BOOK REVIEWS

Creating Faulkner's Reputation: end. Everywhere in the academy nowa- The Politics of Modern Literary days, the concept of disinterested literary Criticism, by Lawrence H. judgment is under assault. The basis of Schwartz. Knox,ville, Tenn.: the assault varies from critic to critic, but University of Tennessee Press, 1988, the two books under review offer a sign of the times. In Creating Faulkner's Reputa- 286 pp., $32.50 hardbound, $14.95 tion: The Politics of Modern Literary Criti- paperback. cism, Lawrence H. Schwartz makes it clear that naked politics account for why we think so highly of a writer like William Faulkner. Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and the And in Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and the Pro- fessors: A Critical Fiction, Austin M. Wright Professors: A Critical Fiction, by transmogrifies all criticism into a species Austin M. W~ght. Iowa City, Iowa: of private, dubiously motivated fiction- University of Iowa Press, 1990, 242 making. pp., $25.00 hardbound, $12.95 In both books, it should be clear, the paperback. intrinsic quality of Faulkner's art is less important than the uses to which that art James W. Tuttleton can be put in making arguments about an entirely different matter- the political, his- torical, and cultural conditions regnant in How is the reputation of a writer made? America during the past half-century. It used to be thought that a writer's stand- Faulkner, it must be said, was critically ing was based on the estimate of many, neglected during the 1920s and 1930s. His many readers of taste and conviction, ex- horrific pictures of alcoholism, incest, mur- perienced men and women whose knowl- der, and madness--in The Sound and the edge of literature was wide and deep and Fury, Sanctuary, and Light in August (to whose standards were formed by the con- name just a few novels)--were often de- tinual comparison and contrast of the style, nounced as bizarrely Gothic, morbid, per- vision, and judgment of writers. Not all of verse, and nihilistic. Worse, they were un- them were formal literary critics. But the intelligible. After the end of World War estimates of literary value by formal critics II, however, his reputation began to soar. used to be weighed carefully by the rest of I can well remember a question posed to us, who perhaps have less time to read as me in the early 1950s, in an interview for widely and weigh so judiciously. In past academic study abroad in which the Ful- ages, literary critics- Dryden, Dr. Johnson, bright Committee wanted to know how I Coleridge, T. S. Eliot, to name only a few-- could justify to foreigners the rising Amer- exercised the useful function of not only ican critical interest in a writer whose vision bringing us the news about poets, play- of the South, and of America generally, wrights, and novelists, but also of discrim- seemed based largely on Krafft-Ebing's Psy- inating amongst them; and their convic- chopathia Sexualis. Wasn't Faulkner distort- tion as to the literary distinction of each ing the wholesome character of American writer served to help the rest of us to life? establish a hierarchy of worth and impor- No one can disagree with Schwartz's tance. account of Faulkner's status with critics in Those days have apparently come to an the first two decades of his writing career. Book Renews 85

But what accounts for his dramatic rise on Schwartz, Faulkner was seized upon by the literary stock market? This is the ques- three groups who wanted to destroy the tion Schwartz undertakes to answer. influence of the old-line leftists like Alfred Kazin, Granville Hicks, and Maxwell Geis- The following study attempts to show how the mar. These three groups wanted to find confluence of literary, cultural, and commercial an important writer whose values were com- forces created and shaped Faulkner's literary patible with the cold war celebration of reputation. It investigates the individuals and institutions responsible for raising him to world- American nationalism, democratic poli- wide fame and for drawing his work into the tics, and capitalism. These three groups canon. It is a book that focuses on the "cultural were the New Critics, the New York mechanisms" that, in less than five years, made for the sudden turnabout .... What can be seen Intellectuals, and the Rockefeller Founda- in the sudden rise in Faulkner's reputation is Lion. the instability of aesthetic criteria .... Literary There is no doubt that the rise of the reputations rise and fall dramatically because the critics reflect not universal, but relative, lit- New Criticism advanced the claims of erary values which are, in large measure, Faulkner to our attention. The critical es- historically determined. says and studies by Warren, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, R. P. Black- About these assumptions, blithely taken mur, and others had the effect of elucidat- for granted, and about the conclusions ing the tensions, paradoxes, ambiguities, drawn from them it is