The Last Intellectuals, by Russell Jacoby

...The truth is that there are plenty of "public intellectuals" around these days, but most of them are neoconservatives...

...Is it possible that a solid American background provided more sustenance for the long haul rather than the immigrant past common to many of the Jews...

...The real reason why so many academics write in unreadable prose is much simpler to explain: this is the way they have been taught to write...

...The issue raised by Jacoby is not in itself irrelevant...

...In graduate school I was frequently criticized by my com'There is a ghastly British equivalent known as the "new" (or "glass and poured concrete") university...

...Instead, there is the office in a modern skyscraper rather incongruously situated on the prairie, a reserved parking place across the street, a scruffy ranch house, a single "gourmet" restaurant, and the fleshpots of urban life anywhere from two to ten driving hours away.' As Jacoby says, "a spectre is haunting American universities, or at least, its faculties: boredom...

...Moreover, many granting bodies, such as the Social Science Research Council, are dominated by boards of academics who take care of each other, or each other's proteges—in a personal as well as ideological sense...

...In the United States, however, rustication is the order of the day—producing isolation, alienation, and (if Jacoby is right) impotence...

...Is C. Wright Mills—who ended his life as an apologist for Castro—really the paradigm of a committed intellectual...

...Moreover, if "economic and social blandishments" rather than principle were the cause of the present views of the Jewish neoconservatives, one must then ask, who are (or were) hotter commercial properties...

...Radical sociologists may dream of revolution," he writes, "but they bank on their profession...

...In all too many cases, the only thing one must give up is the notion that the opinion of one's colleagues is more important than the truth, or common sense, or even self-respect...

...Above all, was New York so inexpensive fifty years ago, taking into account what people earned...

...However, there is still a threat...

...these in turn would be rejected by American society outright...

...But, as he himself notes, the journals they have led, particularly Commentary and the Public Interest, have been unusually open to new contributors...

...This not only forces them to speak the language of daily life, but makes them more sensitive to the realities of the everyday world...

...Further, things may not be quite as bad today as Jacoby makes out...

...throned not the New Left but George Wallace...

...And who would be more likely to receive an honorary degree from an Ivy League university...

...His notion of a public intellectual is a left-wing intellectual, and he is right to note that there is no evident successor-generation to replace the Irving Howes and the Alfred Kazins...

...consequently, there is a constant interpenetration between the professoriat and other leadership groups in the society...

...it is not a skill in which they were trained, and they are certainly not about to pick it up along the way...

...Apart from being located in large metropolitan centers, these institutions have something else in common...

...Referring to the senior generation of Jewish neoconservatives (Kristol, Podhoretz, Hook, Glazer, etc...

...Jacoby's contribution is to document, with considerable accuracy and verve, the state of the American academy today, and its relationship—or rather, its disconnection—with intellectual life broadly speaking...

...In my twelve years before the mast—first at Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and subsequently in Eugene, Oregon—I can recall exactly one such evening, and our hosts ended up rather embarrassed by it all, as if instead of ranging rather widely on a series of public issues, their guests had brought up the finer points of incest or necrophilia...

...this is the way their mentors and other Olympians of their field tend to write...

...But he misses the point, which is that the chief recruiting ground for this movement is largely dissident academics, or people who in other ages would have gone on to become so—men and women who are bored with THE LAST INTELLECTUALS: AMERICAN CULTURE IN THE AGE OF ACADEME Russell Jacoby/Basic Books/$18.95 Mark Falcoff 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 university life, tired of expressing their ideas in a fog of jargon, and sick of paying tribute to a Marxism in which they no longer believe (if indeed they ever did...

...Where, he asks, are the C. Wright Mills's of today and tomorrow...

...What is new is the think tank-cummagazine, which has made possible the re-urbanization of a new intellectual class...

...instead of continually bouncing off each other like academics, they carry on dialogue with an ever-changing cast of characters, many of whom are not themselves intellectuals...

...Edmund Wilson's diaries for the 1930s and 1940s are full of worries about money, and he, after all, was one of the most productive writers of his time, who never had difficulty placing his articles...

...Insofar as any political agenda is at work, it is very different from the one Jacoby suggests...

...Professionalization also spells privatization, a withdrawal from the larger public universe...

...Finally, The Last Intellectuals underlines certain important changes in American life since World War II as they affect the cultural scene, particularly the growth of suburbs and the decline of city-centers, hence, the passing of "bohemia...

...T he problem with The Last Intellec- t tuals is that it doesn't stop at description, but ventures into thickets of analysis, where the author often loses his way...

