Assimilation, the Achievement Gap and White Guilt, Part 2: Universities
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
by Tom Shuford

"You don't have to intimidate us, " said the famous professor of philosophy in April 1969, to ten thousand triumphant students supporting a group of black students who had just persuaded " us, " the faculty of Cornell University, to do their will . . .

The 1969 Cornell incident, mentioned briefly in Assimilation, the Achievement Gap and White Guilt, Part 1 was among the first victories in what would prove a sweeping triumph for self-esteem-focused education in an effort to close the achievement gap. Those opening lines from the "SIXTIES" chapter from Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students capture the attitude of the leaders of American educational institutions at all levels in the face of pressures to degrade the teaching of Western Civilization: its literature and history. (1)

The study of Western Civilization in the university is the province of the humanities [literature, history, languages, philosophy] departments. This is where the universities surrendered to multiculturalism and to a host of fashionable isms. (2) Bloom describes humanities professors' dilemma and how they responded:

[They] are in an impossible situation and do not believe in themselves or what they do. Like it or not, they are essentially involved with interpreting and transmitting old books . . . they are agents of the rare, the refined and the superior. By definition they are out of it, and their democratic inclinations and guilt push them to be with it. After all, what do Shakespeare and Milton have to do with solving our problems? Particularly when one looks to them and finds that they are the repositories of the elitist, sexist, nationalist prejudices we are trying to overcome.

[Not only do the professors lack conviction] the clientele was disappearing. The students just were not persuaded that what was being offered them was important. The loneliness and sense of worthlessness were crushing, so these humanists jumped on the fastest, most streamlined express to the future . . . Humanists ran like lemmings into the sea, thinking they would refresh and revitalize themselves in it. They drowned. (p353)

There was no need for intimidation. Universities - and K-12 school systems - raced down to the Multicultural Sea. (3) This essay will not make a case for rescuing lemmings. As Paypal cofounders David O. Sacks and Peter A. Thiel observe of Stanford University:

For many of the faculty hired in the last 20 years, such a return would be literally impossible - they have become as ignorant of the despised Western Civilization as the students they purport to instruct . . . ( The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus , 1999, p. 228)

Stanford and other elite institutions will not become irrelevant. They still have an important role: scientific, technical and professional training:

In the hard sciences and the engineering fields, our top colleges and universities will graduate people who have amassed an impressive array of scientific knowledge and technical skills. At the same time, the business, law, and medical schools will continue to churn out trained professionals. From the outside perspective of companies seeking to hire new computer engineers, biochemists or investment bankers, everything will continue as before. (ibid)

But for the cultivation of a capacity to think about broad challenges to society and to individuals, we can no longer look to the university. In its new utilitarian role -

The university will have been transformed into a multiversity, not longer capable of providing a universal framework that enables students to integrate a wide assortment of knowledge into a coherent whole. That kind of framework, so essential for thinking about the larger problems facing individuals and societies, simply cannot be provided by science; it must be gleaned from the humanities and can be reached only after rigorous study - in philosophy, literature, history . . . The loss of this framework . . . will be felt keenly . . . by a generation of students increasingly alienated from an incoherent and senseless world . . . (ibid)

Universities (and K-12 school systems) can no longer defend Western Civilization. But rare individuals can, like African-American author Shelby Steele:

In looking at difficulties in the black American community over the years, it has always astounded me how much white Americans take for granted the rich and utterly decisive heritage of Western culture. There is no space here to reiterate the vast and invisible web of ideas, principles, values and understandings that have evolved over the millennia to undergird the American civilization. To mention only the fewest highlights, there was the magnificence of Greek thought, the Roman development of law, a renaissance of reason, the concept of a social contract, the idea of the individual as a self-contained and free political unit with rights and responsibilities, free markets, the scientific method, separation of church and state - all this and so much more converging to make the American and Western way of life successful in so many ways . . . This is the cultural capital that whites too often take for granted and rarely think of insisting on in the former victims of exclusion. ("War if the Worlds," Wall Street Journal , Sept. 17, 2001)

And like Arab-American psychologist Wafa Sultan: Sultan's five-minute debate with an Egyptian professor of religious studies on Al-Jazeera (February 21, 2006) is an international sensation. When the English-captioned video of the debate became available on the web, within three weeks it had over a million hits. Excerpt:

The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality.

Sultan's defense of Western Civilization recalls another critic of Islam, Oriana Fallaci. But whereas Sultan chastens Muslims in the grip of a totalitarian ideology, Fallaci rebukes the West for groveling in political correctness and for ignorance of Western accomplishments.

