July 5, 2007

An Anti-Progressive Syllabus

The first anthology of criticism I read in college was a low-budget volume edited by David Lodge entitled 20th-Century Literary Criticism. It was for an undergraduate class, the first one that spotlighted interpretation and opened a window onto graduate topics. A year later, this time an M.A. student at the University of California at Los Angeles, I took a required course on literary theory, with the anthology Critical Theory Since Plato (1971) edited by Hazard Adams. In a seminar not long after we toiled through Critical Theory Since 1965 (1986), edited by Adams and Leroy Searle, and another class selected Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies (1989), edited by Ron Schleifer and Robert Con Davis. After I left graduate school, more literary/cultural criticism anthologies appeared along with various dictionaries and encyclopedias. The process seems to have culminated in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (ed. Vincent Leitch et al), whose publication in 2001 was momentous enough to merit a long story by Scott McLemee in The Chronicle of Higher Education that included the remark, “An anthology stamped with the Norton brand name is a sure sign of the field’s triumph in English departments.”

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For McLemee to speak of “stamping” and “branding” was apt, more so than he intended, for every anthology assigned in class carries institutional weight. From the higher floors in the Ivory Tower, anthologies may look like mere teaching tools, and editing them amounts to service work, not scholarship. But while professors may overlook them except at course adoption time, for graduate students just entering the professional study of literature and culture, anthologies serve a crucial guiding function. Students apply to graduate school in the humanities because of their reading, the inspiration coming usually from primary texts, not critical works — Swift not Barthes, Austen not Bhabha. They go into English because they like to read novels, or history because the past intrigues them, or philosophy because they want to figure out the great questions of life. Soon enough, they realize that joy, appreciation, moral musing, and basic erudition don’t cut it, and the first year or two entails an adjustment in aim and focus. The discourse is more advanced and specialized, critical and ironic. New and exotic terms emerge — “hyperreal,” “hegemony,” “postcolonial” — and differences between contemporary academic schools of thought matter more than differences between, say, one epoch and another.

Fresh students need help. What the anthologies do is supply them with a next-level reading list. The tables of contents provide the names to know, texts to scan, topics to absorb. In spite of the radical and provocative nature of many entries, the volumes mark a canon formation, a curriculum-building activity necessary for doctoral training. Plowing through them is not only a course of study but also a mode of professionalization, a way to join the conversation of advanced colleagues. As tutelage in up-to-date thinking, they strive for coverage, and to help young readers take it all in, they arrange the entries by chronology and by different categories. The Norton, for instance, contains an “Alternative Table of Contents” that divides contributors up by 42 classifications including “The Vernacular and Nationhood,” “Gay and Lesbian Criticism and Queer Theory,” and “The Body.”

As a poor and insecure 25-year-old in the mid-80s, I slogged through the selections one by one, and I thought that completing them would acquaint me with every respectable and serious current thread in literary and cultural thinking. But when I look back at them today, the anthologies look a lot less comprehensive. In fact, in one important aspect, they appear rather narrow and depleted. The problem lies in the sizable portion of the contributions that bear a polemical or political thrust. These pieces don’t pose a new model of interpretation, redefine terms, outline a theory, or sharpen disciplinary methods. Instead, they incorporate political themes into humanistic study, emphasize race/class/gender/sexuality topics, and challenge customary institutions of scholarly practice. When they do broach analytical methods, they do so with larger social and political goals in mind.

The problem isn’t the inclusion of sociopolitical forensic per se. Rather, it is that the selections fall squarely on the left side of the ideological spectrum. They are all more or less radically progressivist. They trade in group identities and dismantle bourgeois norms. They advocate feminist perspectives and race consciousness. They highlight the marginalized, the repressed, the counter-hegemonic. And they eagerly undo disciplinary structures that formed in the first half of the 20th century.

Reading through these titles (in the Norton: “On the Abolition of the English Department,” “Enforcing Normalcy,” “Talking Black,” “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” etc.), one would think that all decent contemporary criticism stems from adversarial leftist impulses. There is nothing here to represent the conservative take on high/low distinctions, or its belief that without stable and limited cultural traditions a society turns vulgar and incoherent. Nothing from the libertarian side about how group identities threaten the moral health of individuals, or how revolutionary dreams lead to dystopic policies. The neoconservative analysis of the social and economic consequences of 1960s countercultural attitudes doesn’t even exist.

And yet, outside the anthologies and beyond the campus, these outlooks have influenced public policy at the highest levels. Their endurance in public life is a rebuke to the humanities reading list, and it recasts the putative sophistication of the curriculum into its opposite: campus parochialism. The damage it does to humanities students can last a lifetime, and I’ve run into far too many intelligent and active colleagues who can rattle off phrases from “What Is an Author?” and Gender Trouble, but who stare blankly at the mention of The Public Interest and A Nation at Risk.

This is a one-sided education, and the reading list needs to expand. To that end, here are a few texts to add to this fall’s syllabus. They reflect a mixture of liberal, libertarian, conservative, and neoconservative positions, and they serve an essential purpose: to broaden humanistic training and introduce students to the full range of commentary on cultural values and experience.

