In black and white

Rarely, if ever, is there a shortage of things to write about as a week draws to a close here. I had thought earlier this week about discussing the crisis on the Korean peninsula. While I am no expert on it and the North Korean regime is hard to interpret, the steps that it has taken, and particularly the denunciation of the nearly 60-year old armistice agreement, would in other times have been an almost certain prelude to an imminent war. I was reliably informed by a rare American visitor to North Korea about 15 years ago that that nation would not possibly be capable of sustained military action, but. . stranger things have happened. However, before I could begin, my email led me to something else.

I do not think there are very many professional academics among my 2-3000 regular weekly readers here, although I know there are some. I have discussed the states of academia, and particularly the humanities, from time to time, and I always worry when I do that I'm not making much of an impression, because I don't think the lay world has had much of an idea of what is happening on campuses for several decades. What reached me today was an opportunity which I simply cannot pass up.

It began with an email reporting on the recent annual meeting of the National Association of Scholars, which was founded in 1988 to try to preserve traditional values in universities. At that time it attracted a wide variety of impressive scholars, including an above-average number of conservative academics, but also some traditional liberals like myself, and even Eugene Genovese, one of the greatest Marxist historians the United States has ever produced. I joined in the early 1990s and I wrote one article, "My War with the AHA," for its journal, Academic Questions, although I've never attended an annual meeting. The organization was dedicated to maintaining traditional values of scholarship and to opposing postmodernism and poltiical correctness. Academic Questions has run wonderful articles skewering the work of some of the most prominent academics in America, including Stephen Greenblatt, Martha Nussbaum, Frederic Jameson (who gave perhaps the single most brilliant course I ever took in college before he became a postmodernist), and Louis Menand. In recent years, however, its membershpi has aged, shrunk, and moved very measurably to the right. I still belong and read the journal, but I feel much less at home in the organization than I used to.

Well, today I got an NAS email reporting on the recent annual meeting at the Harvard Club in New York, which, to repeat, I did not attend. But it referred to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the NAS that appeared in the issue of March 1, "National Scholars' Group Turns 25, Showing Its Age," by one Peter Schmidt. The NAS, it began, like many professional higher education associations, is in trouble financially for a variety of reasons. "But most other such groups," Schmidt continues, "exist to represent specific sonstituencies, like admissions officers or language professors, and can alter their messages to keep up with the times. The NAS cannot change its message because its message is its reason for being."

And then came the sentence that nearly made me shriek, right in the middle of Sawyer library here at Williams College.

"That message is that colleges should be meritocracies focused on teaching, research, reasoned discourse, and the scientific method, and should resist tailoring their policies and instruction to conform with anyone's political views."

I don't think there's a way to insert a poll in these blog posts, but if there were, I would do so, asking everyone to indicate whether they regard that sentence as a controversial statement. Because you see, if you don't think it's controversial--and I sure as hell don't--then you evidently, pace The Chronicle, an intellectual dinosaur peddling snake oil. Schmidt continues:

"It is a message rooted in romanticized recollections of how America's colleges operated in the middle of the 20th century, before the advent of affirmative action, ethnic studies departments, and other products of the 1960s that the association regards as anathema."

Now I am very eager to test this statement out on my current class, but unfortunately it crossed my path at the worst possible time, the day before the start of spring break, so that will have to wait for two weeks. I did ask a random undergraduate in the library whether he regarded the summary of the NAS message as controversial or debatable, and he replied, interestingly enough, that it might be, but only because simple, straightforward intellectual tasks are now being outsourced or performed by computers and that colleges therefore might need to be more "conceptual." I then showed it to the inhabitant of the next office over, an economist, who found nothing controversial in it at all. But Schmidt and his editors apparently do.

If you asked him for his alternative vision, he would probably begin by saying that the job of a university was to offer a diversity of viewpoints reflecting the diversity of the world's population, which is divided into different races, genders, classes, and religions. Many would argue that there was never a single truth that universities could try to teach, merely European white male truth which the ruling group used universities to promulgate in an effort to maintain their "hegemony," intellectual and otherwise. That was indeed the rationale for founding ethnic and gender studies departments and it is at least part of the rationale for affirmative action in universities for everyone from undergraduates to faculty. That is the reality. Now to understand how this happened, and what it means for the future, let's go back to Schmidt's original statement, which I think is accurate, of the NAS view.

"That message is that colleges should be meritocracies focused on teaching, research, reasoned discourse, and the scientific method, and should resist tailoring their policies and instruction to conform with anyone's political views."

That is a good statement of what universities in the western world aspired to be for approximately a century, i would argue, from around 1870 to 1970. Many would argue that the picture was an idealized one. They are right. No generation produces enough men and women with the curiosity, dedication, passion and self-discipline that is required to do that kind of serious intellectual work and show others how to do it. A great historian or literary critic isn't any more common than a great hitter--which shouldn't be in the least surprising, since both skills require a rare mix of talent and dedication. But as long as this remained the ideal, universities and colleges could thrive and perform a critical function for the rest of society. It was the abandonment of that idea about forty years ago that has led to the catastrophic situation that they face today.

Yes, Virginia, the modern western intellectual tradition was a great thing, but it was not a natural outcome of the human mind. It had to be founded, built upon, and continually revised. Several generations spent substantial portions of their youth in libraries and archives introducing themselves to it. (I was really one of the lucky ones, because that was about as hard for me as it is for a pig to lie in mud. But to repeat, that's very unusual.) That's why it has been so much easier to tear it down than to build it up. That's why it's future is now extremely uncertain. Remember, more than a Millennium passed between the end of the first great era of rationalism in Greek and Rome and its revival in the Renaissance.

Those like myself, who were introduced to that tradition when it was still vibrant and swam against the tide of their adulthood to keep it alive, now face an interesting dilemma. What in fact could we do to try to keep it alive? As I remarked here very recently, it's not clear how that could happen in universities, where newly minted graduate students have never been exposed to it. What other forum exists that could, crucially, attract younger people and in turn give them a chance to replicate themselves? I don't know.

My students at Williams still can, and do, respond to opportunities to do serious historical work, but there are fewer and fewer such opportunities in colleges. Ironically, the resources available on line have made serious historical work easier than ever, and the book I am completing on U.S. entry into the Second World War is much better, drawing on far more sources, than it could have been when I started out, because I could access and store so much more data so efficiently. And there will be readers for this book. How many people under 40 remain who might write one like it, however, is an entirely different question--and one that makes me very sad.




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