necessary, in part, and ironies of much difficult modernist to disagree. But for Schwartz there are literature. And a part of that project was to several reasons advanced to account for demonstrate aspects of Faulkner's literary Faulkner's delayed critical acclaim. First, genius that had been overlooked in the an argument had to be advanced-and was, previous twenty years. But were they Cold largely by Robert Penn Warren and Mal- Warriors striking a blow against the So- colm Cowley--that Faulkner had been mis- cialist Left? Most of the New Critics, it understood by his detractors and was in should be noted, were centrally concerned fact a "literary genius" and "a serious mor- with the aesthetic features of Faulkner's alist." Second, the availability of cheap pa- fiction: his techniques of fictional struc- perbacks and a vast postwar reading audi- ture, point of view, style, and symbolism. ence made it possible to keep Faulkner's To the extent that they had a cultural or books in print, thus fueling the revival of political perspective, many of them were interest in him. About these two points as much pro-Southern as pro-American and there can be little disagreement. But were distinctly critical of those pre- and Schwartz goes on to a doubtful third rea- postwar conditions that are customarily in- son, which is the real focus of the book. voked to define America: urbanism, indus- During the cold war confrontation be- trialism, liberal democracy, etc. Attached tween capitalism and communism, the as- to the "Fugitive" and "Agrarian" move- sumptions of American left-wing writers ments -- their manifesto had been declared and critics-who favored the methods of in I'll Take My Stand: The South and the realism and naturalism-had to be con- Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners tilted. How? By advancing "an elitist (Harper, 1930)--the New Critics were aesthetic-an aesthetic that claimed im- perhaps more interested in furthering the portant literature was remote, complex, reputations of "Southern Literary Renais- iconoclastic, and inaccessible, and re- sance" writers (Thomas Wolfe, Katherine quired interpretation." According to Anne Porter, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, 86 Academic Questions / Summer 1991

Ellen Glasgow, Stark Young, and Carson lectuals about how their cold war objec- McCullers) than having at the Commu- tives ought to be prosecuted. There were, nist Left, whom they largely dismissed. he reports, That the New York Intellectuals- William Phillips, Philip Rahv, Lionel Trill- three waysof supporting American letters: sub- ing, Dwight "McDonald" and Irving sidies to selected literary journals to raise the [sic], rates paid to contributors; grants in literary crit- Howe, among others--were Cold War- icism to special institutes or schools, such as riors is beyond dispute. Deriving, on the Ransom's Kenyon School of English or one whole, from a socialist background in the suggested by Blackmur at Princeton; and fel- lowships awarded direcdyto writers selectedby 1930s, they turned against Stalinism and the editors of literary journals. communism and championed a literary ex- perimentalism that sharply differed from Guess who got the money? Funds were the journalistic proletarian writing so of- doled out to Phillips's Partisan Review. Ran- ten inflated in importance by the New Masses som's Kenyon Review got emergency grants. and the early Partisan Review. That the So what? Other journals got grants too-- literary experimentalists they favored-- Poetry, Accent, etc. And some magazines, Eliot, Faulkner, Pound, and Lawrence, for like Allen Tate's Sewanee Review, didn't example--were political or cultural con- get support, largely because Tate had left servatives, made for grotesque contradic- the editorship. Although Schwartz comes tions in their thought, but nobody seemed short of claiming a conspiracy hatched by to mind. Still, why were they taken with these three so different groups, reverber- Faulkner? ations of the ominous echo in the book. I have always suspected that their aban- It would be tedious to rehearse the ev- donment of proletarian trash in favor of idence that Schwartz adduces to support writers who produced genuine literature his outlandish claim that Faulkner was can- was a form of penance, which required the onized in order to further the aims of the humiliation of acclaiming modernists who Cold Warriors. Not only is the evidence were very conservative in their social exiguous and susceptible of different in- views--although this is not a suspicion that terpretations, it also assumes that a writer occurs to Schwartz. He is of the opinion can attain canonical status and a wide read- that the New York Intellectuals mobilized ership of millions simply on the basis of in support of Faulkner to further the anti- what Malcolm Cowley or Irving Howe said Stalinist position and to show the bona about him at one time or another. Schwartz tides of their own American nationalism. says that his book "does not debunk This is plausible