Why must Western Civilization depend on lone champions? Why do its schools and universities fail to defend the civilization that makes freedom possible?

I have two theories.

My K-12 theory is simple: Would-be teachers enter colleges of education ignorant of Western Civilization and exit as they came. Moreover, few teachers have any say over curricula. K-12 education is a top-down, central planning catastrophe, the educational equivalent of the ultimate central planning project, the now defunct Soviet Union.

My university theory is more complicated. College humanities and social science professors are also ignorant of Western Civilization. When they become graduate students they must specialize, usually in a narrow research interest of a supervising professor. Their career goals: earn a doctorate, secure a position, publish enough - in journals almost no one reads - to earn tenure.

I have experience with this. I was in a doctoral program in psychology at Emory University in the early 70s before I was bounced out with a masters. A mechanical engineering graduate from Duke, my interests shifted to psychology. I received a National Institute of Mental Health Traineeship at Emory University. I was naive enough to think I could pursue already distinct interests in graduate school. Instead, I found myself working in a lab for a professor doing classical conditioning experiments. There were alternative research "opportunities" in educational psychology that seemed - that were - equally fruitless. Indeed, can the reader name a single major discovery - a single social good - that we owe to the research of the psychologists and sociologists of the last forty years?

More important to understanding why universities cannot defend Western Civilization is to appreciate what happens to students who submit themselves to the endless years of  other-directed  study that culminate in a humanities/social science PhD. Absorbing one block of information for a semester, dropping it abruptly then absorbing (memorizing lecture notes for) another block of information, etc., always suppressing rebellious urges to go one's own way on one's own time table, takes an intellectual toll.

Ultimately there may be little left of oneself to "go" anywhere. At the end of this other-guided journey - at the top of the education pyramid - are the survivors, humanities and social science PhDs. These professors would not need to be intimidated to jettison Western Civilization for the latest thing.

I must add, however, that Allan Bloom had not given up on universities in 1987 when The Closing of The American Mind was published:

Our problems [as a civilization] are so great and their sources so deep that to understand them we need philosophy more than ever, if we do not despair of it, and it faces the challenges on which it flourishes. I still believe that universities, rightly understood, are where community and friendship [of a philosophical nature] can exist in our time . . . But for all that, and even though they deserve our strenuous efforts, one should never forget that Socrates was not a professor . . . that the love of wisdom survived, partly, because of his individual example. This is what really counts, and we must remember it in order to know how to defend the university. (p382)

Bloom died in 1992. Had he lived would he still believe universities have a role beyond narrow scientific and professional training?

Today's universities and K-12 systems seem beyond repair in governance and structure.

The Great Books of Western Civilization are the sine qua non of a general education. Not institutions, bricks and mortar or otherwise. Bloom acknowledged as much, even if he wasn't ready to let go of his romantic notion of what a university could be:

Men may live more truly and fully in reading Plato and Shakespeare than at any other time, because then they are participating in essential being and are forgetting their accidental lives. The fact that this kind of humanity exists or existed, and that we can somehow still touch it with the tips of our outstretched fingers, make our imperfect humanity . . . tolerable. (p380)

And -

...the only serious solution [to the incoherence of a university education] is the one that is almost universally rejected: the good old Great Books approach, in which a liberal education means reading certain recognized classic texts, just reading them, letting them dictate what the questions are and the method of approaching them - not forcing them into categories we make up, not treating them as historical products, but trying to read them as their authors wish them to be read . . . (p343)

And -

...one thing is certain: wherever the Great Books make up a central part of the curriculum, the students are excited and satisfied, feel they are doing something that is independent and fulfilling . . . The advantage they get is an awareness of the classic - particularly important for our innocents . . . and, perhaps most important of all, a fund of shared experiences and thoughts on which to ground their friendships with one another. Programs based on the judicious use of great texts provide the royal road to students' hearts. Their gratitude at learning of Achilles or the categorical imperative is boundless . . . (ibid)

But few now walk that royal road:

...It is the easiest thing in the world to devise courses of study, adapted to the particular conditions of each university, which thrill those who take them. The difficulty is in getting them accepted by the faculty. (p344)

* * *

Let us remove this obstacle. At the end of Assimilation and the Achievement Gap, Part 1, I wrote: " The self-esteem/social goals line of reasoning, pursued in evermore strained variations for almost a century, must end unhappily. There is another way."

