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Thursday, October 05, 2006

Liberal Thursday III

OK, so at least a couple of you are already aware that What’s Liberal got itself a substantial and kinda condescending and dismissive review in the New York Observer.  It was written by Jonathan Liu, a senior at Harvard, and from what I can gather in yesterday’s comments section, some of you were put off by the review’s closing move:

On issues like race and class, he writes, “my classes contain plenty of students who are more outspokenly ‘liberal’ and/or left-leaning than myself …. [It] doesn’t occur to [conservatives] that some of their demonized liberal faculty members have our share of undergraduates who find us not liberal enough for their tastes.”

What never occurs to Michael Bérubé is that these “more outspoken” students might finally be objecting to the same impulse as the conservatives, the same “procedural liberalism” that results in a tenured professor like Mr. Bérubé constantly worrying about offending his students. The truth is, college liberal-arts students aren’t much impressed with friendly professors who talk about popular music and are adept at playing devil’s advocate. To the contrary, we seek out those—liberal, conservative or otherwise—with passion, who will fight and intimidate and humiliate us in order to impart their scholarly revelations, who don’t treat us like the equals we aren’t, who will leave us defeated but challenged and finally emboldened.

So let me set you all straight about two things before anyone comes rushing to my defense or running up with a crying towel to assuage my hurt feelings.  One, the premise of this passage is entirely true.  This is my twenty-second year of teaching, and it never has occurred to me that my more outspoken students are objecting to my liberal-proceduralist m.o. because they prefer being fought and intimidated and humiliated, defeated and challenged and finally emboldened.  In fact, not a single one of my thousand-plus students has ever faulted me for not being challenging enough.  So this is a new one on me.  Live and learn.

Two, having said that, let me add that I wish I had a whole mess of students like Mr. Liu.  He didn’t much care for my book: so what?  He’s smart and energetic and sounds like a great interlocutor.  Though his review is dismissive in places—particularly in its last paragraph, which weighs me in the balance and finds me “overwhelmed by self-doubt” and “caring, fastidious and totally forgettable”—it’s one of the more interesting dismissals I’ve come across.  And I don’t actually think it’s possible to argue people into liking my work, anyway.  I believe Flannery O’Connor put it best when she wrote:

“Everybody is different,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
“Yes, most people is,” Mrs. Freeman said.
“It takes all kinds to make the world.”
“I always said it did myself.”

So I wouldn’t use this here blog to try to persuade Mr. Liu himself that he is mistaken, or to demonstrate that when I’m not being caring, fastidious, and totally forgettable, I’m actually being rude, snarky, and thuggish—often right here on this very blog!  I’m simply going to point out two or three ways in which Mr. Liu mischaracterizes the book’s actual contents.

Thing one:

Mr. Bérubé—both a committed Democrat and a committed democrat, not to mention a former rock musician and a current blogger—is never quite able to describe what exactly he’s defending.

Well, it’s prima facie true that I was unable to describe what I’m defending in such a way as to convince Mr. Liu that I had done so.  But I think it all depends on just how carefully you read my brief for participatory parity and pragmatist pluralism in chapter six, or my brief for the intellectual independence of universities in a pluralist civil society in chapters one and seven.  If, like Mr. Liu, you write off chapter six in half of a subordinate clause as dealing with “the anti-foundationalist possibilities of postmodernism,” then you’ll very likely write off my entire argument about antifoundationalism as a basis (though much depends on what one means by a “basis”) for belief and action. Eric Rauchway got this point, I’m greatly relieved to say, as did Aaron Barlow.  Mr. Liu is well within his rights to say that I didn’t make it well, or didn’t make it convincingly; that’s entirely possible.  But I don’t think he’s justified in claiming that I didn’t make it at all.

But then, much of the review is devoted to claims that I didn’t make this or that argument.  For instance, Mr. Liu writes:

having divided conservatives into the “extreme” and the “thoughtful,” it seems plainly bizarre for Mr. Bérubé not to engage more fully—or at all—with the allegations of the latter group. Mr. Douthat’s recent memoir Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class would have been a good place to start; his scathing portrait of his alma mater (he’s class of ’02) belongs to a critical tradition that began with William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951) and reached its apotheosis with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987).

The deep conservative grievance—repeated with generational variations in each of those three volumes—is simple: In an environment dominated by “electives” and binge-drinking, American higher education is no longer a force that gives students meaning. Young adults stumble out of colleges bewildered and strangely unfulfilled, and what the eminently likable Mr. Bérubé fails to appreciate is that this melancholy is in no way limited to the conservatives.

