Lawrence Levine's The Opening of the American Mind
Jacoby, Russell
THE OPENING OF THE AMERICAN MIND: CANONS, CUL TURE, AND HISTORY, by Lawrence W. Levine. Beacon Press, 1996. 212 pp. $20.00. Almost ten years ago the collected complaints of a conservative...
...For Levine, the new diversity should be applauded and extended...
...Of course, he is not completely wrong...
...In all the contemporary discussion of multiculturalism and cultural diversity, Adelman continues, we hear little about foreign language instruction for native English speakers...
...Clifford Adelman, who headed the Department of Education study, also points out something that should be of interest to Levine and other liberal champions of cultural diversity— the staggering decline in the serious study of a second language by college students...
...Levine is a cheerleader at a pep rally for the home team...
...A reading of history shows that the American mind has been "opening" since the early nineteenth century, meaning that it has been moving away from simplistic and monochromatic notions of culture...
...A short answer is not possible, but Levine is no better than the critics...
...These two propositions exhaust Levine's book...
...The curriculum, the courses of study, the ideas of truth, and the student population itself have all become increasingly complex, multidimensional, and diverse...
...Expanding part-time faculty and unemployed Ph.Ds...
...In what way does Levine himself exemplify cultural multiplicity...
...The rising dropout rate after freshman year...
...What does he say about affirmative action...
...Virtually nothing...
...Affirmative action may be the contentious issue for the foreseeable future...
...Nor does this prize-winning historian have anything to say about the origins or popularity of the conservative critics he wants to refute...
...And not only does Levine have little to say about subjects he addresses, it is extraordinary how much he leaves out...
...Overspecialization...
...Yet Hughes at least offered some names...
...Almost ten years ago the collected complaints of a conservative University of Chicago professor became an unexpected bestseller...
...Nothing...
...Lawrence Levine is not a displaced person...
...Most academics loathed these volumes, expressing their distaste in conversation or reviews, but books that responded in kind did not soon show up...
...The test case would not be Levine, but, if he has them, his children: how are they different from third118 • DISSENT Books generation Italian-Americans or Greek-Americans...
...In fact," the single Modern Language Association (MLA) survey Levine cites hardly suffices to answer critics...
...These tracts decried the incoherence of higher education: its politicization, political correctness, relativism, and faddishness...
...Most are taking occupational and preoccupational courses...
...Deteriorating teaching...
...Absolutely nothing, except that the curriculum is changeable and infinite...
...Scholarship, knowledge, diversity, teaching, insight: they only improve...
...The MLA surveyed three upper-division English courses: Renaissance literature, the nineteenth-century British novel, and American literature from 1800 to 1865...
...Professor Levine huffs: "Diggins's claim was unaccompanied by any evidence whatever...
...Nothing...
...I am] convinced by everything I know and have seen that the American academic world is doing a more thorough and cosmopolitan job of educating a greater diversity of students in a broader and sounder array of courses covering the past and present of the world they inhabit than ever before in its history...
...Political correctness...
...In a series of short chapters Levine picks apart the charges of Bloom et al...
...Nothing...
...His father was a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant who rarely spoke his native Yiddish and wanted his son to be a real American...
...He offers his own life as an advertisement for ethnic diversity...
...Nothing...
...How can valid generalizations be drawn...
...Levine, of course, is exhilarated about "the exciting period of growth and discovery" in ethnic identity and history...
...Others will find that this book goes nowhere...
...he is a veteran of scholarship and classroom with the reputation and skill to convincingly answer the conservatives...
...Every previous generation of Americans has had its profound difficulties accepting ethnic and racial groups who did not seem to adhere to some earlier model...
...Levine objects that Hughes offers little evidence for "this ludicrous judgment of the discipline of history which is in one of its most exciting and original periods...
...Eventually a few books appeared, yet typically these were smaller in scope, and more academic in prose and approach, than the books by the conservatives...
...Left and right prefer squabbling over reading lists rather than confronting the real illiberal education, multiplying courses in career training...
...Grade inflation...
...Were these readers all nineteenth-century WASPs...
...The threat is less the mauling than the malling of America, the reduction of cultural differences to shopping and brand names...
...He is a progressive historian with a vengeance: the world—or at least education—gets better and better...
...Bloom gives us cranky conservatism, Levine saccharine progressivism...
...He objects to a statement by the historian Jack Diggins that a white conservative Ph.D in American history has "about as much chance of getting hired on some faculty as Woody Allen of starting as point guard for the Knicks...
