At one of those moments, Bérubé cites a case of falsely imputed “liberal bias,” and it indicates something else, precisely the curricular dispute that should be, but isn’t, elaborated. It concerns an assigned essay topic that was claimed by a conservative student to be anti-American, a claim rightly judged by Bérubé a silly exaggeration. Still, the tendentiousness of the question is plain. Here is the final sentence:
Analyze the U.S. constitution (original document), and show how its formulation excluded [the] majority of the people living in America at that time, and how it was dominated by America’s elite interest.
And here is Bérubé’s comment:
If students of American political science are not introduced to the contradictions underlying the foundation of a revolutionary democratic nation that practiced slavery and restricted the vote to landowning men, they are being miseducated.
What Bérubé considers good history registers with conservatives quite differently. They note the emphasis on exploitation and hypocrisy, along with no chance to argue otherwise. The Founding’s positive side is glossed over as if it were false ornament. And as for miseducation, the historical significance of the Constitution isn’t primarily that it legalized “exclusion” and “class domination,” but rather that a group of men acculturated to exclusion and domination should have conceived a system of government and a set of rights from which free and oppressed people have drawn inspiration for two centuries. The assignment, then, asks undergraduates to take a partial and politically loaded viewpoint on the Founding. If we want full historical context, by all means bring in the inequalities and injustices of the time, but let’s not obscure the extraordinary moral and political breakthrough represented by the document.
That Bérubé accepts such assignments as straightforward history goes a long way toward explaining why conservative criticisms appear unbalanced or cynical. The liberal outlook, especially regarding race and gender, has seeped into and saturated the curriculum so much that questioning it looks not like a new venture into the marketplace of ideas but like a violation of civility. This makes it almost impossible for conservative reformers in higher education to question, much less alter, the curriculum. It’s a frustrating impasse. Liberal approaches to the curriculum are so embedded that conservative attacks look suspect on procedural grounds. Say that multiculturalism as commonly practiced is incompatible with the training of erudite students and you offend the other parties. Describe “diversity” as a coercive and illusory term that will be remembered as nothing but a curious example of the mores of the early twenty-first century and you become an unprofessional crank. The substance of your criticism is waylaid by its impropriety.
When substantive points are recast as lapses in decency, outsiders have no chance of gaining a seat at the table. Someone as professionally aware as Professor Bérubé should recognize that, and he has at other times done so. But here, he overlooks the situation, because, I think, the aggressive actions of David Horowitz and others have raised the threat level. What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, the major statement on the issue by a major academic voice, never outlines the most important aspect of any educational program, its curriculum. On the evidence of its arguments, we may safely assume that in spite of all the publicized assaults from the outside (such as the Academic Bill of Rights) and all the humiliating episodes on the inside (such as Ward Churchill), the humanities remain tied to a liberal outlook—not to liberal personnel, but more deeply to liberal values and pedagogies.
Comments
Bauerline seems to confuse the cultural binary of liberal/conservative with the political binary of Democrat/Republican. The attacks against which Berube defends the academy are mostly about folks like Horowitz trying to get Republican ideas into the academic market. The conservatives Bauerline discusses here—the traditionalists, the national culturalists, the core curriculumists, etc.—are not necessarily, or even often, Republicans. Schlesinger and Hirsch come to mind as politically liberal, culturally conservative scholars, and I don’t think that the culture wars today are about getting more people like E. D. Hirsch in the academy (for there are plenty of them as far as I can see).
"When substantive points are recast as lapses in decency, outsiders have no chance of gaining a seat at the table.”
Well, no, the conservative attacks, led by Horowitz, *are* lapses in decency. Surely Horowitz is one outsider whose strategy and tactics have legitimately denied him a seat at the table.
“Defenders of current practices will shout about censorship and zealotry even though our proposals merely ask that conservative opinion be granted a modest place in the curriculum and in student life.” That’s from a Bauerlein March 2004 article supporting Horowitz, which goes on to attempt to redefine academic freedom.
Going to politicians to import conservatism into the liberal arts curriculum is no different than forcing the teaching of intelligent design as well as evolution in a biology course. The academic field itself is supposed to decide on its curriculum.
Thanks for your review of Professor Berube’s latest book. Quite interesting to me in light of the recent debate me’n Mr B conducted on his site that spilled over onto Professor O’Connor’s ACTA Online site. The thread over at ACTA has only now been closed. To paraphrase Rita Hayworth in Gilda, if the debate were a ranch it’d be called the “Bar-none”.
