Russell Jacoby's Dogmatic Wisdom
Ryan, Alan
DOGMATIC WISDOM, by Russell Jacoby. Doubleday, 1994. 235pp. $22.95. Here is a book that is easier to praise and to agree with than to review and to criticize. Its main theme is simple, right,...
...Sacked professors turn out to be graduate students who have resigned in pique...
...in business ed, but only some 3 percent of the student population goes to such places...
...Moreover, its shortcomings catch nobody's attention, for America is a country in which it is taken for granted that what is worth bothering about is what catches the public eye, and the everyday difficulties of the worse-off don't...
...But, says Jacoby, what makes the conservative critique so feeble is that conservatives think that it's all the fault of leftist professors...
...by the stunning hypocrisy of the conservatives...
...To understand this is to subscribe to a simple materialism, not materialism as a theory of ideology, not materialism as a theory about the relations of minds to brains, but the materialism that insists that a decent society would pay attention to the surroundings in which the next generation of all its children are to be brought up...
...The desire not to wound, or positively to enhance self-respect, is simply the enemy of the search for the truth...
...it was, he complained, part of a "service station" mentality that all too easily overtook American institutions...
...Students who won't read the Great Books don't turn to peace studies or Marxism...
...he says that if liberal education is a mess at the college level, it will certainly be a mess at lower levels, but here focuses on higher education for the entirely plausible reason that this is where the "culture wars" have been fought...
...Their education is illiberal in the old sense: utilitarian, job-oriented...
...meanwhile the world of the self—education and jobs—collapses...
...Moreover, the credentials of the critics of political correctness are unimpressive...
...Jacoby observes that it seems particularly odd that the Plato-worshiping Bloom had never noticed that one of America's most distinguished ancient historians, Moses Finley, had been sacked from Rut284 • DISSENT Books gers in 1952 and spent the rest of his life in England...
...Its main theme is simple, right, and rather mysteriously neglected on all sides: the "culture wars" have been an enormous diversion from the serious work of improving American education at all levels...
...Most go to community colleges or other public schools whose tuition is not the $20,000 a year that Princeton and Harvard charge...
...they turn to vocational and occupational courses...
...William F. Buckley began his career with God and Man at Yale denouncing the very idea of academic freedom...
...students supposedly excluded from courses by angry professors turn out to be students shut out of a section by a student assistant...
...Faculty and students dispute which words violate the rights of which groups...
...It does not—for the most part, though not entirely —take a lot more than clean classrooms, safe schools, colleges where teachers sympathize with the aspirations of their students and have a desire to enlarge their opportunities...
...They go to get the credentials that will get them a better job...
...the truth is that it's much more the fault of unremitting commercial and utilitarian pressures...
...Bloom, for instance, rashly claimed that McCarthyism "had no effect whatsoever on curriculum or appointments . . . Professors were not fired and they taught what they pleased in their classrooms...
...Falwell's "Liberty University" is something less than an oasis of free inquiry in a naughty world...
...In an international mathematics test, Japanese and Korean thirteen-year-olds did very well, American thirteen-year-olds very badly...
...Even where the desire that we should say the right thing, use the right code words and the rest of it is well intentioned, the results are dire...
...it is not about turning literary studies into the criticism of criticism rather than the study of literature, nor about unmasking oppression, nor about the most narrowly utilitarian goals...
...the National Rifle Association wanted Ice-T's "Cop Killer" censored, observes Jacoby, even as it defended the citizenry's right to load their weapons with cop-killer ammo...
...Jacoby therefore reckons that conservative critics like Allan Bloom and Dinesh D'Souza are partially right about the horrors of American higher education...
...He is certainly better than most recent commentators, largely because he is so imitated— by the feebleness of most academic responses to the likes of Kimball, Bloom, and D'Souza...
...to observe that they have taken over the attitudes of the conservative and fundamentalist right is to be very unreassured indeed...
...Wherever the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, and the like advance large empirical claims about the spread of repressive speech codes or small empirical claims about the fate of particular professors allegedly sacked for opposition to politically correct dogmas, hirings, or syllabus changes, Jacoby digs out the kernel of truth that usually underlies them...
...Most education is, or properly should be, morally, scientifically, and pedagogically "low-tech," to use Jacoby's apt description...
...The results showed that American children thought they had done the best of all...
...To observe that they are too few and too thoroughly controlled by their institutions to do much damage is not much reassurance...
...Students don't go to Williams or Amherst to get a B.A...
...The tone of the parts of the book addressed to cultural radicals and cultural conservatives alike is thus "a plague on both your houses," but the point SPRING • 1995 • 283 Books throughout is to stick up for a traditional, egalitarian liberalism in the educational arena...
