The "Double Life" in Academia

...To some, like Stephen Balch and Herbert London, it is evidence that "the American campus is now the nesting place for a significant population of political extremists . . . the campus has probably become American extremism's principal address...

...for the neoconservatives, this is a struggle for Western civilization...

...Instead, they use code words to appeal to a liberal audience...

...Because, "as a species of utopian delusion, it is unable to withstand rigorous, scholarly scrutiny...

...It's not so much the quantitative as the qualitative threat of the New Left in the academy that troubles the neoconservatives...

...As for the muddling of truth and ideology, teaching and indoctrination, the Carnegie Foundation report suggests that liberal views about the place of politics in the university are probably as strong as ever...

...Although a good deal of postmodern literary theory has been devoted to this question, it has been written in the language of its discipline and, as yet, has not contributed much to the general debate...

...Stanford will support the Hoover Institution, and the City University of New York the Socialist Scholars Conference...

...Scholarship, too, benefits from the free play of ideas, stripped as far as possible of stuffy, "value-free" conventions...

...There will be conservative journals and radical ones...

...but the highest ideals of that civilization carry their own persuasiveness, and are the precursors of our own...

...And "the distinction between teaching and indoctrination altogether evaporates...

...Instead of obediently shuffling rightward, "the spectrum of respectable opinion" in the academy has shifted "further and further to the Left...

...the neoconservative as ideological warrior strives noisily to exclude certain kinds of inquiry and to narrow the forum...

...Three decades later, we are neck-deep in another period of complacency, conventionality, and nationalism, but fortunately the academy has not conformed as supinely as it once did (though it has by no means been immune to the general rightward drift...

...But academics never have been able to maintain in practice the arm's distance from colleagues that ideological pluralism demands...

...This is the neoconservative in the selfappointed role that Peter Steinfels has called the "counterintellectual": one whose duty it is to counteract the egoism and undiscipline of the intellectual while somehow remaining an intellectual oneself...

...When asked which goals were most important for undergraduate teaching, faculty mentioned "tolerance of diversity" most often, and 90 percent mentioned "competence in mathematics" and "appreciation of literature and the arts...

...Gertrude Himmelfarb, "Denigrating the Rule of Reason," Harper's, April 1984...

...Over half agreed that scholarship should not consider social implications...

...Sir Walter Scott—"fortunate man...

...Graduates of the Class of 1968 are finally turning out their "big books," their tickets to tenure, and with the power and confidence that tenure endows they are extending their tendrils into the Establishment...

...have been reluctant to address for fear of reviving the warfare of the 1960s...

...Commentary, February 1986...

...So it's the academy that is the problem...

...Only the neoconservatives could transmute a mild resistance to prevailing ideological winds into a latter-day Gunpowder Plot...

...Although rarely articulating it, most radical academics respond in practice to this area of ambiguity by embracing a kind of ideological pluralism...

...Nuechterlein) So the "open forum" should not include radicals...

...This is not just crankiness or hypocrisy on the part of the neoconservatives (though they are not short of those commodities): it is a sign of the central dilemma of neoconservative thought...

...Some neoconservatives have adopted another, more honorable response to schizophrenia—still no cure—by choosing to lead a double life...

...The dilemma has been acknowledged by neoconservatives themselves...

...But that is a poor reason for dodging the question of how politics and scholarship do mix...

...Their liberalism may be a mere tactic, but that is no reason to spurn liberalism ourselves...

...When I was a graduate student at Princeton in the early Fifties," fondly remembers Norman Cantor, "one of my fellow students turned out to be a Marxist...

...They claim to teach their students not a dogma but a method: how to think for themselves...

...Then you must share the odd view that the study of the humanities in elite institutions like the Ivies is an essential bulwark of social cohesion, while disregarding the sharper shift to the right in the places where most Americans are educated...

...Once again, the treason of the intellectuals, but compounded first by the vast extension of higher education and compounded again by the irresponsibility of the New Left...

...They have to be policed, and the neoconservatives are bursting to offer themselves as policemen...

...WINTER • 1989 • 99...

...Still, even the veneer of liberalism has had beneficial effects...

...They try not to apply ideological criteria too explicitly to hiring searches...

...Dramatic cases of political perversion stalk the pages of neocon journals: Maoist Barbara Foley challenges her weak-kneed liberal colleagues at the University of Chicago to tenure her...

