[Paleopsych] Spiked: Norman Levitt: Academic strife: the American University in the slough of despond
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Norman Levitt: Academic strife: the American University in the slough of
despond
http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CADAC.htm
5.10.12
Academic strife: the American University in the slough of despond
By preaching the virtues of 'cultural competence', the academy betrays
its lack of confidence.
by Norman Levitt
First, the summary from the "Magazine and Journal Reader" feature of the daily
bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.10.18
http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/10/2005101801j.htm
A glance at the current issue of spiked: The problems of cultural
competence
The hot new term in higher education is "cultural competence," says
Norman Levitt, a mathematics professor at Rutgers University at New
Brunswick. But, he warns, the phrase is little more than a euphemism
that cloaks "problematical and even disturbing policy initiatives in
linguistic vestments."
"Cultural competence" means an individual can work across cultural
lines, can value and adapt to diversity, and can demonstrate such
abilities in leadership and policy-making roles. However, when you
shed the happy talk, Mr. Levitt says, "cultural competence" means
"deference, even servility, toward the norms and values espoused by
fervent multiculturalists." It also does not allow people to raise
ideas that might make certain groups uncomfortable: Suggesting that
affirmative action is unfair, for instance, would be a culturally
incompetent offense, he says.
The practice of cultural competence also further fragments professors
and university administrators, he writes. When administrators at the
University of Oregon proposed cultural-competency standards in May,
professors balked at terms that would have, among other things, made
hirings, promotions, and salaries dependent upon an evaluation of
cultural competence.
"The message to faculty was this: You're going to adopt our
sociopolitical point of view (or pretend to) or pay the price," writes
Mr. Levitt.
The Oregon example, he says, illustrates the staying power of the
left-wing ethos of political correctness. Such PC-sponsored
initiatives as cultural competence, he says, work only to make their
sponsors unpopular, while "doing virtually nothing concrete to
ameliorate the painful real-world situations that provoke these
projects in the first place."
"There is good reason to remain aware of the dangers of cultural
chauvinism," writes Mr. Levitt, "but the point is to cleanse our
standards of judgment of narrow and local prejudices, not to abandon
the very notion of standards of judgment."
The article, "Academic Strife: The American University in the Slough
of Despond," is available at
[54]http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CADAC.htm
--Jason M. Breslow
_________________________________________________________________
Background articles from The Chronicle:
* [55]U. of Oregon Backs Off Plan Linking Tenure and 'Cultural
Competency' After Faculty Members Balk (5/27/2005)
* [56]Verbatim: an interview with Mr. Levitt (12/17/1999)
* [57]2 Scholars Examine the 'Bizarre War' Against Science They Say
Is Being Waged by the Academic Left (4/27/1994)
Opinion:
* [58]Why Science and Scientists Are Under Fire (9/29/1995)
* [59]The Perils of Democratizing Science (10/5/1994)
References
54. http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CADAC.htm
55. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/05/2005052702n.htm
56. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v46/i17/17a02601.htm
57.
http://chronicle.com/che-data/articles.dir/articles-40.dir/issue-34.dir/34a01501.htm
58.
http://chronicle.com/che-data/articles.dir/art-42.dir/issue-05.dir/05b00101.htm
59.
http://chronicle.com/che-data/articles.dir/articles-41.dir/issue-06.dir/06b00101.htm
E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles.
---------------------
A new buzzword has entered the lexicon of academic fashion in the USA,
threatening to drown poor professors like me in yet another wave of
coy euphemism. The term is 'cultural competence'.
Like its predecessors 'affirmative action,' 'diversity,' and
'multiculturalism', it attempts to cloak problematical and even
disturbing policy initiatives in linguistic vestments that suggest
that no right-minded person could possibly demur. A 'culturally
competent' academic, one might naively surmise, would be one who has
absorbed and is able to propound some of the deep values - ethical,
aesthetic or epistemological - that embody the stellar achievements of
Western culture, one who could explain, for instance, why Dante or
Kant or Ingres is present, at least subtly, in the assumptions under
which we all live. Or something like that.