T.E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism” (first published 1924). This essay remains a standard in Anglo-American modernist fields, but it seems to have disappeared from general surveys of criticism. Still, the distinctions Hulme draws illuminate fundamental fissures between conservative and progressive standpoints, even though he labels them romantic and classical. “Here is the root of romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get progress,” he says. The classicist believes the opposite: “Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him.” That distinction is a good start for any lecture on political criticism.
T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). Eliot’s little essay remains in all the anthologies, but its central point about the meaning of tradition often goes overlooked. Teachers need to expound why tradition matters so much to conservative thinkers before they explain why progressives regard it as suspect. Furthermore, their students need to understand it, for tradition is one of the few ideas that might help young people get a handle on the youth culture that bombards them daily and nightly. They need examples, too, and the most relevant traditionalist for them I’ve found so far is the Philip Seymour Hoffman character (“Lester Bangs”) in the popular film Almost Famous.
F.A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science (U.S. edition, 1952). Most people interested in Hayek go to The Road to Serfdom, but the chapters in Counter-Revolution lay out in more deliberate sequence the cardinal principles behind his philosophy. They include 1) the knowledge and information that producers and consumers bring to markets can never be collected and implemented by a single individual or “planning body”; and 2) local customs and creeds contain values and truths that are not entirely available to “conscious reason,” but should be respected nonetheless. Such conceptions explain why in 1979 Michel Foucault advised students to read Hayek and other “neoliberals” if they want to understand why people resist the will of the State. We should follow Foucault’s advice.
Leo Strauss, “What Is Liberal Education?” (1959). For introductory theory/criticism classes, forget Strauss and his relation to the neoconservatives. Assign this essay as both a reflection on mass culture and a tone-setter for academic labor. On mass culture and democracy, let the egalitarians respond to this: “Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.” And on tone, let the screen-obsessed minds of the students consider this: “life is too short to live with any but the greatest books.”
Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (English trans. 1957). Aron’s long diagnosis of the intellectual mindset remains almost as applicable today as it was during the Cold War. Why are Western intellectuals “merciless toward the failings of the democracies but ready to tolerate the worst crimes as long as they are committed in the name of the proper doctrines”? he asks, and the answers that emerge unveil some of the sources of resentment and elitism that haunt some quarters of the humanities today.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1992). First formulated just as the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, Fukuyama’s thesis sparked enormous admiration and contention as the interpretation of the end of the Cold War. When I’ve urged colleagues to read it, though, they’ve scoffed in disdain. Perhaps they’ll listen to one of their heroes, Jean-Francois Lyotard, who informed people at Emory one afternoon that The End of History was the most significant work of political theory to come out of the United States in years.
Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (1995). With the coming of the Bush administration, the term neoconservative has been tossed and served so promiscuously that reading Kristol’s essay is justified solely as an exercise in clarification. But his analyses of the counterculture, social justice, the “stupid party” (conservatives), and life as a Trotskyist undergraduate in the 1930s are so clear and antithetical to reigning campus ideals that they could be paired with any of a dozen entries in the anthologies to the students’ benefit. Not least of all, they might blunt the aggressive certitude of political culture critics and keep the students from adopting the same attitude.
David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (1997). Many people will recoil at this choice, which is unfortunate. They should not let their reaction to Horowitz’s campus activism prevent them from appreciating the many virtues of this memoir. It is a sober and moving account of America’s cultural revolution from the moral high points to the sociopathic low points. At the core lies the emotional and ethical toll it took on one of its participants, who displays in all nakedness the pain of abandoning causes that gave his life meaning from childhood to middle age. Students need an alternative to the triumphalist narrative of the Sixties, and this is one of the best.

Professors needn’t espouse a single idea in these books, but as a matter of preparing young people for intelligent discourse inside and outside the academy, they are worthy additions to the syllabus. Consider them, too, a way to spice up the classroom, to make the progressivist orthodoxies look a little less routine, self-assured, and unquestionable. Theory classes have become boring enough these days, and the succession of one progressivist voice after another deadens the brain. A Kristol here and a Hayek there might not only broaden the curriculum, but do something for Said, Sedgwick & Co. that they can’t do for themselves: make them sound interesting once again.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

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Comments

Good Idea!

I suspect that this post, like Mark’s so many others in forums across the ‘net, is more a wish to move the academy back to more “comfortable” notions of the liberal arts (to him and others on the political right—not the “conservative”- researcher/academic/teacher) than what is otherwise very worthwhile in his criticism: the notion that academics should constantly review, revise, and update… keep current with the literature in one’s area of expertise and have that breath and width of one’s own education reflected in the classroom, the syllabus. Thanks for reminding us of that, Mark…We never would have thought of it ourselves.

michael vocino, at 7:40 am EDT on July 5, 2007

Loose Canon

Well said. The new isn’t invariably valuable; the hoary doesn’t invariably obsolesce.

Just don’t tell me the galley proofs are ready for the Norton Anthology of Rap.

Abbott Katz, MST College, London, at 7:45 am EDT on July 5, 2007

Does this article not boil down to affirmative action for conservative voices? Bauerlin decries, rightly I think, the political one sidedness of so many anthologies (a problem not limited to English Departments I’m afraid), but then, despite his claim that his list “reflect[s] a mixture of liberal, libertarian, conservative, and neoconservative positions,” he (typically of campus conservatives) offers a frankly one sided list of his own. He cannot think of one progressive thinker that needs more attention in academe today (contrary to myth, while academe leans left not all leftist thinkers are feted equally or at all for that matter). This is why effective criticism of myopic leftism in academe cannot come from campus conservatives; they are just blind in a different eye. A professor who is so blinded by his own ideology that he thinks the above list contains a “mixture” of ideological voices should heal himself before offering any comments on the ideological blinders of others!

Ken, at 9:05 am EDT on July 5, 2007

A GENUINELY PROGRESSIVE SYLLABUS

I agree with Mark Bauerlein’s piece in all respects but one. His proposal is not “anti-progressive,” but progressive in the very best sense. He proposes a method whereby young people on the left side of the political/cultural divide may acquire an education and not merely further indoctrination. So often it is only those on the right side who are able to acquire a real education, since they are the only ones whose basic assumptions are challenged.

Another suggestion. Bring back Walter Lippman. Particularly his essay “The Necessary Opposition,” which is probably among the best statements by a true progressive explaining why Bauerlein’s approach is not just a good idea, but essential. Here are tidbits:

“When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions.”

And

“The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But, though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.”

ClioSmith, Associate Professor at Trinity Bible College, at 9:05 am EDT on July 5, 2007

One More Book

One book that I would suggest adding to this list: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, as it helps explain not only how science, but all disciplines, develop knowledge and create expertise.

Peter C. Herman, Prof. at SDSU, at 9:15 am EDT on July 5, 2007

syllabus

I agree with the poster who suggests Thomas Kuhn. Not only was Kuhn’s book of major importance, it also points out yet again that there is a political/sociological slant to the criticism in every era. By the way, if T.E. Hulme is read, then read Henri Bergson as well.

