A New Start for the Humanities?

In a previous post, I discussed Allan Bloom’s cry for help on behalf of American intellectual life in general, and the university in particular. I would now like to offer some additional thoughts on the subject.

Few would dispute the assertion that the social sciences and humanities (with the possible exception of economics) have fallen completely under the spell of what was once referred to as the Radical Left. The testimony of professors, students (including some on this blog), and others has given us a vast collection of horror stories that point to a rigid ideological conformity tolerating little or no dissent.

One of the most poignant of these tales of woe is the case of Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, who was drummed out of his job for challenging feminist orthodoxy. He had the audacity to rely on science to guide his opinions. The high priestesses and their male sycophants quickly closed ranks to purge this relic of Enlightenment from the hallowed grounds of the (poison) Ivy League.

The fate of the American university was sealed back in the 1970s, when the demands of campus radicals of the 1960s began to be implemented on a large scale. A personal story will illustrate the point. From 1976 to 1980, I was an undergraduate in the liberal arts at the University of Buffalo. This major public institution had been busy for several years bending its curriculum and its practices to please the Left. I recall one class I took, “Disarmament,” an upper-level interdisciplinary course in which two dyed-in-the-wool Marxists tore into the United States from every conceivable angle. In many other courses, the polemics were equally tendentious, albeit usually presented in a more subtle manner.

The university was also busy with a back-door affirmative action program. They were recruiting unqualified minority kids, paying all the bills, and shunting them off to a residential “college of urban studies” or some such nonsense. By a fluke, in my freshman year I was assigned to a dormitory in this experiment of social engineering, which was about 85% black and 10% Hispanic. I must say that for myself personally, it proved to be a fascinating experience.

It also provided me with an early glimpse of the catastrophe of affirmative action. The program was emblematic of the reintroduction of institutional racism and racial segregation that was occurring, just a decade after the triumphs of the civil rights movement. There was no escaping the brutal reality when, during my first week at school, a student of pharmacy in his senior year asked for my help in writing an essay. His level of grammar, spelling, and overall use of English could not have been beyond a third-grade level. He eventually graduated and secured a position as a pharmacist in New York City. Alas, this young man was nothing but a tool of the system, as some of my professors were wont to say. I hope the beneficiaries of his apothecary talents managed to survive.

In those years, I was very interested in civil rights and civil liberties. I became involved with a campus organization that maintained strong ties to the ACLU. In these circles, I made the acquaintance of the old guard, attorneys and other professionals. They were educated and cultivated people. Although tending toward the leftward side of the political spectrum, they saw in the apolitical defense of civil liberties one of the foundations of American democracy. But alongside them was a new generation of politicized campus activists who saw civil liberties as a weapon to brandish against the “system,” part of their overall effort to undermine society. Their supposed loyalty to the Constitution was a thin veil to cover their true objectives. In more recent years this veil has fallen away, as the “human rights” movement, as it is now known, no longer makes a great effort to hide its real agenda.

Let us fast forward to the late 1980s. Fresh from several years in the Middle East, I lectured at numerous college campuses on several relevant subjects, particularly the Arab-Israel conflict. It did not take long to distinguish a mold for the ubiquitous “panel discussions” that seemed to be popping up at universities everywhere. There were typically several categories of speaker:

(1) the Arab, who of course was viscerally anti-Israel, spewing lies and venom from behind his Westernized façade; (2) the clergyman, representing one or another committee on interfaith dialogue, usually quite anti-Israel; (3) someone from a “peace institute,” or think tank, or UN-affiliated NGO, also anti-Israel; (4) a professor in a relevant discipline, such as Middle East studies or international affairs, predictably from the Left; (5) a journalist, relaying first-hand accounts of the suffering of his beloved kafiyyeh-clad freedom fighters; and (6) an Israeli, normally a hapless third-rate diplomat who pathetically defended his country, instead of emphasizing the deeds and methods of the totalitarian states that populate the region.

The student and faculty audiences welcomed these panelists with open arms. Most of them were foaming at the mouth (some quite literally) for Israel’s and America’s blood. It started with condemnations of the evil Zionists, but America always was lurking in the shadows, with Israel portrayed as just a pawn in Washington’s machinations to achieve global domination. The “Palestinians” could do no wrong; they were the super-victims, the Third World inheritors of the defunct proletariat. I might add that the more “elite” the university, the more intense this tendency.

Today, it is with trepidation that I set foot on a college campus. Bloom’s prognosis was accurate to a degree that chills the soul. It is truly the cutting edge of Western intellectual decline.

Has mass higher education failed? Probably. This child of the Enlightenment, intertwined in our hyper-democratic environment with endless expansion of rights and equality, has reached its comical conclusion, a grotesque caricature of scholarship and learning. Perhaps worst of all, the contemporary university has polluted lower levels of education with its insidious rot.

Perhaps the universities eventually will disown their failing parts, and concentrate on what they do best: scientific research along with training for the professions, be it medicine, business, or oil exploration. As for the “professors” of gender studies and literary deconstruction, they could be sent to work in the fields, as Mao would say. (Might I have inadvertently hit upon a solution to the lettuce-picking conundrum?)

The final decomposition of the humanities may very well be just what the doctor ordered, however. Since it can no longer be denied that the current model has failed, we have no choice but to move on. We bought the advanced chemistry set for our five year-old, and he burned himself. Let us give the child safer toys, and transfer the serious work to the adults.

There are other models from which to draw inspiration. There is the association between a master and a small group of students, in the manner of Socrates; the retreat, as practised by Cicero in his Tusculan villa; or the more structured Jewish talmudical academy, the yeshiva. The intellectual atmosphere in all three cases is dense, with reverence for the teachers, the masters of all previous learning. The gates are open to a greater or lesser extent, but only the most serious students can flourish and advance.

Such a reorientation may be necessary to restore the spirit of free inquiry. The questions and dilemmas we face are daunting, and there is much to be gained from a dialogue with the great minds of all the ages. The possibility of accomplishing this task within the university as it is presently constituted is becoming more and more remote.