...Belying the notion that since the late 1960s the New Left has institutionalized itself in the academy, these figures represent a perceptible shift to the right from a similar study undertaken in 1969...

...Some of the ideological institutions are actually housed WINTER • 1989 • 97 Academia within the liberal university, and the thin partitions separating them are easily breached...

...To do so, they must not only appeal to the liberal ideals of the open forum and reasoned scholarship, but also insist upon limits to that forum and apply their own ideological understanding of "reason" to scholarship...

...In the New York Times Magazine, Colin Campbell sings of a time when the Yale English department "resemble[d] a sort of English country estate...

...Everything was in order...

...How then do we get rid of the radicals while still preserving an "open forum...

...It is a battle they want very much to fight...

...Here is the second point that we should concede to the neoconservatives, who have at least raised the question of how ideological people should comport themselves in the academy...

...This new-found power is allowing them to change the rules of the game and to perpetuate their hegemony long after their historical moment has passed...

...No one wants a return to the slugfests of 1968, when the university was nothing but politics...

...No, for "by its very nature, radical scholarship can only be a caricature of the real thing...

...By day, they may work and teach peacefully in the university, as "counterintellectuals...

...Hilton Kramer, "A Note on the New Criterion," New Criterion, September 1982...

...The neoconservatives pretend to be defenders of the liberal ideals traditionally associated with academic freedom...

...Some thirty years ago in these pages, William L. Neumann registered an eloquent protest against the acquiescence of American academics to the conservative temper of their time...

...All they want, they say, is to restore politeness and decorum, truth and objectivity...

...Meanwhile, "open forums" should have carefully defined limits...

...Participating in a public debate on the content of a liberal education will not be as safe or simple as the refuge of ideological pluralism...

...the history departments at Princeton and New York University have been "taken over by the Marxists and their radical feminist allies...

...Stanford suffers from the Hoover Institution, too...

...There is no such thing, they say, as "valuefree" scholarship, and the defense of "valuefree" scholarship has generally served as a thin disguise for a defense of the political status quo...

...Hailing from the new professional middle class themselves, they know that it is not possible simply to roll the academy back to the 1950s...

...First, you must accept Cantor's very broad definition of a Marxist, so broad as to include my colleague Lawrence Stone, the historian, whose last known political commitment was to Gary Hart...

...Forms of campus expression introduced in the 1960s — demonstrations, teach-ins, political rallies dressed up as educational "forums" —must be delegitimized...

...In the old days," rhapsodizes Joseph Epstein, one can imagine a strong English-department chairman, in the approved English-professor manner, taking Prof...

...By night (or on sabbatical), they devote themselves to ideological warfare through the neoconservative journals, think tanks, institutes, etc...

...The neoconservatives, therefore, want badly to neutralize the academy, to cast out the ideologues (that is, the left-wing ones...

...This paradox is the source of the schizophrenia evident in the neocon ideal of the university...

...Stephen H. Balch, "Radical Delusions," and Stanley Rothman, "Academics on the Left," Society, March/April 1986...

...One lives the double life, but the Marxists don't...

...Those who have embraced the double life have at least acknowledged the difficulties of pursuing ideological commitments in the liberal forum of the university...

...No one wins tenure at an elite institution for publishing in the Radical History Review or the Insurgent Sociologist...

...The proportion of "left" faculty, 5.8 percent nationally, was found to rise to 6.3 percent when research universities alone were considered and to 6.7 percent at four-year liberal arts colleges...

...The double life is also psychologically taxing...

...Frederick Crews, "Dialectical Immaterialism," American Scholar, Autumn 1985...

...If we were all more frank about acknowledging this common ground, then we might be in a better position to engage in the common debate about the function and content of higher education, a debate that is inevitable...

...American historical writing . . . embodies the prosperity, the conventionality and the nationalist emphasis of the Truman-Eisenhower years...

...They resist the left-wing machismo that insists upon colorful displays of political commitment at every possible opportunity...

...q Notes This article is based on an unscientific sampling of neoconservative literature on academic politics since 1980...

...Academics are constantly being asked to judge their peers...

...Of course, the diffuseness of the modern university is not the fault of radicals...

...We are faced with a paradox," Stanley Rothman writes in Society...