To RP: David Horowitz has promoted a modest programme of higher educational reform consistent both with free speech and academic freedom rights. A mon avis, he is a courageous campaigner for many good causes, including the war on global Islamo-fascism and against leftist political indoctrination on college campuses. He often faces hostile critics virtually alone; I’d another taste of this sort of one-against-all action on Professor Berube’s website when his oppo-research attack dogs thought they’d cornered me. Little did they know . . . Not a bad two-day piece of agonistic rhetorical blog-work for an old soldier. And me VFW mates at the Friday eve fish-fry loved it--especially the ACTA Online finishing-work this morning, as several just emailed me.
Cheers,
Dr JA
Remarkable how strongly David Horowitz figures in the horizon of academics interested in the liberal bias issue. Blissett’s comment applies more to Michael’s book than to my review, for What’s Liberal precisely doesn’t discuss educators who have mounted strong criticisms of the existing curriculum, including Hirsch and Ravitch. That these people may be political liberals is beside the point.
And Pukalsky’s final remark is telling, equating intelligent design with conservatism. Are there no elements of conservatism that lack controversial and unscientific elements, but which get short shrift in the curriculum? Pukalsky says that we should let the academic field itself decide the curriculum. But what if the field has become so insulated and self-absorbed that its management amounts more to conformist police work than it does to the advancement of knowledge and instruction? That is, I think, the case with the humanities today.
I’ll quote from WLAtLA pg. 204-205:
“Why is there so little ‘conservative’ historicism in the humanities? [...] the intellectual right says, ‘No! works of art are timeless, timeless, timeless’”
“In this, as in other schools of cultural criticism, the intellectual right hasn’t brought anything to the table in decades.”
If conservatism hasn’t brought anything to the table, why should it be at the table? Intelligent design advocates wish that they had a place at the table within biology, but they don’t—not because the field is insulated and self-absorbed, but because they have done no useful work.
And there is another respect in which the two issues are linked. In order to get support for changing curricula in the humanities, those who support Horowitz are going to the same politically conservative network that supports intelligent design and other pseudosciences. Once the principle of political control over curricula is established, there is nothing to prevent it being expanded; the same politicians who would be necessary to implement the one would also implement the other. That is a worse outcome than a bit of insulation and self-absorption.
(a) Horowitz/ACTA figure on a lot of people’s people’s horizon because they’re *on* the horizon lobbying state legislatures. Folks at private universities can afford to be more blasé. And judging from early reviews there are still people who don’t get the procedural liberalism point or reject it, so you need writing of this kind.
(b) Mark wishes Michael had written instead on his favorite subject of “the” curriculum. As I’ve noted elsewhere I think the terminological schemas Mark (I comment at length at DeLong’s) and others are using for this are way too impoverished to get us beyond food-fight blog squabbles. Yes, absolutely, there’s lots of smart stuff that can go under one or more category of conservatism that should be taught—Burke and Hayek should be taught more, for example. Let’s *do* it, and not as as some lame scale-balancing exercise (a rhetoric Bauerlein appeals to) but because it’s exciting, challenging thought.
(c) The “conformist police work” point wants to be demonstrated not asserted.
(d) Mark, would you support an effort to increase the representation of Austrian, Marxist, Post Keynesian, Feminist, and Institutionalist thought in the contemporary Economics curriculum?
Mark, your problem here is that there’s no evidence that smart folks like Hirsch or Ravitch or Schlesinger have a hard time of it in the academy. There’s also no evidence that their viewpoints are ignored by the groupthinkers in the humanities. (Having just written a review essay of Hirsch on cultural literacy and core knowledge, I can safely say that Hirsch received supportive AND critical replies from scholars in the fields of education, psychology, English, history, and philosophy.) That Berube ignores Hirsch or Ravitch on curricular reform is no doubt because Hirsch is concerned largely with K-6 education, and Ravitch with K-12 education.
My main problem with this debate is the idea that we need simply to add conservative scholars to “balance” out the liberal scholars, as if the truth is merely an antinomy. For example, check out Ron Silliman’s blog for a link to Language Poet/poli sci professor Bruce Andrew’s recent debate with Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly, like Horowitz, has accepted some weak version of postmodernism: there are no standards of truth, there are no standards of verisimilitude (which, as psychologist Jerome Bruner reminds us, is narrative’s version of truth). Instead, for every liberal book on your syllabus, you need a conservative book.