This, alas, would be a comical error. 'Cultural competence' is, in
essence, a bureaucratic weapon. 'Cultural competence', or rather, your
presumed lack thereof, is what you will be clobbered with if you are
imprudent enough to challenge or merely to have qualms about
'affirmative action', 'diversity' and 'multiculturalism', as those
principles are now espoused by their most fervent academic advocates.
Cultural competence, like the UK's proposed new identity card, is
something a professor is supposed to keep handy at all times, and to
display with a straight face whenever confronted with a socially or
ethnically charged situation, in order to dispel any suspicion of
racism, sexism or Eurocentrism that might arise in the minds of the
professionally suspicious.
What is 'cultural competence'?
The term has been around for a couple of years, drastically mutating
as it puts down deeper roots. Originally, it was fairly innocuous. It
was largely restricted to the healthcare professions, and referred to
the ability to function effectively with members of ethnic minorities
and immigrant groups by dint of insights into the local community's
idiosyncratic prejudices, fears and assumptions, insofar as these
differed from the norms of middle-class white society. It seems
obvious that such knowledge could be helpful to a doctor, nurse or
social worker hoping to convince patients or clients from these groups
to keep medical appointments, complete a course of antibiotics or have
their children vaccinated. Though cultural competence, in this sense,
presumes a degree of open-mindedness and empathy, it seems only
vaguely political, at most.
Now, however, cast loose from its original moorings, the phrase has
become emphatically political. I offer the reader, with some
trepidation, the formal definition as jargonistically set out by some
purported educators:
Cultural competence requires that individuals and organisations:
a) Have a defined set of values and principles, demonstrated
behaviours, attitudes, policies and structures that enable them to
work effectively in a cross-cultural manner;
b) Demonstrate the capacity to 1) value diversity, 2) engage in
self-reflection, 3) manage the dynamics of difference, 4) acquire and
institutionalise cultural knowledge, and 5) adapt to the diversity and
the cultural contexts of the communities they serve;
c) Incorporate and advocate the above in all aspects of leadership,
policymaking, administration, practice and service delivery while
systematically involving staff, students, families, key stakeholders
and communities.
If we divest this of its thick integument of happy talk and explore
the details, we find that in practice it means deference, even
servility, toward the norms and values espoused by fervent
multiculturalists, along with tame assent to whatever measures they
propose to achieve their aims. Attempts to explicate the idea
occasionally slip into language that reveals the underlying political
programme:
[C]ultural competence entails actively challenging the status quo and
advocating for equity and social justice.
In the context of higher education, cultural competence necessitates
abject refusal to articulate or defend ideas that might make certain
protected groups uncomfortable. Professors can only be deemed
'culturally competent' if they openly profess the approved corpus of
received values.
Here is an illustrative if fragmentary list of transgressions that
would likely strip an academic of any chance of being designated
culturally competent:
· Suggesting that affirmative action might conflict with other
standards of justice and equity, or that opponents of affirmative
action are not ipso facto Klansmen waiting for their white sheets to
come back from the laundry;
· Taking issue with the claim that Malcolm X was a paragon of
humanitarianism and political genius;
· Disputing the wisdom of feminist theory as regards the social
constructedness of gender;
· Asserting that the early demographic history of the Americas is more
accurately revealed by scientific anthropology than by the Native
American folklore and myth celebrated by tribal militants;
· Expressing doubts that 'queer theory' should be made the epicenter
of literary studies.
Likewise, to maintain that hiring, retention and promotion within the
university should focus on the traditional academic virtues of the
scholar, rather than assigning enormous importance to the candidate's
race, ethnicity, sex or sexuality, would banish one permanently from
the culturally competent elect. To deny that feminist theorists should
call all the shots on matters having to do with sexual harassment
would be an act of self-immolation.
