Battle over, anxiety takes hold

From Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals, Martin Anderson's Impostors in the Temple, to Lynne Cheney's Telling the Truth, there seemed no end to the conservatives' attacks on the academic left and the democratisation of the professoriate and curriculum.

Though we could never compete with our antagonists' corporately-endowed publicity machines, the academic left responded with works like Henry Louis Gates's Loose Canons, my own The Powers of the Past, Gerald Graff's Beyond the Culture Wars, John Wilson's The Myth of Political Correctness, and Lawrence Levine's The Opening of the American Mind.

Yet it appears we have reached a stalemate, the right commanding extra-academic discourse and the left holding on in the academy. Indeed, the past decade's conflicts seem to be subsiding and giving way to new concerns. Perhaps everyone is weary of the battles. Or perhaps material forces - straitened university budgets and the aging of the professoriate - are finally asserting themselves and determining ideological developments.

Of course what I take to be change might well be just a pause. Nevertheless the academic culture wars are on the wane, or at least in abeyance, as books on "the battle of the books" cede space to writings on the state of higher education, academic freedom, and the professorial career. The questions remain political, and the need for action critical, but the writings are now more reflective than reactive, more anxious than combative.

Several new works warranted attention, in particular a few addressing the liberal arts. For example, leading one to wonder if we are all Marxists now, the contributors to Alvin Kernan's edited volume, What's Happened to the Humanities? (Princeton, 1997), examine the economic and material contexts of contemporary humanities work - demographics, funding patterns, classroom experiences, books and libraries (technologies included), theories and ideas, and institutional demands and practices.

In the more classical mode of humanities discussions, The Condition of American Liberal Education (The College Board, 1995), a symposium organised by the National Center for Cross-Disciplinary Teaching and Learning, opens with Bruce Kimball's argument that the resurgence of the "pragmatic tradition" in several disciplines promises the making of a new consensus. Although the responses to Kimball belie a consensus, they also belie the sense of doom which for a long time has plagued such discussions.

Notable and intriguing, as well, the winter 1997 issue of Daedalus on "American Academic Culture in Transformation" convenes practitioners of economics, literature, philosophy and political science to recount their respective disciplinary histories in the light of "the American Century, 1945-1995". Contrary to Kimball, the editor of this collection, historian Tom Bender, perceives a number of growing and deepening divides within and across the disciplines. For example, he notes a serious split in the humanities between those who "eschew essentialism and emphasise the contingent" and those pursuing a new essentialism in which "race and gender" are primary identifiers and determinants.

The three volumes make for good discussions. However, all of the contributors to these works emanate from elite institutions, thus offering a view of higher education "from the top".

The question of academic freedom has been central to the academic culture wars. While conservatives declare themselves an oppressed minority, leftists have good reason to believe the former really long for a return to the darkest days of the early 1950s. Affording a needed historical perspective, The Cold War and the University (New Press, 1997) presents a set of valuable recollections by the likes of Noam Chomsky, R. C. Lewontin, David Montgomery and Howard Zinn.

Hoping to engender fresh conversations, two recent symposia - Advocacy in the Classroom (St Martin, 1996), sponsored by several professional organisations and edited by Patricia Meyer Sparks, and The Future of Academic Freedom (Chicago, 1996), commissioned by the American Association of University Professors and edited by Louis Menand - directly tackle the subject of professorial rights and responsibilities. Their chapters are timely in the light of initiatives by state legislators to abolish tenure.

The changing prospects of the academic vocation press upon all discussions. Contrary to predictions, job markets and the very conditions of academic life worsen as a consequence of our failure adequately to respond to the right's anti-academic campaigns and the subjection of education to the market and the priorities of capital.

As the papers in Cary Nelson's edited volume Will Teach For Food: Academic Labor in Crisis (Minnesota, 1997) recount, commodification and proletarianisation are no longer just lecture topics. They are experiences. And, as ever, those who suffer first are those on the bottom: postgraduate students who teach for low wages and a chance to learn from the great; itinerant PhDs ever hopeful that the next one will lead to a tenure-track job; and the professoriate of the non-elite state universities who teach too many classes with too many students for far lower pay than faculty at the elite private institutions and flagship campuses of the public systems.

In a practical vein - exploiting the heightened anxieties engendered by intensifying fiscal and political pressures - university presses have begun to publish academic "guides" or "handbooks" for aspiring dons. The Academic's Handbook (Duke, 1995) edited by L. Deneef and C. Goodwin, covers academic hierarchies, fads and fashions, diversity, freedom, harassment, employment, administration, teaching and advising students, and scholarly research and publication. Robin Derricourt's An Author's Guide to Publishing (Princeton, 1996) tells authors how to turn their research into manuscripts.

Hoping the cessation of the academic culture wars does not mean an end to all insurgencies, I close with two cheers for Cary Nelson's Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (NYU Press, 1997). A literary scholar and culture-war veteran, Nelson exhibits a keen sense of justice and ability to detect "BS". Following chapters on the canon conflicts, he turns to the "job wars" and chastises those who preach intellectual radicalism yet fail to support graduate-students' union-organising efforts. He urges Ivy-League academics and others to face up to the new political economy of higher education.

Although Nelson recognises how the fate of higher education is bound up with the public good, he does not advocate strongly enough that we commit our intellectual skills to cultivating the broader politics of the public good. New challenges demand original and radical initiatives. Otherwise, whither academe?

Harvey J. Kaye is professor of social change and development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.