That’s ridiculous. For example, I agree that left-wing literary criticism of imperialism and the novel too often over-simplifies empire into some Star Wars-esque The Empire. But the solution to this isn’t to teach conservative over-simplifications alongside leftist oversimplifications. (Especially considering that most conservatives would argue that the very idea that art might have some connection to imperialism is a wrongheaded way to view art.) Instead, literary scholars need to be forced to adhere to better evidentiary standards. I don’t think that bringing in conservative hires to the academy will necessarily improve evidentiary standards (it’s not like O’Reilly argues that conservatives have better facts—he just wants an equal attention to liberal and conservative narratives without any real attention to evidence in either case).
The “conservative” position within literature departments tends to be “apolitical.” In other words, it almost never is an application of right-wing theory to literature, but almost always a resistance to the idea of politicization itself. This position is well represented by many prominent and successful scholars who might very well be “liberal” in their political lives outside the department. That creates a certain asymmetry--perhaps what Luther was referring to in his first comment. It would be pointless to want to find a rightwing perspective to balance the leftwing perspective, because nobody is interested in actually developing such a perspective toward literature, in my experience at least. A conservative in English department culture would gravitate toward an art for art’s sake position and be indistinguishable from a liberal, non-marxist in his or her actual scholarship.
I agree with some of the follow-up comments here, such as the need to avoid personnel balancing acts. I think that open-minded liberals are just as capable of teaching conservative traditions as conservatives are.
I agree that “scale balancing” in the curriculum is wrong-headed as well. We shouldn’t accept anything into the classroom just because it has representation in certain areas of public life. It has to pass certain tests first: historical influence, epistemological rigor, etc. I don’t think intelligent design belongs in a science classroom.
But certain conservative/libertarian traditions and ideas do pass those tests. Does one have to make a case for Hayek? Why should grad students have to read Discipline and Punish or Words and Things in several classes in grad school (as I did), while never reading a word of The Counter-Revolution of Science (on much the same subjects)? Are the essays in The Public Interest in the seventies any less intelligent than essays from the same time in Diacritics? They were certainly a lot more influential upon American culture and policy.
One needn’t ask for “equal time” for these kinds of things, but some recognition is requisite in a responsible higher-ed curriculum in the humanities. Without it, we come down to assertions such as the one Rich cites: “The intellectual right hasn’t brought anything to the table in decades.” And what of Losing Ground, of The End of History, of Neoconservatism: The Biography of An Idea? You may despise the ideas therein, but they were serious, and they had an impact.
This is not a workable strategy. If humanities professors continue to dismiss conservative/libertarian ideas and traditions that have wide influence in public life, the faculty will become even more marginal to U.S. culture than it already is.
Thanks Mark. We’re now getting at least 3 different notions of conservatism: libertarianism which maps back to 19C liberalism, Burkean 19C conservatism, and the apolitical great-lit position Jonathan points out. It might be useful disentangling these more.
I still find it very odd to see Foucault grouped with liberalism!
One follow-on comment: almost everything intellectually important that I read as an undergrad (including Foucault!) or as a grad student, I read off-syllabus. The syllabus tells you where the people teaching you happen to be and how they conceptualize their piece of the field. I’m not trying to let instructors off the hook, but having been through more curricular discussions than I want to remember, I think faculty routinely overestimate the extent to which their choice of readings influences students. What persuaded me that Austrians had something to say was seeing them do new things with Austrian theory and reach places others couldn’t.
P.S. Michael has posted more at http://www.michaelberube.com/ on what the book has to say about the exam question discussed above.
Mark, I’m curious of your answer to Colin Danby’s question. Economics departments are famously narrow, ideologically, and this ideology clearly favors ideas that range from the center-right to the right. Do you also demand that economics departments allow left-wing ideas through their doors?
And does this extend to outside the School of Arts and Humanities? Conservative ideas have almost total hegemony over business schools. Do you think that business schools begin to appoint leftists to their faculty?
Mark, I see where you’re coming from. On a personal note, I read Fukuyama in literature grad school for a Hegel and Theory course taught by a far-left Lacanian. (I also received the highest praise for the paper I wrote in the class on Dewey, Fukuyama, and democracy, a paper that was entirely center-left politically.)
Mark Bauerlein: “And what of Losing Ground, of The End of History, of Neoconservatism: The Biography of An Idea? You may despise the ideas therein, but they were serious, and they had an impact.”
How is this relevant to a discussion of Bérubé’s book, or even to a discussion of a great-books curriculum? Bérubé is a cultural studies professor, and examples of teaching that he describes in his book concern literature and philosophy. I dispute that these books were in any way serious—I would say that they are primarily pop-cultural—but granting for the sake of argument that they were, it is a bait-and-switch to imply that all this time we were concerned with political science.
