by Tom Shuford
Columnist EdNews.org

"You don't have to intimidate us," said the famous professor of philosophy in April 1969, to ten thousand triumphant students supporting a group of black students who had just persuaded "us," the faculty of Cornell University, to do their will by threatening the use of firearms as well as threatening the lives of individual professors . . .

The professors . . . were fawning over what was nothing better than a rabble; publicly confessing their guilt and apologizing for not having understood the most important moral issues, the proper response to which they were learning from the mob; expressing their willingness to change the university's goals and the content of what they taught . . . (Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, a 1987 best seller) (1)

The Cornell incident was among the first victories in the triumph for self-esteem-focused education to "close the achievement gap" throughout the K-16 system. Those opening lines from Bloom's "SIXTIES" chapter capture the attitude of leaders of American educational institutions at all levels. (2) In the face of campaigns to degrade the teaching of Western Civilization, they surrendered — smoothly — to multiculturalism and other isms. (3)

In universities, the study of Western Civilization is the province of the humanities [literature, history, languages, philosophy] departments. Bloom describes the dilemma professors in those departments faced:

"[They] are in an impossible situation and do not believe in themselves or what they do. Like it or not, they are essentially involved with interpreting and transmitting old books . . . they are agents of the rare, the refined and the superior. By definition they are out of it, and their democratic inclinations and guilt push them to be with it. After all, what do Shakespeare and Milton have to do with solving our problems? . . . they are the repositories of the elitist, sexist, nationalist prejudices we are trying to overcome."

And how they responded:

"[Not only do the professors lack conviction] The loneliness and sense of worthlessness were crushing, so these humanists jumped on the fastest, most streamlined express to the future . . . Humanists ran like lemmings into the sea, thinking they would refresh and revitalize themselves . . . They drowned." (p353)

No, there was no need for intimidation. Universities — and K-12 school systems — raced to the Multicultural Sea. (4) This essay will not make a case for rescuing lemmings. As Stanford University graduates — and Paypal co-founders — David O. Sacks and Peter A. Thiel observe of their alma mater:

"For many of the faculty hired in the last 20 years, such a return would be literally impossible — they have become as ignorant of the despised Western Civilization as the students they purport to instruct . . ." (The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, 1999, p. 228)

Stanford and other elite institutions are not irrelevant. They have an important role to play: scientific, technical and professional training:

"In the hard sciences and the engineering fields, our top colleges and universities will graduate people who have amassed an impressive array of scientific knowledge and technical skills. At the same time, the business, law, and medical schools will continue to churn out trained professionals. From the outside perspective of companies seeking to hire new computer engineers, biochemists or investment bankers, everything will continue as before." (ibid)

But for the cultivation of a capacity to think about broad challenges to society and to individuals, we can no longer look to the university. In its new utilitarian role —

"The university will have been transformed into a multiversity, no longer capable of providing a universal framework that enables students to integrate a wide assortment of knowledge into a coherent whole. That kind of framework, so essential for thinking about the larger problems facing individuals and societies, simply cannot be provided by science; it must be gleaned from the humanities and can be reached only after rigorous study — in philosophy, literature, history . . . The loss of this framework . . . will be felt keenly . . . by a generation of students increasingly alienated from an incoherent and senseless world . . ." (ibid)

Defending the West

Universities (and K-12 school systems) can no longer defend Western Civilization. Rare individuals can, like African-American author Shelby Steele:

"...it has always astounded me how much white Americans take for granted the rich and utterly decisive heritage of Western culture. There is no space here to reiterate the vast and invisible web of ideas, principles, values and understandings that have evolved over the millennia to undergird the American civilization. To mention only the fewest highlights, there was the magnificence of Greek thought, the Roman development of law, a renaissance of reason, the concept of a social contract, the idea of the individual as a self-contained and free political unit with rights and responsibilities, free markets, the scientific method, separation of church and state — all this and so much more converging to make the American and Western way of life successful in so many ways . . . This is the cultural capital that whites too often take for granted and rarely think of insisting on in the former victims of exclusion." ("War if the Worlds," Wall Street Journal, Sept. 17, 2001)

And, like Arab-American psychologist Wafa Sultan: Sultan's five-minute debate with an Egyptian professor of religious studies on Al-Jazeera (February 21, 2006) was an international sensation. When the English-captioned video of the debate became available on the web, within three weeks it had over a million hits. Excerpt:

"The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality."

