The culture war in higher education
has been a controversial issue for over a decade. It is a war in
the universities between tenured liberals
and conservatives. Moreover, some people believe that culture wars
are primarily fought over politicizing curricula rather than the
debate over the value of knowledge itself. However, not only the
issue of politicizing academic life, but also the origins of the
literary canon debate are being questioned. The leftwing liberals
are claiming that conservatives have started the culture war, whereas
the rightwing conservatives are saying that radical students have
simply been unsatisfied with the classroom curriculum being irrelevant
since the 1960’s. This paper examines the different viewpoints
of conservatives and liberals on the issue of culture wars. It also
seeks to provide a potential solution to the conflict.
In her essay “The
Canonical Debate as Influenced by John Guillory,” Maureen
Corcoran says, “ I think is imperative to recognize that our
extant literary canon was formulated within a political context
and political actions are not known for producing results that serve
the members of an entire populace exactly well.” Thus for
some critics, the culture war is the result of political actions
of liberals against conservatives, which produced two opposing viewpoints
on what should be taught in the higher education system in the United
States. Consequently, the culture war is inevitably related to the
issue of academic freedom and political
correctness. In the book Soldiers
of Misfortune: The New Right's Culture War and the Politics of Political
Correctness, Valerie Scatamburlo writes that the conservatives
are claiming that the liberals are trying to politicize academics
by imposing the politically correct curricula in American universities.
However by doing so, Scatamburlo contends, liberals are limiting
the freedom of speech “due to a zealous attempt to legislate
‘correct’ thought and language.” The issue of
liberal professors in the universities silencing the opinions of
conservative students, thereby limiting their freedom of speech,
will be discussed later in this essay.
In response to conservatives, liberals are claiming
that students coming from a diverse assortment of backgrounds have
been denied proper academic attention, and that liberals are simply
uncovering whatever has been missing in the curriculum for years.
In his book review article “Beyond
the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American
Education,” Henry Gonshak says that:
From those [liberal] radicals themselves
comes the heated rejoinder that the literary canon has been politicized
all along, composed by phallocentric Dead White Males in order
to bolster the hegemony of Western culture against subversive
incursions by women, minorities, and the post-colonial world.
Gonshak suggests that liberals think conservatives
started the culture war in order to promote Western civilization
through means of politicizing academic life.
A number of critics have argued that within
universities, tenured faculty members are not really teaching, but
instead indoctrinating their students. Gonshak
points out that neoconservatives have stated that “a cadre
of ‘tenured radicals’, frustrated old hippies who’ve
transferred their countercultural revolution from the streets to
the more hospitable groves of academe, have politicized English
studies, using literary criticism as a pretext to preach their left-wing
‘P.C’ gospel on issues of race, gender, class, and sexual
orientation.” This statement goes back to the idea of politicizing
academic life in the name of diversity. However, according
to conservatives, the liberal efforts are only compromising
academic integrity, making race, class and gender the only “fit
concerns for academic inquiry.”
The other critics, particularly from the rightwing
of the political spectrum, believe that the old curriculum of traditional
Western civilization should be emphasized in higher education. They
believe that general education should not be politicized or contain
social concerns of today’s world. Instead it should focus
on the unlimited quest for knowledge that may be found behind the
beauty of profound text like Shakespeare, classical philosophy,
and science. Disciplines such as history and literature have been
transformed and politicized, which lead to the creation of non-politicized
professional organizations such as the Association of Literary Scholars
and the Historical Society. In his article
“The Culture Wars in Higher Education,” the Executive
Director of the National Association of Scholars in Princeton, Bradford
P. Wilson, provides the statistics of the top seventy schools in
the country that don’t require students majoring in English
take courses discussing Shakespeare’s works. Even though,
there are many electives in the literature department, as the majority
of faculty admits that:
[T]heir aim was to help students “understand
influence of race, class, and gender on literature and interpretation”…The
“blunt instruments,” as the authors of the article
on the MLA report in the journal Academic Questions put it, “by
which the radical academic beats upon the body of American society,
capitalism, liberal democracy, and Western civilization.