...The fact that many are Marxists is purely incidental to this fact...

...Again, however, this lack may not be felt by those for whom the principal objective is ideological hegemony in a restricted space, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 41 rather than a more diffuse (and problematic) cultural influence in the society at large...

...Their intellectuals face outward...

...hence, they continuously rail against what they imagine as the threat from the universities...

...There is the Institute for Contemporary Studies in San Francisco, the Manhattan Institute in New York, and a host of institutions set up to study specific issues relating to individual states of the union, usually located in important regional centers...

...Or, stated inversely, the increasing dispersion of intellectual life to an archipelago of university towns which, for reasons of geography alone, cannot hope to play the role of the New York intellectual scene of the 1930s and 1940s...

...peres for "writing like a journalist...

...They are also free from the pressures of peers to conform, since they do not live in the asphyxiating environment of the university town...

...This subterranean discontent might surface, reconnecting with public life...

...Norman Podhoretz and Sidney Hook...

...participation in both world wars, and who ended his life believing he was too good for this country...

...No more cheap rents, inexpensive restaurants, all night bookshops, ready gathering places for an independent intelligentsia...

...Marxists have no difficulty sailing through to tenure...

...I hope they are right...

...Since the defeat of McGovern in 1972, the academic left has retreated to a defensive perimeter where, by redefining the boundaries, they can wholly control the environment...

...Most American academics neither can nor wish to write in readable English prose...

...The world," he tells us with a perfectly straight face, "is slithering toward nuclear disaster, global pollution, and starvation, but one Marxist critic writing on another brightly trades in Marxist academic futures...

...indeed, in no other way could their work be considered "serious...

...For many professors in many universities, academic freedom meant nothing more than the freedom to be academic...

...Thus—bad news, Mr...

...Louis, and Kalamazoo—but, as he explains, the peculiar circumstances attending their concentration in the academy has tended to neuter them politically...

...It is certainly true, for example, that just about the last thing you can ever expect to hear at an academic dinner table in this country is a serious conversation about books and ideas...

...There are magazines like the Public Interest/National Interest, which are soon to be relocated in one center in Washington, but also the New Criterion and Grand Street in New York and the Atlantic in Boston...

...government—knows that this is very far from the case...

...no doubt Jews in the final analysis have more reason to appreciate the United States than, say, Edmund Wilson, who opposed U.S...

...The price, indeed, of being a public intellectual in the United States is very nearly to leave academia altogether, a decision which —given the salary and general environment—is not as difficult as it once might have been...

...Better to confine one's activities to "theory building," or raising money for the guerrillas in El Salvador (or both), and wait for better days (when the intelligentsia and the masses finally speak the same language...

...And, of course, there is the New Republic, produced in Washington but owned (and edited) by Martin Peretz, who lives in Cambridge...

...It puts its finger, also, upon one of the fundamental differences between academic life in continental Europe and this country...

...If our Marxist academics actually began to write in plain English, they would reveal their public purposes...

...he asks, "Is it possible that Jewish intellectuals visited radicalism, while more non-Jewish intellectuals stayed the winter...

...Though conservatives do, as Jacoby says, worry about what is being taught in universities, perhaps their concerns are overwrought...

...It is fascinating, by way of contrast, to read Jacoby's version of the plight of academic freedom in American universities today...

...Did the radicalism steeped in anxiety slide into conservatism, while the Texan, Puritan, or Scottish identities of Mills or Wilson or Vidal or Galbraith gave rise to a bony radicalism more resistant to economic and social blandishments...

...it is Jacoby who is dissatisfied...

...During the sixties one of the war cries of the campus left was "Power to the people...

...See Joseph Epstein, "A Case of Academic Freedom," Commentary, September 1986...

...Actually, what many of us know is that most academic 'The high incidence of Jews in the neoconservative movement elicits some remarkably vicious comments from Jacoby, which suggest deep-seated grudges or envies —or both...

...In the former, universities tend to be located in major cities...

...Where, indeed...

...and that those few leftists who have failed to obtain tenure have had to be grossly deficient in their professional life—some have failed to make the grade because they chose to test the civility of academic life beyond its furthest limits...

...On one hand, he fully concedes that the McCarthyite nightmare is quite over...

...With all its merits, this book is in many ways nothing but an excuse for its author to vent his spleen against neoconservatives, but also against the academic left, which he sees as too self-centered and self-satisfied to work for radical social change...

...According to him, the only people now capable of doing this are neoconservatives, a tiny, corrupt, and even malevolent minority (many of them Jews, by the way) who have sold out to right-wing foundations and the Reagan Administration...

