With a reply

...A more remote effect has been the splintering up of teaching responsibilities by the various movements of advocacy teaching...

...Both set the thoughts of the individual on a par with the demands of the group...

...I agree with Gitlin that classes inculcating the basic skills of "critical detachment" from mass culture may now actually be necessary even in college...

...Within the humanities the following two criteria have some utility: (1) The assigned work in question should be something that students would not routinely find for themselves...

...This rigid proscription against judgment, or taste, has its corollary in the wish for a whole-length remodeling of our image of authors and readers...

...What if it turns out that tolerance, the encouragement of free discussion, is itself a Western idea...

...But nothing in the nature of an academy makes it so...

...But it has also led to an expectation among many students and scholars of finding in the university itself the community of like-minded and like-behaving persons that one is denied elsewhere, because they are dispersed, or inarticulate, or persecuted, or simply because not many of them exist outside universities...

...I object here to the "us...

...But that is not what they seek in any case...

...asks Todd Gitlin...

...The liberal ideal of tolerance, which drew no comparable limits around permissible speech, will have been exposed as part of the imperial ethic of "the West...

...and (2) The work should meet the teacher's highest standard of what is worth reading and worth talking about...

...For some time now, the universities have existed in a compensatory relationship to the political culture outside them...

...To one degree or another these movements tend to be intolerant, but, it is sometimes said, the worst they could produce by acting together is an incoherent pluralism...

...If academic life in this country becomes less free in the near future, one way it may happen is by a series of concessions to the sensitivities of the advocacy groups I mentioned above...

...What proportion of new and old books should we assign to students...

...This picture can be called far-fetched...

...But again, it all depends on which fathers you have in mind...

...The defeat of the latter entity will have been worth the sacrifice...

...If it is argued that some of the judges were bigoted, I ask whether we can get the benefit of their judgments without falling prey to their bigotry...

...For they naturally defend against one kind of knowledge—the kind that challenges the protective instinct of a group-identity...

...The answer often given is a very hasty, ill-informed, and self-satisfied "No...

...Thus the choices of criticism are reduced to the knowledge that any author I can care for will be "my type of person...

...Notice that both (1) and (2) refer to the quality of the work and not the interest of a possible approach to it...

...I can imagine a different outcome: a negotiated economy of rival intolerances, in which the active and energetic groups work in concert, and together shape the curriculum of higher education...

...Beneficiaries of institutional compassion, they will control the scene of education to assure that nothing wrong, or strange, or possibly injurious to the group-esteem of their members, gets said in the public forum of the classroom or the quad...

...Bolingbroke, Pope, and Voltaire come out sounding shallow today (with their stress on universal truths and a translatable core of response...

...That still leaves uncertain how we justify the elements of a given curriculum...

...Cynthia Epstein reflects that "the classics," for all the fresh thinking they may prompt, "have probably also led us astray...

...Both refuse to associate the prestige of learning with the brute facts of authority and force...

...We have grown used to regarding the academy as the freest part of a society remarkable for its freedom of speech and expression...

...A person who conceives of reading in relation to some corporate body, some us—contemporary improvers, consciousness raisers, male leaders, or whatever— has been led astray even before the reading began, and any conclusion that follows has interest only for the historian of received ideas...

...Doubtless, as Epstein goes on to observe, the "founding philosophical fathers" were parochial, by our modern lights, in their understanding of "human nature...

...Maybe because their idiom is so dated, those appeals have been less often attacked in the current climate than the parallel Enlightenment arguments for tolerance...

...In a class on modernism in the visual arts, Cocteau's Blood of a Poet might well pass both tests...

...I defend a kind of reading that wants to lead just one person astray...

...But the conception feels rather different if one reads inquisitively in Hume and Burke and Joseph Butler (with their stress on species-loyalty and its affective implications...

...Pretty clearly, this way of thinking is anti-intellectual and anti-individual, but it is widespread in the academy now, and it suggests how far the fate of individual thought may indeed depend on the fate of liberal learning...

...SPRING • 1990 • 257...

...To the extent that we cooperate, our reading will come to be guided by the demands of our own membership in a group...

...Must we on that account agree to teach it merely as one more plausible notion among the many lively alternatives...

...The mixed good it brings to that person's life will be the "wayfaring virtue" Milton speaks of, in Areopagitica, as an inevitable result of the clash of truth with falsehood and of truth with truth...

...This is the initial judgment that must be made: those who cannot do so have not begun to know their own minds, and ought not to be in the business of instructing others...

...The sciences, of course, would still go on as they have always done...

...An immediate effect of this anomaly has been a confusion, in the habits of study, between the mood of asking questions and the mood of soliciting 256 • DISSENT Communications grievances...

...Absurdities are therefore countenanced in school that would scarcely have come to light except for the conviction that they somehow "balance" absurdities of an opposite sort in the society at large...

...And the professions would continue to induct students after graduation—an ever more cynical mass of young persons, surer than ever before that society, like the culture they have learned about in school, is nothing but a contest between victims and victors, with no such thing as a common object of admiration...

...So do I and so have many educators since the end of the eighteenth century...

...And both look on the breakup of group practices as an occasionally necessary side effect of the creation of individuals...

...In a class on narratives of the frontier, "The Beverly Hillbillies" would be unlikely to pass either test...

...In this last sense of the words, human nature seems to me an idea one ought not to surrender too quickly— whatever the promptings from the communitarians in political theory, and from a host of Foucault-inspired believers in macroscholarship and micropolitics...

...Divided by sex, race, class, or geography, united only in their belief that all significant speech is political speech, these groups will have little to say to each other...

...He supports some reasonable blend of the two...

...Even such small sects can add up to a large threat to uncoerced discussion at a university...

...We are urged to praise books in keeping with their promotion of certain social aims, and to admire authors for the obviousness with which they participate in a certain group...

...Or read the articles on Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn now at last emerging from Soviet academicians, which describe a recent milieu of proscription apart from the machinery of the state...

...Read the anonymous attacks on the salons of the French academy of painting, in the aristocratic eighteenth century, and again in the republican nineteenth century...

...Academies, in fact, are well adapted to set limits to the freedom of expression or to fix a conformity of opinion...

...Notice also that neither criterion makes any reference to the age or the medium of the work...

...If so, the scholars best equipped to carry out teaching on that model remain in the social sciences...

...It was a fear of just this nurturing and sheltering and oppressive tendency in every parochial community that provoked the great Enlightenment appeals to cosmopolitanism more than two centuries ago (including some memorable passages of the Federalist Papers...

...It is—I hope that it is...

...The word itself is misleading as well as solemn, and I used article was something different: the relation of individual thought to the reading of good books...

...The debate about the curriculum has become the accidental focus in which a good many tensions of American society are dramatized...

...As a basis for common discussion, this state of things is unhealthy enough...

...I still find a useful test of that relation in the opinions of qualified judges both living and dead...

...But as moral and intellectual goods, cosmopolitanism and tolerance are closely connected...