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nada? So long as these studies are elective or voluntary, their fallout
affects those who have surrendered their minds to them. But if the
content and method of these studies are smuggled into the required
courses, this constitutes an outrageous betrayal of the liberal tradi–
tion . We are already hearing complaints that there are not enough
teachers available to discuss these questions in a scholarly way ,
coupled with the preposterous notion that those qualified to teach
the great works of Western Culture are incapable of mastering the
relevant materials on these themes , and that therefore the teaching
staff must be expanded to bring in persons specially qualified by
race, sex, or class to present themes in these areas sympathetically.
Such views are sometimes heard even among those who imag–
ine that they are Marxists of sorts in the fields of comparative litera–
ture or literary criticism, in which deconstructionist dogmas about
"the myth of objectivity" give them license to take any liberties with
texts or verifiable events. One almost feels sorry for poor Marx
because of those who invoke his name. Marx naively believed that
his position rested on historical evidence . His was intended to be an
empirical view. To be scientifically credible it had to be refutable ,
that is, stand the test of experience. Marx had left the irresponsible
voluntarism, revived by twentieth-century existentialism, behind
him with the swaddling clothes of his idealistic Hegelianism, which
now reappears in the patched-up garments of the Frankfurt school.
We hear a great deal these days of the
Marxisant
allegiance of
university faculties in the humanities and social studies , especially
among the not insubstantial number who were activist students in
the sixties . Because of the collapse of rigorous standard of scholar–
ship , these activists have survived as tenured teachers in the institu–
tions they once sought to destroy. Once scholars have won their pro–
fessional spurs , they have as much right to be Marxists as Straus–
sians or Thomists or what not. There are good and bad among all
these schools of thought. But the astonishing thing is the degree to
which those who pretend to, or profess, a Marxist orientation inter–
pret Marxism not as a scholarly scientific approach but as a
commit–
ment
to a variety of political causes. The chief component of this
commitment is opposition to American foreign policy whenever it
involves a conflict in third world countries or with the Soviet Union
and its satellites . What they expound as Marxism is a blatant variety
of vulgar Marxism, which is more Benthamite than Marxist , or a
form of pseudo-Marxism in which there is no distinction between the
causal efficacy of "the foundations" and "superstructure" of culture ,
