Academia/ After the Debauch
Lynn, Kenneth S.
dollars in damages. It will not be long before the outcomes of Superbowl and World Series games are held up until some federal judge rules on a contested game-decision. As the judiciary has...
...Yet at the same time that the colleges and universities have been trying to wipe out the legacy of Kenneth S. Lynn teaches American history at the Johns Hopkins University and is the author of books on Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and other American writers...
...As for foreign-language requirements, they have come back from the very edge of extinction and are once again being enforced...
...The erstwhile occupiers of deans' offices~ have also been in the forefront of the effort to destroy meaningful standards of promotion by urging the rapid advancement of black professors and women professors regardless of the quality of their scholarly work...
...Dooley's fifty-year cycles of recurrence should be considerably shortened...
...As the judiciary has weakened the walls of family and local community, so it now weakens the walls of sports in America...
...Fifteen years down the road from the campus violence of the late sixties, a curious combination of fundamentalism and leftism sets the academic tone...
...The proliferation of courses in ethnic studies and women's studies continues unabated, and indeed in many places whole departments have been organized around these pseudo-subjects...
...yesteryear they have also been unable to escape it...
...Since true heroism is beyond any performer's reach in our politicized, industrialized, computerized, and hyper-publicized sports world today, what can be offered the public...
...A mere fifteen years after the sweeping curricular changes with which college and university faculties bought peace in their time, those same faculties are busily engaged in an attempt to restore some semblance of the status quo ante...
...Examining the course catalogue, however, hardly begins to suggest the weaknesses that have been built into our system of higher education in the last decade and a half...
...The desire, in short, to impose stiffer standards of performance upon the students coexists in the minds of contemporary professors with the desire to identify themselves with the flabbiest of radical causes...
...What this country needs is a revolution in the streets, Professor Sheldon Wolin wrote in democracy in the summer of 1981, but in the absence of such a blessed event he would continue to speak out on political and cultural issues...
...Another innovation of the liberationist sixties, the "pass-fail" grade, has likewise been largely replaced by the old system of letter gradesnand no one has been more pleased by this reactionary move than the students themselves, who are aware how important good grades are in landing an interesting job or in gaining admission to a professional school...
...Now that these veterans of the Harvard bust, the battle of Morningside Heights, and a hundred other confrontations have received their Ph.D.'s and entered full-time teaching, they have begun to take over the colleges and universities of this country by more subtle means than they formerly employed...
...As Mr...
...In the case of higher education, one could argue that Mr...
...In the insanely individualistic years when "doing your own thing" was the watchword of young people, students won the right to tailor their courses of study to fit their own perception of their needs...
...Special awards (Ruthies, Grangies...
...In the field of history, for example, Marxism is by all odds the most fashionable mode of analysis among teachers of European history, while in American history more and more of the current scholarship is consecrated to the expression of contempt for the achievements of our civilization...
...I suggest something along the lines of Hollywood's Oscar night, staged at the Los Angeles Coliseum and televised throughout the world...
...Thus while there are grounds for believing that Ronald Reagan has succeeded in shifting the entire nation rightward, Democrats as well as Republicans, the generalization certainly does not apply to the academic world, nor is it likely to in the years ahead...
...Again we ask, how can a sports hero emerge out of tawdry litigation...
...In addition to having second-rate intellects, the typical graduate students of the 1970s clung tightly to the revolutionary attitudes of their undergraduate days...
...For what the catalogue doesnot record is that when turmoil came to the campuses in the late sixties, the quality of applicants to graduate schools of arts and sciences at once began to go down, and that as the real income of professors was eaten into by the inflation of the 1970s the nation's most gifted undergraduates turned away from teaching careers in ever increasing numbers...
...And the blacks and women who have been professionally rewarded on the basis of their race or sex have in turn been in the forefront of the movement to discredit the official values of the American people...
...Indeed, the leftist professors of my acquaintance have lately become more intransigent than ever, for with the drying up of public funds for educational purposes they have found it easy to think of themselves as the victims of a brutal and uncaring society, and there is nothing that makes the anti-Americanism of academia grow faster than the tears of self-pity...
...for each and all of the vast multitude of specializations, assembly-line techniques, and marketplace piracies, with the parade of noseguards and designated hitters all weeping their gratitude before camera and through tears thanking Morn and the agent who made it all possible...
...Dooley observed long ago, America is more given to rapid change than any other nation on earthmwith the result that if you take a close look at the Republic at fifty-year intervals you will find that it has hardly changed at all...
...Today, more and more colleges are demanding that students take a universally prescribed "core curriculum...
Vol. 15 • December 1982 • No. 12