up to a point, but it should Faulkner's genius or talent, or question be remembered that they were always much the intrinsic literary merit of his novels more attentive to European writers (Dos- and stories." And that is true-unfortu- toyevsky, Kafka, Mann, et al.) than to Amer- nately. ican literature. If he had questioned the intrinsic liter- What about the Rockefeller Founda- ary merit of Faulkner's work, Schwartz tion? The announced intention of the foun- might have seen in it those distinctive aes- dation was to strengthen the humanities thetic qualities that have made Faulkner in the United States. But it is Schwartz's stand out against his lesser contemporar- argument that from about 1942 onward, ies as the genius he is now widely claimed the officers of the humanities division of to be. It ordinarily takes a while for a writer the foundation reached a consensus with (as well as a saint) to be canonized. His the New Critics and the New York Intel- immediate contemporaries may disqualify Book Reviews 87

him because of his "small Latin and less hand in marriage. (This dismays young Greek," insufficient blotting of the lines Charlie Mercer, an untenured assistant pro- (as Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare), or for fessor who has amorous designs on the a like reason. But no writer can be forced shapely Eva.) For those who may not have into the canon or attain a wide readership, read it, As I Lay Dying is a hilarious ac- and sustain it for a half-century, as a result count of a redneck Mississippi family of of overt or background political maneu- poor whites. Anse Bundren takes his chil- vering of the kind Schwartz here de- dren Darl, Jewel, Cash, and Dewey Dell scribes. The Masses critics tried it early on, on an arduous journey to Jefferson to bury but the reading public-who are not fools- the body of his dead wife Addie. Along the wouldn't buy it. way every conceivable disaster happens, with Faulkner is put to a different use in Aus- grotesque and often hilarious conse- tin M. Wright's Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and quences for the becoffined corpse in the the Professors:A Critical Fiction. This book wagon. The novel is extraordinarily com- is concerned with the critical wars-with plex and difficult: the several characters the tendency of literary criticism to pro- are all pulling at obscure cross-purposes, pose critical methods or systems, for these and some fifty-odd separate interior mono- systems to come into contention with each logues complicate the point of view and other, leaving the reader confused. Which thus our grasp of what is happening. is right-- the New Criticism, the New His- Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and the Professors toricism, structuralism, deconstruction, etc.? is not without its amusement, here and Each has its methodology, each its propo- there, in Wright's portrait of the behavior nents, each its tendency to try to demolish of students and professors in trying to dis- the arguments of the others. What is the cover the inherent meaning of literary works poor reader to do? Viewed abstractly, each (or, conversely, in claiming to make the system has its claims to make. Wright wants meanings they are said to have). On the to see what happens when each is applied first day of the colloquium, a "formalist to the same text. Hence he creates a "fic- reading" of As ILay Dying by a Prof. Tnt- tion" in which a hapless but beautiful and tie stresses its organic unity; then an anti- sexy college student named Eva Birdsong formalist attack on Tuttle is given by a comes to tears because she learns one sys- Prof. Jake Jackson, who stresses the nov- tem one day only to have it destroyed and el's "discontinuity." Other critical notions replaced by that of another professor the are introduced only to be shot down by next day. How can she make sense of lit- one or another department member. The erature since none of the professors can so-called "death of the novel" is invoked agree about it? and attacked; presentations commending To soothe his daughter, Mr. Birdsong, or dissenting from notions like "the au- who is said to have founded the English thor's intention," "the implied reader," the department and staffed it with these wran- "determinacy" or "indeterminacy" of mean- glers, creates a four-day faculty collo- ing in literature are considered. quium in which the various systematic crit- Psychoanalytic approaches are voiced, ics are invited to apply their approaches to including the "pleasure of the text" as a a single text, in this case Faulkner's As I kind of orgasm (and its adequacy or inad- Lay Dying. Eva is to assess the arguments, equacy as a substitute for the real thing). and whoever convinces her of the right- Prof. Olga Wing, the resident liberal fem- ness of his interpretation wins the prize--in inist, is a spokesman (I was going to say this case, according to Mr. Birdsong, Eva's "spokesperson") for the politically correct 88 Academic Questions / Summer 1991