...Cafeteria-style education is the order of the day, as if we were operating a sort of intellectual Chinese restaurant whose patrons can put together the most amazingly indigestible or uninteresting combinations of items without help from the kitchen or the staff...
...courses proliferate and universities have no idea which courses students should take...
...As Francis Oakley's Community of Learning pointed out a couple of years back, the collapse of liberal education is not a phenomenon of the colleges and universities where the very brightest students go, and where the faculty is most energetic in research...
...The children were also asked how well they thought they had done...
...Here, he is agreeably acerbic about an underreported consequence of this fact—the excessive attention paid to squabbles about the teaching of history and literature in expensive, elite schools, and a corresponding shying away from some grim realities about what goes on in the bottom half of the country's 3,400 institutions of higher education...
...meanwhile society turns increasingly violent...
...Jacoby cites a familiar but nonetheless alarming example of what can happen...
...Still, they are leveled with a decent anger and with a cumulatively depressing effect...
...If liberal education is in sad straits, it is because it all too faithfully reflects the sad state of liberalism in the wider society...
...Psychologists preach the virtues of a healthy self-esteem...
...In Universities, Flexner pointed out that although students at Columbia could get an education in serious subjects, they could also take "elementary stenography," "the writing of advertised copy," and even "wrestling, judo, and selfdefense" for credit...
...Jacoby isn't interested in rehashing terrifying accounts of American education such as Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities or Illiterate America...
...Jacoby does not sustain his opening note...
...Although one might feel a bit let down by his turning away from what looked like a promising investigatory vein—what does go on in West Los Angeles College?— Jacoby is good on his chosen ground...
...This kernel of truth is frequently unimpressive...
...The egregious D'Souza is a fan of the Unification Church and the admiring biographer of Jerry Falwell...
...Readers of Jacoby's highly regarded The Last Intellectuals will recall that he is none too happy that so much of the nation's intellectual life has gone to roost in assorted ivory towers...
...Jacoby's argumentative tactics are simple but adequate...
...Among the especially enjoyable passages of arms is Jacoby's uninhibited squelching of the more ludicrous and farfetched claims of a "new McCarthyism" with which conservative critics of political correctness have terrified their readers...
...q SPRING • 1995 • 285...
...All parties, says Jacoby, have been fiddling while Rome burns: Conservatives, liberals, and radicals argue over which books should be taught in schools...
...Censorship is the common coin of the right...
...At this late stage of the battle, the charges hardly bear repeating—is anyone going to defend the smug enthusiasm for the professionalization of literary studies that Jonathan Culler and Stanley Fish exude, or the self-regarding, ever so hip, but ever so dilute Marxism that Andrew Ross reckons to represent...
...The moral is one that seems oddly unregarded these days...
...The unstructured curriculum about which Flexner complained has become less structured yet...
...And we can guess why conservative critics of higher education keep quiet about that trend...
...This appears to understate the firings by about two hundred, and blithely to ignore the pressures to conformism that made so much of American higher education in the 1950s a bad joke...
...sponsored, published, and publicized by conservative foundations, they find it hard to complain about the impact of the sacrosanct free enterprise system...
...Jacoby's gloom about the upmarket selfdescribed left in academia is spelled out in several chapters of Dogmatic Wisdom...
...and by the self-regarding, highpriced academic left, whose belief in their own power and importance Jacoby sometimes treats as a delusional state barely short of full-blown dementia...
...But his larger aim is simply to stick up for the liberal values that he supposes liberal education should promote...
...It is a commonplace that conservatives found it easier to go on about the counterculture than to take government seriously for twelve years of wholesale social neglect, but it's a disgrace if liberals and radicals succumb to the same temptation...
...The fact that most of the noise about political correctness is made by assorted hypocrites, fundamentalists, the hired help of the Olin Foundation, and all the rest is no comfort, however...
...Having registered the fact that 97 percent of the higher education population is ignored by the Blooms and D'Souzas, and that we are a society that regards culture as so valuable that we don't want the public to spoil it by using it, Jacoby, too, turns to the arguments that have riven the elite schools — multiculturalism, free-speech issues, campus tolerance, the canon, and so on...
...Citizens wrangle over multiculturalism, arguing how, when, and if diverse cultures should be studied...
...meanwhile the irresistible power of advertising and television converts multiculturalism into a monoculture of clothes, music, and cars...
...but they are infinitely less acute than were Abraham Flexner and Irving Babbit sixty-five years ago...
...meanwhile few books are read, and a liberal education shatters under the weight of commercialism...
...For the gloomy fact is that the left has to an alarming degree ratted on the ideals of free speech and open inquiry...
Vol. 42 • April 1995 • No. 2