I’ll admit that when the book’s publication date loomed near, I was afraid I’d get reviews like this: Bérubé says nothing about how college athletics have eroded our moral fiber, Bérubé says nothing about the rapacious student-loan industry, Bérubé never once addresses the demand for ‘accountability’ in educational outcomes. Because it’s true, I don’t address any of those things (two of which are worth addressing), and people who open my book thinking that it is my obligation to write about them if I’m writing about higher education will surely find me to be a coward or a failure.  And when it comes to those stumbling, unfulfilled college graduates, I explicitly wrote that I have a “profound distrust” of “professors (and dapper seventy-something novelists) who speak as if they know all about students’ lives, spiritual strivings, personal habits, and complicated family dramas.” So I’m no help on that score, either.

But what am I to say about binge drinking?  I do mention it in the book, and I say that all the awful things you’ve heard about drinking on campus are true.  I honestly don’t know what to do about it.  And as for the elective system: Mr. Liu writes, “We regrettably never learn what Mr. Bérubé thinks about conservative concerns over ‘grade inflation’ or the calls to adopt ‘Great Books’ core curricula. Both are nuanced issues, ones that might attract a surprising number of Marxists or even Derrideans over to the ‘right-wing’ side.” Fair enough.  I did not enfold my various defenses of Western Civ courses into What’s Liberal?, and in retrospect I think this was a mistake.  I’ve written in favor of core curricula in Dissent, the Common Review, Slate, and a couple of other places, and I guess I didn’t think I needed to stump for them again—or to make the point (obvious on campus, but almost always obscured by the anti-academic right) that Great Books and Western Civ courses are most strenuously resisted, on campuses like mine, not by the feral multicultural Theory Left but by the engineering, preprofessional, and business administration wings of the enterprise.  This was a missed opportunity, I think.

But there’s something tonally awry about Mr. Liu’s complaint that I should have tried to appeal to conservatives on this count, because the most serious charge in his review is that I “haphazardly triangulate” by distinguishing myself from all conservatives and a handful of leftists.  And to try to make that charge stick, Mr. Liu has to contort the book a bit—but only a bit, because, as you all know very well, I really do distinguish myself from a handful of leftists.  I disagree with them, and they disagree with me.  It takes all kinds to make the world!

Let’s get back to Mr. Liu’s description of my descriptions of my courses:

On topics ranging from Willa Cather’s supposed “queer[ing] of the prairie” to the anti-foundationalist possibilities of postmodernism, Mr. Bérubé reveals himself to be an easy-going pedagogue, always ready to play devil’s advocate—even, he loves pointing out, to the liberal students.

Well, if I love pointing this out, you’d think that I might do it more than once.  But I don’t.  The passage Mr. Liu is referring to here, oddly enough, is the same passage he refers to at the end of his review, when he quotes me saying that “my classes contain plenty of students who are more outspokenly ‘liberal’ and/or left-leaning than myself.” The episode involved a student who said to me, after a class in which I’d jump-started a discussion of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by talking about Rush Limbaugh’s remarks about Donovan McNabb, that I should have said in so many words that Limbaugh’s remarks were racist.

That’s it.  That’s the one time I mention an encounter with a liberal student who wanted me to be more “outspoken” than I was.  It takes up two paragraphs in chapter five, in which I write,

Sometimes, when I read conservatives’ accounts of campus life and classroom “intimidation,” I wonder, what’s happening with the liberal students on American campuses?  Don’t they ever feel uncomfortable?  Don’t they ever make their professors uncomfortable?  I’ve begun to suspect that for some critics on the right, it’s a mystery why liberals exist at all:  they sometimes speak as if no one, left to his or her devices, would wind up as a liberal but for professorial indoctrination and brainwashing.

In the rest of the book, I narrate at much greater length my dealings with two students who were, for very different reasons, deeply antagonistic to me: John, to whose defense of the WW2 internment camps I responded by reminding him that when we’d discussed black nationalism he’d insisted that we’re all Americans first and hyphenated-Americans second; and Stan, who responded passionately and combatively to the Rorty-and-pragmatism part of the postmodernism class, believing that antifoundationalism licensed precisely the kind of moral relativism that had corrupted our society.  I’m kind of surprised that someone like Mr. Liu, who clearly favors professors who antagonize and challenge their students, would ignore these whole stretches of the book in favor of the one moment in which a student told me I should have been more emphatically anti-Rush.