In fact, I would argue that much of what was bemoned in the article treads on well worn ground, critics just using different vocabulary but repeating the same cry of make it new....hmmmm, Ezra Pound or William Carlos Williams anybody?

I would suggest, too, that the authors suggested and counter suggested here come from largely a single socio-cultural matrix. How cross-cultural are these lists? Ezra Pound long ago suggested that the best examples of literary types do not all come written in the same language.

For a send up of critics and art, read Dawn Powell’s novel THE WICKED PAVILION. Or read John Marquand’s WICKFORD POINT for his send-up of academic literati.

Perhaps it is time to stop seeing critical theory as cutting edge...or all-or-nothing.

Theron, at 9:50 am EDT on July 5, 2007

Wrong Side of History

And just to be clear, the folks who were on the wrong side of history are the ones who supported the Vietnam War (though most of them, of course, let others do the actual fighting).

Unapologetically Tenured, at 11:45 am EDT on July 5, 2007

Why not Ann Coulter?

[I actually sent this post first, but it apparently got caught up in the internet tubes, which is explains the non sequitur post above.]

Horowitz? Radical Son? There’s obviously good money to be made in salving the consciences of people who were on the wrong side of history, but that’s no reason to force Horowitz on kids born two decades after the 60s ended.

Let’s face it: If the right-wing canon can only go eight deep before it reaches Horowitz, then we no longer have to wonder why conservative thought remains underrepresented in the anthologies.

Unapologetically Tenured, at 12:05 pm EDT on July 5, 2007

Any new non-political analytical approaches?

“These pieces don’t pose a new model of interpretation, redefine terms, outline a theory, or sharpen disciplinary methods... When they do broach analytical methods, they do so with larger social and political goals in mind. The problem isn’t the inclusion of sociopolitical forensic per se....”

Actually, THAT is a problem. Current canonical criticism leans so much to the ethical-political that any new approaches are treated very suspiciously. For instance, I think cognitive (cog-sci) approaches to interpretation are greatly under-rated and under-appreciated in most departments that deal with any kind of interpretation. It took me several years, and finally wandering outside the canonical theory encyclopedias, to find out that cog-sci turned on all kinds of intellectual light bulbs for someone looking to “sharpen” his analytical skills. The fact that it fits neatly in neither the liberal or conservative camp makes it that much more attractive—and that much more likely to be kept out of the current canon.

David Matthew PhD, at 1:00 pm EDT on July 5, 2007

That tenured radical is a charming fellow...why debate the merit of the arguments when you could go for ad-hominem attacks? The former sounds like work, and one certainly does not get tenure to do THAT

The very fact that this list is being made and promulgated is a sign of progress in restoring balance to the Western university curriculum.

Janus, University of Pennsylvania, at 1:10 pm EDT on July 5, 2007

Michael,

You say that this list is designed to provide more “comfort” for people in the humanities. But in truth, there is little comfort to take in these texts, for anyone across the political spectrum. Horowitz’s book, for example, which U.T. can’t seem to separate from his dislike of Horowitz the man, is deeply disturbing for about 200 pages. Hayek is filled with warnings, Fukuyama’s thesis (in light of recent events) acquires a tragic aura, and Eliot’s “tradition” is something involving enormous labor and selflessness. No complacency in these texts at all.

mark, at 1:10 pm EDT on July 5, 2007

A question for ClioSmith, since I agree that indoctrination is to be resisted: at your institution, Trinity, do you 1. allow and/or actively recruit faculty and students who both agree and disagree with the idea of Biblical Creation 2. allow and/or actively recruit faculty and students who agree and diagree with David Hume’s ideas that accounts of supernatrual miracles are non-trustworthy 3. allow and/or recruit faculty and students who hold, teach or espouse both non-theistic as well as theistic philosophical viewpoints? I think I need not go on. If the answer to these question is no, as I suspect it will be, are you not a hypocrite to denounce “indoctrination” of college students while you work at an institution that pushes only one intellectually legitimate side of many controversial and hardly solved issues?

Ken, at 1:50 pm EDT on July 5, 2007

Radical Son

First, I don’t dislike David Horowitz the person. I’ve never met him. I do dislike David Horowitz the insufferable media personality. And I am quite familiar with Radical Son, Horowitz’s memoir of coming rather late to the movement, gravitating toward its very worst elements, and then deciding that his experience was emblematic of an entire generation, rather than simply evidence of his own very poor judgment.

Even if students “need an alternative to the triumphalist narrative of the Sixties” (because lord knows that successfully opposing an unjust war and clamoring for equal rights is a legacy in need of apology), Horowitz’s book hardly provides it. Indeed, the key turning point in the man’s life takes place when he begins a close association with the Black Panthers in 1974. Ninety-seventy-freaking-FOUR!

By then, Bob Scheer was already working toward a highly successful career as a mainstream journalist, Tom Hayden was less than two years from launching a serious campaign for the U.S. Senate from California, and most everyone else was getting on with his or her life. This is not the story of someone who was betrayed by the movement. It is the story of someone who tried to stay at the party long after the guests had gone home and the hosts had headed off to bed.

Academic freedom being what it is (at least until ACTA gets their “intellectual diversity” quota system enacted), anyone who wants to foist Horowitz on their students doesn’t need my permission. So I’ll just say again, if that’s all you’ve got, then maybe the anthologies aren’t conservatism’s greatest problem.

Unapologetically Tenured, at 2:05 pm EDT on July 5, 2007

I having an immense difficulty figuring out what class or even discipline this “syllabus” is supposed to target. These are interesting choices — certainly an excellent selection of foundational and representative conservative texts — but most would be much more appropriate to political theory or perhaps social theory than to any general humanities course.

Jonathan Dresner, at 4:25 pm EDT on July 5, 2007

IN RESPONSE TO KEN

I appreciate Ken taking the time to dialogue. I suspect we actually agree more than we disagree, particularly about the open-ended nature of inquiry. I have a few related thoughts that I will put down, as I have no pressing duties at the moment.