Great Books is shorthand for "the other way" to tackle the achievement gap between whites and whites and whites and minority students and to aid in the assimilation of students of immigrant backgrounds.  It may seem outlandish to propose use of Great Books with minority children, but it is the only way to go. How to do so is the topic of a coming series on Great Books.

Endnotes:

1) See Political Correctness and Textbooks for the effects of pressure groups on K-12 textbooks. 

2) Humanities professors' struggle for profundity is comically illustrated in the embrace of an "ism" now in the popular lexicon: deconstructionism. Here's Bloom's description:

The interpreter's creative activity is more important than the text; there is no text, only interpretation. Thus the one thing most necessary for us, the knowledge of what these texts have to tell us, is turned over to the subjective, creative selves of these interpreters, who say that there is both no text and no reality to which the texts refer. (p379)

Humanities professors employ many other "theories," "frameworks," "methods" to deform the study of Great Books: Freudian Criticism, Marxist Criticism, New Criticism, Structuralism, New Historicism . . .

Trendy ideologies flourish not just in the elite universities. Paul W. Anghinetti is emeritus professor of English at Rhode Island College. Below are my notes on Anghinetti's account, in the Providence Journal, of the sad trajectory of the RIC English department:

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS TO RESPECTABILITY: "RIC, which emerged out of its normal-school roots when I began teaching there, in 1962, moved inexorably out of its second-rate academic status to become a very respectable liberal-arts institution. Embracing the great tradition of intellectual freedom of inquiry that characterized the very best American institutions, RIC grew in stature as a place where Voltaire's great dictum was a by-law for faculty and administration: 'I do not agree with a word you say, sir, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'"

RESPECTABILITY TO GULAG: "Alas, my final years at RIC forced me to adopt the role of Dostoyevsky's 'Underground Man'. . . RIC - particularly the English department, where I labored - slowly became an academic gulag . . . a closed society, run by propagandists intent on their ideological myopia."

PROFUSION OF IDEOLOGIES: "The litmus-paper test for the English department resides in its course offerings, which will reveal . . . its radicalized shape. Euro-centrism, Feminism, Marxism, The New Historicism, Reader Response, Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction Theory got adopted with a fervor worthy of medieval scholastics or Muslim fundamentalists."

DEAD WHITE MALES VERBOTEN: "Dead White Male authors became anathema to my colleagues, who shuddered at the sound of 'Milton,' 'Melville' or 'Hemingway.'. . Literary value yielded to extra-literary political and theoretical concerns. Down with form and content, up with socio-political and pop agendas!"

REAL VICTIMS: STUDENTS: "Ultimately, of course, our students have become victimized by the subtle trashing of traditional academic values." ("Propaganda factory - Political correctness ruining RIC," Providence Journal, September 9, 2004)

3) University humanities departments were ready to be taken. Bloom explains:

...Cornell was in the forefront of trends . . . It had for several years been a laundering operation for radical Left French ideas in comparative literature. From Sartre, through Goldman, to Foucault and Derrida, each successive wave washed over the Cornell shores. These ideas were intended to give new life to old books. A technique of reading, a framework for interpretation - Marx, Freud, structuralism, and on and on - could incorporate the tired old books and make them a part of revolutionary consciousness. At last there was an active, progressive role for the humanists, who had been only antiquarians, eunuchs guarding a harem of aging and now unattractive courtesans . . . (p352)

I see parallels with colleges of education. The task of humanities departments is pretty simple: get students to read Great Books (Discussion is icing on the cake). The task of school teachers is also pretty simple: give the young fundamental academic knowledge and skills. The basic character of these tasks is not glamorous. To justify the lofty title of education "professional" or university professor one must cloak a simple enterprise - K-8 schooling, liberal education at the university level - in high-sounding theories, frameworks, techniques.

An exchange below between two sixtyish British educators from the Education Consumers Clearinghouse message board illustrates the deception involved in carrying on this charade:

Mona M: We learned our tables by chanting: Once 7 is 7; two 7's are 14 and so on. Then this daft fad came of just counting 7 14 21 28 . . . Now there are even dafter activities (Groups) which are supposed to end up with children knowing their tables. But they are just a waste of time. In the final analysis - who dreams them up? Why are these people so determined NOT to teach the simple old way?

Tom B: Anyone can teach the simple old way. But if you are trying to pretend that teaching is a "profession" requiring specialised training, you have to think up all these daft ideas.

Tom Shuford tomshuford@aol.com is a retired teacher living in Lenoir, North Carolina