Back to school

...In class, the students talked about sexual "roles," about "power" and "transactions...

...Denby's italics] . . . The students want to be truly tolerant and open-minded, and many of them are, but they live in a hypersensitive society, and they fall into the trap of confusing bland-ness and caution with tolerance...

...Many of Denby's mistakes are simple errors of fact...

...Trying to be scrupulously fair, he talked to some of the most vocal opponents of the core courses at Columbia, including an assistant professor with the marvelous politically correct name of Siobhan Kil-feather...

...Denby takes up the highly controversial topic of Aristotle's view of slavery, a key issue for opponents of the canon, who like to condemn canonical Greek authors as apologists for a slave-holding society...

...They scrape away the media haze of secondhandedness...

...if nothing else, it had helped destroy the old language of romance...

...Denby is at his best when systematically demolishing the arguments that left-wing academics have made against Great Books courses...

...But he goes ahead with the story of his mother's death anyway, which would be maudlin under the best of circumstances but, juxtaposed to the greatest of Shakespeare's tragedies, sinks quickly and inevitably to the level of pure bathos...

...So once a year I try to attend the seminar given by movie critic Roger Ebert at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville...

...Denby has nothing but contempt for the current tendency to dumb down the college curriculum...

...Denby pays particular attention to the plight of genuinely religious students in the contemporary secular university, where, in a glaring lapse of the sensitivity supposedly prevailing on our campuses, their beliefs are often treated with open scorn...

...But even on literature, Denby can miss the boat...

...He also rejects the notion that a syllabus ought to reflect the ethnic composition of the students taking the course...

...The graduate students embracing "theory" were university careerists...

...Throughout Den-by's account one can admire his impulse to familiarize himself with the Great Books, to come to feel at home with them, in a sense to make them his own...

...Revolutionaries...

...He shows that today the radicals are the real conservatives, contributing to the perpetuation of our dumbed-down media culture, while the conservatives are the real radicals, offering the great classics of the Western tradition as the most effective means of liberating students from the orthodoxies of our day...

...And Denby's errors are frequently more serious than slips of memory or of the pen...

...Consider what is probably Den-by's most forceful statement on the nature of contemporary students: The exact temperamental identity of the sexes is now a received idea among undergraduates...

...In the end, I am willing to overlook the manifest and manifold faults of Denby's book for the sake of the good it might do...

...At one point, he proudly reveals that he once threw a tomato at Ronald Reagan (it missed), but at another point he gives a withering critique of a feminist Take Back the Night rally at Columbia, for which he has already been scolded by no less than Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Times Book Review...

...He warns them to be careful in choosing the rhetoric with which they promote the cause of the Great Books...

...I do not expect Denby to accept Kolakowski's authority on faith, but he does owe it to a scholar of such stature to take a look at his writings before irresponsibly accusing him of ignoring an important aspect of his subject...

...But Denby has something of value to say to conservative defenders of the Western canon as well...

...To his credit, Denby acknowledges: "The play is about fierce, pre-Christian aristocrats, not American Jewish mothers...

...Denby has an acute eye for how left-wing academics mirror the very middle-class way of life they profess to despise but in fact secretly envy and emulate: "They had given up history, given up their own judgment, and had allowed, of all things, market principles—satisfy the customers' needs—into the curriculum...

...This passage sounds just like Bloom's last book, Love and Friendship...

...Did he learn nothing about hubris reading all those Greek tragedies the first semester...

...Unfortunately Denby chooses King Lear as the occasion for a meditation on the aging and death of his mother, which is supposed to parallel the lesson of Shakespeare's play...

...Denby does not help matters by stating Aristotle's position this way: "He decided that slaves were not fit by nature for rational thought...

...He points out that, far from overwhelming students with a uniform set of precepts to be passively absorbed and parroted back, the classics of Western literature and philosophy engage in a complex dialogue with one another, and thus potentially with us as well...

...Conservatives would be hard-pressed to formulate their criticism of the academic Left more incisively than Denby...

...They need to take seriously Denby's heartfelt and timely warning that they are committing intellectual suicide, pulling the very ground out from under their own feet...

...One advantage of Lit Hum was that it avoided the procedures of graduate school—the specialized teacher working with specialized students, the depressing professionalization of literature and the subsequent deployment of books in "fields" and "conferences" and all the rest of that career-enhancing bureaucracy...

...If they emphasize the traditionalism of canonical works, they in fact do them a disservice by, quite frankly, making them sound boring...

...Denby does a superb job of analyzing the mentality of the academic Left and the self-serving character of its attack on the canon...

...For example, he writes: "When Plato wrote the Republic, Greece was breaking up, just the way Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union have broken up in our time," as if there had ever been a nation called Greece in the ancient world, and not merely a set of Greek cities like Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes...

...Literature was about power, sex was about power...

...The book is filled with jabs at heartless Republicans and the benighted forces of Christian fundamentalism...

...He explains clearly what it is about contemporary American life that makes it difficult for students to understand the classics of the past, as in this account of their bafflement with Oedipus: True Americans, they were used to the claims of victimization but had trouble comprehending a man who is destroyed partly through his own greatness...

