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Spectator, The New Republic, Policy Review, The American Scholar, The New
Criterion.
On the other side are very powerful protagonists - the university
presses. Eighty or eighty-five percent of them are dedicated to politically
correct analyses. The struggle is one of ideas translated into a marketplace
of ideas. I think before we leap to what can be done we ought to be
very cautious and try to negotiate new societies, new agencies, new
institutional forces. The whole world of research is not in the university.
The marketplace is speaking to us within the university, and there is rea–
son for an enormous amount of optimism. Transaction runs thirty-five
journals, and every one of them has a market, because a democratic cul–
ture is small, not because it is big. We have to recognize the spread of
American society, or we would be subject to the charge of conservatism.
We have to be careful that our struggle is a struggle for democratic cul–
ture, not for a non-ideological point of view, but for a very ideological
point of view. Democracy itself is on the line. That is what's critical.
Heather MacDonald:
One of the things that's been battled over in the
marketplace of ideas, however, is rhetoric, as Roger Kimball said. You
mention democratic culture. That's precisely what the Teachers for a
Democratic Culture are claiming, to have a monopoly on democracy, to
be the ones representing democratic forums, democratic curricula and re–
forms in admissions policy. I think what's important in getting our mes–
sage out is in fact that our commitment to standards, that meritocracy is
precisely a democratic tradition which allows people, regardless of their
background, race or color to go as far as they possibly can. That posi–
tion is far more compatible with an open society than one that allocates
resources based on someone's gender or ethnic affiliation. This society
obviously had a dreadful racist past, but I think there are certain standards
that do transcend narrow parochial interests. It is not racist to argue for
standards.
Jean Elshtain:
I think we're getting to the heart of what's going on,
that is, the battle over our interest in democracy itself. When I entered
the academy in the early seventies, if you had standards or were talking in
a certain way, you were accused of being elitist or male-identified. Part
of what has been going on since the 1970s has been a battle over the
understanding of democracy. As Martin Luther King said, ''Judge people
by the quality of their character and not by the color of their skin or by
their gender."
James Farganis:
On the question of this struggle for the definition of
democracy you have two competing schools - a procedural and a sub-