...Norman Cantor, "The Real Crisis in the Humanities Today," New Criterion, June 1985 and letter to the New Criterion, December 1985...

...By helping them with their ambiguity, we would be helping ourselves with ours as well...

...On the other hand, insofar as we directly confront them, we contribute to some degree to the politicization of the university...

...They are cheerfully open about their political views when for whatever reason these arise, but they do not insist that their politics should always be immediately visible in their work...

...University teaching is, after all, one of the most collegial of professions...

...They also understand that intellectual battles are now fought, more or less inevitably, on political (rather than, say, religious) terrain...

...My own department does not teach a standard introductory history course because, in large part, we cannot agree on what should go into it...

...There, free from distracting diversity, students, and "contemporary noise" —free also from the obligation to be polite and collegial—they can fire undiluted ideological salvos without harming liberal values...

...Colin Campbell, "The Tyranny of the Yale Critics," New York Times Magazine, Feb...

...Ah, "the old days...

...They hold that academics should be encouraged to pursue their ideologically committed scholarship and teaching, whatever its coloration...

...Thus Harvard has a "core curriculum" that has no core...

...It is, at best, a fruitless struggle, trying to feed the generation of the 1990s on the stale and unnourishing food of the 1950s...

...Because of the great diversity available in American higher education, students will be exposed to a wide variety of positions and be able to choose for themselves...

...o]nly those conditioned by limited expectations of human capability can be satisfied by limited achievements, and such people are not, by definition, radical...

...lived in a tidier and more fastidious intellectual universe than ours," whereas today "there are many worse disasters to be visited upon the life of culture than the Edinburgh Review...

...The Hoover Institution, in many ways an admirable neoconservative think tank, suffers from being a more-or-less organic part of Stanford University...

...Examination of specific disciplines within these elite institutions revealed powerful concentrations: 10.2 percent in English literature, 19.8 percent in history, 21.7 percent in philosophy, and 37 percent in sociology...

...2 In a 1969 survey, 5 percent of academics characterized their politics as "left," 41 percent "liberal," 27 percent "middle-of-the-road," 25 percent "moderately conservative" and 3 percent "strongly conservative...

...The neoconservatives are right to complain that it fragments knowledge, confuses students, weakens the power of the teacher...

...They do not shrink from speaking at demonstrations or teach-ins, but they understand the difference between this exercise of free speech and the kind of speaking they do in lectures and seminars...

...No one, equally, wants a return to the monolithic academy of the 1950s, in which the discrete concerns of white upper-class males were embodied in "value-free" scholarship...

...This could be done by rolling back numbers and funding to 1950s levels, but the neoconservatives are too canny to swallow that political poison (though there is a taste of it in the creepy nostalgia for the "good old days...

...They want to turn the new class from a social corrosive into a social cement...

...Desperately casting about to find some beds still infested with Reds, neoconservative journals have in the last few years launched their own "unremitting attack" on the elite institutions of American higher education...

...A study of ancient Greece was a study of life, not a preachment or conversion...

...What should universities teach...

...Why should they...

...Seizing on the fine print of the data, they could still find confirmation for some of their worst fears...

...This schizophrenia can lead to some awful hypocrisies...

...The neoconservative response to the vacuity of the coreless curriculum has been to fight a covert action in favor of the old canons and "value-free" social-science techniques of the unreconstructed academy...

...Joseph Epstein, "Reviewing and Being Reviewed," New Criterion, December 1982...

...knowledge should be considered as "always tentative, subject to falsification through the acquisition of new evidence, and never to be cloaked in the garb of definitive pronouncements" (Balch and London, 48...

...Universities are being gradually converted "from open forums for the examination of ideas into organizations with established ideological lines...

...The Dreier case, over which left-leaning faculty at Tufts seemed split, also illustrates the complete inability of the New Left to organize conspiracies and corruptions— an incapacity one would have thought was abundantly illustrated in the 1960s...

...On that level, there is a great silence...

...In these maneuvers the radicals are assisted by that old right-wing bugaboo, the "national media," who give "rave reviews" to any old piece of radical rubbish and thus allow pseudointellectuals to "develop national reputations on the basis of work that would once have been dismissed as frivolous at best...

...Although they do not like to think so, here they share some common ground with liberals and with neoconservatives, too...

...the study of literature at Yale has been "hijacked" by "philosophic terrorists...