As for the rest, if intellectual conservatism has to depend on invocations of Hayek, or on essays in The Public Interest in the seventies, then I’d say that the assertion that “The intellectual right hasn’t brought anything to the table in decades” is true of more than just cultural studies.
A few responses:
Yes, Colin is right that I’m mixing a few different traditions here (libertarian, traditionalist . . .), and it’s unfortunate that while humanities curricula delve scrupulously into the differences between different versions of gender studies, political criticism, and the like, we get little discrimination of conservatisms. Colin also could be right about overestimating syllabus selections, but the syllabus sure counted a lot back in the 70s and 80s when people were all over “opening up the canon.”
To Walt: If current left and center-left notions of economics meet scholarly tests, then of course they should be included in econ courses. And because they have been so much a regrettable part of 20th century history, they should be included in economic history courses. Hiring practices are another matter, and I like preferential treatment on political grounds as much as I do on racial grounds.
To Rich: The End of History is a work of speculative philosophy/history in the Hegelian tradition, and the essays in Neoconservatism include many on culture and intellectuals. They are much more humanistically-oriented than many of the works now routinely included on cultural studies syllabi. And as for what intellectual conservatism depends upon, I could add many more names than Hayek, going back 200 years to Burke, and I’d stand by the value of essays in The Publiic Interest as far exceeding the pop-cultural. We just have to agree to disagree on that. But at least you’ll acknowledge that they proved far, far more powerful and influential than anything that appeared in the liberal or left journals, and on grounds of historical impact deserve some consideration in the theory/culture/society syllabus.
It’s my understanding that the problems that the Austrian economists (e.g. Hayek) have in the American university come from mainstream economists, who are more often conservative than not. Austrian economists are not happy folk. I personally favor breaking up all the paradigm orthodoxies, and that would let some conservatives in too, but I can’t see it happening.
The reason Bérubé focuses on Horowitz and the intelligent design people is that they are big players. The reason why Berube’s critics pretend Horowitz and intelligent design aren’t there is that he’s an embarassment to them. Why shouldn’t Bérubé write a book mostly about Horowitz et al? Someone who wants a different book should write it themself.
On his blog Bérubé responds on the Constitution question.
"But at least you’ll acknowledge that they proved far, far more powerful and influential than anything that appeared in the liberal or left journals, and on grounds of historical impact deserve some consideration in the theory/culture/society syllabus.”
I’m not sure whether the theory/culture/society syllabus really makes any concessions to historical impact, in the sense of influences on politics. Actually, I’ll rephrase that: I have been arguing for almost a year now that whatever is studied within this constellation appears to have nothing to do with actual politics. But that doesn’t mean that it necessarily should. That, again, is up to those within the field itself. In a political science course that covered recent history, I would expect these ideas to be studied, of course.
“And as for what intellectual conservatism depends upon, I could add many more names than Hayek, going back 200 years to Burke [...]”
Well, yes, that is the problem—that it goes *back* from Hayek to Burke (plus those essays from the seventies, if you wish). Within the last couple of decades, conservatism has been taken over by a deeply anti-intellectual political movement, which has produced little or no intellectually worthwhile work. Yes, they are politically influential, as the Bush administration proves. But this political influence makes them an object of study, not a source of ideas.
Let’s distinguish, Rich, between political movements and intellectual traditions. The post above exemplifies one of the many problems of using “conservatism” or “liberalism” as massive catch-all terms.
(This does mean of course problematizing the argument about political influence; it’s hard to make a first-principles argument that the current administration is particularly conservative in any of the traditional senses of the term.)
To add to Rich’s post: I’m also not sure 18th and 19th century conservative and traditional liberal writers aren’t included on syllabi in relevant fields. In Brit lit classes, we read the canonical essayists, including Johnson, Burke, Arnold, Ruskin, Carlyle, and others.
Why Marx and not Hayek? I’ve not read much Hayek, but he doesn’t seem to offer a framework for the analysis of non-economic or cultural formations. The usefulness of Marx for literature scholars is precisely in the way Marx, however clumsily, noted the intimate connection between economic and social processes on one hand and artistic processes on the other. This is why the first 60 pages of *Capital*, the 18th B., and the Manifesto are probably all most lit folks read: in the first, we get ideas of alienation and fetishism (how people become things and things become animated); in the latter two, we get maps of cultural history superimposed over economic history.