The University of Oregon: a cautionary tale
Where has this orthodoxy come from? The State of Oregon on the West
Coast seems to have been the seedbed of the cultural competence
movement in American education (1). Why this should be so is not at
all clear. Oregon is scenically glorious and politically moderate, and
its colleges and universities have not notably suffered from racial or
ethnic tensions. Nonetheless, it was at the state's flagship
university, the University of Oregon, that advocates of cultural
competence recently grew so rash as to provoke an enormous uproar that
will doubtless make the term into a new red flag in the Culture Wars
and set off endless rounds of vituperation.
The trigger was the emergence of a concrete proposal to implement
cultural competence standards on campus. This long, turgid document
called for more of the things you would expect such a declaration to
call for more of - 'diversity' admissions, multicultural courses,
programmes to enhance cross-cultural sensitivity, and, of course, an
assortment of administrators and committees to effectuate all this
righteousness. But this much was predictable boiler-plate; the real
fireworks showed up in the section mandating development of cultural
competence among the faculty.
Here the authors, obviously feeling their oats, launched a serious
power play. They prescribed a draconian regime of attitude adjustment
aimed at professors and instructors. They proposed that all faculty be
required to 'participate in ongoing cultural competence professional
development' under their tutelage. But this was just the beginning.
The drafters further called for academic departments, across the
board, to reconstruct their hiring policies so as to make affirmative
action the central factor in generating job offers. They insisted that
every course in the school be scrutinised for its consistency with
multicultural doctrine. Above all, in hiring, promotion and
determination of salary, they called for a formal evaluation of the
candidate's cultural competence!
Stripping it down to its essence, the message to faculty was this:
you're going to adopt our sociopolitical point of view (or pretend to)
or pay the price; so far as hiring and retention is concerned, your
professional standards shall be modified or overruled to insure the
predominance of people of whom we approve because of their race, sex,
sexuality or doctrinal purity; if you give us any trouble, lacking
tenure you'll be out on your ear, and even with tenure you'll be out a
lot of money.
The faculty, not being particularly obtuse, certainly got the message
- and promptly began to raise considerable hell. The upshot was that
the higher-ups in the university administration, who had been primed
to endorse the report, did a prompt volte-face and downgraded it to a
preliminary draft slated to be drastically amended before
implementation. Its principal author, like some misbegotten
super-hero, slunk off to a new job far away.
The ultimate fate of these proposals thus seems pretty clear. The
bureaucracy will masticate them over and over in an interminable cycle
of revisions and re-revisions. In the end, a diluted and attenuated
version will finally emerge. It will render some lip-service to
cultural competence in the abstract and grant some funds to its
proponents. But it will leave the faculty to continue largely
unmolested in its well-worn paths.
On this somewhat hopeful note, this particular Political Correctness
horror story now ends, for the time being. But why is it especially
salient, given the long line of PC horror stories of which it
constitutes just one more episode? Perhaps it isn't all that
consequential; yet it is instructive for a number of reasons.
Faction fighting
My tale demonstrates the staying power of the ethos of (left-wing)
Political Correctness (or whatever you choose to call it) in the face
of many years of scorn and ridicule. It shows how little its
proponents have adjusted to discouraging realities, most notably the
fact that the chief effect of PC-sponsored initiatives has been to
make the sponsors unpopular while doing virtually nothing concrete to
ameliorate the painful real-world situations that provoke these
projects in the first place.
Most folks on a typical US campus think of PC as tiresome and even
silly, and regard its advocates as self-righteous and censorious to
the point of nastiness. The chief beneficiaries of PC antics, indeed,
are the right-wing talk show hosts, bloggers and columnists who
gleefully decry them at every opportunity.
Even more, the story tends to underline the fragmentation of
university culture in a much wider context. Why, one might ask, are
university administrators, largely bureaucrats rather than ideologues,
still willing to accommodate PC enthusiasts? Perhaps because to be an
American university administrator these days entails being all things
to all men, women and transgendered persons, the servant of all
masters (yet master of them all). Each constituency exacts its own
tribute, and the shrewd administrator is one who knows how to render
it up without sparking the ire of another faction whose view of the
world might be markedly different. A list of these groups, at least
roughly representative of the implicit infrastructure of most American
universities, might be helpful here, if we allow for the fact that
boundaries are sometimes blurry.
