The Victims' Revolution

by Bruce Bawer

  The NAS has supported anti–affirmative action initiatives, great books programs, and courses that teach about America’s founding ideals. How effective has the NAS been? Balch is frank. It’s had “a little bit” of an impact. The problem is that the malady that has infected the academy has also blighted all of American society. Indeed, the post-sixties revolution in the humanities is “partly a leading indicator and partly a driving force.” Balch admits that “we haven’t gotten the breakthrough I’ve always wanted. Because the balance is so heavily to the left that administrators are scared to challenge them.”

  When I mention identity studies, Balch is quick to insist that some admirable work has been produced in these disciplines. Yet on the whole, he says, these fields have been “infected with a spirit at odds with formative notions of the modern university.” Balch himself has had research interests that would easily fit into identity studies if those disciplines were more properly conceived: “I was interested in the use of eunuchs in premodern society. They were popular because they could guard harems and couldn’t set up dynasties.” He still finds it a fascinating subject, certainly one worthy of study. But because of the current tendency of scholars to give their work a politically correct slant, “I would worry nowadays whether a book on that subject was reliable.” Indeed, “you need to take the products of these studies with a grain of salt. And it’s a shame, because the subjects these fields deal with are not unimportant subjects.”

  Part of the reason why the humanities have lost their way, he suggests, is that the people who engineered the humanities revolution “conflated things that were not essentially similar. They equated natural science with humane sciences”—the latter being his umbrella term for the humanities and social sciences. The difference is that in the “humane sciences,” as opposed to the natural sciences, there’s no clear way to test a proposition, and “passions aren’t involved in the same way.” Yes, “scientists do have egos, but scientific struggles are usually not an integral part of broader political issues, the exception being in such cases as evolution and global warming.” By contrast, “the humanities are almost all political. They’ve become so abstracted from anything anyone cares about,” and “when they’re supported by privately endowed universities, you need systems in which the [people with the] prevailing points of view can’t decide on their own who’s going to be invited into the guild. You need checks and balances to keep them honest.”

  Balch wonders aloud, “How much good do the humanities and social sciences really do? If physics and medicine disappeared, we’d be in bad shape. But if sociology disappeared? Even good academic history? Do we understand politics better than the Federalist Papers did? Or are we just creating this new priestly class that wants to shame us and rule us?” But he’s hopeful: “ultimately they can’t” rule us, “because they don’t have the stomach for tough politics. They can’t stand up to terrorists, and sooner or later this bluff will be called.”

  Based at Boston University, the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW, originally ALSC) was founded in 1993 by such distinguished critics as Denis Donoghue, Roger Shattuck, and Christopher Ricks in reaction to the rise of postmodernism in the humanities. The spring 2011 issue of the journal Academic Questions, includes an essay, “Rescuing Literature: The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers at Sixteen,” in which David Rothman laments that theory-besotted English departments have “given up faith in their own field” because it isn’t science and “have desperately sought to represent themselves as being stocked with ersatz economists, anthropologists, sociologists, and legal and political theorists.”

  Rothman is right. If the political upheavals of the 1960s turned the heads of English professors and others laboring in the vineyards of the humanities, the heady advances of mid-twentieth-century science and technology made many of them feel terribly inferior and irrelevant—and that’s a key part of the picture of the postmodern humanities.

  As a student I was quite aware of the awe, envy, and insecurity with which some of my English professors regarded scientists and their work. Living in an era defined by breathtaking, rapid scientific and technological advances—an era in which science was where the action was—they weren’t content with the idea of “simply” being, say, old-fashioned textual scholars or literary critics. Truth be told, some of them weren’t all that interested in literature in the first place. In any event, they certainly didn’t want to be acolytes—people whose job it was to read other men’s and women’s masterpieces attentively, even reverentially, and to teach others how to read them attentively, too. No, they wanted to be the stars; they wanted to be perceived as doing something every bit as difficult, and as being every bit as important to the world, as Einstein or Alexander Fleming or Stephen Hawking or Watson and Crick—which meant turning their field into a pseudoscience complete with murky, scientific-sounding jargon and “theories.”

  If I, as a student, was blessedly immune to such foolishness, it was largely thanks to my father, an internist who’d worked as a medical researcher, as a hospital chief of staff, and, for two decades, as the editor in chief of a medical journal, but who’d also published short stories and had radio plays produced on CBS and NBC. He loved both medicine and literature, and was at once a first-rate diagnostician who could pinpoint an obscure ailment and a top-notch script doctor who could put his finger on exactly why a friend’s screenplay didn’t work. In our home, science and literature coexisted peacefully: the living room shelves were crowded with fiction, drama, and poetry, the basement shelves with medical and other scientific texts. Neither was better; each had its place and served its purpose. As a child I was powerfully drawn to both art and science; in high school my English professor encouraged my writing even as my chemistry teacher was telling me I should become a chemist. In college I followed a double path, majoring in English and taking premed courses.