...But to suggest that their "bony radicalism" arises from a higher sense of moral purpose—particularly in the case of Vidal—is as far from the truth as it is possible to go...

...that most academics are, in fact, left-of-center, some decidedly so...

...according to frequent reports in the press, most students these days are mainly interested in getting out of school as expeditiously as possible and making lots of money...

...if that is so, they cannot possibly be much impressed with their professors, whose ideas and interests have only gotten them this far...

...One cannot help wondering if Jacoby is aware of the snobbery and self-hatred he has betrayed here...

...There the "people" are now in power...

...Not every contemporary academic has dropped out of the public discourse—the names of James Tuttleton, or Kenneth S. Lynn, or Robert H. Ferrell, or Joseph Epstein immediately come to mind, as do Richard Pipes, Irving Louis Horowitz, and James Q. Wilson...

...Calero and inciting a riot which caused the cancellation of his talk...

...There are Mark Falcoff is a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations...

...Now, there is something about this description which will immediately strike a note of familiarity with anyone who has spent time at an American university during the last twenty or so years...

...It would be interesting to know where Jacoby would put the case of Northwestern University professor Barbara Foley, who violently disrupted a meeting where Adolfo Calero, leader of the Nicaraguan resistance, was supposed to speak.3) Jacoby hints darkly that the arcane language of much of contemporary social science is due to the need to mask radical thought from funding agencies...

...How good were the "public intellectuals" of the 1930s and 1940s...

...If actually applied literally at that time, however, it would have en'For this breach of academic citizenship Professor Foley was denied tenure by the Northwestern administration, over the protests of the vast majority of her colleagues, who saw nothing wrong in throwing red paint on Mr...

...Though he has taught at a number of American universities, Jacoby's grasp of the wider trends in our cultural life seems uncertain—which, given his own frame of reference, may not be so illogical...

...His book is not about the disappearance of intellectuals as such, then, but about what he sees as the passing of a certain kind of intellectual—one who can write in the language of public discourse, and raise basic issues in wider public forums...

...It has found its fictional archetype in Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man (London, 1975...

...those who judge their work also write thusly...

...Actually, however, anyone vaguely familiar with the foundation world—or, for that matter, even certain branches and extensions of the U.S...

...I think they are wrong...

...Small wonder so few are leftists...

...That is the book that Jacoby started to write, and one wishes he had tried to finish...

...Conservatives suspect and fear this...

...Jacoby also misses an essential point about American university life...

...that Marxists are tenured and heavily entrenched in the system...

...But it is academia, not intellectual life, which is in trouble in America...

...thing about the United States worth writing a book about—the growth of university communities whose intellectual products are basically irrelevant to the broader cultural issues facing our society...

...In academic life, as it used to be said about the Congress, "to get along, you have to go along...

...To be sure, not everyone in the academy considers this cost excessive...

...the price which they have had to pay, however, is a decreased relevance to American society...

...we all know (or have known) the academic for whom the high point in any fortnight is the arrival of the New York Review of Books...

...Many of these are in Washington, D.C.—the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Brookings Institution—but some are not...

...Books that deplore the passing of an age always make one wonder if things were really so golden in times of old...

...Jacoby makes much of the generational factor—as if Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Norman Podhoretz, and others are something of an endangered species...

...We "all know," he writes, of "cases of teachers forced out, not because they were imperfect professionals, but because they were something more: public intellectuals and radicals...

...that most conservatives have trouble even getting hired...

...Or Gore Vidal, Edmund Wilson, and John Kenneth Galbraith...

...Jacoby—there is a whole new crop coming along, including Nick Eberstadt, Joshua Muravchik, Scott McConnell, David Gress, Bruce Bawer, Mary Tedeschi, Mark Lilla, Roger Kaplan, Suzanne Garment, Terry Teachout, Daniel Pipes, Eliot Cohen, Stephen Schwartz, Fernanda Eberstadt, Carol Iannone, and many, many others, a few under thirty, many under forty, and all under fifty.2 Again, as Jacoby points out, Kristol himself has been something of a one-man employment agency for dozens of younger neoconservatives (myself included...

...It is self-evident that most of the really important intellectual discussions in this country are taking place in magazines, not "learned" journals...

...plenty of left-wing, even Marxist intellectuals out there—not merely in large university centers like Madison, Ann Arbor, and Berkeley, but also at community colleges in Detroit, St...

...or Gore Vidal, who derives a sense of self-esteem from poking fun at our most sacred institutions...