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PARTISAN REVIEW
ideology which dictates that the entire world, universItIes included, is
engaged in an updated form of class struggle, divided into dominators
and victims. Let's take power away from the dominators; don't read
them; that'll teach them. This is a world then of
a priori
ideology, which
immunizes it from challenge. Of course there may be many reasons to
teach a course on women's literature, but there are no good reasons to
teach a course on the nineteenth-century novel whose entire
raison d'etre
is to get even with Charles Dickens.
Unfortunately, as one critic wrote recently, "Silence and repression
are our answer to the stress of ethnic pluralism. Forced to wear the hair
shirt of timidity and reticence," university students grow resentful, and
hostility and bitterness erupts in the form of attacks which often, as you
know, have racial motivations. We are "creating enclaves that are irre–
ducibly, irretrievably uniform." The general proliferation of demands for
sensitivity, backed up in some instances with restrictive speech codes and
the like, speaks to a larger problem in America with litigiousness and
spite, where we think we can legislate everything. It's not surprising that
the university has moved along these lines. It also points to a disguised
return, a return in benevolence's clothing of the old
in loco parentis
rule.
But I'd rather take
in loco parentis
straight than have it emerge in this
form. We're getting, I think, a kinder, gentler form, a manipulated form
of what pop culture would call despotism. We assume that students are
quivering infants who can't take care of themselves and lack the ability
to engage in conversation, dialogue , and robust debate in a ruled,
governed atmosphere with their fellow students and teachers in a com–
munity of scholars and learners.
We can't attempt to micro-manage every thought and deed, but I
think we can create an atmosphere within which debate is welcomed,
not shunned, within which differences as articulated positions, on the
level of ideas, not wounded identities, are helped to flourish - where
students, teachers, learners, and citizens are marked both by what divides
and what unites us. To teach students takes on, also, the possibility of a
common culture, which is neither uniform nor conformist, and the pos–
sibility of a liberal education, by which I mean not merely acquiring in–
formation or solidifying a group identity but, in the words of Michael
Oakeshott, "learning to recognize some specific invitations to encounter
particular adventures in human self-understanding." And, finally, the pos–
sibility for genuine diversity, by contrast to those entrenched and
reapplied social and gender exclusivities which deny us the most cherished
of all fragile achievements, our individuality, and as central to our indi–
viduality, to create together a commonality and even, I daresay, from
time to time, solidarity.