And as far as I know, Hayek doesn’t argue that economic history doesn’t push cultural history. So that a neocon like Fukuyama can basically import Marx wholesale into a liberal capitalist framework, using Kojeve to show that dialectically speaking, Marx simply got the destination, not the process, wrong: history tends toward the West (America) not the East (Russia and China).
Finally, when it comes to literary scholarly interest that really does involve political science, conservative thinkers are always included. Just look at the renewed interest in Schmitt and the idea of the state of exception in all the recent scholarship on sovereignty and culture.
Colin: “Let’s distinguish, Rich, between political movements and intellectual traditions. The post above exemplifies one of the many problems of using “conservatism” or “liberalism” as massive catch-all terms.”
I don’t see the problem. Mark Bauerlein supports Horowitz’ effort, which is a classic right-wing political move. I don’t see any contemporary conservative intellectual tradition that is seperate from actual right-wing political conservativism.
What names have actually been mentioned? Well, Hayek and Burke are not contemporary, needless to say. Three specific books were recommended, by Charles Murray, Francis Fukuyama, and Irving Kristol. How can you possibly preserve the distinction that you want to preserve?
So who are the literary intellectual conservatives, as opposed to political conservatives? People like Harold Bloom? But Bloom doesn’t need Horowitz to get him into the university.
To take up a few lines of criticism:
Colin and Rich, I think that you underestimate the cultural aspect of neoconservatism during the 70s and 80s. Even in essays such as “broken windows,” you see deep-seated assumptions and speculative ideas that have far-reaching implications for cultural study. The same goes for Hayek’s less economic texts, Luther, such as the one I mentioned earlier, “The Counter-Revolution of Science.”
Finally, John, Michael’s counterpolemic against David Horowitz et al is skillful and entertaining, but my point in the review was that it doesn’t address the deeper criticisms of today’s version of liberal education by folks such as E. D. Hirsch (whose K-8 curriculum, which I have assisted in, applies well as a criticism of the undergraduate curriculum). And Hirsch calls himself an “educational conservative.” The reason to bring up these figures in relation to Michael’s book may be seen from his title, “What’s Liberal . . .?” That’s a pretty broad topic, and at least some consideration of the conservative educational case (along with the conservative political case) against the current curriculum would have strengthened his book.
Ultimately, we’re back at the “canon wars” of the 70s and 80s. Only this time, the question concerns secondary more than primary texts.
When looked at this way, I don’t think the issue is much about politics at all. For example, literary theorists don’t cling to Freud and Lacan because of some shared political vision with these psychoanalysts—for crying out loud, feminists cling to Freud, even as they beat him up for his ridiculous ideas about female sexuality.
Mark is right that a certain complacency has taken over certain quarters of the humanities (although my friends in biology and physics departments say the same thing about the dominant views in their fields). But I don’t think it’s political. Hopefully, when folks like Scott become faculty members, we’ll see a slow shift away from disproven psychoanalytic ideas and toward more scientifically established theories. (Ironically, education departments—often mocked as intellectually bankrupt—seem more up to date on ideas about cognitive psychology, information processing, and the like, and almost never cite Freud or Lacan in their publications.)
Likewise, I hope that the initial burst of scholarly activity spurred by critics like Said, Spivak, and Bhabha becomes more balanced and empirical in its claims. This has actually happened to a large degree, as “postcolonial studies” becomes more local and historical in its focus. We need the critiques of Said by folks like Knox; at the same time, we must not abandon the powerful questions Said raised because of political pressures from the Right. Is *Orientalism* full of sloppy scholarship? Sure. Did it inaugerate an almost entirely new set of questions about the relationship between knowledge and power? Indeed. Daniel Pipes demand for more knowledge about the Middle East winds up proving Said right!
At the same time, Mark needs to reply to Rich more thoroughly. Since the 1970s, we’ve seen a highly endowed conservative network of think-tanks, but what enduring scholarship has emerged from them? Fukuyama renounced *The End of History*, and I admire him for it (even though Derrida, among many others, devastated Fukuyama’s ideas long before 9/11 hammered in the last coffin nails). There’s Thomas Sowell at the Hoover Institute, along with his buddy Dinesh D’Sousa, and both have been shown to fabricate evidence and promote false research. (And Albert Murray, a staple of African-American Studies syllabi, gave us every worthwhile idea of Sowell’s long before Sowell.)
Finally, as I’ve written many times, my own dissertation is neither theoretical nor political, and I never encountered the slightest resistance from the committees at a highly recognized, Ivy League English department. Which is to say: conservative close-reading approaches to literature can still earn you a Ph.D.