...Not surprisingly, MLA officialdom did not find significant changes from traditional courses in these areas...
...Indeed, much of this book reads like copy for an alumni magazine or college brochure: the students are smiling and ethnically assorted, the professors serious and pathbreaking, the courses engaging, the scholarship profound...
...The increasing cost of education and its impact on students...
...In his final pages Levine does ask why the conservatives have been so successful in "casting aspersions" on the "eclectic, open, culturally diverse" curriculum...
...Levine offers none, convinced beyond words that his cohort has shed more light than all previous generations combined...
...It seems likely they do not...
...One might imagine that defenders of liberal education might address this reality, but they hardly notice...
...it is what makes America exciting and dynamic...
...The point is not to sing the virtues of poverty and joblessness...
...Levine surveys the debate on cultural diversity, arguing that ethnic diversity is neither new nor bad...
...All signs indicate this book will rout the conservative critics...
...For instance, he protests Robert Hughes's statement that apart from a few exceptions like Simon Schama, Robert Darnton, and 116 • DISSENT Books Edward Said, few professors are "writing firstrate history, biography or cultural criticism...
...The accelerating privatization of research and programs...
...Levine's argument is straightforward: the critics of higher education fictionalize the past and distort the present...
...With other Chicago kids young Levine was drawn to black culWINTER • 1997...
...Only a cabal of reactionaries and killjoys cannot appreciate the wonders of American education...
...Yet culturally the father did not leave the shtetl, and the son never had to choose between Jewish and American identity: he could have "both Moses and Lincoln...
...Moreover, his ideas of evidence are somewhat crabby...
...The U.S...
...As with most surveys, the design determined the outcome...
...few students are taking these courses...
...In fact, the critics have it exactly wrong...
...Answer: these are displaced people who no longer have "faith in the future, in progress...
...Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education begins with a discussion of affirmative action at UC-Berkeley, and specifically Berkeley's rejection of high scoring Asian-American students in the name of ethnic diversity...
...or whether the courses at select schools—Levine reviews once again the arguments over the revised core curriculum at Stanford—reflect the situation elsewhere...
...The subtitle of The Closing of the American Mind ran How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students...
...Absolutely nothing...
...After all, Bloom's book sold eight hundred thousand copies in hardback...
...Levine comes in for the kill: "In fact, the most exhaustive surveys of college and university literature courses . . . provide no documentation for this accusation made so frequently by conservative critics...
...To the disbelief of many liberals and leftists, Bloom's volume commanded inordinate attention...
...To use Levine's formulation, "in fact" the most exhaustive survey of college courses, Tourists in Our Own Land, finds a precipitous decline in all the humanities...
...Levine, finding no merit to their criticism, concludes they are shoddy scholars comfortable only with anecdotal WINTER • 1997 • 115 Books evidence...
...So much for the views of a major liberal professor on the issues facing American higher education...
...He fusses that the conservative critics just poke about quoting a title here, questioning a student there...
...About this Levine has no facts...
...More decisively, most analyses of assimilation use a three-generation model...
...The university was once the bastion of upper-class Protestants and their culture...
...The first reviews have been jubilant...
...Most students are taking courses in business management, not introductions to the humanities...
...If there are any problems, they are momentary, as the transmission shifts into higher gear...
...Prior to publication Levine's book was heralded in several news articles...
...his preface celebrates scores of people, assistants, and institutions...
...To understand what happened to me and my friends," Levine exults, one has to drop simple models of assimilation and adaption...
...One searches in vain for evidence, for citation, for documentation...
...Levine, who says he eschews anecdotal evidence, offers his own life as evidence...
...What about increasing ethnic and intellectual segregation on many campuses...
...As a historian, Levine wants us to understand that the critics have sought to "escape history by detaching the present from the historical process...
...Why do they label "political correctness," he wonders, what is "the most heartening growth of sensitivity to and awareness of human differences" in our nation's history...
...now it is home to a varied population and its complex needs...
...He offers no new information, studies, or analysis...
...WINTER • 1997 • 119...
...He has been a chaired professor at UC-Berkeley, and the beneficiary of the largesse of the MacArthur, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim Foundations...
...The "classical" curriculum, which the conservatives champion, was only briefly in place...
...His father remained in a Jewish immigrant world, while seeking to be a real American...
...The curriculum has never been static...
...The book sports blurbs by leftists and liberals like Mike Davis, Michael Berubé, and Ronald Takaki...
...Nothing...