First of all, there is Profland, the traditional faculty, oriented,
presumably, to serious scholarship and its code of values. But
Profland lacks real cohesion. Its postmodern wing, for instance,
usually doubles as a faction of the PC Mafia. This is even more true
of the Myrmidons of the Downtrodden, who staff the various 'oppression
studies' programmes - Women's Studies, Black Studies, Latino Studies,
Queer Studies, Native American Studies, and so forth. Collectively,
they are the consiglieri of the PC Mafia.
The most self-satisfied subtribe, on the other hand, is They Who Could
Make a MUCH Better Living in the Real World and Often Do - that is to
say, the faculty of the Law School, the Medical School and the
Business School. They are in Profland but not of it; unlike professors
of English or archaeology, they have enough worldly clout that they
needn't seek solace by anointing themselves intellectual holy men.
At the other end of the self-esteem spectrum, we find the SubAcademic
Wannabes who teach in not-quite-intellectually-respectable programmes:
Education, Social Work, Journalism, and so forth. They seem to be part
of Profland, but are haunted by the knowledge that in that enchanted
realm, they will always be placed below the salt, mere squires rather
than cavaliers. The Entrepreneurs should be singled out as well,
scientists and engineers whose research is directly translatable into
technology, patents and royalties accruing (if they're shrewd) to
themselves as well as to the university.
Beyond Profland, the Undergraduate Eloi predominate, drenching the
campus in booze, sex, downloaded music cuts and annoying ring-tones.
They are only distant cousins of the less-numerous Grad Student
Helotry, essentially passive and resigned creatures who can
occasionally be rousted from their library carrels long enough to make
a bit of a fuss - but not for long. The latter, however, are not so
forlorn as the Academic Gypsies who constitute the provisional or
part-time instructional staff. These grossly underpaid wretches are
doomed to aspire to Profland without much chance of ever getting
there.
Most anomalous and therefore most surprising to those not long
immersed in American tribal culture is the Jockocracy, a faction of
immense power at most public and many private universities despite
being utterly alien to education, scholarship or learning in any form.
This consists of the administrators and chief functionaries of the
athletic programme, most notably the coaches heading the school's
football and basketball teams. Such programmes are run for the
economic benefit of these worthies while also enriching media outlets,
purveyors of jock-related trinkets, and manufacturers of athletic
shoes. Their viability depends, ultimately, on the eagerness of young
athletes, typically profoundly deficient in academic skills, to be
ruthlessly exploited while largely surrendering their personal
autonomy. The underlying looniness of the situation is epitomised by
the fact, no doubt mind-boggling to most non-Americans, that at a
university with a 'big-time' team, the football coach will earn eight
or nine times as much as the most distinguished professor. Athletics
is the most hypocritical, corrupt, cynical, vicious and depraved
aspect of university culture and, therefore, it is the one aspect of
university culture unreservedly approved of by politicians,
businessmen and the general public.
Public universities must take special notice of the Pols, the state
governors and legislators, along with the appointees thereof, who
ultimately run the place, de juro. These touchy people require
periodic jollying-up and, on dire occasions, fervent propitiation. The
amorphous mass of Alums can also be a powerful, if unseen, force,
though it's not easy to give a categorical description of what will
antagonise or please them. Pols and Alums are the clans most likely to
sympathise with a relatively new formation, the Dark Side, political
and religious conservatives who have been organising recently to
demand greater representation in Profland, a club that has welcomed
very few of their protégés heretofore.
Dark Siders are characterised not only by their expressed loathing for
the PC Mafia, but for their cynical habit of counting as PC anyone to
the left of Rush Limbaugh. Oddly enough, however, they align with the
PC Mafia on some crucial matters. There are certain texts they are
obligated to deplore - JS Mill's On Liberty and The Origin of Species,
for instance - that rank high on the PC shitlist as well. Though they
are frantic to abjure the term, Dark Siders also strongly favour
affirmative action for certain under-represented minorities - in this
instance, free marketers, born-again Christians, Intelligent Design
theorists and Bushmen in general.