ideological viewpoint: she complains that Contingencies of Value, by Barbara all these previous approaches are irrele- Herrnstein Smith. Cambridge, vant to the moral and political outrage that Mass.: Harvard University Press, Southern poor whites or women will feel 1988, 184 pp., $22.50 hardbound, at Faulkner's stereotypes of low-class buf- $12.95 paperback. foons and his evident misogyny. Finally, the principle of "recalcitrance" Michael Levin is introduced by poor young Charlie Mer- cer. This view, presumably espoused by Wright (if the title of this book is any This defense of relativism, although not clue) proposes that any long, rich, and com- nearly so compelling as its author imag- plex novel has built into it its own means ines, implicitly raises some challenging ques- tions about the curriculum. of preventing the reduction of it to any Prof. Smith maintains that no artwork critic's system; moreover, readerly recal- has "intrinsic value." Preferences are ir- citrance will always prevent the systems of reducibly plural, depend upon the respon- others from being wholly acceptable. The dent's personality, culture, and biological book ends ambiguously, but Eva has ap- makeup, and are not to be ranked as higher parently decided that the cacophony of fac- or lower. There is nothing wrong with ulty voices- thoroughly shredding the nar- someone who prefers soap operas to rative of poor Anse, Dewey Dell, Addie, Shakespeare, nor need his experience of and the others--has now enlightened and soap operas be less intense or involving liberated her to be herself, that is, she is than that of a reader of Hamlet. Prof. Smith's now free from having to marry whoever principal lemma for this conclusion ap- (if any) managed best to convince her of plies what philosophers call the "open ques- his truth. tion" argument: given any descriptive trait Although occasionally amusing, Wright's of artworks whatever- engagement of the book will hardly satisfy as an account of higher brain centers, popularity among reflective thought about meaning and in- knowledgeable adults-it may always be terpretation in literature. Nor will it stand asked what is good about this trait. As David up as a novel, despite its subtitle, since it Hume observed, a gap separates values from lacks altogether the power of visualizing facts. Thus, Prof. Smith can (equivocally) character, scene, and action. It is best un- concede asymmetries in preferences- derstood as a hash of Plato and Bakhtin, in many people move from nursery tunes to which critical positions in a dialogical re- Bach while few make the reverse trip- lationship are each given a voice. For my but deny that later preferences are better. own part, I was most convinced by the Pursuing her argument with a (very) few examples from literature and virtually none formalist arguments of his Prof. Tuttle, from the other arts, Prof. Smith ignores who nearly has it right; but I would expect more definitive criteria of success created Wright to be recalcitrant to the organicist by other artistic activities. It seems clear, view of literature that Plato and Aristotle for instance, that draftsmanship succeeds and a whole line of master critics have insofar as it recognizably depicts what is bequeathed to us. difficult to depict. Nonetheless, I am in- clined to accept Prof. Smith's aesthetic rel- ativism because Hume convinced me of James W. Tuttleton is professor of English at essentially this view. Aware of the differ- New York University, New York, NY 10003. ent "tastes" of different societies, Hume Book Reviews 89

traced aesthetic standards to "human na- scolding that she will not allow anything ture" rather than "reason." When tastes to be considered objective. Thus: differ aufond, discussion ends. At the same time Hume recognized the persistent pop- the characteristic resources of the culturally dom- ularity of certain authors and suggested inant members of a community include access that, under normal conditions, certain sorts to specific training and the opportunity and oc- of narrative and rhetorical style will in fact casion to develop not only competence in a large number of cultural codes but also a large be found pleasing. These we call "excel- number of diverse (or "cosmopolitan") inter- lent," whatever else we may think we mean. ests. The works that are differentially repro- So Prof. Smith has reinvented the duced, therefore, will tend to be those that grat- ify the exercise of such competencies and engage wheel--or in this case the saw, that de gus- interest of that kind: specifically, works that are tibus non est disputandum. Possibly to en- structurally complex and, in the technical sense, hance the impression of novelty-for her information-rich .... [S]ince those with cultural power tend to be members of socially, econom- own benefit as much as the reader's-she ically, and politically established classes (or to picks fights with those who agree with her. serve them and identify their own interest with Thus, she manufactures an attack on theirs), the