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of the literary imagination that have little to do with literature's sup–
posed reflection of phallocentrism, colonialism, and the oppression of
the working class. It was at Carleton College in Minnesota - a place
perhaps off the prestige circuit but one of the better liberal arts colleges
in the country - that two assistant professors of English set me on to
A.
D. Nuttall's vigorous and invigorating polemic against structuralism and
poststructuralism,
A New Mimesis,
a book I had not previously heard of.
I begin to suspect that some of the really interesting new works of criti–
cal thinking may not even be mentioned at Berkeley and Harvard and
Yale.
The problem with all such impressionistic judgments about either the
prevalence or the limited scope of political correctness is that the quanti–
tative dimensions of the phenomenon remain unclear. It must be said
that the correctniks may be a distinct minority of the profession - I
would guess that in fact they are - and yet exert an influence out of
proportion to their numbers. The Siavist scholar Gary Saul Morson, one
of the important new critics to have emerged over the last ten years, put
it to me this way in conversation not long ago: no more than twenty
percent of a department needs to be made up of ideological activists in
order to ensure the takeover of the department. Morson's Law works
because, within the other eighty percent, at least twenty percent are
likely to be indifferent to issues of departmental policy, even to the point
of rarely attending meetings, and half of the remaining forty percent can
be counted on to fall in line with the activists out of sheer conformist
fear of being deemed retrograde. This schematic approximation suggests
that those who would impose some rigid political measure on all aca–
demic matters do constitute a real threat to the variety and freedom and
complex pleasures of intellectual life on the campuses. This is a threat
that is likely to continue in the near future, though my guess is that its
scope and gravity have been exaggerated by most conservative reactions
and in the popular media.
The group I have not yet accounted for in my schema of revolution
from the middle is the most crucial one - the bottom stratum, the stu–
dents. The received wisdom is that the young are unformed, uninformed,
and naively idealistic, and thus on all three grounds are highly manipula–
ble from above, especially when the manipulation is adorned with the
banners of supposedly progressive causes. Admittedly, there is a good deal
of truth in this sad analysis. One can scarcely avoid running into twenty–
year-olds on the campuses who after one semester with a single insistent
professor have become party-liners of one sort or another, spouting the
predictable formulas, having replaced the challenging stuff of literature
and history with a set of deadening abstractions that lull the young mind