The last and, in some sense, most significant faction is the
Ringmasters - that is to say, the administrators who try to keep the
whole circus going. The most notable thing about this clan is that, in
recent years, its traditional roots in Profland have withered. These
functionaries - in American parlance usually called Presidents,
Provosts and Deans, in descending order of majesty - have become a
tribe unto themselves. Fewer and fewer, at least at the highest level,
are primus inter pares professors raised to the seat of power from
within the faculty (a practice much more common years ago). More and
more of them are drawn from a distinct professional mandarinate,
people who cut their ties to teaching and research fairly early in the
game (if, indeed, they ever spent time in Profland), and who readily
move from one institution to another as they climb the career ladder.
Over the past decade or so, the tone of academic administration has
changed considerably. It has become 'managerial' rather than strictly
academic. Budgetary and financial matters predominate at the highest
administrative level. Perhaps this has always been so, but today's
preoccupation with money seems single-minded and intense to an
unprecedented degree.
This attitude is reflected in policy towards faculty and curriculum.
Narrow or esoteric disciplines that draw few paying students are
luxury items that have disappeared from many campuses. Increasingly,
especially in technical areas, a professor is judged by his ability to
support his own financial weight through research grants or even by
fecundity in coming up with marketable inventions. The typical
university now relies to an unprecedented extent on Academic Gypsies,
along with Grad Student Helots, to handle teaching responsibilities.
Regular faculty with tenure or serious prospects thereof form an
ever-shrinking proportion of the teaching staff, simply because they
cost so much in terms of pay and benefits. For fear of losing paying
customers, schools cater more and more to the shallow tastes of the
Undergraduate Eloi, providing courses that are long on entertainment
value and generous in their grading standards.
At most schools, the president is above all the fundraiser-in-chief,
and endures or is cast aside depending on whether the revenue stream
he generates is munificent or meager. Most schools now have elaborate
fundraising machinery staffed by specialists in this field.
Inevitably, institutional plans and ambitions are increasingly shaped
by the enthusiasms of large donors. Additionally, at publicly
supported institutions, presidents must continually dance attendance
on Pols and the politically well-connected to ensure that
appropriations are not choked off.
Management through diversity
In consequence of all this, universities must increasingly play to
public opinion. The prominence of athletic programmes is one result.
Another is the emphasis on 'diversity', though this policy has
repeatedly turned into a public relations minefield. Most faculty and
student supporters of diversity - in blunter terms, preferences
accorded to certain racial and ethnic minorities - see their position
as arising from the quest for social justice. Most administrators,
however, see it as a way of buying social peace or at least deflecting
nasty social conflict from the university's doorstep.
Diversity policies play, obviously, to the liberal sentiments of most
of the faculty, and to those of many students as well. But, under
ideal circumstances, they play to a certain strain of conservative
opinion, too. Despite the reputation of conservative activists and
intellectuals as adamant opponents of affirmative action, racial
preferences, quotas and the like, much of the business community,
conservative or Republican in its general outlook, views affirmative
action programmes and diversity goals as a way of mollifying the black
and Latino populations. They help to ease the tension of day-to-day
life in communities where different ethnicities continually interact.
This is why anti-affirmative action politics has received only
lukewarm support even in conservative states and cities. For pragmatic
conservatives, social placidity is more important than ideological
consistency.
So it is no surprise that even somewhat conservative university
administrators will advocate and defend their school's affirmative
action programmes. Affirmative action is, from one point of view, a
way of co-opting the brightest and most ambitious minority youth,
bringing them to identify, in the long run, with conventional
bourgeois values rather than oppositional doctrines. Conservatives are
likewise content with speech codes, broad anti-harassment regulations
and the like, on the theory that these will eliminate or dampen the
flashpoints that set off militant protests and even violence. In fact,
when these statutes are applied to some kinds of 'sexual harassment'
cases - the current definition of sexual harassment is both broad and
vague - it is hard to tell whether the ideology being served is
radical feminism or the conservative prudery of traditional religion.
