Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2002/06/09/at_the_twilights_last_gleaming_reflections_on_academic_culture_at_dartmouth.php

At the Twilight's Last Gleaming: Reflections on Academic Culture at Dartmouth

Sunday, June 9, 2002

Over the past two years, I have had the pleasure of being a student in Professor Darryl Caterine's classes four times. A more caring, energetic, and inspiring teacher at Dartmouth cannot be found. Despite being honored with a Profile in Excellence Teaching Award earlier this year, his teaching contract was not renewed. Next fall he will join the staff of the Religion Department at California Lutheran University.

—John R. Carty

The appearance of an article in the May 10, 2002 edition of the Dartmouth ('Profs.Allow Classes to Set Own Grades: Policy Raises Questions of Abuse') misconstruing genuine intellectual inquiry as a 'thought crime' sent me into several days of morbid reflection on the state of higher education, here at Dartmouth and throughout the nation. In a collegiate version of Bonfire of the Vanities, the executive editor of the Daily Dartmouth dispatched a freshman who had never taken one of my courses to spy on my 'Religion and Society in America' class midway through the term—presumably to distribute newspapers by scandalizing a well-known professor. The notion that undergraduates can think for themselves and share in the evaluation of their own work was subsequently twisted into alleged evidence of my disrespect for students, disdain for 'academic integrity' at Dartmouth, and proof that I did not deserve, on second thought, this year's Student Assembly Profile in Excellence Teaching Award. Most of the students, faculty members, and administrators I have spoken with since May 10 have tried to dismiss the article—and the Dartmouth's news reporting more generally—as a classic example of yellow journalism, but I am not so easily reassured. To me the article was proof enough that the raison d'etre of a liberal arts education is no longer clear or even important to many members of this academic community. It is, after all, no mystery to students here that grading is 'what matters' most in education—but not for reasons of 'academic integrity' that the Dartmouth, of all sources, purports to uphold. Today's college students know that grades have become the equivalent of white-collar food stamps, a kind of currency that is readily converted after graduation into high-paying jobs or prestigious graduate programs. Hence the focus and frame of the Dartmouth article, which quite simply sidestepped questions of why students are here to learn—and what they are learning.

The gracious offer by The Dartmouth Review to revisit the issue of my educational philosophy is ironic. The allegedly 'conservative' newspaper on campus is the one to recognize something of value in a professor who defines himself as a traditional American liberal—even as the Dartmouth, in complicit alliance with the so-called 'liberal' academy, would seek to excommunicate him. The reason, in my analysis, is simple. Once upon a time in our national history—prior to the end of the Cold War, to be more exact—'conservative' and 'liberal' denoted differing priorities and objectives in relation to American foreign and domestic policies. The two sides disagreed, fought, and in many instances vilified one another. But one thing was clear: both conservatives and liberals of the bygone era implicitly agreed that something called 'America' exists. Today, this consensus has all but disappeared. The political labels have not changed, but their meaning has. Today's so-called 'liberal' academy does not wrestle with serious issues of domestic and foreign policy in a democracy, but throws itself headlong into a project of dismantling the concept of America itself, in a social project that can only be described as suicidal. For the last two decades, the American Academy has devoted its full intellectual resources not to a sustained reflection on e pluribus unum but rather to an ahistorical and anti-intellectual monologue about e pluribus: 'celebrate diversity.' The concept of an unum—a shared American and western culture that alone gives context and meaning to domestic or international diversity, or the raison d'etre of liberal arts education, for that matter—has been repeatedly and systematically demonized as 'Eurocentric,' 'patriarchal,' 'heterosexist,' and the like. It is the 'conservative' element of our society, the likes of The Dartmouth Review, that has refused to endorse or participate in the Academy's coup d'etat of western and American culture.

You accurately recognize that, despite differences we might have on particular domestic and international issues, I am one of the academic 'thought criminals' who still orients his life, teaching, and intellectual endeavors to e pluribus unum. And it is for that orientation, I assure you, that my teaching methods horrify the staff of the Dartmouth and make my colleagues very uncomfortable. But these should be the least of our concerns.

