GEORGE
LEVINE
and said in Western civilization from the depredations of a philistine cul–
ture. Our politics were - where they existed - continuous with our
vocation, that is, liberal. We saw no inconsistency in, on the one hand,
insisting on the specialness of literary values, literary criteria, literary
methods, and, on the other, writing amateur essays of social criticism
circling more or less vaguely about classic literary texts.
The crisis of conscience is, then, an aspect of the crisis of liberalism.
Many of us awoke one day to discover either that we were not in fact
liberals or that liberalism itself had turned out to be badly wanting.
The inherent inconsistencies of the profession had been forced into the
open by what may well seem to be the bad luck of its engagement with
teaching. Few teachers in American universities escaped at least tem–
porary dislocation as a result of the activities of students and institu–
tions in relation to the war in Viet Nam. Even the overwhelmingly dull
Modern Language Association needed to come to terms - more or
less - with the problem of social relevance, and much of the activity
of that group over the last few years has had the quality of comic
(or farcical) opera. I can personally bear witness to a good many meet–
ings and a good many cocktail parties gone sour in a bewhiskeyed haze
of passionate indignation. Guilt and bad conscience are a function of
fear, and all of us are threatened - either by doubt about what
we
are doing or by visions of hordes of passionately intense people corrupt–
ing the dispassionate pursuit of knowledge. Yet who could have re–
mained entirely untouched by the revelation that awarding a low grade
could be the equivalent of pronouncing a death sentence, or by the
experience of teaching
Benito Gereno
or even
Othello
to a class full of
newly conscious Black students? It is hard, in such circumstances, not
to begin asking questions about the importance to humanity of getting
straight the language of the best creative minds of the West. These
minds, we became freshly aware, were full of the prejudices of their
culture, and by virtue of their power of language disseminated those
prejudices powerfully. Were we, in the pursuit of scholarly truth and
contributions to knowledge, implicated in the disasters of our culture?
Academic liberalism was put to the test in two equally difficult
ways. We were forced to face the consequences of our humanitarian
position, to consider the continuity between our lives as professionals,
the systems which gave us our bread and our responsibility to act out
our beliefs. We were forced, also, to consider our students in a new
way, to stop lecturing and start talking, to experiment with the class–
room in ways that should have worked but only rarely did. So aca–
demics went out on strike, demonstrated, joined in student organiza-
