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Introduction: The Radicalization of Academia
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19851 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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5 / 1991 |
697 Words |
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Are American academia and the professoriate mis-teaching or failing to teach America's students? Within the past few years a loud and growing chorus of voices--from both within and outside academia--have been highly critical of academia, the professoriate, and the academic enterprise. The list of critical books includes, among others, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (Simon and Schuster, 1987), Charles J. Sykes' Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education (Regnery Gateway, 1988) and his The Hollow Men: Politics and Corruption in Higher Education (Regnery Gateway, 1990), Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (Harper & Row, 1990), and Page Smith's Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America (Viking, 1990). Besides these books there have been a large number of magazine and journal articles on this subject. The Book World section of this issue of THE WORLD & I contains a review of Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education (The Free Press, 1991) entitled "The Question of Quotas" and written by Charles Sykes.
These books and critics do not agree on just what is wrong, and some can be faulted for adopting a near-hysterical tone. But, in summary, the criticisms seem to be: that the professoriate and academia are expensive, fat, lazy, and hollow; that academic standards have been widely lowered and adulterated; that a tendentious notion and practice of affirmative action--often including racial quotas or racial norming of grade scores--has pervaded academic admission and hiring; that strange, false, or otherwise unworthy things--deconstructionism, epistemological and ethical relativism, and "multiculturalism" being the worst--are taught in place of recognized great and classical works of Western civilization; that professors increasingly do not teach but instead are paid high salaries for dubious research; and that the professoriate and academia have become subverted by 1960s radicals who have now reached positions of tenure and leadership. One of the widely made charges is that there is now a "politically correct" (PC) position--that is, expressive only of the radical political position--that is imposed everywhere.
Apocalyptic changes did take place in American academia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Beginning at Berkeley in 1964, and traveling from there to all the elite universities and the large state and other public universities, and then to almost every college in America, campus after campus was convulsed by student protests, riots, takeovers, and shutdowns. These events were led and sometimes coordinated by a band of youthful, mostly student,
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