...But there is another ideal of the academy more or less explicit in neoconservatism...

...9, 1986...

...A bellcurve distribution resulted: 5.8 percent "left," 33.8 percent "liberal," 26.6 percent "middleofthe-road," 29.6 percent "moderately conservative," and 4.2 percent "strongly conservative...

...I want here to examine their critique of the academy, a critique that appears in virtually interchangeable articles in Commentary, the New Criterion, Society, and the American Scholar.' In 1984, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching asked five thousand teachers in two- and four-year American colleges about their political views...

...For Hilton Kramer, the golden age is not the 1950s or even the 1920s, but the 1820s...

...We cannot simply go about our business, for that leaves the field to the ideologues...

...Yet neoconservative intellectuals have allowed themselves to be traumatized by these figures...

...Nothing worries the neoconservatives more than the damage done to the social and cultural fabric by unrestrained individualism...

...In the future, tenure will be granted not to the superior minds, but to the politically "correct...

...It challenged the legitimacy of the old standards, but it is no basis for legitimating new ones...

...Today the culture is disordered, cluttered with bad dissenters, and the deep, silent contemplation of thinkers is shattered by what Joseph Epstein calls "the contemporary noise": women's liberation, mid-life crisis, sexual identity...

...If you toss these objective standards overboard, academia will be plagued by patronage and corruption and, indeed, by the kind of internal strife from which neoconservatives want to protect the university...

...Space and resources must be provided so that individual inquiry can be pursued in contemplative silence, free from "the contemporary noise...

...Naturally, the superior minds are demoralized by this kind of corruption, and they avoid academic careers...

...He was forced to leave...

...We might incidentally reduce some of the ideological pressure on the academy that the neoconservatives fear and that causes them to entertain lurid fantasies of revanchism, which causes them, that is, to violate the partitions of the double life...

...indeed, Peter Dreier lost a celebrated tenure battle at the Tufts Sociology Department, it is said, for publishing in far less controversial journals like Social Policy...

...They describe their teaching and scholarship as "critical," not always as "radical...

...In my own field, history, the tasks are clear: "the restoration of reason to history," reason being defined by Gertrude Himmelfarb as "the rational ordering of society by means of constitutions, political institutions, and laws...

...Research is no longer about the search for truth: "the methods of scholarly inquiry, the level of intellectual discourse, and simple standards of honesty have gradually been degraded to accommodate ideological ends...

...To be sure, "in the old days" radicals would not get even as far as an untenured post...

...X aside to say, "Look here, X, do be a good fellow and forget that rot about the bourgeois attitudes of the New England writers I understand you are teaching...

...If Prof...

...In an odd deviation from their usual boosterism, they see 96 • DISSENT Academia this problem as a fault line running back to our Puritan forebears, who bequeathed to American society a vision of "Adamic innocence" and unreasonably "high expectations about human and institutional perfectibility...

...First, it suggests that the truce that ideological pluralism represents is no longer tenable, that it is time to move on from the pedagogical resting place at which the academy has been stuck for too long...

...Surreptitiously...

...It is not easy to live this double life...

...So neoconservatives find it difficult to con fine themselves to the passivity of the "counterintellectual...

...Why not articulate and justify the place of women's studies, cultural criticism, social and labor history, and historical sociology in a liberal education...

...At the very top of the 94 • DISSENT Academia scale, at the Ivies and comparable institutions outside the Northeast, Norman Cantor extrapolated, "at least 50% of the best minds are now committed to [Marxist and neo-Marxist] ideologies, and among scholars below the age of 40, 75% are so committed...

...If there are more radicals in the academy today than twenty years ago—and the Carnegie study suggests there are not—it cannot be attributed to a well-organized conspiracy...

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

...Balch and London hold out for the ideals of Western civilization . . . the study of classics of political theory or world literature • . . the deposited wisdom of civilization...

...The liberalism of the "counterintellectual" is almost entirely tactical...

...Unless some common discourse is restored among colleagues of widely diverging commitments, radical scholars will organize against conservatives within departments to hire "the best" (i.e., the best radical scholars), and vice versa...

...But, to another neoconservative, history is the endless dismal accountings of frustration, fragmentation, and loss that make up the record of organized social life...

...But this modest display of independence is not to everyone's liking...