The implications of the Academy's successful dismantling of America are almost too horrific to contemplate. We find ourselves today standing on the brink of global catastrophe, and the best that most of our 'intellectuals' can come up with are variations of 'one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.' I remember hearing this on National Public Radio a day or two after September 11, as the Pentagon still smoldered and bodies were being pulled out of the World Trade Center—and it was nothing other than a distillation of what I had been hearing as a graduate student and Dartmouth faculty member for the last twenty years. We are now staring face to face with urgent and critical questions of cultural and religious difference—in the form of governments with nuclear bombs and sociopaths with plastique—but we, the so-called 'liberal' Academy, have dismantled the historical and philosophical standards by which we can think intelligently and ethically through this hour of crisis. Equating terror with freedom—war with peace, hate with love—we either 'celebrate diversity' or attempt the cover up our intellectual abyss with American flags and bumper stickers. The nightmare of higher education has now become the country's nightmare. Who are we? Where did we come from? What do we stand for? The answers are either unclear or shallow. Our national identity crisis is not the fault of traditional American liberalism by any stretch of the imagination, but rather a new ideology, hatched by the so-called 'postmodern Academy,' based on cultural relativism and an attendant philosophical nihilism.

Astute and responsible analyses of our country's intellectual crisis have been appearing now for two decades, keeping abreast of developments within the Academy—and therefore rarely appearing on college reading lists. Some of the books that have informed my own thought and teaching include Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987), Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (1997), and Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass (1999). Without trying to situate myself in exact relationship to these conservative intellectuals, I will simply supplement their arguments against what Bork calls 'modern liberalism' and what I would call 'neo-liberalism' with an observation of my own about American culture, which pertains to the postmodern dismantling of our shared western and American heritage. We must not forget that American culture is derived largely from the utopian vision of our Puritan founders. This vision rests on an attempt to create a new world by either usurping or denying pre-existent history or tradition. In the European context, Puritanism (together with the Protestant Reformation more generally) demonized its own Catholic past. In the North American context, Puritanism articulated a prototypical meaning of America that ignored or demonized the pre-European, Native American past. In both cases, the English colonies established themselves as a predominantly future-oriented society (waiting for the imminent Apocalypse)—in marked contrast to the Spanish and French settlements to the south and north, which retained an orientation to pre-existent European history (Catholic Christendom), and established a New World identity based in various ways on the mixing and melding with the indigenous peoples and places in this hemisphere.

My point in digressing into what for some is the minutiae of my academic field (American religion) is neither to berate the Puritans nor idealize the Native Americans, Spanish, or French. Rather, it is to point out that our culture has since its inception been predisposed to the periodic dismantling of tradition—in the name of religious or political freedom, or simply 'progress.' This is a decidedly utopian orientation, and as such, largely fantastical. The past can indeed be willed away, but the consequences of yesterday's actions will inescapably be waiting for us tomorrow, tempering the ideal of unlimited freedom. The postmodern Academy's utopian dream of willing away a shared western and American cultural tradition is, among other things, the final realization of a Puritan-inspired fantasy: the desire to demonize and liquidate our own heritage altogether. And if there are any doubts as to the hazards of this vision, just ask some of today's graduating Dartmouth students—be they black or white, women or men, gay or straight—who they are or what their country stands for. Most likely they will be able to respond only with a series of negations: who they are not, who has oppressed them, and what is wrong. These are the Americans who have been 'liberated' from history. Our postmodern academy is succeeding in molding future generations of Americans bereft of pro-active, personal or political vision. It is no surprise, then, that grades are the only meaningful reference point by which students can feel passionate about their time here.

My now-antiquated beliefs in American democracy have struck students as 'radical,' colleagues as 'non-academic.' In short, I have taught here at Dartmouth in defiance of postmodern academic culture, with full knowledge that my efforts would be misunderstood. I have defined myself not as an ideologue (liberal, conservative, or neo-liberal) who challenges students to think like their teacher, but rather as an educator who tailors his knowledge to enrich and challenge each student on his or her 'own ground.'

In defiance of the postmodern, academic culture, I still believe that the human person is a spiritual being, and that education should be an exercise in uplifting, empowering, and refining each person in his or her own particularity. I still hold to the now-antiquated belief that the health of a democracy stands or falls on an educated citizenry in this sense of the term. In defiance of postmodern academic culture, I have increasingly become outspoken in my moral abhorrence of a culturally relativistic, multicultural ideology that sounds liberal, but in fact flatters institutions of power by crediting them with far more accomplishment than they have earned. The old, traditional liberal in me cannot pretend that class and racial inequalities do not persist in my own country, or that the extension of American ideals to other parts of the globe does not raise questions about their benefit or usefulness in other contexts. But in order to make intelligent critiques of my country—without which a democracy becomes subject to what Alexis deTocqueville called 'the tyranny of the Majority'—I must first have a clear idea of what my country is, what it stands for, and whence it has come. My comments about the Puritanical cast of the neo-liberal Academy is a case in point.