texts that survive will tend to be those that appear to reflect and reinforce es- Hume's appeal to normalcy as "elitist," tablishment ideologies. quite failing to understand the right of rel- ativists to recognize the perfecdy straight- So far at least, Prof. Smith does seem to forward distinction between normal and be conceding that complexity and infor- abnormal perceptual functioning. Here, as mation ("in the technical sense") are elsewhere, the urge to undercut any pos- objective. However, sible grounds for Passing Judgment leads Prof. Smith to deny the obvious. In nay own view, "normal" functioning is func- it should be noted that "structural complexity" and "information-richness" are, of course, sub- tioning that was adaptive during evolu- ject-relative as "qualities" and also experien- tion, but whatever the correct analysis, a tally subject-variable .... [W]hat is interestingly glaucoma sufferer's failure to appreciate complex and engagingly information-rich to one subject may be intolerably chaotic to another Persian miniatures may properly be attrib- and slickly academic to a third. Moreover, these uted to a visual defect. A clinician would tolerances and competencies are themselves the certainly be surprised to learn that glau- complex and variable products of culturally spe- cific conditions. For these reasons, and pace the coma is simply a condition that the upper more naively ambitious claims of"empirical aes- class stigmatizes in order to distinguish it- thetics," such features cannot operate as "ob- self. "Normal" may sometimes serve to jective" measures of aesthetic value. smuggle in evaluations, but it need not, and is otherwise a quite legitimate analytic She later appears to allow that literary works category. (Possibly, enjoyment of the clas- really have plots and characters, and really sics requires not normal but exceptional display (or fail to display) such traits as psychophysical functioning; above-aver- irony, but suggests that "high-culture aca- age intelligence, for instance. Perhaps the demics" use "that idiom" to signify their more intelligent have also tended to be passage from "darkness into light." socially dominant, which is why more de- This skepticism is not only intrinsically manding art has always been equated with implausible, it undercuts Prof. Smith's own high culture. This wrinkle would not ren- village-Marxist sociology. If complexity can- der Hume's theory less skeptical.) not be recognized by everyone, and if, Prof. Smith is so sure that any distinc- moreover, everyone's favorite work ap- tion whatever will be an excuse for critical pears optimally complex to bim, the "cul- 90 Academic Questions / Summer 1991

rurally dominant" could not distinguish sue. She repudiates truth and objectivity their taste by the complexity of its object. altogether without argument, she says, since, Anyone could join the moneyed classes in being a relativist, she doesn't have to jus- spirit simply by declaring his tastes "com- tify any of her assertions! (Prof. Smith does plex." The quality by which the dominant grudgingly acknowledge that science has identify themselves, however arbitrary, must been successful, but only in the sense of be real and objectively discriminable to serve securing grant money for scientists.) De- the function Prof. Smith ascribes to it. spite herself, she does suggest an argu- In fact, Prof. Smith has quite miscon- ment when she professes "inability to grasp strued the typical uses of critical catego- notions such as 'absolute truth.'" The tech- ries. Few critics are out to pontificate. Even nique here, a common one, is to obscure the conventional vocabulary of appraisal discussion by invoking the grandiose epi- has a largely descriptive meaning evident thet "absolute." There is no unclarity at from context. A "delightful" comedy pre- all about the simple notion of "truth," as sumably contains dialogue amusing to late- was demonstrated decades ago by Alfred twentieth-century adults, with no scenes Tarski to the satisfaction of everyone com- of dismemberment. (Prof. Smith notes this petent to read his work. but makes nothing of it.) As for the aca- The traditional snare of relativism is its demic examining, say, the David, he prob- application to itself. For isn't Prof. Smith ably wants to understand Michelangelo's claiming that relativism is true, and more technique, the difference between the David tenable than absolutism, and, in so doing, and a Rodin, the influence of Donatello implicidy accepting the framework of ob- on Michelangelo, and of Michelangelo on jectivity herself?. Prof. Smith insists, cor- the Mannerists. As Nelson Goodman has rectly, that relativism does not imply the observed, merit itself is merely one of the equal value of all values, an ascription re- critic's "minor aids" toward understand- quiring just the sort of transcendental stan- ing. dard that relativism rejects. Prof. Smith Appraisal per se is very nearly superflu- even dubs this inference the "egalitarian ous to the critic's job. Having