ROBERT ALTER
The Persistence of Reading
The
degree to which American campuses have become captive to the
movement of political correctness is hard to assess. The wave of articles
in the popular press a year and a half ago about the new "thought po–
lice" at the universities was no doubt exaggerated, a tactic of sensation–
alist journalism, as many of those criticized in the articles justifiably
protested. To be sure, the political correctniks are out there in clam–
orous numbers, and some of them are prepared
to
be ruthlessly coercive
in relation to curriculum, appointments, promotions, and the evaluation
of scholarship. Nevertheless, the evidence about the extent of their activ–
ity is anecdotal, not statistical, something that can be readily seen in the
book-length exposes by Roger Kimball and Dinesh D'Souza, which are
strong on monitory tales and deficient in their vision of the larger varie–
gated picture of American higher education at the end of the twentieth
century. All of us who teach at the university level have our own scare
stories, and so I would assume that most of the specific instances Kimball,
D'Souza, and other critics have reported are reasonably accurate. There
is also, however, anecdotal evidence to be offered on the other side of
the balance sheet, and I wi ll presently invoke some from my own obser–
vation.
If
the powers that be in some departments of English, impelled
by the desire to exhibit the appearance of political virtue at any cost,
have made Toni Morrison more important than Shakespeare - required
reading for all sections of freshman English, the subject of special faculty
workshops, an inevitable item on graduate reading lists - there is evi–
dence that many students of literature sti ll find more material for pas–
sionate admiration in Shakespeare than in Morrison, despite
Shakespeare's undeniable whiteness and deadness and maleness and his re–
puted implication in the corrupting discourse of imperialism.
The ideologically driven trend in teaching and scholarship is an odd
phenomenon - a would-be revolutionary movement operating within
the circumscribed sphere of the academy, in the context of a society that
offers not the slightest prospect of radical political change.
In
sentiment
it is certainly intensely political, though I suspect that what really moti–
vates it is the politics of profession.
It
is also a revolution neither from
below nor from the top down but from the middle, up and down. The
revolutionary impulse, by and large, manifests itself in the generation of
humanities scholars and social-science scholars now in their thirties and