...117 ture and music—and grew up among GreekAmericans, Italian-Americans and others, "choices and influences far more numerous" than theorists of assimilation recognize...
...Observations like this do not cloud Levine's sunny vision...
...He does not explain this and perhaps cannot...
...In this uncrowded field, Lawrence Levine enters with a book that promises to be the answer to Allan Bloom and his supporting cast that many have been waiting for...
...Nothing...
...Similarly, the charge that the core curriculum has been adulterated is based on defective historical knowledge...
...And every generation of Americans has been incorrect in its fears...
...Yet for good reason the English word for "school" derives from the Greek word for "leisure...
...Nothing...
...In the name of history the historian Levine appeals to the tritest historical truth: things change...
...where they see decay is the growth of a vital diversity, what Levine calls "a flowering of ideas and scholarly innovation unmatched in our history...
...Do they hang out with Landsman in the old neighborhood...
...Department of Education study, which examined actual college transcripts of over ten thousand students, remains an eye-opener...
...For this we should thank him...
...Throughout Levine courageously defends pluralism and progress, as if they were not the dominant ideology of American institutions and businesses...
...Even a respected field like "American literature" is a relatively recent construction...
...Yet without a foreign language, Americans cannot be more than cultural "tourists...
...Declining humanities...
...Neither Levine nor the conservatives ask how much reading students are doing at all...
...Levine himself taught at UC-Berkeley for thirty years...
...Poorly prepared students...
...Do they speak Yiddish...
...Allan Bloom, who had been known mainly as a translator of Plato, published a broad indictment of the character and "soul" of American higher education...
...Critics, who are "frustrated by the shape and texture of modern America," want to turn the clock back to a time that never was...
...What does he say about the nature of liberal education...
...Now the courses and curriculum have opened up to many approaches and fields...
...The major consequence of the new heterogeneity on campus, however, has not been repression but the opposite—a flowering of ideas and scholarly innovation unmatched in our history...
...Throughout The Opening of the American Mind one finds the tritest observations delivered as upbeat reports of exciting changes...
...In the main, however, he simply appeals to the unshakable self-satisfaction of liberal academics...
...Than ever before in its history" is the mantra of this book...
...To this he adds America's favorite cliché: things improve...
...This truth seems to have been forgotten by both liberals and conservatives, who worship work and preparation for it...
...Or he ridicules critics who present "no evidence that writers like Shakespeare are actually studied less now than they were before the 1960s...
...Nothing...
...Nothing...
...When Levine studied history in college, only Western political history was considered legitimate...
...The issue has always been lower-division requirements: what books must freshmen and sophomores read...
...These snippets of autobiography can only convince the ideologues...
...The critics do just scamper around, but the higher education beast is large...
...Recent historians have "done more than all previous generations of historians combined to penetrate the darkness" of ethnic history...
...Much of what we have seen recently in terms of speech codes and the like are a stumbling attempt to adapt to this new heterogeneity...
...And if they do not diverge from other third-generation youth, what is multiculturalism all about...
...For good reason: Levine is a respected UC-Berkeley historian and a MacArthur Prize Fellow who has written several well-received books on American history...
...What they got was a pop gun...
...Shouldn't a historian address the widespread appeal of the ideas Books he is trying to refute...
...Levine does not even give us a hint of what it means for him to be multicultural, a term that easily loses all content...
...Yet the book suffers from one main problem: a suffocating banality...
...and worse, it was followed by a series of widely discussed kindred books like Tenured Radicals, Illiberal Education, Killing the Spirit, Dictatorship of Virtue, and The Disuniting ofAmerica...
...Nothing...
...Yet the issue is hardly how courses in Renaissance literature have changed...
...Many liberal-minded scholars," said the New York Times, "are now saying [Bloom] has finally met his match...
...In other words, with The Opening of the American Mind the liberal (and, to some degree, left) establishment rolled out one of its biggest cannons to blast into smithereens the conservative flotilla long harassing its shores...
...Levine makes valid points, and many will find useful rejoinders to conservatives here...
...He has been president of the Organization of American Historians...
...The problem is not that students are studying African-American history rather than European history: they're studying neither...
...that the university is going to the dogs...
...All this is very convincing for the already convinced—of whom there are many...
...Liberal studies require a space free from the fetish of labor, money, and jobs, a space in which students can pursue learning and reflection...
...He confronts the bogey of conservatives, the fear of ethnic fragmentation, but does not mention the other danger, cultural homogenization...
Vol. 44 • January 1997 • No. 1