noted the fallacy." She also insists, somewhat less plau- makeshift plot, stilted dialogue, and im- sibly, that relativism doesn't imply "qui- plausible behavior of the characters in a etism," since the relativist still cares about Robert Ludlum novel, what does the critic "the longer-range consequences of her ac- add by calling the novel a "failure"? The tions." However, in insisting that egalitar- skeptic may profess not to see what is so ianism and quietism really do not follow from terrible about coincidence, implausibility, relativism, that saying that they do is fal- and awkwardness, but in practice this is lacious and mistaken, Prof. Smith is mani- what "failure" means. festly recognizing impersonal, objective As noted, literary relativism, suitably un- standards of inference. And in emphasiz- derstood, is plausible. It is symptomatic of ing attention to the consequences of ac- the megalomania that seems to have over- tion, Prof. Smith is recognizing objective taken literary studies that Prof. Smith moves empirical knowledge. from this extremelymodest position to quite Just why skepticism self-destructs has general relativism without any awareness been well explained by modem logic. A of the need for new arguments. She de- sentence can deny truth (or both truth and fends moral relativism by dropping the falsity) to some other sentence without con- names of obscure figures who, so far as I tradiction, but no sentence can deny truth know, have contributed nothing to the is- of itself. As an immediate corollary, no Book Renews 91

sentence can consistently deny truth- unpopular with traditionalists, precisely for value to all sentences, lest it apply to itself. its disregard of value. Perhaps Hirsch's idea Sentences come stacked in a hierarchy. A deserves another look. limited range of discourse-literary judg- ment, say-can be denied truth-value from Michael Levin is professor of philosophy at the some wider perspective, but contradiction City College of New York, New York, NY strikes when skeptical judgments are sweep- 10031. ing enough to include themselves. That's why Prof. Smith should have stopped after insisting that soap operas and Shake- The Hollow Men: Politics and speare are incommensurable. Nor is this Corruption in Higher Education, point merely logical; the extension of aes- thetic to factual relativism is philosophi- by Charles Sykes. Washington, cally perverse. Value relativism makes sense D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1990, 314 because soft, untestable, emotive values con- pp., $19.95 hardbound. trast in point of epistemic firmness with hard, testable, neutral facts. Conflate fact, John C. Chalberg value, belief, and commitment in a gen- eral smudge, and you dissolve the contrast between science and evaluation, which mo- Who are the "hollow men" of Charles tivates value skepticism in the first place. Sykes's new rogues gallery? Readers of Prof- Her generalized skepticism self-de- scare might instantly conclude that this structs, indeed, but Prof. Smith's more lim- muckraker's eye is still trained on the pro- ited aesthetic relativism does raise ques- fessoriate. And, to a degree, it is. But the tions about the best way to defend the true "hollow men" are not those whose "canon" of Western civilization, cur- minds are filled with ideological claptrap rendy under attack for being too male and or whose briefcases are crammed with con- too white. The defense of science and math- suiting contracts. If anything, the profes- ematics presents no trouble, since they are soriate remains too full of itself, too pre- objectively preferable to all other modes occupied with a misguided sense of mission of knowledge acquisition. All cultures seek to qualify as "hollow." No, "the empty to predict and control nature, and West- men, the stuffed men," chronicled and ern science has achieved that goal most skewered in Charles Sykes's second book fully. But how to defend the humanities are those who nominally lead our univer- curriculum-Shakespeare, Rembrandt, sities, the administrators who have pre- Plato? The relativists are right, I believe, sided over the gradual, but now virtually in suggesting that Shakespeare and com- complete, triumph of the professoriate. pany cannot be defended on the grounds If the target is different, so is the goal-- of their superiority. Nor can they be de- and the audience. Profscam was written as fended on their universal appeal to all man- a tonic for serious teachers, a primer for kind, since, as Prof. Smith suggests, financially strapped parents, and a chal- Shakespeare is no more likely to be em- lenge to gullible legislators. Largely anec- braced by every culture than is the Japa- dotal, itwas a nonetheless powerful, double- nese tea ceremony. A nonnormative de- barreled indictment of academic hustlers fense may have to be deployed. The most who had abandoned the classroom, or who familiar, E. D. Hirsch's emphasis on the lapsed into intellectual gobbledygookwhen- need for intergenerational continuity, is ever they bothered to appear within it. It 92 Academic Questions / Summer 1991

