ROBERT ALTER
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forties. (To see the real proportions of the movement, one must keep in
mind that it is limited in its disciplinary scope. It has scarcely touched de–
partments of physics, chemistry, and mathematics; schools of engineering,
medicine, and business administration; and even within the humanities, it
has made few inroads in some departments, such as Slavic studies and
philosophy.) The oldest generation of scholars is usually thought of as
the locus of tradi tionalism, the last bastion of superannuated Western
civilization, though it includes influential proponents of one or another
radical ideological orientation, like the feminist Carolyn Heilbrun, the
neo-Marxist Fredric Jameson, the anti-colonialist Edward Said. Although
trus generation certainly has its reflexive, proverbially hidebound tradi–
tionalists - any healthy tradition lives by being the constant object of
critical scrutiny and interpretive revision - its more prevalent trait is
conformism, which seems to be endemic to the academic character in ev–
ery generation, including those who have only recently entered the sys–
tem. The conformism explains the susceptibility of the senior scholars to
the pressures of radicalism from the middle generation below.
Departments of literature and of the other affected disciplines, given the
great expansion of American un'iversities in the dozen years from 1957 to
1969, are often top-heavy with people in their late fifties or sixties, many
of whom are perfectly traditional - indeed, conventional - in their own
teaching and scholarship but who are continually anxious to be thought
well of by younger people in their profession who are imagined to be
"advanced" in their views, at the ever-envied "cutting edge" of critical
method. A cutting edge, one might think, should be a razor-thin border
between mind and material, but for the generation that has joined
academia since the early seventies, it looks more like a crowded social
hall where the labor of using precise language is displaced by the recita–
tion of buzzwords, scholarly reflection by conference-hopping, and inde–
pendent analysis by groupthink. One respect in which Camille Paglia's
explosive tirade against the debasement of intellectual life in the academy
seems quite justified is in its indignation over academic conformism.
One should not, of course, tar all the members of a generation with
the same brush. In a country with thousands of institutions of higher
learning, the political demography of the profession has to be consider–
ably more variegated than alarmist accounts would lead us to believe.
Over the past dozen or so years, I have lectured on campuses all over the
country, presenting a critical view of the current ideological orthodoxies
to faculty and student audiences which have usually proved
to
be surpris–
ingly receptive. Again and again, I have encountered people, including
many young people, who resent the expectation that they should march
to one or another "theoretical" drummer, and who seem keen on
teaching literature because they find abiding interest in the achievements