I expect questions such as Ken’s to be in the minds of some readers every time I offer any sort of opinion on this site and identify myself as a professor at a Bible College. I used to be quite wary of identifying my present institutional affiliation, whether on a badge at a conference or on an academic listserve, fearing that anything I had to say on any question would be automatically discounted simply because of the label. That fear may have been justified to some degree. But I decided several years ago that it is better to give people more credit, and expect them to respond less to stereotypes and more to ideas.

The institution at which I do most of my teaching has its own identity and its own niche, just as do tens of thousands of other voluntary associations that form the diverse, complex cultural strands of the nation. It is one tiny product of the vast American experiment in institutional and confessional pluralism. As a school affiliated with the Assemblies of God and serving a certain constituency, it does have certain religious goals and standards, and these are what make it distinct.

I am in no sense opposed to secular colleges and universities. I personally received part of my post secondary education at denominational schools (Trinity Bible College and Indiana Wesleyan University) and part from secular state schools (Dickinson State University and the University of North Dakota). I owe a huge debt to both types of institutions. Both absolutely have their place. I think our democracy would be less diverse and less rich in many ways without both types of education. Likewise, both have their weaknesses and limitations.

There are some (and perhaps Ken is among them) who hold to what would be called individualist pluralism, in which the formal exercise of distinctive moral, intellectual or religious standards by educational institutions or academic departments is seen as contrary to the American spirit of equality, and constitutes in some way a sin against the intellect. This Individualist pluralism insists in principle that one’s distinctive beliefs should in no case bear any relationship to one’s professional standing.

My own view is that America functions best with both types of pluralism, even though they are often in conflict. Increasingly, I see that individuals, whatever their distinctive moral, intellectual or religious beliefs, inevitably partake of spheres in which those beliefs make little or no difference, and also of spheres in which they are quite important. To acknowledge that both secular and religiously oriented educational institutions exist by right and not by the sufferance of the state is, I am convinced, to recognize something essential about the nature of free human beings and their associations. I don’t see how generalized attacks on the integrity of those institutions or the people who operate them makes anyone more free, intellectually or otherwise. Specific suggestions for improvement are another thing entirely.

The sort of “necessary opposition” that Walter Lippman finds so crucial assumes from the start a fairly high level of integrity on the part of both the opposed and the opposer. All individuals who have opinions and also have multiple personal loyalties (that is, people who live in the actual world of human beings rather than in an ideal fantasy universe) are logically subject to charges of hypocrisy. But if one begins by embracing a syllogism that strips an opponent of legitimacy on the basis of alleged hypocrisy, has one won any meaningful argument? Or has the argument simply been avoided?

Best,

ClioSmith, Associate Professor at Trinity Bible College, at 8:05 pm EDT on July 5, 2007

Jonathan asks whether these works on social and political theory would fit in any humanities class. A fair question, and I offered them not really as coherent choices but as just a few possibilities to open up the critical theory/cultural studies monolith. Furthermore, many humanities theory courses assign abundant selections of political and social theory, many of which have a distant relation to literature. The result is a sometimes incoherent mish-mash of readings that don’t add up to much disciplinary training. But that’s how many of my colleagues like it. As long as they throw in social and political theory on the left, they might as well include some on the right—if, that is, they wish to prepare students for public intellectual discourse, or to set the ideas they advocate in a more exciting and contrastive context.

mark, at 4:25 am EDT on July 6, 2007

I appreciate the response Cliosmith. Let me say that I certainly find it to be the fact, both historically and contemporaneously, that many deeply religious and even orthodox folks are also very learned. I do however think there is a tension between orthodoxy and intellectual values such as free inquiry, creative thinking, and critical thinking. Part of what orthodoxy means is to have a feeling of having already found the truth, and indeed it would be silly for any learned professional to hide that truth from their students for the sake of “being objective.” Having people teach what are considered to be plain falsehoods or to deny accepted truths seems to only lead folks astray from what was known to be true at the outstart. On the other hand, religious traditions have been incredibly enriched by dissent from what was at the time accepted “truth.” Augustine, Luther, Kierkegaard, all were profound religious thinkers, yet all were condemned by the orthodox of their respective faiths. How much could these faiths have learned, how much stronger they could have been, either by adopting the areas where these men were intellectual successful or at the least in confronting the very real challenges they brought to the table, and in the confronting to shore up ones own intellectual stances, if only they would have invited rather than shirking (and indeed often suppressing) dialogue? To lose this intellectual progress for the sake of socio-cultural aesthetics is for me a bargain poorly struck. A reason to point out hypocrisy is to create cognitive dissonance in the one you are having a dialogue with. In pointing out that on the one hand you and Prof. Baurelin rightly condemn indoctrination based on the ideological certainty of what is the “right” and the “true” by those on the left, yet on the other hand might bring a related certainty to your own students, is just to appeal to the principle that we all recognize as correct and hopefully to further it in practice. I certainly disagree that hypocrisy is inevitable in the “real” world. Only someone who has never changed their views on intellectual matters can hold the position that they have an immutable grasp on the “truth.” Note, I do not put quotes around these concepts to demean them or suggest there is no such thing, I only want to suggest that we humans are so imperfect in grasping these concepts that we must give reasoned yet differing opinions a hearing on our campuses or we have failed our students in the most serious of ways. We have gambled, knowing that any intelligent man changes his view of truth several times over and that once immutable understandings of these concepts have undergone proper revisions, with the education of hundreds of young minds that came to us to maximize, not truncate, their chances of gaining knowledge. We have gambled that we already have a grip on what is true concerning intellectually controversial matters, and we have all that need be shared with them. It is my sincere opinion that while leftists in academe are all too often included in the ranks of such gamblers, that many private religious colleges are the most egregious offenders out there today. It seems to me a position most easily defended by empirical evidence (one can point to the use of faith statements in hiring and promotion for example). I would suggest that any academic campus that resolves controversial intellectual matters by fiat (as is done with these faith statements) not only precludes any chance for serious intellectual growth or evolution while setting a poor example of how reasoned scholars proceed, but also greatly increases the chances that such pillars of claims of truth are built on veritable sand...

