516
Scaife, Heritage, American Enterprise,
and other right-wing foundations
promote the political interests of
their corporate patrons - a charge
that cannot be made against the
sponsorship of left scholarship or
journalism by foundations like
Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Carnegie,
and MacArthur; few among even the
most doctrinaire academic leftists are
in the hire of special interests.
Finally, Kurzweil and Phillips
fail
to
acknowledge that although
some of the accusations rightists have
made against some academic leftists
may be accurate, many others have
been of the straw-man and ad
hominem variety, filled with misrep–
resentations and calculated to pro–
voke polarization. The bare mini–
mum to be expected from those of
good will on either side is for them
to
admit that their side is as subject
to error and partisan zealotry as the
other.
Donald Lazere
San Luis Obispo, California
Edith Kurzweil replies:
Professor Lazere's letter seems to
exemplify, once again, that ideology
blinds. Instead of responding to my
plea for putting aside political agen–
das in order to help lift the level of
education of our students rather than
politicize them, he misquotes me and
chooses to repeat again the media
discussions, and the slogans, I had
hoped
to
transcend. If, instead, he
and his pals were once again to teach
English and were to forgive their
p
ARTISAN REVIEW
students for planning to "service the
business world" they disdain, Ameri–
can education might not be in the
sorry shape it is in and jobs might
not be moving overseas.
Neither the students who have
been short-changed nor the col–
leagues who have been silenced are
concerned with who sits on boards
of directors, or with the "notoriety"
of John Silber who, incidentally, has
found the time and money to tum
around one of the worst public
school systems in the country. I
also
fail to see the connection of what's
going on in our classrooms to the
genealogy of the Kristol family, to
neoconservative politics, etc., or to
the fact that foundations - whether
conservative or "politically correct"
- choose to give their money where
they please. (According to a recent
survey, the combined assets of so–
called liberal foundations are much
greater than so-called conservative
ones, and
Parfisal1 R eview
and I have
been turned down by both sides.)
Far from "falsely implying that
academic leftists are monolithic in
their belief and behavior," as Pro–
fessor Lazere states, I foolishly had
trusted his own alleged willingness
to
start a dialogue. That I attracted a
diatribe instead proves only that he
does not want
to
replace name-call–
ing, and his own entrenched stance,
with the intellectual honesty he
manages to display in personal cor–
responden ce. This disjuncture, it
seems to me , is itself a manifestation
of the "political correctness" whose
existence he denies.