American institutions have been dominated by
liberals, who in turn produce courses in feminist literature, gay
and lesbian writings, ethnic studies and so on. To many people,
especially conservatives, these changes in curricula can be troublesome.
The president of the National
Association of Scholars, an academic reform group, thinks that
today’s diversity of courses creates a “smorgasbord”
and that due to a lack of required core courses, the common experience
vanishes. In his book, Crisis
in the Academy: Rethinking Higher Education in America, Christopher
Lucas argues that “undergraduate education has withered as
faculty have become obsessed with” publication, tenure, research
grants, university funding instead of
the liberal arts curriculum. Even though there is a great deal of
concern over these issues created by the pressures from university
administrations, the existence
of majors such as Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Gay and Lesbian
Studies proves that there is diversity of academic life in U.S.
colleges. Moreover, history classes are not covering just important
dates and national heroes, but also look at a variety of “human
cultural activity.” In the literature department, many authors
and major works have been recovered or redefined.
I believe the concern of not having a common
ground in education can be addressed on many different levels. It
is reasonable to say that the heterogeneous nature of higher education
creates absence of common ground for students. However, high schools
and the first two years of a university have standardized programs
that allow students to have a common knowledge and basic understanding
of Western Civilization. Some writers have proposed that undergraduates
should be exposed to many perspectives of the same literary work
and then decide for themselves which course they want to take. Yet,
the timeliness of this proposition on the practical level is impossible,
because the students will have to take twice as many courses on
the same subject matter. Therefore, I believe if we assume that
a person is a critical thinker, he or she would be able to accept
or refute ideas based on their personal believes.
Katherine Jensen, the author of
“UCLA: A Lesson on a Political Bias,” points out
that the university is responsible for teaching students critical
thinking skills. However, since the majority of faculty members
at UCLA tend to lean toward the liberal point of view, conservative
students are being silenced. The president of UCLA’s chapter
of Student for Academic Freedom, Kendra Carney, has received many
complaints from conservative students that they have been “shut
down by the man with the microphone.” Students feel that professors
are “using their classroom as a forum for their own beliefs
while at times negating those of their students. It is not education;
it is indoctrination.” The present UCLA issue is similar to
the to the idea presented by Scatamburlo in that liberals are not
just diversifying education, but are also politicizing it, inevitably
curtailing the freedom of speech.
Keeping in mind current situations of culture
war and academic freedom, I would find myself somewhere in between
the liberals and the conservatives. It is crucial to study thought
provoking literary texts, such as those written by Shakespeare,
that are considered classical work of art throughout Europe. It
is also important to read philosophy, history and American authors
of the past, because they make up the Western civilization that
gave birth to the United States of today. Any intelligent person
should read valued books that address the heritage of the country
he or she lives in. However, it is imperative that educators and
scholars recognize that the United States of today is a much more
diverse country than ever before. Therefore, the multiculturalism
of academic curriculum should be undoubtedly emphasized as we move
up higher in the education ladder system.
Nevertheless, the issue of politicizing academic
life is inevitable, since many areas of human life itself are interconnected.
Economical issues are related to politics, and politics in turn
are related to religious and moral conflicts. As a result, if we
were to try and implement pure, objective views of subjects like
art history, literature, or philosophy, it would be practically
impossible. The more vital part of the argument, though, concerns
the notion of student well roundedness. In my opinion, exposure
to liberal disciplines that discuss gender, race, and class, combined
with traditional curricula of Western culture, allows students to
do precisely that.
Links
Closson, Don. “Culture wars.” 1999. http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/cultwars.html
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. “Culture Wars, Shooting
Wars.” 1996. Rev. of Before the Shooting Begins: Searching
for Democracy in America's Culture War, by James Davison Hunter.
Free Press. http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9406/revessay.html
Sanes, Ken. “The New Culture War.” 1997.
http://www.transparencynow.com/culture.htm
Saxon, Shaun. “Literature Versus Academia.”
Rev. of The Western Canon: the Books and
School of the Ages, by Harold Bloom, Riverhead Books: New York,
1994.
Schapiro, Mark. (1994). “Who’s Behind
the Culture War?: Contemporary Assaults on
Freedom of Expression.” http://www.publiceye.org/theocrat/Schapiro.html
|