One more thing while we’re talking about triangulation.  Because I know I’m going to hear a lot more about this from people to my left, oh yes.

Some of his colleagues, he’s appalled to admit, are so far to the left that they don’t even like being associated with the thoughtful liberals; regarding l’affaire Churchill, he writes of “a smattering of academics [who] decided that because the ‘academic freedom’ defense was a ‘liberal’ position, they needed to go further and defend the specific content of the ‘little Eichmanns’ line …. [M]ost of them, I am now convinced, took this vile position chiefly in order to distinguish themselves from the mere ‘liberals’ to their right.”

There seems to be a bit of, as they say in academia, projection going on here. Because, of course, all the talk of “vile positions” is finally chiefly a way for Mr. Bérubé to distinguish himself from the despicables to his left. Sure, comparing 9/11 victims to the architect of the Holocaust is viscerally repellent, and there might be no other way for the general public to take it. But academics who defended the content of Mr. Churchill’s argument might have had any number of reasons to do so—anyone who has read Hannah Arendt’s haunting, ambiguous Eichmann in Jerusalem, for instance, would immediately find an allusive depth to the now-infamous Churchill quote that perhaps even its author never intended. Mr. Bérubé, however, seems to believe that any such “extreme” position is just so much grandstanding vis-à-vis his own common sense, free-speech-even-for-the- repellent liberalism.

When I read this yesterday, my first, visceral response was this: far from using the Churchill fans as a foil for my sensible liberalism, I sometimes do way too much covering for the Churchill fans, on whatever point of our multiple orthogonal axes they might be.  In this case, I didn’t reproduce any textual evidence of some of the many online discussions I had with people in the course of 2005 (including professional committee discussions I can’t divulge here), discussions in which they made precisely the argument I attribute to them: the liberal defense of Ward Churchill did not go far enough because it allowed those craven liberals to defend Churchill’s right to speak without endorsing the specific content of his remarks, so therefore we need to endorse the specific content of his remarks in order to make this a “teaching moment” for our fellow Americans, to stand up against Bill O’Reilly, to applaud Churchill’s heroism, etc.

But my second, more reflective response was this: you know, I probably did botch this one.  I thought my book parsed Churchill’s remarks reasonably carefully, in that milquetoasty liberal way I have.  I agreed that

the blowback argument, by itself, is an intellectually legitimate argument; there is no doubt that the US funded the Afghan mujahideen in their struggle against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, just as there is no question that U.S. support for Israel has generated a great deal of anti-American sentiment in the Arab world.

And I pointed out, riffing off of Sidney Hook, that

academic freedom covers even the most noxious heresies when they stem from honest pursuit of an inquiry or argument (and grotesque as it may sound to some ears, the question of whether there can be such a thing as “collective guilt” among the citizens of a superpower is indeed an inquiry).

But I didn’t make it clear that the “academic freedom” defense of Churchill is indeed more specific and robust than the “freedom of speech” defense, insofar as it speaks to the legitimacy of his remarks as a matter of professional principle rather than as a general right to say vile things in an open society.  Churchill was and is, in other words, entitled as an academic—quite apart from his rights as a citizen—to make the claim that all Americans share in the responsibility for the crimes our nation commits abroad (except, as he helpfully explained later, “the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by.” They’re off the hook).  I happen to believe that he answered the question of collective national responsibility so reductively as to undermine the inquiry, but still, I should have explained the difference between academic freedom and freedom of speech more clearly.

Anyway, let’s end on a happy note, because it’s been a crazy week so far.

What’s Liberal fails to answer (or even to pose) the broader question: Why is Mr. Horowitz—himself a New York Jew, a former New Leftist with degrees from Columbia and Berkeley—more appealing to backwoods citizens and lawmakers than the friendly neighborhood academics among them?

This is an elegant misframing of the question.  For the funny thing is that Mr. Horowitz himself is not very appealing: the reason the Georgia legislature didn’t pass his Academic Bill of Rights, after all, was that Horowitz made the mistake of showing up in person and convincing Georgia lawmakers “they were dealing with a crazy man.” The real question is why hatred and distrust of American universities is so pervasive on the right wing as a whole, and I humbly submit that my book does indeed attempt to pose—and answer—that one.  Though not, I (liberally) admit, to everyone’s satisfaction.

Posted by Michael on 10/05 at 12:53 PM
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