Reviews Democratic Culture

...In 1992 Cole headed the Clinton transition team's "cluster" for labor, humanities, and education and was herself under consideration for secretary of education...

...But his haste to show up the right's recklessness can make him careless...

...But even if Democratic Culture were as flush as its counterparts on the right, it remains uncertain, judging from their performances to date, whether the contributors to the newsletter would ever succeed in getting their message across to a larger public...

...Although the tone of Democratic Culture is far more restrained than the cheerfully sanguinary approach of Heterodoxy, both publications seethe with ideological animus...

...The TDC has lobbied Congress, held conferences, and as its "coordinators," Graff and Jay, reported in the first issue of Democratic Culture in 1991, "gained the beginnings of a voice in the national media...

...Asking, "what does the notion of a `democratic culture' mean and how does it relate to education...

...Sommers's book is a polemical account of what she calls "gender feminism": its obfuscatory jargon, victimolatry, endless self-regard, and tendency to purvey wildly inaccurate statistical information, such as the widely reported claim that "in this country alone . . . about 150,000 females die of anorexia each year...

...McCarthyism, however, traded in spurious charges, whereas to my knowledge no one has publicly confuted Cole's long history as a supporter of totalitarian regimes...

...But Mas'ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton are not invented, and their letter is not, as another letter writer (Fall 1994) humorously suggested, a parody...

...The flurry of publicity that greeted its formation has not been followed with any more stories, while the recent formation of the breakaway Association of Literary Scholars (which has links to Heterodoxy and David Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture) just got its Times story...

...q SPRING • 1995 • 275...

...One of the peculiar features of Democratic Culture is that its own pages furnish plentiful instances of the kind of thinking, expressed in the kind of language, that its editorial policy is concerned to show has been either greatly exaggerated or actually invented by the right...

...How Women Have Betrayed Women is another case in point...

...As it happens, the dismaying facts of that history are duly listed by Wilson himself, whose studied incuriosity about them suggests that he fails to understand the gravamen of the case against Cole's candidacy...

...John K. Wilson, who appears on the masthead as the newsletter editor, and whose byline identifies him as "a graduate student in Social Thought at the University of Chicago," goes about these tasks with notable zeal...

...Examples of the first include Gerald Graff's and Jay's "Some Questions About Critical Pedagogy" (Fall 1993) in which they oppose what they call "ethical pedagogy" to Paulo Freire's The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and criticize the "oppositional pedagogy" of Donald Morton and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, described as a "poststructuralist updating of the notion of ideology articulated by Marx...

...This Statement of Principles, excerpts of which have been reprinted in the newsletter and sent to subscribers, is a curious document...

...It has run pieces on the future of gay and lesbian studies, how to "popularize" the humanities, sexual harassment, "critical pedagogy," free speech and race, and the "media hyping" of Camille Paglia...

...Entitled "Yes, You are Reactionaries: A Letter," it begins, "Having read your most recent desperate attempt to legitimate an oppressive bourgeois pluralism," goes on to indict "your democracy and its allied pedagogy" as serving to "legitimate the violence that constitutes the extraction of surplus labor (profit) from the masses of exploited workers for the benefit of the few" and concludes with denunciations of "your reactionary moralist and corporate humanist theory of the subject...

...It mixes hortatory professions of democratic purpose with (courtesy of the young critic Michael &rube) an insider's attitude that comes off as slightly snide and smug...

...fourteen, with a handful of caveats, attack it and her for being "shallow" and "unscholarly," for believing in a "monolithic feminism," for "misrepresenting" women's studies, or for "abuse" of opponents and the "invention of feminist conspiracies...

...From the five issues that I have seen, the articles in Democratic Culture fall into three categories: measured argument, rhetorical posturing, and debunking...

...While I was preparing to write this piece I discovered that no one I knew had ever heard of the TDC or its newsletter...

...This means not that standards for judging art and scholarship must be discarded, but that such standards should evolve out of democratic processes in which they can be thoughtfully challenged...

...Sommers's arguments deserve consideration, but of the fifteen essays included in Democratic Culture's "symposium" on Who Stole Feminism...

...Graff and Jay characterSPRING • 1995 • 273 Magazines ized their essay as "a personal view," to which they invited readers "to submit responses and challenges...

...Magazines Oliver Conant SAVING DEMOCRACY IN THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT emocratic Culture is the newsletter of Teachers for a Democratic Culture (TDC), an organization of somewhat under two thousand left academics, primarily from the fields of English and the humanities...

...These figures, Sommers points out, are for sufferers of anorexia...

...the morbidity rate for the disease (for the year 1991) was 54...