...They sidled up apprehensively to any established professor in sight, nodding their heads in agreement...

...But something made him think that attending two classes at Columbia now qualifies him to comment on every writer from Homer to Virginia Woolf, from Plato to Nietzsche...

...It is a sign of the times that Denby reports that Kolakowski created a great deal of unease in his academic audience, and even caused some to walk out, with his uncompromising condemnation of the folly of Marx and Marxism...

...He made an admirable effort to get to know the students in the classes he took, and he is quite shrewd in analyzing their character or lack thereof...

...Denby also echoes Bloom in his account of how feminism has poisoned the relationship between the sexes and de-idealized love: Listening to the students, I was sure that radical-feminist language had colored the language of sex for everyone...

...If only Denby had confined himself to countering the academic Left and making the case for studying the Great Books...

...Anyone who has so much as walked through a Modern Language Association convention knows the truth of this statement...

...As Denby writes, "The Iliad in its ambivalence about glory and death challenges most of our current ideas about what is right and wrong, what is true, what is heroic, and finally, what is human...

...had taken thirty years before as an undergraduate...

...But generally he is content to romp his way through the classics, telling us which ideas are still relevant today and which are hopelessly outdated, which meet his approval and which do not...

...In fact Aristotle's view is exactly the reverse: In Book I of the Politics he argues that only those who are not fit for rational thought are by nature slaves...

...For many students power was sexy but sex was not...

...In two classes about feminism and relations between the sexes, I doubt I heard the word "love" spoken even once...

...I find it very difficult to arrive at a single and stable reaction to Great Books...

...Den-by himself refutes his claim that the religious beliefs of students contradict Bloom's argument that relativistic tolerance is the dominant dogma on today's campuses: "They valued openness and respect more than genius and their notion of religion was naive: Religion was simply moral, an area of ethical transcendence removed from the rest of life...

...This was a job hunt...

...It is the charm of a freshman or sophomore, coming to the great thoughts of the past for the first time...

...In their scorn for the canon, they are systematically undermining any remaining claim they have to respect or support from the society that has been paying their salaries as teachers...

...Quite a spectacle: the movie critic of New York magazine claiming that the foremost historian of Marxism of our time does not know his Marx...

...As he repeatedly points out, students should come to college precisely to be challenged, to encounter ways of thinking unfamiliar to them, and not to reinforce their ingrained prejudices, even if in the process they are humbled a bit...

...One can only hope that his strictures will be taken more seriously by mainstream academics because he goes out of his way to distance himself from the political and cultural Right...

...These books—or any such representative selection—speak most powerfully to what a human being can be...

...For me the low point of the book is what by all rights should have been the high point, the chapter on King Lear, by Denby's own admission the greatest of all canonical works...

...Perhaps the reason is that Denby refuses to ally himself clearly with either side in today's culture wars...

...One of the most telling incidents Denby recounts from his year at Columbia concerns a public lecture given by Leszek Kolakowski, perhaps the greatest scholar of Marxist thought in this century, author of the magisterial three-volume study, Main Currents of Marxism...

...Given all these similarities, rather than bashing Bloom, Denby should be acknowledging his debt to him...

...indeed, in the secular university, this belief is as close as the students are likely to come to a sacred doctrine...

...Indeed it is a measure of how radical the academic world in America has become that an ordinary left-leaning, bleeding-heart liberal like Denby finds himself so estranged from its beliefs and its educational policies...

...Aristotle ought to get credit for being one of the first to question the justice of slavery, but Denby misreads the Politics so completely that he provides simple-minded critics of Aristotle with ammunition against him...

...In an epilogue that begins "culture-ideologues, both left and right, are largely talking nonsense," this passage constitutes an astounding concession to cultural conservatism...

...This sounds an awful lot like a "fulmination against relativism as a student norm," and indeed, asked to identify this passage, most people would attribute it to The Closing of the American Mind...

...In core courses like Columbia's, later works answer earlier ones, correcting them, modifying them, complementing them, refuting them, reinterpreting them, but never quite displacing them...

...As Denby argues, studying such works is thus not a process of indoctrination...

...Academic radicals end up being the principal target of his polemic, and they will benefit more than anyone from reading his book...

...Denby exposes the inner contradictions of today's radical pedagogy, especially the way it merely substitutes new forms of authority for old: "The left-academic revisionists gave exams, too, exams that enforced their narratives, which ran counter to the traditional ones...

...The pressures of the job hunt had enforced a desperate conform-ity....A good part of their radical critique of the curriculum, I now saw, was produced by nothing more earth-shattering than the evident desire to claim turf, get themselves noticed, and find a job somewhere...

...When he is good, I want to stand on the sidelines and cheer, but when he is bad, I want to give him the hook and send in someone who knows what he is talking about...

...Kilfeather was a fire-breather, but her ideas led to nothing more radical than reasserting the bureaucratization of literary study...

...Denby repeatedly echoes Bloom's account of the flatness in the souls of today's students, their hesitation to generalize or pass judgment, their unwillingness to take a real stand on anything...

...The one thing he evidently never acquired in his year at Columbia was knowledge of his own ignorance—perhaps the most valuable lesson he could have absorbed from Plato and his account of his great teacher, Socrates...