Sultan's defense of Western values recalls another critic of Islam, Oriana Fallaci. Whereas Sultan chastens Muslims in the grip of a totalitarian ideology, Fallaci rebukes a West groveling in political correctness.

Hating the West

Why must Western Civilization depend on lone champions? Why, in the defense of our own civilization, are our schools and universities failures?

I submit two theories.

My K-12 theory is simple: Would-be teachers enter colleges of education ignorant of Western Civilization and exit as they came. Moreover few classroom teachers have any say over curricula. K-12 education is a top-down, central planning calamity, the educational equivalent of the defunct Soviet Union, blundering along on borrowed time.

My university theory is more complicated. College humanities and social science professors are also ignorant of Western Civilization. As graduate students they have had to specialize, usually in narrow research interests of a supervising professor. Their career goals: earn a doctorate, secure a position, publish enough — in journals almost no one reads — to earn tenure.

I write from firsthand experience. I was in a doctoral program in psychology at Emory University in the early 70s before I was bounced out with a masters. A mechanical engineering graduate from Duke, my interests had shifted to psychology. I received a National Institute of Mental Health Traineeship at Emory. I was naive enough to think I could pursue already distinct interests. Instead, I found myself working in a lab for a professor doing classical conditioning experiments. There were alternative, but equally narrow research "opportunities" in educational psychology that seemed — that were — equally fruitless.

Indeed, can the reader name a single major discovery in the past forty years that we owe to the research of sociologists and psychologists?

Something is lost in submitting oneself for endless years — up to twenty — to other-directed schooling that culminates in a humanities/social science PhD. (I consider science/engineering a separate, unrelated and more confident world.) Absorbing blocks of information for one semester, dropping these topics abruptly then absorbing (memorizing lecture notes for) another block of information, all the while suppressing rebellious urges to go one's own way — on one's own time table — takes a spiritual and intellectual toll.

There may be little left to "go" anywhere.

And so, at the end of this other-guided journey — at the top of the formal education pyramid — are humanities and social science PhDs. These folks don't need to be intimidated to abandon Western Civilization for the latest thing. Far from it.

Elizabeth Kantor is author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature. She has her PhD in those subjects from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In a presentation on C-Span's BookTV.org, Kantor describes English professors:

"...they're the folks, who probably of everybody in America, hate Western Culture with the deepest and most abiding passion . . . If anything, they actively want to prevent that culture from being transmitted . . . This might explain why a lot of English professors teach Marxism or Freud or history of ballet . . . anything except what they were actually hired to teach." (5)

"The Only Serious Solution"

Allan Bloom, it must be admitted, had not given up on universities in 1987 when The Closing of The American Mind was published:

"Our problems [as a civilization] are so great and their sources so deep that to understand them we need philosophy more than ever . . . I still believe that universities, rightly understood, are where community and friendship [of a philosophical nature] can exist in our time . . . But for all that, and even though they deserve our strenuous efforts, one should never forget that Socrates was not a professor . . . that the love of wisdom survived, partly, because of his individual example. This is what really counts, and we must remember it in order to know how to defend the university." (p382)

Bloom died in 1992. Had he lived would he still believe in universities?

Today's universities and K-12 systems seem beyond repair in structure and in governance.

The Great Books of Western Civilization are the thing — not institutions, bricks and mortar or otherwise. Bloom acknowledged as much, even if he wasn't ready to let go of his notion of what a university could be:

"Men may live more truly and fully in reading Plato and Shakespeare than at any other time, because then they are participating in essential being and are forgetting their accidental lives. The fact that this kind of humanity exists or existed, and that we can somehow still touch it with the tips of our outstretched fingers, make our imperfect humanity . . . tolerable." (p380)

And —

"...

the only serious solution [to the incoherence of a university education] is the one that is almost universally rejected: the good old Great Books approach, in which a liberal education means reading certain recognized classic texts, just reading them, letting them dictate what the questions are and the method of approaching them — not forcing them into categories we make up, not treating them as historical products, but trying to read them as their authors wish them to be read . . ." (p343)