assaulted the credentials and psyches of form stimulated by the initiatives of trust- the members of the professoriate who ees and regents (who are both insiders and placed teaching before research by ridi- outsiders), and who, for far too long, have culing much of what passed for their re- been shirking their responsibilities. After search. It encouraged prospective fresh- all, if civilian review boards are a good men and their tuition-paying parents to idea for police departments and the med- vote with their feet by severely criticizing ical profession, why not a variation on that many of the elite private schools. It pro- theme for academic institutions? vided ammunition to distracted lawmak- About two-thirds of Sykes's book is a ers by supplying the facts on just who does- modern history of Dartmouth College, be- and does not-do the teaching at major ginning with the presidency of Ernest Mar- universities. tin Hopkins (1916-1945) and extending Profscam was a muckraker's exposd, and to that ofJames Freedman (1987- ). Henry like Lincoln Steffens before him, Charles Adams once cracked in print that an ac- Sykes promoted reformation through in- count of the American presidency from formation on the assumption that the lat- George Washington to Ulysses Grant was ter would quickly lead to the former. The itself enough to disprove Darwin. Simi- Hollow Men, in contrast, has a much longer larly, theorists of progress will not be heart- historical perspective. In it Sykes de- ened by a recital of Dartmouth presiden- scribes what Robert Nisbet once called the cies following that of Hopkins. Nor will "degradation of the academic dogma," a they find encouragement in the two trends process he argues that began toward the most manifest during the tenures of those end of the nineteenth century. While even executives: the abandonment of the tradi- at this late date Sykes finds a saving rem- tional liberal arts curriculum and the as- nant of small and middle-sized colleges sertion of complete faculty supremacy committed to teaching the traditional lib- within the college. eral arts, he is no longer the optimistic Once upon a time Robert Maynard reformer. An examination of the history Hutchins defined the purpose of a liberal of American higher education has forced arts education as that of freeing the indi- him to conclude that the struggle will be vidual student "from the prison-house of much more difficult than once imagined. his class, race, time, place, background, After all, if the wrong turn was taken over family, and even his nation." Today the a hundred years ago, retracing misdi- animating purpose of too much of what rected steps will prove a lengthy endeavor. passes for the same is the entrapment of No doubt Sykes would like to attract a the student in his racial-, gender-, or class- large readership for his second venture into confined "prison-house." What is more, a the highly politicized thickets of ivy. But traditional liberal arts education was thought his real targets should be the members of to achieve its emancipatory effects by bring- the boards of trustees of our colleges and ing the student into contact with the great- universities. Because profscamists have been est cultural achievements of his civiliza- so successful, reform from without (mean- tion. Contrast this approach with that ing solely by parents and legislators) will implied by current invocations at Dart- be slow and spotty, while reform from mouth against an "unqualified emphasis within (meaning solely by professors and upon Western civilization" (a phenome- administrators) is likely to prove impossi- non that leads Charles Sykes to conclude ble. That leaves, as the best chance, re- that C. S. Lewis was right: each age is Book Renews 93

warned against "those vices of which it is what a man shall be." For Sykes that was least in danger"). To Dartmouth's current sound advice for the men of Dartmouth president, the peril is the assumption of seventy-five years ago, and remains sage Euro-American "cultural superiority." To counsel for the men and women of Dart- Charles Sykes, it is the gutting of the West- mouth today. ern tradition. Sykes's solution is not to In defense of his vision, Hopkins fought reduce traditional requirements, but to re- against any alignment with ideology, store them and add non-Western texts to whether it was the conservatism of Yale or the curriculum as well. the radicalism of Columbia. Instead, he Few faculty, however, care to pursue fostered an atmosphere of intellectual open- Sykes's agenda. Some have long since with- mindedness where thoughtful generalists, drawn into their own academic specialties, both student and faculty, could flourish. while others are engaged in open warfare Taking to heart Ortega y Gasset's warn- against the pluralistic vision that is at tile ing against the "aggressive stupidity" of heart of the Western tradition. For Sykes, those who "know a great deal about one the