Ken, at 4:25 am EDT on July 6, 2007

Vocino: I completed my undergraduate education fairly recently. I come from a left-wing family. There is much in contemporary Liberalism and the Left I respect and find intellectually formidable. The implication that “uncomfortable” ideas should somehow enjoy privilege over “comfortable” ideas is not one of them. It is child’s play. It reminds me of the use of the words “cool” and “prude” in my middle and high school days. It’s a tactic — not a pedagogical tool, a political tactic — I witnessed repeatedly on the college campus, mostly from the mouths of professors. And it isn’t intellect talking. It’s bravado.

Unapologetically Tenured: I tend to agree with you that the Left was on the “right side of history” concerning the Vietnam War. But, like most highly disputed political issues in this country, the moral fault-lines are not as crystal clear as you — and many of your colleagues — make them out to be in anonymous Internet posts and, yes, in the classroom. Things are complicated:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07...nyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

Vocino, Unapologetically Tenured: I oppose Dr. Bauerlein’s and others’ legislative attempts at reform. I prefer the old art of persuasion. One of the creeping problems in liberal/leftist thought is the reconciliation of Foucaultian/Rortyian contingency, uncertainty,plurality,etc. with a politics of state-mandated monopolization, standardization and indoctrination. Hayek’s “The Counter-Revolution of Science” wrestles with this contradiction, as does his “The Sensory Order.” Another name to recommend is just-retired Johns Hopkins professor Richard Flathman, who has written a half-dozen books devoted to this subject. I challenge you to read these materials for yourself. And if you find the central problems raised worthy of your students’ attention, I challenge you to welcome them into the classroom... so that the next generation may enjoy a more elevated, broad and lively political conversation than I did.

(Note: I am aware the fulfillment of this challenge can be limited by what disciplines you teach. Consider this a challenge directed at all relevant professors.)

Ferdinand, Vocino, Unapologetically Tenured, at 4:25 am EDT on July 6, 2007

I would like to add to the list of alternative reading some works from Rene Wellek, possibly the outstanding literary scholar of the twentieth century who appears to be largely forgotten.

http://www.the-rathouse.com/ReneWellek.html

Also I suggest that T S Kuhn has been seriousy over-rated, certainly he contributed little to the philosophy of science, or indeed to the sociology of science. The question that has to be asked re Kuhn is what did he ever say that was both new and true?

http://oysterium.blogspot.com/200...etting-back-on-track-after-kuhn.html

Rafe Champion, at 4:25 am EDT on July 6, 2007

ONGOING DIALOGUE ABOUT INTELLECT AND ORTHODOXY

I was pleasantly surprised to see Ken’s response to the post I offered yesterday. It confirms a habit of mind that I have been trying to develop, which is to believe that many if not most folks will rise to the challenge of dialogue and shun stereotypes if given a proper invitation. I regret that I am only able to respond at present to a small part of what Ken has written.

Ken writes:

we humans are so imperfect in grasping these concepts that we must give reasoned yet differing opinions a hearing on our campuses or we have failed our students in the most serious of ways.

I agree entirely. And I agree that in an ideal university, these reasoned yet differing opinions would be represented by the presence of a variety of living, breathing scholars, committed to their unique worldviews and opinions, engaged in continual cordial but spirited dialogue. In the real world, we must for the most part make do with books, and with teachers whose interests and sympathies are broad enough to bring the ideas in these books alive enough so that students can deal with them accurately and honestly. Thus we have anthologies, and we have arguments about what views should be reflected in those anthologies.

My little college does not have a David Hume on its faculty, but certainly Hume makes an appearance in my classroom, as does Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Tertullian, Augustine, Abelard, Aquinas, Occam, Machiavelli, Kierkegaard, Bacon, Berkeley, etc. The same thing happens all the time (I hope) at other religious colleges and secular colleges. I hasten to add that my appreciation for and understanding of these thinkers gained the most depth while I was attending religious colleges, under instructors who thought that ideas could have potentially eternal consequences. Frankly, I encountered quite a few professors at nonsectarian schools who never took ideas seriously, indeed were pretty much bored by them. Overall the situation is very mixed. Based on my own empirical experience, the absence of a faith statement is no guarantee of real intellectual depth and diversity, and the presence of a faith statement is no indication of its absence. I certainly grant legitimacy to anyone whose actual experiences have been the reverse of mine. I will not, however, grant legitimacy to the mere assertion.

Ken goes on:

I would suggest that any academic campus that resolves controversial intellectual matters by fiat (as is done with these faith statements) not only precludes any chance for serious intellectual growth or evolution while setting a poor example of how reasoned scholars proceed, but also greatly increases the chances that such pillars of claims of truth are built on veritable sand. . . .

My ideal university would have broadly defined statements of faith and would likewise seek to prevent its departments to develop hegemonic ideological orientations of the sort that depend on arbitrary declarations (written or unwritten) to define what can and can’t be thought or said. The first part—dropping the faith statement—is easy. The second part is exceedingly hard and no university succeeds at it all of the time.

As for “controversial intellectual matters” being resolved “by fiat,” that is also done all the time and is unavoidable. The very act of setting the institutional stage for productive academic development depends on fiat decisions. All the great university builders from Humboldt to Eliot to Gilman, etc. laid down fiat declarations as to how their schools would operate. To say that their declarations were “controversial intellectual matters” would be a profound understatement. Arguably one of the most intellectually stimulating periods in an American university occurred at Chicago under the leadership of Robert Maynard Hutchins. Hutchins confronted one of the most controversial intellectual matters—that of the centrality of a canon of western civilization versus a pragmatist, presentist orientation—and by fiat oriented his university toward a great books curriculum. Hutchins didn’t ultimately succeed, but it’s hard to argue that his efforts did not facilitate intellectual growth.

Those born and reared in purely secular academic settings may find this hard to believe, but faith-based institutions are frequently home to a good deal of intellectual strength and diversity. For those who do not understand how this could be so, I suggest George Marsden’s book The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. Kucklick and Hart’s anthology on religious advocacy and American history might also be helpful.