And —

"...one thing is certain: wherever the Great Books make up a central part of the curriculum, the students are excited and satisfied, feel they are doing something that is independent and fulfilling . . . The advantage they get is an awareness of the classic — particularly important for our innocents . . . and, perhaps most important of all, a fund of shared experiences and thoughts on which to ground their friendships with one another. Programs based on the judicious use of great texts provide the royal road to students' hearts. Their gratitude . . . is boundless . . ." (ibid)

Few will walk that royal road:

"...It is the easiest thing in the world to devise courses of study, adapted to the particular conditions of each university, which thrill those who take them. The difficulty is in getting them accepted by the faculty." (p344) (6)

* * *

Let's remove this obstacle. At the end of Assimilation, the Achievement Gap and White Guilt, Part 1, I wrote: "This self-esteem logic, pursued in evermore strained variations, must end unhappily. There is a better way." Great Books is the better way to tackle the achievement gap between whites and whites and whites and minority students and to aid in the assimilation of students of immigrant backgrounds.

It may seem outlandish to propose Great Books with minority students, but it is the only way to go. The question is how.

Endnotes

1) The surrender of the Cornell University curriculum to "a rabble" recalls a 1988 incident at Stanford University:

"Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's got to go!" chanted protestors. A freshman survey course on Western culture went.

I Googled the phrase, "Western culture's got to go." The top-listed article — a 1989 piece in the Fairfield Citizen News — will repay the time to read it, despite the simple format.

The forced resignation of Harvard's president Larry Summers in February, 2006, is also illuminating as to the condition of American universities. Summers' candor vexed the Harvard faculty regularly. The most incendiary of his violations of campus etiquette, however, was venturing the tentative hypothesis that the relative scarcity of females at the highest levels of math, science and engineering might not be entirely due to environmental factors. The ever quotable Thomas Sowell describes Summers' error:

"...the tragic fact is that the academic world is one of the most intolerant places in America when it comes to diversity of ideas. Even the president of Harvard dare not step out of line."

2) See Political Correctness and Textbooks for effects of the capitulation to self-esteem-focused education on K-12 textbooks.

3) Humanities professors' struggle for an appearance of profundity has its comic elements — as, for example, the embrace of a fashionable "ism" now in the popular lexicon: "deconstructionism." Bloom's definition:

"The interpreter's creative activity is more important than the text; there is no text, only interpretation. Thus the one thing most necessary for us, the knowledge of what these texts have to tell us, is turned over to the subjective, creative selves of these interpreters, who say that there is both no text and no reality to which the texts refer." (p379)

Humanities professors employ many other "theories," "frameworks," "methods" to deform the study of Great Books: Freudian Criticism, Marxist Criticism, New Criticism, Structuralism, New Historicism. Trendy ideologies flourish, morever, not just at elite universities. Paul W. Anghinetti is emeritus professor of English at Rhode Island College. Below are excerpts from Anghinetti's account, in the Providence Journal, of the trajectory of the RIC English department:

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS TO RESPECTABILITY: "RIC, which emerged out of its normal-school [teachers training institute] roots when I began teaching there, in 1962, moved inexorably out of its second-rate academic status to become a very respectable liberal-arts institution. Embracing the great tradition of intellectual freedom of inquiry that characterized the very best American institutions, RIC grew in stature as a place where Voltaire's great dictum was a by-law for faculty and administration: 'I do not agree with a word you say, sir, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'"

RESPECTABILITY TO GULAG: "Alas, my final years at RIC forced me to adopt the role of Dostoyevsky's 'Underground Man'. . . RIC — particularly the English department, where I labored — slowly became an academic gulag . . . a closed society, run by propagandists intent on their ideological myopia."

PROFUSION OF IDEOLOGIES: "The litmus-paper test for the English department resides in its course offerings, which will reveal . . . its radicalized shape. Euro-centrism, Feminism, Marxism, The New Historicism, Reader Response, Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction Theory got adopted with a fervor worthy of medieval scholastics or Muslim fundamentalists."

DEAD WHITE MALES VERBOTEN: "Dead White Male authors became anathema to my colleagues, who shuddered at the sound of 'Milton,' 'Melville' or 'Hemingway'. . . Literary value yielded to extra-literary political and theoretical concerns. Down with form and content, up with socio-political and pop agendas!"

