Breakdown of the University

...A psychologist colleague of mine tells me that recently he was invited to attend a seminar on Theory...

...We have come, in short, to an odd, sad pass...

...I suspect that everyone who professes in the field of humane letters—from Mr...

...At the end he had few graduate students and the undergraduates were brutal in their course critiques...

...When he retired, no one knew...

...You don't have to be of an Old School, or of Yale and Princeton, to know that in the university the authority of a core tradition of humane letters is not only under assault, which in itself would not be bad, but is about to disappear...

...But his book has resonances beyond its tone, and if he becomes bitter, as he does toward the end, his bitterness has a point...

...As Kernan says, during the 40-odd years of his witnessing the university has become more and more democratized...

...Hired by Yale, he was tenured a decade later and went on to become Assistant Provost of the University and then Acting Provost...

...In addition, grade inflation had become standard practice, gender and racial politics drove faculty recruitment, and deconstructionism relativized everything...

...In 1973 he was appointed Dean of the Graduate School at Princeton...

...Most of all the practice (praxis) of Theory, and perhaps the latent theory of Theory, has led to a selfabsorption so intense as to be virtually physical...

...So he stayed home...

...Kernan begins in 1946, when he returned from the Navy eligible for a government scholarship under the G.I...

...Ancient discriminatory assumptions, if not necessarily practices, have also been largely addressed and canceled...

...Now they might as well be dead white European males themselves...

...I happen to be none of the above...

...Curiously it is the new professorate, more than the students, who believe this...

...A native of Wyoming, Kernan started his college career at Columbia, but left after a few months because he didn't like New York's noise and crowds and unfriendliness...

...He stops just short of saying catastrophe has been visited upon the institution, however...

...He ends sometime around 1988—the date is not entirely clear from the text—when he took early retirement from a professorship at Princeton...

...When Allen Ginsberg was anthologized, that was the end of it...

...Nevertheless, I could not help agreeing with Kernan that his unraveling at the end was something other than a matter of age or of personal failing...

...he asked...

...After receiving his undergraduate degree and spending a year at Oxford, Kernan earned his PhD in English at Yale with a dissertation on the 16th-century poet John Marston (published by the university's press as The Cankered Muse...

...There are, for instance, no longer many institutions that are likely to advertise themselves as all-white and all-male...

...More andmore, even such likely new fields as Women's Studies or Black Studies submit to what goes by the name of "Theory...

...he was there...

...Just what theory do you have in mind...

...This is a matter of considerable importance...

...Yet the view that moral authority resides with those who have not read the books, that intellectual authority is an imposition, remains...

...The English Department is not the be all and end all, but literary studies is the place, signally, where the past is present, whether as inheritance or as burden...

...Thus Cultural Studies, Queer Theory, New Historicism, and Neo-Marxism today develop a rhetoric of vertiginous paradoxes, with room at the table for the two Jacques, Derrida and Lacan, the elders...

...Much that is valuable follows: ethical assessments, social concepts, manners and morals, ideas of beauty, and not least an experience of nuanced communication —that is, notions of how, ideally, to write...

...To an extent this is a result of the triumph of "adversary culture," foreseen some time ago by Lionel Trilling...

...author, "After Alienation: American Novels in Mid-Century," and "Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes" Alvin Kernan has written an often genial, occasionally witty memoir of academic life, one suffused with a certain gentleman-scholar coziness—although he does not shrink from providing anecdotes with names attached...

...Then there were the events of the late '60s: the protests, the student sit-ins, the drugs, the sex...

...As for curriculum, as Nathan Glazer has said, we are all multiculturalists now...

...He did like Williamstown, Massachusetts, and Williams College, despite the fact that—as he tells us—many of the faculty were Ivy League castoffs...

...Kernan had been both a demanding and popular teacher...

...Many of his charges had gone on to celebrated careers...

...In Plato's Cave is the author's act of privileged witness: He suffered...

...That tamed out to be an unhappy experience, so he returned to the classroom there full-time...

...But those good things no doubt have been especially traumatizing for institutions that defined themselves in explicitly antidemocratic terms, as elites...

...Although decline and degeneration had been apparent at Yale, Kernan soon saw that in his new circumstances academic shoddiness and even downright craziness were overlooked...

...Bill...

...Chips to David Lodge's Morris Zapp (based on Stanley Fish), from old fogy to young fogy, from grim conservative to happy vandal—knows the subject matter is disintegrating even as he or she professes it...

...Bill and later Federal loans, almost any American graduating from high school could attend college...

...They were deprived of their role, and so were the gatekeepers who resisted them...

...The answer was, simply, "Theory...

...My own observation (at a large state university) is that among the students the wildness has pretty much given way to apprehension...

...And with the end of an assumption of authority from the top, the idea of a standard corpus of learning in the humane disciplines, to be accepted or rejected but in any event to be engaged, has become a fading memory...

...Not all of these developments are bad...

...Sometime after 1946, with the G.I...

...A generation passeth: Kernan's story is an old one, and inevitably is somewhat parochial...

...As the accepted canonical authority of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton has diminished, the tendency of literary studies for perhaps the last 20 years has been to branch out in search of subjectmatter...

...These were ways of rejecting not only the elders but the very idea of a past coming to bear on a present...

...Kernan's testimony suggests that whereas other institutions have tried to adapt, these have lurched...

...Having breached the gates, the barbarians were within...

...It will be of special interest to those who studied with him (they must number in the thousands), or who were his colleagues, or who have profited from his scholarship, primarily in Elizabethan literature...

...Much of it is directed at what he calls the "democratization" of the university (meaning, really, Yale and Princeton, and by implicit extension, perhaps Harvard...

...In one case an astrological analysis of Romeo and Juliet was submitted as a PhD dissertation, and accepted...

...Strange things have resulted, and none has been stranger than the case of current literary studies...