There are those who would insist that intellectual evolution toward any type of orthodoxy (especially religious orthodoxy) is prima facie evidence of hypocrisy and bad faith. Many others would not go that far, but would say that the creation of any communal intellectual enterprise devoted to an orthodoxy is in principal a violation of some fundamental principle of reason or liberty. I don’t see how any such charge can be sustained in the absence of another sort of commitment whose basis is firmly in fiat assumption—even if it is an assumption buttressed with anecdotal empirical evidence. The choice between competing orthodoxies is ultimately made by subjective experience, and the experience differs in countless ways for different people.

Thanks for the dialogue. I have enjoyed it.

kelandsmith@gmail.com

ClioSmith, Associate Professor at Trinity Bible College, at 12:35 pm EDT on July 6, 2007

I wish I had more time to respond, but let me concentrate on one quote:

The choice between competing orthodoxies is ultimately made by subjective experience, and the experience differs in countless ways for different people.

I would argue that while in reality the choice is indeed made by subjective experience it should be made on the strength of empirical evidence. For the many religious colleges to assert that such controversial assertions as 1. Jesus is the Son of God and was Resurrected from the Dead 2. Creation occurred as described in Genesis 3. the Bible is an infallible guide to many matters (some even extending this to science or history) etc., is dubious at best when tested empirically. To assert that these assertions and more will be used for hiring, promotion and recruitment, on pain of punishment (dismissal), is the essence of attempting to solve such matters by fiat and as such betray any pretentensions of honest intellectual inquiry. I for one, have seen nothing like it in leftist leaning academics, for all their faults.

Ken, at 1:55 pm EDT on July 6, 2007

If you’re putting in Radical Son, then I’d think Witness by Whittaker Chambers should also be on the list.

There’s also a whole world of worthwhile essays out there that you haven’t touched. How about some of Thomas MacAulay’s parliamentary speeches, something by Mencken, Steven Den Beste, Roger Kimball, or Roger Scruton, or John Fund’s essay on transnationalism, just to name a few. If you really wanted to turn some heads, you could throw in a few of Limbaugh’s best monologues.

AYY, at 5:30 am EDT on July 7, 2007

MORE DISCUSSION ON FAITH AND INTELLECTUAL INTEGRITY

Thanks to Ken for the comments. I typed a response yesterday but then went back to the list and your post seemed to be deleted. So I did not send it. But I checked in again this morning and it was back, so I’ll go ahead and submit my comments.

I don’t dismiss Ken’s sensitivity about the real or apparent incompatibility of communal religious confession with honest intellectual inquiry. Even aside from the positivism that often lurks like the substrata of an iceberg beneath the sort of charges he raises, I think that every religious person with intellectual aspirations ought to wrestle with them.

For the record, my views on creation are complex and really don’t resemble the currently faddish caricature that anticreationists are intent on assigning to anyone who dares question their currently dominant origins story. So I’ll skip that and talk about Jesus.

I personally have no problem whatsoever with believing and declaring Jesus to be the Son of God, and that he rose from the dead and will return to judge the living and the dead. There are of course powerful presuppositional arguments (though, I think, not powerful empirical arguments) against those beliefs. And of course these beliefs are controversial, even scandalous. Christian scripture indicates that those who embrace those beliefs will be scoffed at. So, by all means, all are welcome to line up and scoff. If honest intellectual inquiry by definition requires me to reject either the belief in this confession or the possibility that it is indeed true, then Ken’s argument is sealed and I have clearly lost.

If, on the other hand, it can be acknowledged that an individual may simultaneously retain both this confession and his or her intellectual integrity, then why not acknowledge that groups of people might do so as well? I really don’t see what is illegitimate or worrisome about free associations of individuals gathered on the basis of a common confession, even if that confession seems bizarre to a majority. Again, the fear seems to stem from an embrace of individualism and a conscious or unconscious dread of institutional and confessional pluralism. Lots of folks like diversity just fine as long as it means peculiar individuals standing alone as atomistic particles, darting from belief to belief with no genuine associational ties. When they see ties (the ligio, or ligaments which are the essence of religion) being formed, their deepest anxieties come to the fore.

To put the discussion on a somewhat broader plane, one might consider other religious groups besides Christians. About a sixth of the people in the world identify as adherents to the Islamic faith. Despite variations within Islam, virtually all Muslims hold beliefs about the Prophet and the Koran that would strike a modern secularist as quite simply untrue. Are we to conclude, therefore, that one cannot be a faithful Muslim and an honest intellectual at the same time? If so, what are the parameters of this incompatibility? Islam undeniably has an intellectual tradition. Should we say that Al-Kindi was intellectually honest but that Al-Ghazali was really a traitor to the mind, that Averroes gets our approval because his intellectual formulations place him outside of true Islam? And where should we place the Sufi mystics? What is really to be gained by insisting that no Muslim educational institution can foster intellectual freedom and genuine inquiry?

Consider Mormonism, which holds beliefs about its founding Prophet and its revelation that are often regarded by the critical outsider’s mind as preposterously false. Can an LDS scholar be intellectually honest? Can BYU be a “real” university as long as its professors are required to subscribe to (or at least not oppose) a statement of faith? It gets even more interesting to consider Hinduism, Buddhism, and various forms of spiritism and paganism, all of which in one way or another reference themselves (some more than others) by adherence to certain intellectual beliefs about the nature of the world and human beings. Must all of these unique beliefs be dispensed with in order for followers to be granted the “intellectual honesty” seal of approval? If not, why not? Where exactly are the boundaries to be drawn? Who gets to draw those boundaries, and on what authority? Now we get close to the crux of the matter.

I hope I have made it clear that I think the quest to separate and classify individuals and groups into “intellectually honest” and “intellectually dishonest” categories on the basis of religious confession and association is absolutely a fool’s errand. I am more than happy, though, to invoke the Jamesian (and New Testament) understanding that ideas and the people who hold them should be judged by their “fruits” and not by their “roots.” I’m even willing to admit that by that standard, many of my friends and I myself fall far short, as most people do. There’s plenty of room for criticism, especially self-criticism. But I’m impatient with the sort of syllogistic, non-empirical criticism of religion and religious institutions that seems so in vogue at the present time.