REAL VICTIMS: STUDENTS: "Ultimately, of course, our students have become victimized by the subtle trashing of traditional academic values." ("Propaganda factory — Political correctness ruining RIC," Providence Journal, September 9, 2004)

4) University humanities departments were ripe for the taking. Bloom explains:

"...Cornell was in the forefront of trends . . . It had for several years been a laundering operation for radical Left French ideas in comparative literature. From Sartre, through Goldman, to Foucault and Derrida, each successive wave washed over the Cornell shores. These ideas were intended to give new life to old books. A technique of reading, a framework for interpretation — Marx, Freud, structuralism, and on and on — could incorporate the tired old books and make them a part of revolutionary consciousness. At last there was an active, progressive role for the humanists, who had been only antiquarians, eunuchs guarding a harem of aging and now unattractive courtesans . . ." (p352)

I see parallels with colleges of education. The task of humanities departments is pretty simple: get students to read — just read — Great Books. The task of school teachers is also pretty simple: to give the young basic academic knowledge and skills. These tasks are not glamorous.

To justify the lofty title of education "professional" or university "professor" one must cloak a simple enterprise — K-8 schooling, liberal education at the university level — in impressive-seeming theories, frameworks, techniques.

An exchange below between two sixtyish British educators from the Education Consumers Clearinghouse message board illustrates the grand deception — of self and public:

Mona M: We learned our tables by chanting: Once 7 is 7; two 7's are 14 and so on. Then this daft fad came of just counting 7 14 21 28 . . . Now there are even dafter activities (groups) which are supposed to end up with children knowing their tables. But they are just a waste of time. In the final analysis — who dreams them up? Why are these people so determined NOT to teach the simple old way?

Tom B: Anyone can teach the simple old way. But if you are trying to pretend that teaching is a "profession" . . . you have to think up all these daft ideas.

5) Elizabeth Kantor's 26-minute talk on The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature delivered to an audience of college students on June 22, 2007 can be viewed online. It's well worth it. At the link, to the right, click on "Watch."

6) The New York Times has published an excellent retrospective on Allan Bloom's battle to save the university, "Revisiting the Canon Wars," September 16, 2007, by Book Review editor Rachel Donadio. Donadio strives mightily for balance in this piece — to give Bloom's opponents their due — but her sympathies are with Bloom. Concluding paragraph:

"Bloom believed education should be transformative — that it should remove students from the confines of their own backgrounds to engage with books that open up new realms of meaning . . . In 'The Closing of the American Mind,' Bloom . . . wrote that a liberal education should provide a student with 'four years of freedom' — 'a space between the intellectual wasteland he has left behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate' . . . From Bloom's perspective, 'the importance of these years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him.'"

For the long view of what has happened to American universities over the past two centuries, there is a gem of an essay that must not be missed: "From Christian Gentleman to Bewildered Seeker: The Transformation of American Higher Education" (pdf file) by Russell K. Nieli, a lecturer on politics at Princeton University. Sample this excerpt on one of the charming ironies of the present multicultural era:

"The political ideals that the multiculturalists believed were more highly respected in Third World societies than in the supposedly racist-sexist-homophobic West, [Dinesh] D'Sousa explains, were in large part Western-derived ideals that had little resonance outside the West. 'The movement for curricular expansion, D'Sousa writes, 'arose in the aftermath of the civil rights, feminist and homosexual rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. For its advocates the purposes of studying other cultures is to affirm them as alternatives to Western mores, to celebrate the new pluralism and diversity.' The basic difficulty here, D'Sousa goes on, 'is that, by and large, non-Western cultures have no developed tradition of racial equality. Not only do they violate equality in practice, but the very principle is alien to them, regarded by many with suspicion and contempt. Moreover, many of these cultures have deeply ingrained ideas of male superiority . . . [For instance], the renowned Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiyya advises, "When a husband beats his wife for misbehavior, he should not exceed ten lashes." . . . Feminism is simply not indigenous to non-Western cultures.'"

And this on multiculturalism's effects on assigned texts:

"Alice Walker's The Color Purple," one knowledgeable observer remarked in the early 1990s, "is taught in more English departments today than all of Shakespeare's plays combined."

Updated August, 2007.

Tom Shuford [email protected] is a retired teacher living in Lenoir, North Carolina