Politizing American universities - Education

WHEN the American Council of Trustees and Alumni accused various faculty members and the president of Wesleyan University of being unpatriotic and unsupportive of civilization in their response to Sept. 11, the criticism was itself un-American and false to Western civilization. The implication is that those academics the Council regards as "unwilling to defend its civilization," thus providing "comfort to its enemies," are as bad as, if not worse than, the terrorists themselves.

These accusations can be read as another skirmish in what was called the Culture War, a conflict that replaced the Cold War in providing Americans with a simplified moral compass. The Culture War has been proclaimed over, but if the new accusations teach anything, it is that this is far from true. Only now, the issue is not which books to read, but which bombs to drop.

The new demand, like those in the past, that everyone give unequivocal support to American policies is not seen as itself a political demand. What is seen as political is the stance taken by ideologically driven intellectuals who are unable to bring themselves, even in this time of national mourning and crisis, to support the nation and the Western intellectual tradition that makes their existence possible. The charge that political correctness has again driven ungrateful professors to a knee-jerk sympathy with America's enemies should sound a familiar note since it is a continuation of the major battles in the Culture War over who was politicizing the university. Today, however, the issue is treason and betrayal in a war where men and women were dying.

Why is it important to visit this older conflict that seemed to be winding down, if not over? The explanation is that, as the Cold War established a political template for the Culture War, so the Culture War has established one for the present controversy over who is and who is not patriotic and loyal to what.

Let us call one side in the Culture War cultural conservatives, the other multiculturalists, though, like all labels, these obscure the differences within each group and similarities across them. Thus, some multiculturalists remained respectful of the Western canon of great books, and some Marxists were critical of multiculturalism.

For cultural conservatives, politicizing the university meant using race, ethnicity, gender, class, or sexual preference as a litmus test in the selection of students, the hiring and promotion of faculty, and the determination of curriculum. They resented and rejected the idea that membership in a so-called oppressed group could confer legitimacy on what was said and who could say it. Whether something is true or not has nothing to do with the social status of the speaker, and the belief that it does transforms universities from citadels of reflection to representative assemblies where power, rather than reason, determines educational agendas. If universities refuse to remain aloof from political conflicts, the distinction between dogma and knowledge, education and indoctrination, will collapse. Since support for America in the Cold War then, and the war on terrorism now, is support for civilization itself, the demand for such support poses no threat to these distinctions.

Multiculturalists respond with disbelief. "That people with a straight face can protest the eruption of politics into something that has always been political," Henry Louis Gates, Jr., chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard University, maintains, "says something about how remarkably successful official literary histories have been in presenting themselves as natural objects, untainted by worldly interests."

In these terms, cultural conservatives are hypocrites twice over. First, they deny having cultural power as a way of keeping it. One would never know, for instance, that books currently considered essential to our cultural heritage were once thought to be trash, that "purely" academic criteria have evolved over time, or that some curricular changes such as the World Civilization course at Columbia University or the substitution of English for Greek and Latin were partly instituted for political reasons (which does not mean they were unjustified).

Second, multiculturalists regard their conservative critics as hypercritical because they are engaged in politicizing the university in the way and at the moment they accuse others of doing so. Indeed, their hyperbolic language of war, battle, and Armageddon ensures that the debate will be more ideological and emotional than rational and reflective. Finally, multiculturalists challenge what they deem the arrogance of those who believe that America and the West represent a universally valid norm and the only reasonable way of organizing human life.

Despite the fact that one side thinks the university was unpolitical until recently while the other believes that its long-time politicalness has just been revealed, there are striking parallels between the two camps. Each claims that it merely wants to educate, whereas its opposite number wants to indoctrinate; that while they are for troth and justice, their enemies are ideologues brandishing the weapon of political correctness. Each side feels besieged--cultural conservatives by the liberal ethos of elite universities and colleges, and multiculturalists by the more-conservative political world and that part of the academic one dominated by right-wing think tanks unashamedly sponsoring procapitalist, moral majoritarian, or libertarian political research.