But is it Liberal Art?
A professor disproves academia’s “bias.”
By Ezra Klein
Wednesday October 18, 2006
There is a Rashomon quality to the college experience. For most of those in it, classes are mundane things, hours expended in a too-small seat while a too-monotone instructor expounds on a too-abstract subject. The discussion of the changing sexual identities of migratory Panamanians between 1842 and 1845 is occasionally enlivened by professorial digressions into real life, pop culture, politics, and sports. The pit stops are ephemeral: little-noticed bursts of opinions and relevance that don’t even make it into the day’s notes. Or so the unwitting professors think.
But for some outside the classroom, those occasional forays into politics are far grander and more sinister. Universities are nothing less than reeducation camps, where innocent young minds are reprogrammed with secularist, liberal, postmodern ideas, and American students cry out for liberation.
Penn State literature professor Michael Berube has been making war against these would be liberators—such as David Horowitz. Horowitz and his “academic freedom” movement have gained recognition and even political momentum, introducing an “academic bill of rights” that would police professors’ speech in 18 state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives (“Students for Academic Freedom” has a rundown of their efforts at their site). Berube, a well-known postmodernist and public intellectual, writes a popular blog where he gleefully mocks, provokes, and antagonizes the Horowitzs of the world, celebrating his inclusion in Horowitz’s list of dangerous professors and his place in a shadowy supposed “network” of leftists (Campus Progress was also honored with a place in that pantheon).
But mockery isn’t enough for Berube. So he has written What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts (full disclosure: I was surprised to find myself quoted in it. I have never met Michael Berube and wasn’t aware I was quoted before I read the book). The book is a more strategic attempt to respond to academia’s detractors. In a sense, the project a tacit admission of defeat, a recognition that the enemy has escaped the margins and must now be engaged. As Berube resignedly writes,
[I]t is hard, no doubt, for many liberals and thoughtful conservatives to take these developments seriously. A campaign for “academic freedom” which would bar professors from dealing with religion and politics, and which seeks to give students the right to sue their biology professors for teaching the theory of evolution without giving “respect” to a “theory” for which there is no (and by definition, can be no) scientific evidence whatsoever? How does this make any kind of sense?
But nobody said it needed to. And so Berube has produced a book intended to set the record straight. Unlike his other recent release, Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities, this is neither an academic nor a complicated work. It is not for a hardened political hack like David Horowitz, nor for a campus activist. Instead, it is a document aimed at hearts and minds, parents sending their kids off to college and bystanders attempting to fact check the conservative movement’s re-imagining of universities as war zones. Berube, after all, is a teacher. And the bulk of his book chronicles his experiences in the classroom.
To spend time reiterating this portion of the work is to bore an audience that, after all, sits in classrooms themselves. Berube doesn’t deny the prevalence of liberalism among his colleagues. What he does deny is its dominance, or even relevance, in the classroom, where most professors are just trying to stumble through too much material in too little time. It’s the myth of politicization of lecturing and grading that Berube dismantles—he’s trying to teach his students literature, not liberation theology. “Any liberal professor will tell you the same thing; we’d much rather read a well-written, well-argued conservative essay than a careless, shoddy, liberal-minded screed.”
But what they’d prefer may no longer be the issue. What Horowitz and his ilk are doing is expressly politicizing the university, and not to widen the space for political expression, but to destroy it. Until now, politics have swirled about in the collegiate milieu of experimentation and exploration, existing on equal, chaotic footing with all the other assumed identities and tested epiphanies that make dorms so very entertaining. The extreme liberalism, staunch libertarianism, and sundry other “isms” that routinely and temporarily grip frosh possessed of little direction or gravity are the harmless, costumes assumed on a playground, not uniforms donned on a battleground.
Horowitz hopes to change that impression, Berube to defend it. Berube’s detailed recounting of classroom life gives the sense that politics may happen at a university, but they are not the point of the university. If opinions seep into the classroom, save on the rare occasions when an irresponsible professor of any type pursues ideological conformity, they are reel changes on the film, noticeable only to those looking for them.
But as in Fight Club, when Tyler Durden advised us all to search for black circle in the upper-right hand corner of the screen and made the artifact noticeable forevermore, Horowitz seeks to permanently politicize the campus, ensuring every instance of political speech is overseen, rigorously examined, and made meaningful. In so doing, he will destroy the low stakes and bemused indulgence that render colleges such an important and glorious ground for political experimentation.
Unless, that is, Berube and others stop him, not by trouncing Horowitz’s conservatism with liberalism, but by discrediting his attempts to politicize the apolitical. That’s why I was disappointed to see Berube pivot in the final chapter of his book and close with an essay on what liberalism should be. David Horowitz wants to embroil academia in a war of ideologies because he knows his doesn’t have to triumph in order to win. His victory is assured as soon as the other side accepts that the university is a political battleground, and decides to start fighting on it.
Ezra Klein is the writing fellow at The American Prospect. His blog is at www.EzraKlein.com.
--------
Comments
|
!
Horowitz, like the neoconservatives cannot get away from Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who they still think are the opposition and can only be overcomed with more power and more propaganda. Everything is politics to them and there can be only one Party in the end.
— Frank Lornitzo - Oct 19, 08:34 PM - #Everything IS political though. thoughts, ideas, subjects, and this incorporates a wide range of opinions. Everything on campus is political, but this doesn’t mean it is completely one way as Horowitz so desperately suggests.
— Cassandra - Oct 20, 02:21 AM - #i don’t get it.. if you’re a good writer, why can’t i understand you?
— Rajiv - Oct 23, 04:39 PM - #Hi, videos!
— Ivan - Feb 27, 10:01 PM - #<a href=http://sc0854.tripod.com>free58</a><a href=http://enitanlewknor4442.tripod.com>free118</a>