What's Wrong with Our Universities

...His is a Utopian proposal, and yet it is precisely this kind of thinking we need—not the complacency of PC, or the hysteria of its conservative critics...

...of Harvard hailed The Opening of the American Mind...

...The fact that some critics have lost their grip on reality, though, does not mean nothing is wrong with higher education in America...

...Levine further believes that professions, particularly his own, have been enriched and stimulated by these developments...

...Crisis in the Academy: Rethinking Higher Education in America By Christopher J. Lucas St...

...The depth and range and diversity and sophistication of history education simply exceeds anything I experienced in my student days," he remarks...

...But without tenure many financially strapped institutions would find it hard to resist the temptation to replace older, relatively well-compensated faculty members with underpaid beginners...

...Bloom wrote that changes in academe had led to "the collapse of the entire educational structure...

...He has carefully analyzed a host of knotty questions, brushed aside much professional cant—PC and otherwise—and produced a probing, challenging book that forces us to rethink some cherished pieties...

...288pp...

...It was the age, after all, when professors such as Daniel Boorstein, C. Vann Woodward, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kenneth Stampp, Henry Steele Commager, David Potter, and Richard Hofstadter (to whose memory, with unintended irony, Levine has dedicated The Opening of the American Mind) were transforming how we looked at our past...

...to, that is, the complex of considerations that today is referred to much too simply as 'political correctness.'" He is right, of course...

...PC is harmful, therefore, not because it rules by terror but because it measures progress in terms of academic fads and (often spurious) race and gender gains, while ignoring the decline of standards...

...As Levine points out, plenty of professors manage to have successful careers without being trendy or politically correct...

...Levine has a unique justification for PC power as well: "Students have always had to learn to accommodate to the whims and prejudices of professors, to the attitudes and sensitivities of fellow students, and to the values and beliefs of the larger society...

...Martin's...

...Their writings are often unintelligible to outsiders, and their ideas have little effect upon undergraduates—who, to the degree that they have any political thoughts at all, share the prevailing conservatism of middle-class America...

...Colleges and universities admit too many students—most of them white—who are unprepared for high-level academic work...

...That proved to be impossible...

...Nor do university affirmative action programs, a favorite PC cause, for the beneficiaries are almost invariably middle-class blacks and Hispanics who would have gone to college anyway—although in some instances to lower ranking schools where they might have been successful instead of failing or dropping out, as frequently happens...

...That, I hasten to add, is not to say Levine and his allies are fascists, only that he enjoys the dominance of PC and feels it is entitled to its prerogatives...

...That may be true at Berkeley and Harvard, it is certainly not the case at most institutions of higher learning, as Lucas makes abundantly clear...

...This is of no importance to the politically and the professionally correct, yet it ought to be...

...But, as he previously explained, the City College of New York that he attended in the 1950s was noted for the brilliance of its students and dullness of its faculty...

...Changing student minds has always been much more difficult than is generally supposed, and is especially hard at present because students are not, on average, as capable and literate as they used to be...

...It means giving up the effort—never entirely successful—to make universities hospitable to a broad range of ideas...

...This is a refreshing contrast to most defenders who almost always insist that there is no such thing as political correctness, that it is a concept invented by conservatives to destroy everything beautiful and good...

...But that was merely a transitional phase, for even though the New Left failed to take over society, eventually it did gain control of academia, dismissing the old liberalism and its quaint ideas about free speech...

...Christopher Lucas, a professor of education at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, has made that the subject of Crisis in the Academy...

...Nevertheless, the "it's our turn now" defense, while disarming, does not quite satisfy...

...Moreover, they were doing so with powerfully written, even elegant books that reached large audiences—and in several cases influenced policy...

...the foreign language departments are now too small to handle a big teaching load, and there is no money to expand them...

...In the old days the fear was that professors would be fired for advancing unpopular ideas...

...Little wonder, then, that Crisis in the Academy lacks the cheerful serenity of Levine's book, in which everyone is either gladly learning or teaching in a liberated, multicultural and innovative environment...

...At Rutgers, a faculty group voted to restore the foreign language requirement dropped long ago, as at most universities...