...Recently this neoconservative counterattack has taken organizational form in the modestly titled National Association of Scholars, which aims to win back control of the academy from the "barbar ians" of the Class of 1968...

...It is a method for restoring a more congenial political atmosphere, not a good in itself...

...Nor did Barbara Foley win tenure at Chicago...

...It is a cop-out, a refusal to make educational policy...

...Similarly, you must consider all ideological systems that have come after Marxism, in response to its failures—like structuralism and poststructuralism— to be "post-Marxism" or "neo-Marxism" and cast them into the same circle of Hell...

...But the problem of excessive individualism has been aggravated disastrously since the Second World War by the rise of a new professional middle class, even more detached from realism than the old bourgeoisie...

...Again, simply on the surface of things, this scenario is preposterous...

...If one is ranting and raving at night about the threat to liberties posed by classroom radicals, it is difficult to walk into the office in the morning and share a liberal cup of coffee with a Marxist colleague...

...if he were not yet tenured, the request would no doubt be more insistent...

...Academic radicals tend to sweep aside the subject altogether, denying that a double life could be led, that scholarship and politics could be separated...

...X were tenured, the request would be a friendly one...

...it is a once-and-for-all transformation of intellectual life...

...One is still handicapped, and this is no Easter egg roll...

...But it attracts public attention because it does address fundamental questions about the role of the academy that academics— of all people...

...Instead we offer a smorgasbord, perplexing and delightful...

...On the whole, the neoconservatives stood fastidiously aside from the campaign against David Abraham, but they did nothing to stop it...

...Stephen H. Balch and Herbert I. London, "The Tenured Left," Commentary, October 1986...

...A far better organized—and far more successful—ideological campaign was mobilized from the right against a young historian, David Abraham, a Marxist who did not get tenure at "Marxist" Princeton and who (thanks to intensive lobbyWINTER • 1989 • 95 Academia ing by prominent anti-Marxists) has now been driven out of the profession altogether...

...Why...

...There is going to be a national debate about what universities should teach, and academics of the left cannot abstain from it...

...trendy administrators try to cram women's studies down the craws of unwilling Kenyon College students...

...But leave these cavils aside and consider the neoconservatives' chief concern, that is, the virulence of the New Left...

...But in between lies a huge area of ambiguity...

...Universities should be "open forums for the examination of ideas," says Balch (p...

...The neoconservative critique—for all its hysteria and hypocrisy—might, therefore, have something to teach us...

...It asserted the claims of deprived social groups and the excluded parts of the ideological spectrum for a place at the academic table...

...The most important essays considered and cited are James Nuechterlein, "Radical Historians," Commentary, October 1980...

...So it turns out that the open forum should not be very open at all...

...The double life—accepting that different standards of political behavior obtain inside and outside the university—has much to recommend it...

...Today's American historian probably reflects his age more completely than in any previous generation," he wrote...

...In the neocon fantasy, this is not just a generational turnover...

...Why not leap at a chance to make more 98 • DISSENT Academia coherent and consensual those changes in academic style and substance that have so quietly revolutionized the campus over the last generation...

...As a wedge to break up the old, false consensus, ideological pluralism made a lot of sense...

...The neoconservative as "counterintellectual" quietly defends the liberal values of free inquiry and the open forum...

...it has many other sources, not least the premium now placed on over- specialized research...

...2 It will be interesting to see how the National Association of Scholars—its founding conference described by the New York Times (November 15, 1988) as "more typical of a political rally than of an academic conference"— will negotiate this paradox...

...Elizabeth Lilla, "Who's Afraid of Women's Studies...

...The liberal academy reconciles people to these judgments by assuming that there is some kind of objective standard upon which everyone can rely...

...As the Carnegie statistics suggest, many radical faculty already accept the double life in practice...

...This can amount to an academy "in danger" only if you share the most peculiar neoconservative obsessions...

...Paul Hollander, "The Survival of the Adversary Culture," Partisan Review 53 (1986...

...Within this new class, the least responsible of all are the Luftmenschen of the academy, itself described as "a kind of heaven for concepts that have slipped their earthly moorings...

...Only about a quarter of all academics polled thought that their colleagues' teaching and research even "reflected" their politics...

...Radicals "press for hiring scholars who share their outlook" and are "more sure than traditional liberals that those who are not good radicals are not very smart and do not deserve tenure track appointments" (Rothman, 6...