Assault on the Citadel

FOR decades now, conservatives have been complaining about the failure of the academy to defend the cultural patrimony. If the university is not going to transmit to young people the highest achievements of the human mind and heart, it has forfeited its true mission and become a mere accrediting agency for the Upper Middle Class; such an institution will, for a time, hide its intellectual irrelevance behind huge financial endowments--but the day of reckoning will surely come. The marvelous new book Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (Columbia, 725 pp., $29.50), edited by Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral, shows that the day of reckoning may be nearer than we think--because it shows that conservatives are no longer alone in their critique of a failing institution.

Theory's Empire is a splendid achievement, a collection of 47 essays by scholars who object to the recent dominance of capital-T Theory in higher education--the historic shift away from an emphasis on intellectual and aesthetic content (artworks, histories, etc.) to a totalizing discourse making generous use of abstractions that are half-baked, pretentious, and arbitrary. The book's tone is established even before page one, by a cartoon opposite the title page: A couple of mice are discussing a box of cereal labeled "Deconstruction Breakfast Food Product." One mouse comments: "Pretty dry and flavorless, isn't it?" The other retorts: "Your question is informed, or should I say misinformed, by the conventionalized bourgeois cereal paradigms that center on such outmoded esculatory notions as taste, nutrition, and edibility." Clearly, this is not your father's textbook; it's closer to The Norton Anthology of Screw-the-Academy.

"What really damages deconstructionist criticism," writes Morris Dickstein in one of the essays, is "its remoteness from texts, its use of them as interchangeable occasions for a theoretical trajectory which always returns to the same points of origin, the same indeterminacy and happy multiplicity.... Skeptical of interpretation, the critic remains faithful to the sound of his voice, the invitation some texts offer to his resourceful cleverness." Many academic maladies--politicization, sexualization, identity politics--are diagnosed by the contributors, who sometimes bring to light hilarious examples of scholarly nonsense. For example, in his essay on "queer theory," Lee Siegel recounts what theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick made of a certain passage in the writings of Henry James. Aged 62, visiting California and looking forward to returning home full of material to reflect on and write about, James wrote in a notebook: "My long dusty adventure over, I shall be able to [plunge] my hand, my arm, in, deep and far, and up to the shoulder--into the heavy bag of remembrance--of suggestion--of imagination--of art." Sedgwick explains this passage as demonstrating "how in James a greater self-knowledge and a greater acceptance and specificity of homosexual desire transform this half-conscious enforcing rhetoric of anality, numbness, and silence, into a much richer, pregnant address to James's male muse, an invocation to fisting-as-ecriture." One need not be committed a priori to the idea that James was a heterosexual to recognize that this is worthless pap.

The strangest of strange bedfellows in this anthology is the left-wing polemicist Noam Chomsky, who contributes an essay deploring recent academic attacks on what is fashionably labeled "white male science"; Chomsky stands up for the rationality of the scientific endeavor. His is a valuable brick in the collective wall of these 47 essays, which amount to a full-scale Defense of the Humanities, and a Vindication of the intellect generally; that Theory's Empire comes from a prominent Ivy League academic press is great news, a sign that the good guys are winning the cultural high ground.

* The only clergyman--and only college president--to sign the Declaration of Independence was Scottish Presbyterian minister John Witherspoon, whose story is told in the new book John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic (Notre Dame, 220 pp., $22.50), by Jeffry H. Morrison. Witherspoon's influence on the new republic continued past the founding era, because he had been mentor, at Princeton, to some of Federalist America's most important figures, including James Madison. (Curiosity, and a Google search, yield the additional information that among Witherspoon's direct descendants is, yes, the actress Reese Witherspoon.)

"What we now call the Revolutionary War," writes Morrison, "was known by many in Europe and England-even by George III--as the 'Presbyterian Rebellion.'" As the central figure in colonial Presbyterianism, Witherspoon was well placed to help guide the uprising; it was helpful that he was both a "staunch Calvinist" and a man of "manifest Christian ecumenism," "more tolerant than most" of his contemporaries. (Of Roman Catholics, for example, he said: "We ought in general to guard against persecution on a religious account as much as possible.... Papists are tolerated in Holland without danger to liberty.") Witherspoon realized both the need for religion in a healthy body politic, and the desirability of religious liberty and freedom of conscience: a nuanced position that would become the American consensus.