It might come as a surprise to hear that the students in my classes most relieved to hear challenged the Academy's multicultural, culturally relativistic rhetoric have been students from economically or racially marginalized communities, or international students. To them it is obvious that 'the more things seem to change, the more they remain the same'—that the university's chameleon-like transformation into an allegedly 'non-western, non-American' institution is at best an act of self-deception, and at worst an abdication of responsibility to wield its power responsibly and ethically. The point is not to criticize institutions of power for opening their doors to previously disenfranchised groups. Rather, the point is to cut through the self-congratulatory rhetoric of multiculturalism and redirect attention to the mounting problems that continue to exist at the margins of power. And most critically, it is to redirect the neo-liberal Academy back to the classic western and American ideals that made possible a sharing of power and privilege possible to begin with. In their revolutionary zeal to reinvent America and the West, higher education has forgotten that its own roots are American and western. Deprived of the philosophical, religious, and ethical resources of its own past, the postmodern Academy dies a slow death on the shores of nihilism, taking down the country as it goes.

At this point in my personal life and career, I have little hope that the Academy will do anything but continue its dismantling of America. There are many reasons for my pessimistic prognosis. One is that the academic institution is a classic case of the 'foxes guarding the hen houses.' The faculty and administration surveys, evaluates, and perpetuates itself; neo-liberalism is now entrenched. Those who might see the depth and extent of the Academy's crisis choose not to buck the tide, out of a well-founded fear of losing their jobs. Another, related reason is the extent of control that universities wield in monitoring the public's perception of their inside business. Apart from a few meetings with public relations representatives and the occasional 'parent weekends,' parents have little contact with the philosophical and social ideology to which their children are subjected for four years. As for the real consumers, the students themselves, some are disgruntled or depressed by what they are learning, but lack the intellectual tools to diagnose or articulate the problem; alcohol, drugs, sex, food, and anti-depressants fill the void. For others, the College is doing exactly what it is supposed to do—help them achieve their dreams of financial and social success. As long as assignments are given and grades are dispensed, there is no problem at all.

In the meantime, voters wonder why the integrity and vision of their leadership is slowly degenerating. Sociologists ponder the causes of malaise and despair among youth. Fingers are pointed everywhere—to families, violence in the media, chemicals in the food—but seldom do we hear sustained and informed analyses of higher education itself. The causes of a society's moral and ideological deterioration are of course manifold and complex, but education plays a disproportionate role in the shaping of individual and collective vision. As sociologist Anthony Giddens has reminded us, what 'experts' have to say about their cultural world actually shapes and changes it.

Educators, particularly in the human and social sciences, are not merely describing an inert social world 'out there.' They are actively inventing it, shaping it through their own vision. If social fragmentation, identity crises, and moral nihilism abound in America today, it is in large part because this has been the vision of the Academy, the moral and intellectual diet of the students, for the last twenty-or-so years.

I would like to end on an optimistic note, but clearly this cannot rest on platitudes directed towards the Academy. In addition to the university, America has another, longstanding institutional base from which it has mounted political changes in the past. This is its network of religious institutions. In what could turn out to be one of our country's greatest historical ironies, religious institutions—long suspect for their potential threats to democracy—may very well step in out of necessity to fill the void of meaning created by the Academy, democracy's traditional watchdog. In yet another act of misrepresentation, many 'liberal' academics are terrified of religion's role in public life. This is a misrepresentation because the allegedly 'multicultural' university will oftentimes demonize American religions with the same arguments it once used to cast, say, Africans and Native Americans as superstitious savages. But we need no longer send anthropologists to the Congo, social workers to the Great Plains, or ethnographers to the neighborhood evangelical church to drum up the most chilling representations of barbarity. They sit as ethicists justifying infanticide or geneticists dreaming of winged men in our very own halls of higher learning.

Despite its own demonization as a journal bent on moral and intellectual destruction, The Dartmouth Review has emerged in the Brave New World of the twenty-first century as a potential locus of truly critical thought in this 'deserto' of the postmodern Dartmouth campus. I am grateful that you would take seriously this antiquated American liberal—still assigning books by the likes of Alan Ginsberg, Martin Luther King Jr., and Henry David Thoreau.

The fact that the Review would provide a forum for my thoughts underscores the obsolescence of the old 'liberal' and 'conservative' labels that I grew up with; the political and cultural landscape that has emerged in our country since the fall of the Berlin Wall is truly unprecedented in our history. The real hope of your paper, it seems to me, is not in changing the academic culture of Dartmouth, which is indeed entrenched. Rather, the hope of your paper is in providing for readers outside the campus a window into the very real crisis in higher education here in Hanover, which is just part of a nationwide crisis with far reaching implications for our country.

Perhaps some of your readers will at some point take seriously the possibility of initiating an educational reform on the university level—which must somehow transpire outside of, rather than within, Academia as it has come to reinvent itself.