But above all, administrators are fearful of rekindling the militant
passions of the 1960s, to which nostalgic faculty are as susceptible
as ardent young students. Race is the one issue that has the potential
to set this off. Therefore, it is an issue that impels pragmatic
rightists to find rationalisations for ignoring their individualistic
principles.
But this is only part of the long, unremitting balancing act that
university administrations must perform. Like a music-hall juggler
keeping a dozen plates spinning precariously on as many twirling
sticks, an American university president, along with his subalterns,
is continually on the run between one touchy faction and another,
trying to keep them all functioning without smashing into one
another's egos. It is not a task that is well suited to anyone
obsessed with ideological or even intellectual consistency. There are
too many Meccas to bow to at too many different points of the compass.
Under the circumstances, it would be absurd to expect the leader of a
school to personify the sense of scholarly mission and the thirst for
knowledge that universities are supposed to embody.
The academic who actually admits to having been inspired or encouraged
by the eloquence, the philosophy or the deeds of his president must be
the rarest creature on Earth. A president simply doesn't expect to be
admired for incarnating the academic ethos. The best he can hope for
is to be thought well of for his cleverness in bringing in donations
and his prudence in keeping his nose out of things that don't concern
him, which covers everything from the drill-sergeant methods of the
overpaid football coach to the double-talk of the overpaid literary
theorist.
Enforced diffidence
So where, then, do the values of the university repose? Where have
they taken firm enough root to guide and inspire the thoughts and
words of faculty and students? Profland, by and large, flatters itself
that the ancient virtues flourish in its soil, that mercenary or
hypocritical though the university may be in many respects, its
professors, at least, incarnate these ideals.
There may be a little truth to this; professors honestly dedicated to
advancing knowledge and to nurturing students are really not all that
rare. The trouble is, however, that Profland isn't really a community
built on shared values and assumptions. It is, rather, a loose
assemblage of Anchorites, most of them dedicated in their own way, but
each functioning in isolation from the others, apart from such
affinities as might exist among scholars in the same sub-specialty of
the same discipline.
If, by some strange chance, a student should honestly inquire what a
university is really supposed to represent, what its core values are,
what it offers him by way of a mode of thought and life, what it
requires of him beyond classroom routine, there is no place for him to
seek an answer. All he ever gets is an 'orientation' at the beginning
of freshman year, which tells him where the library is, what the
penalty for plagiarism is, and why he should be thrilled to be part of
such a diverse community. There is no authority who can go beyond
clichés to point to actual practice or to other evidence of a
genuinely shared ethos.
The worst of it is that this deficiency is not a matter of
institutional structure, nor of misplaced priorities, nor of temporary
inattention. It arises from the hollowing out of Western culture as a
whole. This a sententious, even grandiose, way of putting it, perhaps,
but if we avoid thinking about the malaise of our larger society,
across decades rather than years, I doubt we'll be able to plumb the
morass into which American higher education - and, probably, the
community of scholars throughout the world - has fallen.
We not only lack guidelines and precepts to conduct us through the
life of the mind, we lack the sense that such principles are even
possible. The needed vocabulary hasn't vanished from our language, but
it is sodden with irony, rotten from years of coarse abuse. Consider
words like 'justice', 'objectivity', 'beauty', 'integrity',
'nobility', 'progress', 'honour', 'virtue', 'fairness' and
'righteousness': it's not only the postmodernists among us who
reflexively snicker at these terms; all of us do so, automatically.
To be asked to respond to any of them with a straight face as denoting
an actual realm of human experience is like being touched up for a
loan. You feel like you've been placed in the awkward position of
having to play the sucker if you're to comply. The cultural demons
lodged in all our psyches tell us that these words are the well-worn
tools of an ancient con-game, that they are names of phantoms, weapons
that the cynical wield to dominate the gullible. If ever we try to use
them without a sneer, shame washes over us.