...Trafficking in fashionable theories about race, gender, patriarchy, is exciting to participants, a smart career move, and occasionally even leads to impressive work, but it confers few benefits upon society...

...A slimmed down system of higher education, with perhaps half as many students as today, would be better funded and have a full-time faculty, higher admission standards, and possibly a more muscular and focused curriculum...

...29.95...

...And, yes, there is more diversity among students and professors than before...

...But these remain exceptional rather than routine events...

...And yet, it is merely one of many...

...Consider the results of a survey of 67 colleges and universities recently published by the Times...

...He also considers universities far better places as a result of their takeover...

...His important book is crammed with facts establishing that the quality of education has been deteriorating at a scary rate...

...For example, he would like to see tenure abolished...

...Levine candidly admits the PC agenda now dominates leading universities...

...No doubt that is because, from the vantage point of a politically correct professor at Berkeley, conditions could hardly be better...

...He offers solutions, too, though not always agreeable ones...

...Given the steady decline of support for public higher education, the quality of teaching is down too, as tenured faculties shrink and more and more teaching is done by part-timers...

...It says something about our times that a work so wide of the mark sold 800,000 copies in a single year and was the second most successful book of 1987...

...He compared higher education in America to Nazi Germany, the Woodstock concert to the Nuremberg rally, and Leftist American professors to academic Nazis like Martin Heidegger...

...This same must be true at many if not most universities, which is a scandal...

...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers...

...The result has been grade inflation, a watering down of curriculums and other evils that allow undereducated students to graduate anyway...

...On the other hand, Lucas is absolutely right in say ing that the student body is entirely too large...

...It found that two-thirds of these schools did not require English majors to study Chaucer, Shakespeare and similar greats, thus making room for courses in popular culture that are easier and more fun...

...All he has to do to expose their hysteria and gross exaggerations is quote The Closing of the American Mind...

...True, he ignores the well-known PC horror stories, and the ease with which minor and even unintended gender and race transgressions can get anyone on campus into trouble...

...Still, I think Lucas underrates the damage that would result if tenure were terminated...

...The politically correct know this and don't care, since the whole point of affirmative action is to achieve the highest possible percentage of minority students regardless of the consequences...

...Henry Louis Gates Jr...

...Since everything new and different is welcome now, and one can hardly be too radical, that apprehension carries little weight...

...In some institutions the bulk of instruction is carried on by these exploited, and, for good reasons, often embittered men and women...

...There has always been an orthodoxy of one kind or another on campus, and in the past it was usually a conservative one...

...Probably they were most open to disagreement and dissent in the 1960s, when the orthodox liberalism of the postwar era made room for the ideas of the New Left...

...There are other problems, including the failed effort of universities to be all things to all people, and the lack of agreement on what constitutes a well-educated person...

...Throughout the summer," the article reported, "scholars began to take sides...

...Actually, Levine has little trouble disposing of Bloom and other conservative critics of PC...

...In the face of such a wholesale abandonment of basics, only politics explains why people like Levine refuse to recognize the abject state of higher education as a whole...

...Few historians occupy a similar position at present, and the ones that do seldom toil in the vineyards favored by Levine...

...There is a crisis on campus about which Levine seems unaware...

...A New York Times story last August 21 suggested that "even before its official publication" his new book appeared destined to become the politically correct refutation of the late Allan Bloom's phenomenal 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students...

...author, "A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II" Lawrence Levine, who spent most of his career at the University of California, Berkeley, is a distinguished historian of American culture...

...He quite correctly observes that it seems to have little relation to performance...

...They constitute a new intellectual proletariat who are paid little, receive no benefits, and must teach more classes than is good for either them or their students...

...History, like other academic fields, is currently dominated by specialists who speak chiefly to each other...

...Lucas' thoughtful work offers at least a glimmer of hope that someday we might finally address the real issues in higher education, instead of endlessly obsessing about gender and race, and instead of tinkering at the margins of a system that needs to be completely overhauled...

...Lynne V Cheney, head of the National Endowment for the Arts under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, called it the same old Leftist claptrap...

...Those of us who had the good fortune to study under gifted historians in the '50s can testify that the field was boiling with intellectual excitement...

...New subject fields—black studies, women's studies and the like—have broadened the scope of scholarly enterprise as well...