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Rebels Against Reason
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17674 |
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BOOK WORLD
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6 / 1990 |
2,893 Words |
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Patrica Summerside
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TENURED RADICALS
How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education
Roger Kimball
New York: Harper and Row, 1990
224 pp., $18.95
Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education is the latest fresh breeze to blow across academia and sweep away many of its pretensions. As such, it carries forward the task begun by Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and continued by Peter Shaw's The War Against the Intellect and Charles Sykes' Profscam.
Bloom's book showed us the rigid orthodoxy that grips the minds of American college faculties - an orthodoxy that waves the banner of diversity with no apparent sense of irony. Shaw used case studies to illustrate the irrational mentality that maintains that orthodoxy. Sykes focused on professors' frequent abdication of basic professional responsibilities, an abdication often grotesquely coupled with much "social justice" posturing.
Kimball's book breaks no new ground. He simply adds further documentation to the steadily building case against academic irresponsibility. Like his predecessors, he shows wit: his more personal observations will probably bring chuckles of recognition to academic insiders. For those outside academia, like this reviewer, who are simply concerned about the influence of contemporary opinion elites in our society, his book offers a lively yet serious clarification of issues. Perhaps the single contribution of Tenured Radicals is its clarification of the canon controversy in the humanities - what shall be taught and how it shall be taught.
What do our colleges teach?
In practice, a fixed canon of "must-read" books has not been the norm in American humanities education. Rather there was a core of works on whose value strong consensus existed, surrounded by ever-widening circles of lesser works: the further from the core, the less agreement. But nearly everyone would agree, for instance, that Shakespeare could not be excluded from the core. And nearly everyone would agree that Harold Robbins could be excluded not only from the core but from serious consideration. With regard to scores of old and new writers in between, there would be ongoing debate.
Thus, both of the mutually contradictory images of the canon that are promoted by anticanon activists are false. Some represent the canon as inherently fossilized; this has not actually been the case. Others imply that because literary standards do change to some extent over time, all standards are merely arbitrary. Both the fossilized canon and the whim-of-fashion canon are caricatures that anti canonists would rather confront than the complex reality of a well-considered canon.
Although Kimball does not delineate them, it is possible to imagine at least four possible perspectives on the canon controversy:
1. Every liberal arts program should have a core curriculum; the humanities component of that curriculum should be organized around a canon; the primary criteria for inclusion in that canon should be the
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