Rich, Andrew Sullivan’s new _Conservative Soul_ is one of many efforts to draw distinctions like this—I don’t think repeating the phrase “actual right-wing political conservativism” gets us real far because it assumes what that which requires demonstration.
I had the impression Mark was trying to distance himself from Horowitz/ACTA, as Daniel Drezner did, but possibly I’m wrong. In any case I suggest to you that as long as academic questions are reduced to the kind of snarling zero-sum politics you find at places like Kos, you cede half the field to goons like Horowitz—it becomes a game of power and who can caricature whom most effectively.
Jerry Muller’s _Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought_ (Princeton 1998) is a good intro survey, and Perry Anderson, if you would rather read a paid-up lefty, has some smart writing on contemporary consertative thought in his 2005 _Spectrum_. Plus I don’t think anyone should have to apologize for citing canonical works! If you want to get a sense of contemporary Austrian economics one portal is http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/
This whole thing is silly. Horowitz isn’t some straw man being used to obscure serious issues. He’s the main player in the game that’s being played and the guy who forced Berube to write his book.
There may be some other argument to be made about how various sorts of conservatives are being treated within the university, but right now Horowitz is what’s happening. Drezner and Bauerlein both want to come in, disavow Horowitz, ask why Berube wastes so much time talking about someone like Horowitz whom they have disavowed, and then take advantage of the Horowitzean moment to advance their own agendas.
Horowitz may or may not be a conservative, but he’s definitely a partisan Republican and he’s something of a goon into the bargain.
Perhaps, once this particular game is over, a more thoughtful debate can be begun. I suggest that Drezner and Bauerlein use their tremendous authority within the conservative movement to muscle Horowitz out of the way, and then maybe we can talk.
From the Hayek Wiki:
In 1950, Hayek left the London School of Economics for the University of Chicago, becoming a professor in the Committee on Social Thought (he was barred from entering the Economics department because of his Austrian economic views by one member whom he would not name and many speculate was Frank Knight).
Frank Knight was not a liberal. The discrimination against the Austrian school comes especially from the mathematical economists—the Austrians are anti-mathematical. Economics is plenty conservative these days, but it’s still not Austrian.
John Emerson has it right above. The problem is that MB wants to (rightly) distance himself from the anti-intellectual, flamethrowing Horowitz position, and wants Berube to ignore that position and instead only pay attention to Hirsch and co. However, Horowitz is out there, and conservative critics of higher education, including MB, have supported him.
Basically, if conservative critics like Bauerlein want to be taken seriously by liberal academics, taken as acting in good faith, then they need to distance themselves from Horowitz and the like. (Just as any serious liberal refuses to endorse someone like Ward Churchill.) To put it another way, you don’t get to be one kind of critic on The Valve, and another on FrontPage.
I, for one, wish conservatives as astute as Bauerlein—people, who, like Bauerlein, believe that the academy should be reformed rather than wrecked—would disavow the reckless hatred of the Horowitzes and work toward the kind of serious conversation that Bauerlein wants to have here. (And, to his credit, B. seems to recognize that Berube wants to have that as well). For starters, Bauerlein makes an excellent point about the inability of contemporary academic liberalism to agree on the content of a curriculum. (None of the responses that I have seen here, though maybe I missed one, came up with a satisfactory counterargument on this point.) I have a feeling that we might want different outcomes, but if comments like his could spur a conversation that would generate a definitive curriculum in the liberal arts, I for one believe it would be a vast improvement. But liberals and conservatives are much more likely to have a truly generative exchange about the content of a liberal arts curriculum if they both believe that their interlocutors are operating in good faith.
Michael (not Berube), I don’t think the issue of curricular reform is ultimately political. Generalized debates might occur between conservative groups like ACTA and lefty cult stud types, but the real-world opponents of Core Curricula are most often the professional schools on campuses: engineering, business, pre-law, pre-med, and so on. Their opposition isn’t ideological; it’s about turf. They want to the right to set the curriculum of the students in their majors. At the university where I went for my Ph.D., the opponents of the required freshman writing course were from the schools of business and engineering.
My own opposition to core college curricula is similarly apolitical. I simply think that if colleges turn into high schools, then that gives high schools permission to continue to be elementary schools. We need more rigorous K-12 curricula, so that a student’s time at university can be a time when the students gets to pursue his or her intellectual interests to the fullest extent.
I also agree with John Emerson. The attempt to make this distinction between bad political conservatives and good intellectual conservatives (who just happen to support the political ones) is weirdly ahistorical. Colin Danby writes: “I don’t think repeating the phrase “actual right-wing political conservativism” gets us real far because it assumes what that which requires demonstration”—but actual right-wing political conservatism is demonstrated every day of the Bush administration.
