The unanswered question remains: Were Wax and Alexander wrong that the virtues of self-restraint, deferred gratification, and future orientation are key for economic and personal success? Like GET-UP, IDEAL had not one word to say about the Wax-Alexander thesis, confining itself instead to accusations of racism. Well, perhaps Wax’s colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania law school would do better?
No such luck. A spokesman for the law school tried to distance the school from the controversy: “The views expressed in the article are those of the individual authors. They are not a statement of Penn Law’s values or institutional policies.”1 That was either an anodyne truism or an underhanded dig at the op-ed as contrary to the school’s “values.” The administration should have made it crystal clear that reasoned argumentation is not “hate speech” or a “discriminatory act.” Wax would not be silenced by the fierce deployment of the racism card. But most academics are not so brave.
The dean of the Penn law school, Ted Ruger, published an op-ed in the student newspaper, affirming that free speech was a “bedrock value” at Penn but noting the “contemporaneous occurrence” of the op-ed and the Charlottesville rally and implying that Wax’s views were “divisive, even noxious.”2 Nearly half the professors at the University of Pennsylvania law school published an open letter condemning Wax and inviting students to report their experience of bias and stereotypes at Penn Law (read: Wax’s class)—a transparent effort to build a case for removing her from teaching first-year classes. The signatories “categorically rejected” her claims,3 but provided no reasons for doing so. New York University’s Jonathan Haidt explained the corrosive effect of such collective, unreasoned denunciations. “Every open letter you sign to condemn a colleague for his or her words brings us closer to a world in which academic disagreements are resolved by social force and political power, not by argumentation and persuasion,” he wrote on his website Heterodox Academy. The rest of the faculty remained conspicuously silent, as has University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann.
Dean Ruger then took a page from UCLA education school dean Suárez-Orozco’s playbook. He suggested to Wax in December 2017 that she take a year’s sabbatical and stop teaching her first-year civil-procedure class, she reports. The poor dean was under pressure to banish Wax, you see, and hoped that the controversy would die down in her absence. Wax declined the invitation to disappear. In March 2018, Ruger’s suggestion that she desist from teaching 1-Ls became a non-negotiable order, however, after remarks she made about mismatch at the law school increased the campus fury against her.
Wax’s coauthor, Larry Alexander, teaches at the University of San Diego, a Catholic institution. USD at first seemed to take the piece in stride. But then the dean of USD’s law school, Stephen Ferruolo, issued a schoolwide memo repudiating Alexander’s article and pledging new measures to compensate “vulnerable, marginalized” students for the “racial discrimination and cultural subordination” that they experience.4
Ferruolo’s letter refused to engage with any of Wax and Alexander’s arguments. The dean simply announced that Alexander’s “views” were not “representative of the views of our law school community” and suggested that they were insensitive to “many students” who feel “vulnerable, marginalized or fearful that they are not welcomed.” He did not raise any specific objections to Alexander’s arguments, or even reveal what the arguments were.
Instead, he promised more classes, speakers, and workshops on racism; more training on racial sensitivity; and a new committee to devise further diversity measures. Stronger racial preferences will most certainly follow. The implication of this bureaucratic outpouring is the absurd notion that the law school faculty is full of bigots.
USD’s response was more significant than Penn’s because it was more surprising. While USD has embraced a “social justice” mission in recent decades, the law school itself has been less politicized. It has one of the highest proportions of nonleftist professors in the country—about a quarter of the faculty. Ferruolo, a corporate lawyer with strong ties to the biotech industry, presented himself until recently as mildly conservative. If USD was willing to match Penn’s hysterical response to the Wax-Alexander op-ed, was there any educational institution remaining that would defend its faculty members against false accusations of racism, should they dissent from orthodoxy?
The Wax-Alexander op-ed’s primary sin was to talk about behavior. The founding idea of contemporary progressivism is that structural and individual racism lies behind socioeconomic inequalities. Discussing bad behavioral choices and maladaptive culture is out of bounds and will be punished mercilessly by slinging at the offender the usual fusillade of “-isms” (to be supplemented, post-Charlottesville, with frequent mentions of “white supremacy”).
The fact that underclass behaviors are increasingly common among lower-class whites, and not at all limited to poor blacks and Hispanics, might have made it possible to address personal responsibility. That does not appear to be the case. What if the progressive analysis of inequality is wrong, however, and a cultural analysis is closest to the truth? If confronting the need to change behavior is punishable “hate speech,” it is hard to see how the country can resolve its social problems.
PART IV
THE PURPOSE OF THE UNIVERSITY
13
THE HUMANITIES AND US
In 2011, the University of California at Los Angeles decimated its English major. Such a development may seem insignificant. It is not. What happened at UCLA is part of a momentous shift in our culture that bears on our relationship to the past—and to civilization itself.
Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton—the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements and replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing. In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent as to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton, or Shakespeare, but was determined to expose students, according to the course catalog, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”
Such defenestrations have happened elsewhere, of course, and long before 2011. But the UCLA coup was particularly significant because the school’s English department was one of the last champions of the historically informed study of great literature, uncorrupted by an ideological overlay. Precisely for that reason, it was the most popular English major in the country, enrolling a whopping 1,400 undergraduates.
Let’s compare what the UCLA student has lost and what he has gained. Here’s Oberon addressing Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
… once I sat upon a promontory
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres
To hear the seamaid’s music.
To which UCLA’s junior English faculty respond: Ho-hum. Here’s the description of a University of California postcolonial studies research grant: The “theoretical, temporal, and spatial intersections of postcoloniality and postsocialism will arrive at a novel approach to race, gender, and sexuality in present-day geopolitics.” To which UCLA’s junior English faculty respond: That’s more like it!
Other readers and listeners have not been so obtuse in their literary judgments. Consider the response of a nineteenth-century Frenchman exposed to Shakespeare for the first time. In early 1827, a troupe of British actors arrived in Paris to perform six Shakespeare plays. The young composer Hector Berlioz was in the a
udience at the Théâtre de l’Odéon and, like most spectators, read along with the English language performances in a French prose translation. Berlioz later recalled the moment in his Mémoires:
Shakespeare, coming upon me unawares, struck me like a thunderbolt. The lightning flash of that sublime discovery opened before me at a stroke the whole heaven of art, illuminating it to its remotest depths.…
But the shock was too strong, and it was long before I recovered from it.… As I came out of Hamlet, shaken to the depths by the experience, I vowed not to expose myself a second time to the flame of Shakespeare’s genius.
This resolution proved fleeting:
Next day the playbills announced Romeo and Juliet.
After Denmark’s somber clouds and icy winds, to be exposed to the fiery sun and balmy nights of Italy, to witness the drama of that passion swift as thought, burning as lava, radiantly pure as an angel’s glance,… was more than I could bear. By the third act, scarcely able to breathe—it was as though an iron hand had gripped me by the heart—I knew that I was lost.1
Berlioz’s reaction was typical. Alexandre Dumas, also in the audience, wrote that Shakespeare arrived in France with the “freshness of Adam’s first sight of Eden.” Fellow attendees Eugène Delacroix, Victor Hugo, and Théophile Gautier, along with Berlioz and Dumas, would create works inspired by those seminal evenings. The Bard’s electrifying combination of profound human insight and linguistic glory would continue catapulting across national borders to influence poets, painters, and composers the world over, as no other writer has done.
Yet the UCLA English department—like so many others—was more concerned that its students encounter race, gender, and disability studies than that they plunge headlong into the overflowing riches of actual English literature—whether Milton, Wordsworth, Thackeray, George Eliot, or dozens of other great artists closer to our own day. How is this possible? The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin. Course catalogs today babble monotonously of group identity. UCLA’s undergraduates can take courses in Women of Color in the U.S., Women and Gender in the Caribbean, Chicana Feminism, Studies in Queer Literatures and Cultures, and Feminist and Queer Theory.
Today’s professoriate claims to be interested in “difference,” or, to use an even more up-to-date term, “alterity.” But this is a fraud. The contemporary academic seeks only to confirm his own worldview and the political imperatives of the moment in whatever he studies. The 2014 Modern Language Association conference, the annual gathering of America’s literature (not social work) faculty, for example, addressed “embodiment, poverty, climate, activism, reparation, and the condition of being unequally governed … to expose key sites of vulnerability and assess possibilities for change.”
It was not always so. The humanist tradition was founded not on narcissism but on the all-consuming desire to engage with the genius and radical difference of the past. The fourteenth-century Florentine poet Francesco Petrarch triggered the explosion of knowledge known today as Renaissance humanism with his discovery of Livy’s monumental history of Rome and the letters of Cicero, the Roman statesman whose orations, with their crystalline Latin style, would inspire such philosophers of republicanism as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
But Petrarch didn’t want to just read the ancients; he wanted to converse with them as well. So he penned heartfelt letters in Latin to Virgil, Seneca, Horace, and Homer, among others, informing them of the fate of their writings and of Rome itself. After rebuking Cicero for the vindictiveness revealed in his letters, Petrarch repented and wrote him again: “I fear that my last letter has offended you.… But I feel I know you as intimately as if I had always lived with you.”
Petrarch was hardly the only Renaissance scholar to feel so immediate a bond with the classical authors. In 1416, the Florentine clerk Poggio Bracciolini discovered the most important Roman treatise on rhetoric moldering in a monastery library outside Constance, a find of such value that a companion exclaimed: “Oh wondrous treasure, oh unexpected joy!” Bracciolini thought of himself as rescuing a still-living being. The treatise’s author, Quintilian, would have “perished shortly if we hadn’t brought him aid in the nick of time,” Bracciolini wrote to a friend in Verona. “There is not the slightest doubt that that man, so brilliant, genteel, tasteful, refined, and pleasant, could not longer have endured the squalor of that place and the cruelty of those jailers.”
