On the same day that my review of George Stade’s academic novel
Sex and Violence (see below) appeared in the Wall
Street Journal, John Tierney in the New York Times
took up that old favorite question of why
university professors are so liberal. Mr. Stade, who teaches
English at Columbia, has lived for so long among people who think
exactly as he does that he does not even think it in bad taste —
let alone wrong and deplorable — to have his narrator and alter
ego toss off the observation that Rush Limbaugh deserves to die.
That hardly even counts as a controversial observation, I’m
guessing, in the Columbia faculty lounge. But the profs do read the
New York Times, so they were glad to write in to Mr.
Tierney suggesting some possible explanations for the lack of
conservatives in the academy. In his column he shared them with us.
They are as follows:
1. Conservatives do not value knowledge for its own sake.
2. Conservatives do not care about the social good.
3. Conservatives are too greedy to work for professors’ wages.
4. Conservatives are too dumb to get tenure.
Tentatively, Tierney provided an alternative to the above —
namely the explanation that the more liberals there are, the more
there tend to be, since without any intentional bias they will
naturally tend to hire other people who think like themselves. This
is what he calls “the false consensus effect” — or the tendency of
any group to gravitate to the “conviction that its opinions are the
norm. Liberals on campus have become so used to hearing their
opinions reinforced that they have a hard time imagining there are
intelligent people with different views, either on campus or in
politics.”
I am sympathetic to this view, but think he should have looked
not only at who is teaching but also at what is being taught. In
the arts and humanities, at any rate, the curriculum itself is
built around left-wing assumptions — such as, for example, that
literature is only worthy of study as the fossil-record of power
relationships between oppressors and oppressed in pre-revolutionary
societies, including our own. Hence the importance of the great
-isms in their critical vocabulary: racism,
sexism, capitalism, imperialism,
fascism, post-colonialism and that honorary
ism, homophobia. All these words are used to
describe putatively oppressive relationships which it then becomes
the job of the literary critic to tease out of, say, Jane Austen
for no better purpose than exposing the fact — which the critic
obviously knew before he ever read Jane Austen — that they are
there. Who but a true believer would choose to make a career out of
such a sterile exercise? By the same token, if you happen to cling
to the reactionary belief that Jane Austen has something of
interest to say beyond the implied critique of the
imperialist-capitalist-racialist-fascist-sexist-post-colonialist-homophobic
structures of the power elite of her time, a university is the last
place you would go to test it.
Even if you believed that every narrative is resolvable into the
schematic of the power relationships of its characters, you’d have
to have either a pretty high boredom threshold or an enormously
high opinion of yourself, or both, if you were to devote your life
to the “decoding” in this way of the world’s great literature.
Indeed, the idea of “greatness” in literature is itself oppressive,
at least to those who are so intimidated by it that they have a
compulsive need to devote their minds to the subject of what great
literature is “really” about. In doing so, they break their own
chains of servitude, as they see it, to the masters of the Western
tradition and themselves become the masters of the masters,
furiously patronizing them for thinking they were writing about one
thing when — thanks to Marx and Lenin and Gramsci and Althusser
and Foucault and a host of others — we know they were
writing about quite another. Whereas the love of knowledge is
common to all political persuasions, this bitter pleasure in
exposing and debunking that which generations have been taught to
revere is a distinctively left-wing phenomenon.
Yet if I am right, it is one which must carry within it the
seeds of its own destruction. Today’s left-wing academics, at least
the older ones among them, were taught by those who still believed
in what F.R. Leavis called “the Great Tradition.” But after a
generation of debunking, their own students must find the memories
of that tradition, as such, growing dimmer all the time. In order
to feel oppressed by it, and therefore called on to “deconstruct”
it, you must have it more clearly in view than the younger profs do
anymore. Otherwise, that motivating anger will tend to fade too. A
few more years of going through the motions of exposing the
shameful political assumptions behind the monuments of Western
culture and the effort will hardly seem worth making anymore. Then
it will be time for the last remaining conservative professor to
stand up and say: “You know what? Maybe it would be fun for a
change to treat those old timey scribblers as if they actually had
something interesting to say to us.”