Colin also writes “as long as academic questions are reduced to the kind of snarling zero-sum politics you find at places like Kos”—well, that’s oddly passive phrasing. Who is doing the reducing, in general? It’s as if Kos just appeared, with no history of reaction to years of right-wing hyperpartisanship. Similarly, who is reducing academic questions to zero-sum politics? Horowitz.
Michael (not Berube) writes: “if comments like his could spur a conversation that would generate a definitive curriculum in the liberal arts, I for one believe it would be a vast improvement.” Well, I don’t think that a definitive curriculum is possible, any more than a definitive reading. The question is, who gets to decide. That’s exactly the question that is the point under attack.
I’ve followed the comments on this topic sometimes with interest and sometimes dismay. In one important sense, the liberal-left political faction dominant at most universities is deeply “conservative” and resistant to change its ever-developing “progressive” antinomian agenda. While it may on occasion “tolerate” harmless nostalgia for the now-destroyed classical or core curriculum, it will not tolerate attempts to reform seriously either its curriculum or its climate of political intimidation (hence the snobbish hostility shown toward modest reform proposals of David Horowitz and his student supporters).
Anyone who is “conservative” rather than “reactionary” or “revisionary” in the face of the abominably low level of classical and modern foreign language teaching in the States on K-12 levels (and thus extending well into higher education levels) has a good deal of explaining to do.
Jacques, we’re talking about something else here.
Horowitz isn’t trying to get Cicero reintroduced into the curriculum, and the people behind him aren’t multilingual cosmopolitans. They’re people who read the Bible in God’s English. They don’t ponder the difference between Plato’s “Republic” and his “Laws”. They’re much more likely to find themselves terribly torn between Ayn Rand and Pat Robertson.
Don’t get your hopes up on the “core curriculum”. Reed College has that and has always had that, and Reed is famously leftish. Every Reedie has read Herodotus and Thucydides, but what good does it do them?
Robert Scholes pointed out a long time ago that literary studies has moved to a canon of methods and away from a canon of content. What Bauerlein wants is to shift that pendulum back (both within lit studs and the humanities generally, I suppose). I still think this is a debate worth having. Moreover, I think that unless humanist academics are willing to have this debate more openly and carefully, so that they define either (or both) canon more precisely, so that the general public knows what humanists are trying to teach and why, then someone else is going to try to define that for them. In fact, that is what is happening right now.
Again, I said before, one of the reasons that humanists feel unable to have this debate is that they feel as though they are under attack from a kind of criticism that believes the entire enterprise is corrupt, full of sycophantic, intellectual lazy, pampered liberals. If someone like Bauerlein wants to be taken seriously by academics and not just by the critics of academia, then he needs to occasionally point out how false this account is.
There’s Thomas Sowell at the Hoover Institute, along with his buddy Dinesh D’Sousa, and both have been shown to fabricate evidence and promote false research.
Any evidence for this, particularly as to Sowell? People disagree with his positions, but that’s a long way from accusing him of outright fabrication.
I am completely in favor of moving way from a canon of method to a canon of content. I think that methodologism and enforced paradigms is the curse of the contemporary university, and as things have developed, there may be no department anywhere where I could possibly be either comfortable or accepted.
I even vaguely agree that Berube is a little too committed to process liberalism, and that his vestigial content liberalism (a weak sort of social democracy, I think) is pretty thin and undeveloped. But this doesn’t really detract from my support of Berube against Horowitz and the intelligent design people.
My department still has a very canonical reading list. I would imagine that a lot of other departments do too. Shouldn’t this debate take place with some empirical support? That is, some reference to whether it is actually true that we have moved beyond the canon? In my experience the canon is still the boss man--except in the field of contemporary literature where the canon is still in the process of being formed.
Since I come from a science background, I favor a canon of method. But I don’t know whether that is really appropriate for the humanities or not.
I would think that one problem for a literary canon of content, though, is that more and more is being written, what with increasing population, literacy, and time for artistic pursuits. Unless you are committed to some kind of narrative of cultural decline, you’d guess that, over reasonably long periods of time, the ratio of canon-worthy to non-canonical works would stay about the same (unless canonical is just a synonym for influential). So a canon of content would seem to expand until no undergraduate could reasonably be expected to read much of it. I think that conservatives have less trouble with canons of content because this narrative of decline permits them to ignore most candidate works.