This kind of resigned cynicism is not just a casual attribute of our
culture. It is ingrained in the zeitgeist of our wounded and
distempered civilisation. We have experienced a century marked not
only by butchery on an inconceivable scale but by the chilling fact
that a good deal of that butchery emerged from the triumphs of what
first looked to be forces of redemption. There are words we can't use
without sneer quotes because their degradation is our way of burying
the dead hopes they once reflected.
Therefore, if I tell you that a university is, above all, an
institution for the preservation and extension of learning and for its
dissemination to the emerging generation, for the winnowing of truth
from falsehood and imposture, for the conservation of the highest
values our civilisation can conceive, for the emulation, insofar as we
are capable, of the finest and deepest minds our civilisation has
produced, for the hoarding and protection of what must survive of our
civilisation even after all the dross has fallen away; if I tell you
all this without satiric intent, and with the purpose of describing an
ideal that is at least approximable if not perfectly realisable, then
I will have committed an enormous gaffe, by the standards that our
culture inflicts on us all. I will have tried to sell you a bill of
goods, swamp real-estate, pump-and-dump stock, the Brooklyn Bridge.
We cannot deal with the concept I have just formulated as if it really
meant something because the cultural confidence to do so has utterly
atrophied. We live in an era of enforced diffidence which makes it
positively painful to assert that there are better ideas and worse,
better minds and worse, superior and inferior ways of knowing,
differences between the enduring and the ephemeral, ways of viewing
the world worth preserving and along with those worth discarding.
We have been conditioned to believe that to credit such distinctions,
or at least to claim special value for particular ideas, minds and
ways of knowing, is hopelessly parochial, culturally arrogant, and
ultimately oppressive. There is good reason to remain aware of the
dangers of cultural chauvinism, but the point is to cleanse our
standards of judgment of narrow and local prejudices, not to abandon
the very notion of standards of judgment.
Nobody can sincerely propound a vision of what a university is
supposed to be, of what actual universities should strive to be,
because it is so hard to assemble that vision, or even to contemplate
its components, without blushing at one's lapse into unsophistication.
Neither pride nor aspiration can really hold a university community
together because our culture instructs us to reject the kind of
solidarity that enables collective pride and aspiration. We are
content to let the university define itself in terms of the
aggregation of functions the larger community and the economy wish it
to perform: babysitting our youth in their protracted adolescence,
staging gladiatorial exhibitions for TV, conducting product research
for chip makers and drug makers, sending forth a reliable supply of
doctors and lawyers, trying to ameliorate America's racial mess
(albeit in a half-assed way), and delving into arcane knowledge here
and there just in case the stuff is ever really needed.
The task of forging a definition based on deep respect for verities,
wisdom and genius (hear how strangely those words ring!), promulgating
it, assembling a consensus around it, and functioning in accordance
with its values - that's something for which we utterly lack the
confidence, the sense of a painful but deservedly abiding past, of an
uncertain but still hopeful future.
And so our American institutions of higher learning drift along, fat,
dumb and happy, or lean, dumb and anxious, according to the size of
their endowment. 'Total Depravity', as the sociologist Thorstein
Veblen labeled it a century ago - but he didn't know the half. It is
foreordained that episodes of extreme silliness shall burst forth
therein from time to time. The cult of 'cultural competence' is now
beginning to afflict universities because they lack the immune system
necessary to suppress such inane crap before it gets a foothold. It is
distinctly possible that the even more inane crap called Intelligent
Design theory might also afflict them before too long, especially if
the power of the PC Mafia starts to slip while that of the Dark Side
waxes. Recurrent inanity, in one form or another, seems to be the fate
of universities as now constituted.
At the risk of sounding nostalgic for what never was, I say that it
needn't have been thus. But avoiding this abyss would have required
prescience and courage that is quite rare in individuals, let alone in
institutions.
Norman Levitt is Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University. He is
the co-author (with PR Gross) of Higher Superstition
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