  I ended up going with English. And I’ll never forget the shock I felt on my first day of graduate school, when the director of the Ph.D. program in English looked up from the test scores in my file and asked: “Why aren’t you in medical school?” To him, it made no sense that someone with an aptitude for science had opted to study literature. I soon discovered that his feeling of professional and institutional inferiority suffused the humanities. No, it didn’t contaminate the very best professors, but it infected many of the others—thereby rendering these disciplines vulnerable to the predations of postmodern pseudoscience.

  Which was absurd, of course, because anyone who truly knows and loves both science and literature understands that neither is more “important” than the other; both matter, for different reasons. Those who try to turn the study of literature into a science only prove thereby that they understand neither science nor literature, that their awe of science is matched only by their ignorance of it, and that their interest in being perceived as “relevant” exceeds their attraction to literature itself.

  In his tiny, cluttered office, David Clemens tells me about the Great Books program he established at Monterey Peninsula College. At first his proposal for the program was opposed by some administrators, one of whom wanted a more multicultural reading list. But in the end it went through. Clemens teaches students how to read great books, covers the critiques and defenses of the “great books” concept, and discusses reading books versus processing material online.

  How, I ask him, has the program been received by students? Clemens says he’s been told again and again: “At last! This is what I came to college for.” Students, he feels, “have had it up to here” with Theory and multiculturalism.

  Months later, looking through the winter 2011 issue of Literary Matters, the ALSCW newsletter, I happen to run across an essay by Joshua Converse, a Monterey undergraduate, that is a tribute to Clemens’s course, which Converse describes as “earth-shattering (or world-shaping).” Converse says that he and his fellow students were “hungry
for something real. We found it in English 1B: ‘Introduction to Literature.’” Converse goes on:

  Over the course of weeks the once-flat landscape of Literature delineated by context, race, class, gender, and the quotidian use of language started to shift beneath us; the World of Ideas opened. We learned how to really read. We were on fire to talk about it. . . . Within weeks other members of the class and I were meeting on our own time to discuss the Great Books. We read Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. We read Sappho. We felt and spoke as if we had rediscovered some long-forgotten treasure abandoned by the generation before. Members of the faculty began to attend, and we became an officially recognized club on campus. . . . We felt we’d missed out on something essential by not being exposed to these works earlier.

  Back in Clemens’s office, he and I talk about the proliferation of disciplines with the word studies in their names. “Anything with studies in it, avoid!” Clemens says. What about Cultural Studies? “That bullshit comes into the classroom in papers.” He mentions Monterey’s Sign Language Program, which was “founded with the best of intentions” but which actually “promotes deafness” in the name of political correctness. “Just think of not healing a child who can’t hear because it’s an offense against deaf culture!”

  For Clemens, one of the most appalling crimes of today’s academy is that it has accustomed students to the idea that teaching is, by definition, an act of political advocacy. Clemens describes himself as a believer in “infusing critical thinking into everything,” and explains that when he covers controversial issues in the classroom, “I try to say: what objections might there be to this? Treat it with academic dispassion.” Today, alas, “students don’t know what dispassion and disinterestedness mean.”

  He’s quick, however, to add a note of hope. “I think there’s a change in the post-9/11 generation—a greater seriousness, a greater desire for ‘the real deal.’ Students feel empty. They’ve been marinated in multiculturalism since elementary school. They’re being taught with technological means that technologize learning.” One student told him about a seventh-grade class in which Dante was taught by means of a PowerPoint presentation in which hell, heaven, and purgatory were bullet points. In American education, Clemens complains, there’s “no longer an interest in history, in the telling of the American tale”; instead, “it’s the black American tale, the feminist American tale,” and so on. This is important, because “what we valorize as the salient feature of our past shapes our future”: if we focus on class struggle and the history of oppression in teaching American history, then those are the lenses through which our descendants will see our country.

  Clemens emphasizes that while the eyes of the mainstream media may be on the Ivy League and other big-name universities, California community colleges such as Monterey “indoctrinate” almost three million people a year with multiculturalism, bogus diversity, and left-wing ideologies that present capitalism as a zero-sum game. Clemens recalls a Korean American student of his who was always being asked: “What is the Asian American viewpoint on this?” “She was a sixth-generation American!” Clemens exclaims. In the academy today, “you’re not an individual—and I think people still want to be individuals!”

  Yet for all the glimmers of hope, it’s not easy to imagine a successful revolt against identity studies and other postmodern academic phenomena anytime soon. The ideologues have transformed the academy—and, to a remarkable extent, driven out the enemy. They’ve taken over the shop and remade it in their image. And there’s no easy route back. After all, there’s nothing more entrenched than a tenured professor.

