Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2007
REVIEW
Defending the Liberal Arts
By Daniel Morris
What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts: Classroom Politics and "Bias" in Higher Education, by Michael Bérubé. W.W. Norton, 2006.
David Horowitz's recent campaign to rid American universities of left-wing professors—through blacklisting (The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America) and calls for pedagogical correctness (his proposed "Academic Bill of Rights")—has sent a chill throughout the American academy. The academic corollary to President Bush's War on Terror, Horowitz's efforts have succeeded in instigating a cultural conflict on university campuses, providing a rallying point for conservative students and faculty eager to make their ideological positions hegemonic in the classroom.
In What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts, Michael Bérubé (one of the "101 Most Dangerous Academics") counters Horowitz and company by documenting what really goes on in the classroom of an unabashedly liberal English professor. He suggests that American conservatives are infuriated not because the academy fails to educate students in critical thinking, but because, like Social Security, it is a liberal institution that works well. Recalling courses he's taught on American Literature and Postmodernism at Penn State and at the University of Illinois, Bérubé presents himself as an open-minded but academically rigorous instructor who strives to preserve, not resolve, conflicts among students of varying political views. Instead of censuring students who disagree with him, Berube imagines his classroom as a "safe space ... for all remarks that are well-grounded in the texts." He calls this practice "procedural liberalism" in which "any reasonable proposition can and should be debated from any reasonable angle." Challenging students to probe their assumptions, whether they are arguing points from the Right or the Left, he ridicules "the wholly uncritical Chomsky fans who seem to have abdicated some of the tasks of critical thinking in precisely the same way that the wholly uncritical Bush worshippers have done." Bérubé deplores as "morally obtuse" Ward Churchill's description of 9/11 victims as "Little Eichmanns." The author cherishes Sidney Hook's defense of tenure as "the right to heresy," but he holds offensive fools in contempt.
Horowitz wants to insulate literature from historical and social contexts, but Bérubé shows that race, class, gender, and ethnicity should inform any thoughtful analysis of novels such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and The Great Gatsby. "Perhaps The Great Gatsby is not only about love and the green light across the bay, but also about culture, society, and systems of value that traverse both 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' economies," he argues. The often contradictory ways in which novelists handle social issues constitute the substance of their compelling works. Following Lionel Trilling, Bérubé believes literary criticism should allow students to see "how complex and remarkable works ... [have] as much to do with their vigorous participation in the literature and culture of [their times] as with their uncanny ability to speak to us across hundreds of years and thousands of miles."
Bérubé admits that most liberal arts faculty are Democrats, but this is a red herring in right-wing critiques of academic bias. "Voting records of my colleagues are actually one of the most trivial features of our departmental deliberations.... [They] do not matter in the least when we're discussing the undergraduate curriculum, the graduate program ... or any of the other things that make up the actual diurnal work of running an academic department." Often withholding his viewpoint in the classroom, in What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts, Bérubé lays his political and philosophical cards on the table. For Bérubé, "liberal democracies seem best suited to realizing the kind of social self-reflexivity necessary for any significant political—or personal—change of understanding with regard to human rights." In a lengthy chapter on postmodernism, he presents an anti-founda-tionalist ethics indebted to the philosopher Richard Rorty. Bérubé supports Rorty's approach to morality because, he argues, appeals to a higher authority as ground for ethics tend to close off discussion and to harden positions. His final chapter offers his vision of a just society in which human rights are extended, and the social safety net is secured.
Bérubé has also edited a collection of essays on the relationship between aesthetics and cultural studies, but his attention to literary forms, techniques, and tropes are fairly limited in What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts. Bérubé carefully demystifies texts. He is not a champion of their sublimity. I suspect many Tikkun readers will find his anti-foundationalist ethics lacking in the spiritual dimension that informs the work of such progressives as Michael Lerner and Cornel West. Given how Bérubé demonstrates his sensitivity as a close reader throughout this book, I also found it a pity that he has devoted so much time and ink to debunking such easy targets as David Horowitz. Nevertheless, somebody has to fight to restore the value of the humanities against fallacious attacks. We should be grateful that, despite whatever disagreements one might have with Bérubé, higher education has such a nimble defender.
Daniel Morris is a proffesor of English and Jewish Studies at Purdue University
Source Citation
Morris, Daniel. 2007. Defending the Liberal Arts[Review of the book What's Liberal About the Liberal Art: Classroom Politics and "Bias" in Higher Education] Tikkun 22(1): 68.
Daniel Morris is a Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Purdue University.