Canons of content are all about student-proofing education. Theey’re great if you think the ultimate goal of education is familiarity with content—sort of like E. D. Hirsch’s desire to have all students be able to think “tragic love” and not much else when they see the words “Romeo & Juliet.” It’s education in a Skinner box.
The notion that a student should pay $25,000 each year so that a professor can force-feed them content is outrageous. Learning is the responsibility of the student; the teacher cannot force the student to learn. The real question is this: how can we develop courses in which students must research the canon of content for themselves, rather than having this content presented uncritically like a Happy Meal for them in the syllabus or core course requirements? I remember reading about a class on *The Waste Land* at the New School. The only required text was the poem. The students used the poem as the basis for individual research programs. I’m sure most of the students wound up learning a lot about Wagner, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, the fisher-king myth, and so on—but through their own research, not through a “Greatest Hits of Western Civ” syllabus. And those students will ultimately recall this research far better, because cognitively, it will all be connected in their schema. (Just as nearly every dissertation student I’ve ever asked has admitted to remembering their dissertation research better than their generalist oral exam research: we remember what we discover ourselves through goal-oriented activities.)
As Jerome Bruner wrote in the early 60s, the goal of education should be having students *do* the field of study and not just *talk* about it. Think of the vast gulf between the way professors teach literature to undergraduates and the way they themselves research literature. It’s not that I don’t believe in “core content.” It’s more about *how* students come to learn about core content. How can this core be tied to an intrinsic motivation rather than an extrinsic motivation? When will we stop treating college students like pigeons in an experiment?
Michael ~B is right that this is a debate worth having. But it’s not a political debate. And let’s be clear: those who favor a canon of content are guided by a largely disproven behaviorist folk psychology.
I think that you would inevitably end up with plural canons. For example, most Catholics and probably most conservatives would probably want to raise the profile of Latin. the relative mixes of hstory vs. philosophy vs. literature vs. social science, classical vs. modern, Eurocentric vs. cosmopolitan, etc., would vary widely.
(That paragraph was about liberal arts generally. Within literature the questions would be similar but more restricted.)
A plural canon would make it impossible to exactly rank schools by quality the way Brian Leiter does, but making Brian Leiter impossible would be a very good thing.
Rick, there are big questions as to whether economics falls on the science side or the humanities side of that line. The fact that there are methodological disagreements within economics the way there really aren’t in physics speaks against putting economics on the science side of the line. Whatever consensus there is is a bureaucratic one, created by control of hiring. (Redman, “Economics and the Philosophy of Science”; Hodgson, “How Economics Forgot History”; Keen, “Debunking Economics.")
My last nonsequiter paragraph above was an aside to Rick based on my agreement that a canon of method is appropriate on the science side, but maybe not the humanities side. I was talking about “where to draw the line”, with economics being an example case.
Luther, either a canon of method or a canon of content can be force-fed.
I think that the assumption of any canon of content should be that all good students will be reading non-canonical works on the side. And actually I suppose I favor a mixed content-method canon.
I don’t see how there can be a canon of method without a canon of content. Presumably a liberal program will include some familiarization with Locke, Mill, Dewey, or various other liberal thinkers—probably at the expense of Schmitt, Lenin, and Carlyle.
I don’t want to come off as renouncing David Horowitz, because I think that beneath the polemics and tactics lies a warranted criticism of the intellectual condition of the campus. His politicking and smearing I take as simply the way politics are played, and having spent some time working in a politically delicate agency in DC, I don’t find his actions any worse than those of any other political advocacy campaign. Yes, he appears unfair, snide, belligerant . . . in academic settings. But in political ones, he’s a normal activist.
I’ll comment on the curricular points raised above in a moment.
I am perfectly willing to use normal political tactics against the Horowitz-Bauerlein team, if that’s what Mark is inviting me to do.
Liberal bloggers are often wrongly accused of wallowing in viciousness and out-of-control anger, and I always defend my little liberal brothers against that slanderous charge.
I myself, however, have a fully-functional capacity for wallowing in viciousness and out-of-control anger, and I am quite willing to use it against Horowitz and his little conservative friends, if that’s what’s appropriate.
I’m not completely sure that The Valve is the appropriate venue for this, but they really can’t stop me either.
Rich I’ll make one more try. You’re assuming things that require demonstration, in particular the unity of something called “conservatism.” Adding terms like “right wing” or “actual” *does not constitute demonstration*. I am not even making a good/bad distinction, and I am precisely insisting on an historical reading: historical method, (note all the solemn discussion of “method” above) assumes some willingness to sort through evidence about the world not just impose prefabricated schemas over it.
The point re Kos e