...Did Michael Chang become great because someone handed him, when he was young, a list of five great Chinese tennis players...

...Students will not countenance the notion of distinctions between people because they assume that all distinctions are invidious...

...Denby asks: "Don't you truly feel good about yourself by meeting high standards in school and work...

...Though Denby is evidently unable to overcome his emotional attachment to the Left, he ends up in effect reversing the common understanding of the culture wars...

...But Denby has a lingering emotional attachment to the Left that compels him to challenge Kolakowski, raise doubts about his motives (referring to his "bitterness"), and even question his knowledge of Marx...

...Radicals...

...If this strategy helps Denby's astute observations get a fair hearing these days, well and good, but the fact is that all of Denby's points about contemporary students can be found in The Closing of the American Mind, expressed just as eloquently and often more incisively...

...In general, Denby is much better at discussing literature than philosophy...

...Thus I have to take my hat off to my mirror image David Denby, the movie critic for New York magazine, who clearly takes the deficiencies in his education more seriously than I do mine...

...That is the thrust of the mainstream of American education at the moment...

...Though acknowledging the validity of some of her criticism, Denby goes right to the heart of her mistake: Kilfeather made the classic error of the academic Left: She confused literary study (and her own professional interests) with reading itself...

...Great Books (Simon & Schuster, 492 pages, $30) is Den-by's account of his year-long return to the classroom...

...He gives several interesting accounts of attempts by orthodox students of various faiths to reconcile their religious beliefs with what they were studying and being taught...

...The canon needs to be presented as a way of opening up issues for our students, of actively retracing the debates that have brought us to where we are today...

...Unfortunately Denby chooses to use the presence of religious students at Columbia as an argument against Allan Bloom and his account of contemporary academic life in The Closing of the American Mind: "They were essentialists, sure enough, and Allan Bloom was wrong if he did not understand, in his fulminations against relativism as a student norm, that students like these existed everywhere in American universities...

...If one cannot learn much about the Great Books themselves from reading Denby, one can learn a lot about what is going on in today's universities...

...Or when talking about what Nietzsche called the "slave revolt in morality," Den-by refers to it as the "transvaluation of all values," which is how Nietzsche designated the movement intended to advance beyond the slave revolt...

...But Denby is over 50 now, and as a professional journalist he ought to have learned something about the simple need to check his facts...

...According to Den-by, Kolakowski denies "the youthful Marx" and ignores his so-called "humanist" writings...

...rather students first learn to think for themselves by engaging the great thinkers of the past...

...The therapies and living strategies that had turned "know thyself" into "absolve thyself" . . . had left the students unprepared for Oedipus' fierce assumption of personal accountability...

...I admire the fact that Denby is not predictable in Great Books, but unfortunately he is inconsistent as well...

...Above all, what Denby makes clear, and what will come as a surprise to most people outside academia, is the rampant careerism of today's radicals, which he observes in the toadying of graduate students at an academic conference: The students' statements were radical in content but obsequious in tone...

...The Kol-akowski episode is symptomatic of everything that is wrong with Den-by's book as an account of the Western canon...

...Never has an author's disclaimer—"any remaining errors and misconceptions in the book are entirely my own responsibility"—been more necessary to let the friends who read over his manuscript off the hook...

...Since most actual slaves are fit for rational thought, Aristotle thus opens up a distinction between those who are slaves by nature and those who are slaves merely by convention, and he inclines to the opinion that slavery of that second category is unjust...

...Did a library card not come along with Denby's registration fee at Columbia...

...Denby himself listened respectfully to Kolakowski and clearly learned from the lecture...

...He often fundamentally misrepresents the thinkers he is describing...

...Indeed, as part of his attempt to distance himself from the cultural Right, Denby is careful to criticize Allan Bloom as often as possible...

...Though he repeatedly expresses his distaste at finding himself in agreement with right-wing defenders of the canon, Denby in his last words on the subject is generous to the conservative cause: I agree with William Bennett and other traditionalists to this extent: Men and women educated in the Western tradition will have the best possible shot at the daunting task of reinventing morality and community in a republic now badly tattered by fear and mistrust...

...Feeling that he had become too immersed in media culture, he enrolled in the two core-curriculum courses at Columbia University, Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, courses he Paul Cantor is professor of English at the University of Virginia...

...After all, "college students are not that vulnerable...

...There is something charmingly American about this intellectual insouciance...

...I count 61 pages in the first volume of Main Currents of Marxism devoted to Marx's early writings, and far from downplaying their importance, Kolakowski concludes: "These are the fundamental principles of Marx's theory, from which he never departed...

...At times Denby is willing to admit to his confusion, and occasionally he even has an inkling that something in the works he is reading may be escaping him, that Plato, for example, may not be quite as foolish as he looks to Denby...

...But in Den-by's account of King Lear one realizes how this goal may result in bringing the Great Books down to our own level and in the process stripping them of a good deal of their greatness...

...Kolakowski was in fact one of the first to refute Georg Lukacs's desperate attempt to salvage Marx's reputation by turning attention to his early writings from his late...