  Students and their parents, alas, are unwitting accomplices in this protracted siege. Most of them simply aren’t aware of what they’ve gotten into. Some of the parents just don’t realize how much things have changed since they were students. Indeed, some of them are so young that they, too, were students under the present dispensation—and they think this is what humanities education is. And so they instruct their children to avoid the humanities as much as they can and to concentrate on “practical” courses that will lead directly to profitable careers. As a result of which their kids never acquire a real liberal education—and thereby risk the danger of never truly understanding, among other things, what it means to be an American. And with every kid who emerges from college possessing a diploma—and an idea of America derived not from the values of the Declaration and the Constitution but from the preachings of identity studies—the American miracle fades a bit more into the mists of history.

  This is a tragedy for America—and for all of humanity. “In a world savagely rent by ethnic and racial antagonisms,” wrote Schlesinger, “it is all the more essential that the United States continue as an example of how a highly differentiated society holds itself together.”

  How to reverse this nightmarish development? First, spread the word. Parents and alumni should educate themselves about what is going on and make noise about it. The people who “teach” this nonsense rely on their ability, when challenged, to silence parents, alumni, and other outsiders with thick clouds of pretentious rhetoric and charges of prejudice and philistinism. Parents and alumni who are aware of what these people are up to and who are not intimidated by their jargon can make a big difference.

  A parent who might ordinarily send a child to his or her alma mater should be prepared to do otherwise if it turns out that the study of the humanities in that institution has been hopelessly compromised by postmodernism—and should, moreover, make an issue out of it. A few parents who advertise their readiness to turn their back on a beloved college for such reasons can set off alarms in that institution’s highest administrative offices.

  There are, after all, very fine colleges—not many, but some—at which the humanities have actually been spared the cancer of postmodernism. Parents who want their children to receive an education worth the money they are paying for it are urged to send them to those places. Doing so would send a message to the entire higher educational establishment.

  There are other ways to win this war. Clemens’s Great Books program provides one example. If the extant departments and programs at a college are a lost cause, run by entrenched ideologues who simply cannot be dislodged, the only solution may be to start a new department or program, as Clemens did, and do an end run around them. In such matters, boards of trustees and administrators have a great deal of power—which they use, alas, all too rarely.

  The most ambitious solution of all is to establish new colleges from scratch. One thing that there is no shortage of in the United States these days is unemployed or underemployed people with Ph.D.s in the humanities. Many of them are unemployed or underemployed precisely because they’ve chosen not to buy into postmodern ideology. Some of them are hardworking adjuncts, teaching several courses per term, often at a number of different colleges and universities, invariably for a pittance. Drawing on this pool of talent, an ambitious educator with seed money, drive, and imagination could create a first-rate liberal arts college. The identity studies owe their existence, in very large part, to the munificence of the Ford Foundation. Isn’t there a foundation somewhere that is willing to put up the money to counter the madness of the postmodern humanities?

  It is staggering how willing many American parents are today to spend outrageous amounts of money on higher educations that are, in many cases, hardly educations at all. What do these parents really want their children to get out of college? Many, for all their generosity, don’t put much thought into answering this question. They accept that institutions such as Harvard and Yale are the gold standard of American higher education, simply because the names of these institutions have long since become synonymous with excellence in the popular mind. Coupled with this lazy acceptance is a cynical awareness that millions of other Americans—including their children’s potential employers—think exactly the same way, the result being that the sight of HARVARD or YALE on a diploma all but guarante
es a smooth ride into a successful career.

  If everybody thinks this way, however, none of this will ever change for the better. And there’s no excuse for not trying to make a difference. For with the Internet at one’s fingertips, it’s not really that difficult for a concerned parent to track down colleges and universities that offer real educations—that can, in other words, prepare a young person both for a profitable career and for an enriching life.

  The future of America hangs in the balance.

  Acknowledgments

  I am profoundly indebted to my editor, Adam Bellow, and my agent, John Talbot—two exceptional men and true friends with whom I have now collaborated on several books in what, for me at least, has been a remarkable and invigorating spirit of camaraderie and shared intellectual enthusiasm.

  I am also exceedingly grateful to Kathryn Whitenight, Marlena Brown, and Joanna Pinsker, Milan Bozic, William Ruoto, and Jonathan Burnham at HarperCollins for their distinctive contributions to this project and for their many kindnesses.

  For their extraordinary friendship, help, advice, and moral support throughout the writing of this book, I wish to extend my deepest thanks to Thor Halvorssen, David Horowitz, Per Birger Sørebø and Mark Smith, Dorothy Heyl and Thomas De Pietro, Mary Hiecke Gioia and Dana Gioia, Fred Litwin, Angelo Pezzana, Nina Rosenwald, David Solway, Brendan McEntee, Alexander Meyer Nilsen, Michael Johannessen, Jenna Bawer, Paula Deitz, Peter Fedorowich, Alex Knepper, Tim Hulsey, Karen Montone, and Valerie Price.

  A very special debt is recorded in the dedication of this book.

  For their generous interviews, I want to express my sincere appreciation to Shelby Steele, Alan Charles Kors, Stephen H. Balch, Phyllis Chesler, Christina Hoff Sommers, David Clemens, Wayne R. Dynes, Larry Kramer, Miles Groth, David Diaz, and Chon Noriega.