fragmentation of the faculty can be thing," he regarded undergraduate educa- traced historically to the late nineteenth tion as an end in itself, and not an occa- century, and particularly to the German sion for either specialization or politiciza- influence on higher education, while the tion. And he knew that his success depended politicization of the faculty is rooted in upon a vigilant board of trustees, not an the turmoil of the 1960s. ambitious faculty. In a sense, Ernest Hopkins--Sykes's ex- The year 1945 marked both the end of emplar of what a college president should the Hopkins era at Dartmouth and Sykes's be--was already fighting a rear guard ac- "Great Divide" in the history of Ameri- tion when he assumed the leadership of can higher education. What had been a Dartmouth on the eve of the American stubborn resistance on the part of the acad- entry into World War I. As early as 1884, emy's Ernest Hopkinses dissolved into a one of the "new Mandarins of the aca- full-scale rout. Victory belonged to the demic order," Columbia professor John "multiversity" where the old-fashioned W. Burgess, had pronounced a death sen- teacher-scholar was little more than an em- tence for liberal arts colleges of the type barrassment. Perhaps the multiversifica- Hopkins was undertaking to lead. Given tion of the major universities was inevita- his admiration for the German university, ble, necessary, and, in its contribution to with its emphasis on specialization and grad- serious research, intellectually defensible. uate education, Burgess had declared it to What is none of the above, however, has be a "waste of capital to maintain" liberal been the conversion of the Dartmouths of arts colleges and "largely a waste of time American higher education into "mini- to attend them." Curiously, Hopkins, who multiversities," and politicized mini- was not an academic, but a more practical multiversities at that. Sykes contends that business executive, thought otherwise. Per- the history of Dartmouth is the history of haps it was really not so curious that it American higher education in microcosm. took someone entering the academy from That he is correct is irrefutable--and the larger reaches of American society to lamentable. remind scholars transfixed by Prussian mod- Dartmouth's surrender to the tempta- els that a college's primary concern was tions of specialization and ideology con- "not with what a man shall do but with firms the wisdom of both the educational 94 Academic Questions / Summer 1991

philosophy and political neutrality of Er- and the presence of anti-apartheid shan- nest Hopkins. Sykes recounts at some length ties on campus. Succeeding McLaughlin the failure of the subsequent presidencies was James Freedman, a career administra- of mathematician John Kemeny and busi- tor with no previous Dartmouth connec- ness executive David McLaughlin. In the tion. In pursuit of his oxymoronic dream early 1970s, Kemeny found it "regrettable of converting Dartmouth into a "liberal that individual courses were owned by in- arts university," Freedman early on cast dividual faculty members." He warned his lot with faculty members at either end against a college with "too many special- of the involvement spectrum: those who ists who are specialists and nothing else." preferred to be left alone so that they might But as president he was doubly ineffective. pursue their academic specialties, and those He could not overcome the peculiar "in- who wanted no one to be left alone while ertia" of academic culture, nor could he they pursued their political agendas. This stop the juggernaut that was undermining unwritten and unholy alliance has con- Dartmouth's commitment to political neu- verted Dartmouth into an ideologically trality. Instead, he finally succumbed by armed camp stripped of its original mis- supporting a campus strike in response to sion as a liberal arts college. the American incursion into Cambodia and This "revolution from above" can only the killings at Kent State, thereby convert- be reversed by another revolution of even ing what had been a student-faculty pro- more elevated origin. The "hollow men" test into a presidential one. In the words who succeeded Hopkins have spurned his of English professor Jeffrey Hart, at that alliance with the trustees in the name of moment Dartmouth "crossed an invisible appeasing the faculty. Until boards of trust- lirte." The remainder of Sykes's story makes ees cease behaving as "hollow men" them- it depressingly clear that that line has not selves, the colleges they ostensibly govern been recrossed. will continue to produce newer versions John Kemeny was followed by Dart- of hollow men and women who possess mouth's first president recruited from the little in the way of a genuine education. business community since Hopkins. David McLaughlin's brief regime, however, was John C. Chalberg teachesAmerican history at destroyed by his paralyzing ambivalence Normandale Community College, Blooming- on two issues: the restoration of ROTC ton, MN 55420.