This burning drive to recover a lost culture propelled the Renaissance humanists into remote castles and monasteries across Europe to search for long-forgotten manuscripts. Despite their rapport with their Greek and Roman ancestors, they were no historical naïfs. The humanists were well aware, unlike their medieval predecessors, of the chasm between their present and the classical past, as exemplified most painfully in the fallen state of medieval Latin. It was precisely to overcome the effects of time on historical sources that they developed the seminal methods of modern scholarship.
The knowledge that many ancient texts were forever lost filled these scholars with despair. Nevertheless, they exulted in their growing repossession of classical learning, for which they felt, in Emerson’s words, a canine appetite. In François Rabelais’s exuberant Gargantua stories from the 1530s, the giant Gargantua sends off his son to study in Paris, joyfully conjuring up the languages—Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Chaldean, and Arabic—that he expects him to master, as well as the vast range of history, law, natural history, and philosophy. “In short,” he concludes, “let me find you a perfect abyss of knowledge.”
This constant, sophisticated dialogue between past and present would become a defining feature of Western civilization, prompting the evolution of such radical ideas as constitutional government and giving birth to arts and architecture of polyphonic complexity. And it became the primary mission of the universities to transmit knowledge of the past, as well as—eventually—to serve as seedbeds for new knowledge.
Compare the humanists’ hunger for learning with the resentment of a Columbia University undergraduate who had been required by the school’s freshman core curriculum to study Mozart. She happens to be black, but her views are widely shared, to borrow a phrase, “across gender, sexuality, race, and class.”
“Why did I have to listen in music humanities to this Mozart?” she groused in a discussion of the curriculum reported by David Denby in his book on Columbia’s core. “My problem with the core is that it upholds the premises of white supremacy and racism. It’s a racist core. Who is this Mozart, this Haydn, these superior white men? There are no women, no people of color.” These are not the idiosyncratic thoughts of one disgruntled student; they represent the dominant ideology in the humanities today. Columbia not only failed to disabuse the student of such parochialism; it is also all but certain that some of its faculty strengthened her in her close-mindedness, despite the school’s admirable commitment to its beleaguered core.
Of course, the absurd game of reducing all expression to gender or race politics is particularly ludicrous when it comes to music—but the charge of Eurocentrism is even more preposterously leveled against Mozart, who makes a Muslim pasha the only truly noble character in his opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, and whose Sarastro in The Magic Flute appeals to a universal humanity.
Ralph Ellison anticipated the contemporary multiculturalist’s shallow self-definition and sphere of interest. Ellison read Marx, Freud, T. S. Eliot, Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Hemingway as a young man in Macon County, Alabama—books, he said, which “seldom, if ever, mentioned Negroes,” but that were to release him “from whatever ‘segregated’ idea I might have had of my human possibilities.” He was liberated
not by black political writers like Richard Wright, he wrote, “but by composers, novelists, and poets who spoke to me of more interesting and freer ways of life.” It requires “real poverty of the imagination” to think that self-understanding “can come to a Negro only through the example of other Negroes,” Ellison concluded.2
That constricting narcissism has now leaped out of the campus and into the arts world at large. Directors in Europe and the United States are dragooning poor defenseless operas to serve as mouthpieces for their own hobbyhorses. These egotistical stage directors wrench centuries-old works into the present and force them to ape the political and sexual obsessions of today’s cultural elite. Audiences can expect to see lots of nudity and kinky sex on stage, as well as cell phones, Big Macs, and snide put-downs of American capitalism. Mozart’s aristocratic seducer, Don Giovanni, is infallibly a charmless, drug-addicted lout wallowing in the detritus of consumer culture and surrounded by sluts, psychopaths, and slobs.
The official excuse for such mutilation is that a work can only be “relevant” to a modern audience if it is tricked out in modern garb and forced to speak, however incoherently, of modern concerns. As the director of the Frankfurt opera declared, no one should care what Handel wanted in his operas; what matters is “what interests us … what we want.”
Actually, the only thing that matters is what Handel, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky wanted. It is their artistic genius that allows us to enter worlds radically different from our own and expand our understanding of what it is to be human. The revisionist director, like the contemporary academic, detests any values, such as nobility, grandeur, or sexual decorum that differ from his own, and will shamelessly rewrite an opera’s plot to eliminate them. But in an era of twerking and drunken hookups, there is much to be gained by experiencing, if only for a few hours, a courtly ethic where desire can be expressed by the slightest inclination of a hand or an almost imperceptible darkening of the voice.
The Diversity Delusion Page 23