Topsy-Turvy: American universities are places of dizzying unreality — and this does considerable harm

In the past, humanities professors taught a body of knowledge -- historical facts, philosophical doctrines, time-honored themes in novels and plays -- that might offer a student the ability to translate the daily chaos of the present into some abstract wisdom of the ages, with an appreciation for beauty thrown into the bargain. But of what immediate relevance were all such distant facts and ideas when old white men in the here and now had ensured that young people were dying in Vietnam and that the planet was suffocated in a gaseous cloud?

In response, the university took on the Sisyphean task of guaranteeing social change according to the idealistic visions of an often out-of- touch and ill-prepared faculty. The deductive thinking of predetermined results and theories -- the ancient creed of the sophists -- now triumphed, as the old notions of fairness and two sides to every issue were deemed less important. The right politics were alone the proper corrective: If students were to leave the university equipped to counterbalance the power of corporate America, white males, the Republican party, and the global reach of the United States, there were only four brief years of preparation and no time or need to offer competing "discourses."

Sometimes we see the results in the proliferation of "Studies" programs -- "Ethnic Studies," "Women's Studies," "Environmental Studies," or "Peace Studies" -- as if the traditional missions of philosophy, literature, and history suddenly about 1970 had been found incapable of dealing with age-old issues of class, race, gender, war, and the environment. Take, for example, the list of classes from the University of California, Santa Barbara, for the academic year 2001-2. There are some 62 different courses listed under "Chicano Studies," among them Introduction to Chicano Spanish; Methodology of the Oppressed; Barrio Popular Culture; Body, Culture, and Power; Chicana Feminism; History of the Chicano; History of the Chicano Movement; History of Chicano and Chicana Workers; Racism in American History; Chicano Political Organizing; Chicana Writers; De-colonizing Cyber-Cinema; and Dance of the Chicanos. In the history department are listed 13 similar courses on Latino and Chicano issues, in addition to more generic classes on race and oppression. In contrast, the entire catalogue has few classes listed on the Civil War, and no real courses dedicated to either the Revolutionary War or World War II.

It is not just that many of these classes are politicized -- imagine writing a paper on past corruption in the United Farm Workers Union's health fund, the fascist Sinarquismo movement of the early 20th century that favored both Prussian militarism and later German Nazism, or ritualized mass murder in pre-Cortes Mexico City in "Methodology of the Oppressed" or "History of the Chicano." The problem is also that such therapeutic classes as "De-colonizing Cyber-Cinema" do not necessarily teach a broad body of disinterested knowledge -- elements of the ancient world, Renaissance, Reformation, or Enlightenment -- that is subject to debate and differing analysis, the building blocks of a true liberal education. Instead they reinforce the most unfortunate of youthful tendencies -- arrogance coupled with ignorance -- as activists with incomplete historical knowledge and without writing and speaking fluency claim wisdom on the basis of their commitment or zealotry in a particular cause.