Thanks again for the conversation. If you want to continue, email me at kelandsmith@gmail.com

ClioSmith, Associate Professor at Trinity Bible College, at 2:40 pm EDT on July 7, 2007

“Bob Scheer was already working toward a highly successful career as a mainstream journalist ...”

... when he wasn’t writing mash notes to Kim Il Sung, that is ...

Knemon, at 11:50 pm EDT on July 7, 2007

You’ve got to be kidding

This list is more than odd. Everyone after Hulme and Eliot is a social scientist (Hayek, Strauss, Aron, Fukuyama) or a political hack (Kristol, Horowitz). There are respectable conservative schools of thought in the social sciences, but you’ll only find one of them in this list: Hayek. Strauss is a cult figure, rightly despised by real philosophers. Raymond Aron wasted a vivid intelligence on anti-communist polemic (Mark’s book) and journalism (tiresome weekly columns in L’Express). Fukuyama is a Straussian retread whose fame is based on one article that captured the self-congratulatory delusions of the early post-Cold War era.

The problem is that most valuable conservative work in the social sciences is too technical for Bauerlein’s audience. But if the social sciences are to make entry into this corpus, then scrap Bauerlein’s list after Hayek and substitute William Riker, Liberalism Against Populism, and James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent. Unless, of course, Bauerlein is a closet Trot who wants grad students to conclude that conservatives really are “the stupid party.”

Michael McIntyre, at 10:10 pm EDT on July 8, 2007

Flathman, Kolakowski

Well, Michael, I’m with you as far as Public Choice Theory goes. But to characterize Strauss as a mere cult figure, Aron as a casualty of his own journalism (the world *does* matter) and Fukuyama as nothing but timely is, well, a bit glib in my mind.

In any case, I’ll take the opportunity to re-emphasize Richard Flathman, who while no conservative, and an ardent critic of American empire, makes the most eloquent, learned and in-the-age (almost postmodern) defense of limited government I have yet to come by.

I’ll also mention Leszek Kolakowski, particularly his massive “Main Currents of Marxism.” What a treat.

Ferdinand, at 5:10 am EDT on July 9, 2007

Oh, and Strauss a “social scientist"?

C’mon.

Have you even read the guy??

Ferdinand, at 5:10 am EDT on July 9, 2007

I could see reading David Horowitz’s “Radical Son” alongside something like Manning Marable’s “Race, Reform and Rebellion” (I think the Marable book would make Horowitz look sick, but that’s just my opinion). However, these would make sense as texts for a class on certain aspects of post-1945 US history, not for cultural studies or literary theory or intellectual history or whatever discipline is being rescued from “progressives” here. I confess I’m not sure from reading the essay.

A syllabus is more than a list of Great Books, or even Books That Upset the Applecart. What are the questions under debate that these books are supposed to illuminate? What intellectual tradition is supposed to be represented here? It seems unlikely to be conservative political thought or intellectual history (Kristol, Fukuyama, and Horowitz, but no Burke, Oakeshott, or Russell Kirk?)Not even Daniel Bell and Sidney whatshisname? Prof. Bauerlein, I’m a scientist, not even a historian or humanities type. Why am _I_ asking _you_ these questions?

Benjamin W., Enormous State University, at 5:15 am EDT on July 9, 2007

As one commentator noted, the anti-progressive syllabus does not reverse the radical trend of substituting political for literary analysis in English departments. Having a broad education and being aware of issues is all very well, but if English is to become more than a bastion of ill-formulated ideas and fashionable sophistry, it must cohere as a discipline. This is what the New Critics realized; unfortunately, their attempts to reform literary studies have been grossly misunderstood by the radicals who had ousted them. Of course literature isn’t just about “textures” but also about politics, history, and race-gender-class relations, but are English professors who do not hold a degree in political science, history, or sociology qualified to treat of such topics at any serious level? Except for a few luminaries whose native intelligence qualifies them to talk about everything under the sun, the answer is no.

I would suggest reading Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature as though it were written, not half a century ago, but today. Their survey and critique of academic trends before the New Criticism is no less applicable to academic trends after the New Criticism. John Ellis’s The Theory of Literary Criticism: A Logical Analysis is an interesting companion piece, though its social definition of literature as whatever “the community” decides to accept as literature unwittingly justifies the canon wars that were to take place shortly after its publication, pace his later polemic in Literature Lost.

The good news is that the study of literature qua literature is not lost; it is pursued out of the radical limelight by philosophical critics like Martha Nussbaum, by German narratologists, by scholars of rhetoric, and so forth. These deserve their rightful place at the core of undergraduate and graduate theory courses; next in line would be literary theorists, philosophers, and other thinkers who dwell on the nature of literature but do not formulate tools of literary analysis; the least priority should be assigned to issue-raisers from the left and from the right, not because issues aren’t important but because there are other departments which specialize in teaching them. I see very little place in any curriculum for intellectual impostors such as Jacques Lacan or Jacques Derrida, who have never been taken seriously by their proper fields, and that for good reason. Why waste time plowing through their arcane texts when clearer thinkers and better writers remain neglected?

Somewhere along the line, students should be encouraged to read Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. This work has been a real eye-opener for me; it cannot really be classified under any rubric. The most important thing about it is that it manages to analyze the cultural situation in the West without resorting to spurious clichés like postmodernism.

Jonathan, Graduate Student, at 5:15 am EDT on July 9, 2007

Some of the most central and detailed thought of what may be called the liberation tendency in US literary criticism of the first half of the twentieth century may be found in, for example, the half dozen books and their like below. The books by Sinclair, Calverton, Smith and Geismar have been buried, in being scandalously neglected by virtually everyone:

1903 Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist 1924 Upton Sinclair, Mammonart 1932 V. F. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature 1939 Bernard Smith, Forces in Literary Criticism 1941 Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form1958 Maxwell Geismar, American Moderns—From Rebellion to Conformity

Tony Christini, at 2:50 pm EDT on July 9, 2007

More Ideas!