...This is a pity...

...In "McCarthyism and the Case of Johnetta Cole" (Spring 1993) he accuses the Forward newspaper and A.M...

...It is a culture in which terms like "canon," "literature," "tradition," "artistic value," "common culture" and even "truth" are seen as disputed rather than given...

...Perhaps, as recent fund raising appeals in the newsletter suggest—"WE DESPERATELY NEED your money to continue producing Democratic Culture and coordinating the other activities of TDC" —it's all just a matter of underfunding, an old story on the left...

...All this favorable attention, not ordinarily bestowed on university-based groupuscules, probably owed much to the celebrity value of some of the names listed among the "Original Signatories" of a "Statement of Principles" put out by the TDC on its founding, including such highly visible academics as Houston Baker, Stanley Fish, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Richard Rorty, and Edward Said...

...Bêrube, who has himself had no appre274 • DISSENT Magazines ciable difficulty in representing the claims of theory in all sorts of nonacademic places—first the Village Voice, most recently, the New Yorker—is here no doubt writing on behalf of colleagues less gifted with his "scribal ability" when he vents his scorn at all those uncredentialed outsiders or failed aspirants to professional status who have dared to speak with such deplorable—well, freedom...

...Rosenthal of the "guilt by association tactics of the McCarthy era...

...rube is cited as observing that "recent literary theory is so rarely accorded the privilege of representing itself in nonacademic forums that journalists, disgruntled professors, embittered ex-graduate students and their family and friends now feel entitled to say anything at all about the academy...

...Morton and Zavarzadeh's reply, printed in a subsequent (Spring 1994) issue, is instructive...

...One article, acknowledging the effectiveness of Sommers's "cannily crafted attempt at a hatchet job" uses the occasion to urge the development of "communicators and feminist PR experts who have 'scribal' abilities...

...Published three times a year, it consists of articles, excerpts from books, essays, and reviews, most of which contest what the editors regard as a campaign by the right to distort and vilify the work of adherents to "new academic movements...

...Some of this overlaps with the material examined in the conservative monthly Heterodoxy, which I reviewed in these pages (Dissent, Fall 1994...

...For this reader the quoted passage is remarkable mainly for its implicit assumption that there is nothing in the world more consequential than deliberations about the canon, as if the monthly faculty meeting— whose air the passage fairly breathes—were the equivalent of a constitutional convention...

...it returns this answer: . . .in our view, a democratic culture is one that acknowledges that criteria of value in art are not permanently fixed by tradition and authority, but are subject to constant revision...

...they are both professors of English at Syracuse University, where they publish their own left academic periodical: Transformation: Marxist Boundary Work in Theory, Economics, Politics and Culture...

...And so this segment of the academic left, confusing the urgency of creating and defending a democratic culture with propagating the pieties of advanced literary criticism, finds itself, yet again, talking to itself...

...Teachers for a Democratic Culture was founded in 1991 by Gerald Graff, Gregory Jay, and others as a sort of public relations operation to explain the ideas of the academic left to a public that they imagine to have been misled by malicious ideologues on the right, abetted by a cynical media...

...The New York Times ran a sympathetic page-one story on the TDC's formation ("In Battle on Political Correctness, Scholars Begin a Counteroffensive," New York Times, September 25, 1991) and the group's aims have been reported, also positively, in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Lingua Franca...

...The neocon, paleocon and yahoo crowd really does, after all—not always but often enough— wantonly caricature people and their ideas in the service of their own ideologies...

...Some of the same kind of indiscriminate lumping of opponents goes on at both places, as witness Gregory Jay, who in the course of an article on "Liberalism and Multiculturalism" asserts, "Left liberals such as Irving Howe, C. Vann Woodward, John Searle, and Arthur Schlesinger (and, one might add, virtually everyone now associated with Partisan Review) echo the neoconservative line on cultural politics, often relying uncritically on sources like Dinesh D'Souza...

...In the pages of Democratic Culture this work remains undone...

...Of this bit of exposition one might want to ask how standards can be said to remain, or even to be, standards in any meaningful sense if they are subject to "constant revision," or what the hopeful phrase, "democratic processes" actually means...

...The treatment accorded in a recent issue (Fall 1994) to Christina Hoff Sommers's Who Stole Feminism...

...Those ideologies are in many ways inimical to the beleaguered enterprise of sustaining liberal education in America, and they should be intelligently and clearly opposed...

...A certain vagueness, perhaps a strategic one, attaches to the program articulated by the Statement...

...The debunking pieces are largely confined to disputing press accounts of PC horror stories, or exposing distortions or ignorance in rightwing attacks on trends in literary theory...