Hey, that’s one way to go, Mark. Another way would be to present the truth of the Marxists in some of their most revealing texts:

1. Zhdanov’s Social Realism 2. Marx’s letter to Engels in which he says that Lasalle “has the dirty blood of a negro Jew” 3. Pol Pot’s speeches 4. Valerie Solanas’ Scum Manifesto 5. Andrea Dworkin’s preface to Pornography where she insists that lynch law is the method of choice for the new feminism6. julia Kristeva on why Mao’s revolution presents a shining path for women’s future

Some suggestions to balance out the roster with actual Marxist “literature":

Marx’s “poetry” Simone de Beauvoir’s “poetry” Chairman Mao’s “poetry” Stalin’s “poetry"One or two of Solanas’ “plays”

Toss in the poems of Son of Sam, for fun, and shake.

The funny part would be that the students would probably learn the texts by heart, and spit back whatever was required of them so that they can get the house in the suburb with a garden hose that goes with a solid education. The hard part would be to keep a straight face throughout the semester and to continue to treat these works as being of utmost reverence.

no-one special, at 11:20 pm EDT on July 9, 2007

Mark Bauerlein seems so caught up in the left vs. right dichotomy that he is blind to the obvious bias he shares with so many left/progressive figures: that is, the bias toward interpretation as the only acceptable focus for literary criticism.

Norman Foerster is a glaring omission from Bauerlein’s list, since Foerster’s cultural politics (I’m guessing) would be somewhat in line with Bauerlein’s. More importantly, though, Foerster would challenge the interpretive bias in literary study, insisting that practice in and knowledge of the modes of literary composition must be accorded equal weight with the modes of literary interpretation.

Tim Mayers, at 12:50 pm EDT on July 10, 2007

The main problem with the article is that, as a whole, it itself is a quibble. If you’re going to question thought in English departments during “the Sixties” or currently, you won’t find better texts to use than the ones I mentioned above (though there are other more recent valuable ones, particularly from the progressive left) whose burial is actually scandalous, rather than quibble-ous. As Vincent Leitch noted in American Literary Criticism from the 30s to the 80s (1988):

“What was odd about the Marxist criticism of this [1960s-70s] Renaissance associated with the post-1950s new left and the Movement was its complete disregard of the old left. Mention was never made of V. F. Calverton, James T. Farrell, Granville Hicks, Bernard Smith, Edmund Wilson, or other Leftist Critics prominent in the thirties. The native tradition of radicalism stemming from the nineteenth century had been forgotten during the heyday of the new left….”

Probably more accurate to say it had been rejected, to a great extent. Some of the slack has been picked up but the main problems remain that the departments are scandalously status quo and too often rooted in a sort of cloistered and sometimes jargoned talking to one another, as is true of universities and intellectuals generally, exceptions far from the rule aside. The article’s proposal would essentially perpetuate the status quo, its quibble aside. —- More of the Leitch quotation here:http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/...cle/anti_progressive_syllabus/#16509

Tony Christini, at 1:50 pm EDT on July 10, 2007

Require Biff n Bunny to read a lot of Bertrand Russell—both his technical writings and journalism—-and to point out any errors........(btw Marxist dogma has plenty of problems——yet Hayek’s quackery ain’t the solution) .....

Adversary, Mr., at 5:55 am EDT on July 11, 2007

liberalism/ aesthetics, anyone?

I don’t know why students aren’t required to at least read genuinely liberal writers to contrast against the Marxism they are being fed.

John Locke James Madison Ronald Dworkin Hernando DeSotoAmartya Sen

IF you’re going to have to politicize literature study (almost certainly a bad idea, but now that it’s been done, some balance might be appropriate!), then at least add the classical liberals.

That is, after all, what our society is all about. If all of us have to pay taxes to support the universities, they shouldn’t be allowed to be hijacked by a tiny group that must represent something less than 1% of the electorate. How many votes does the Communist Party get these days, anyway?

Personally, I’d prefer a return to literary studies based on aesthetics. If theory has to have total sway then the theory should be aesthetic theory: Aristotle, Bakhtin, Gadamer, Breton, Susan K. Langer, etc.

But I don’t know why it is that plays and poems aren’t enough on their own. Just to introduce students to the experience of reading a powerful poem by Attila Joszef or Paul Celan or a novel by Carmen Firan would certainly be worth more than years of reading theory about this experience.

Kirby Olson, Associate Professor at SUNY-Delhi, at 10:05 pm EDT on July 11, 2007

“Lester Bangs”

I think you’re pretty thoroughly wrong about how important it is for English departments to be “fair and balanced", but your writing doesn’t indicate that you go in for the stupid “fooled-ya” misdirection which characterizes some of the sort-of left. So I conclude from your quotation marks that you do believe that “Lester Bangs” was not a real person; but he was, and his essays are still much admired by (untenured) rock critics. A collection of those essays, *Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung*, is widely available (check your public library). I suspect, however, that you may not find it as “traditionalist” as you would like.

Jeff Rubard, at 10:40 pm EDT on July 11, 2007

One question this article raises for me—and perhaps it is obvious—is “What are the terms by which we classify certain theories as progressive or conservative?” Surely the narrative of progress implied by the very deployment of such categories is one which deserves the most urgent interrogation—especially at this age in which the biggest impediment in the march of progress toward a liberal utopia is being framed as the appropriation by conservatives of traditionally progressive pet issues.

Thomas, at 12:50 pm EDT on July 12, 2007

“""One question this article raises for me—and perhaps it is obvious—is “What are the terms by which we classify certain theories as progressive or conservative?”""”

Good question. For instance, where does one place the writings of a Quine in the cultural schema? I think it goes under “shiete we don’t like to deal with.” Many of these pseudo-problems would be eliminated if scholars paid more attention to language, argument, proof, semantics, etc. Verificationism (even a V-ism retrofitted via Quine, or for that matter statistical modeling techniques), however, does not play well with various academic zealots—-especially ones in Belle-lettres, Inc.

Perezoso, at 1:35 pm EDT on July 13, 2007

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