644
p
ARTISAN REVIEW
Step
17:
PI/blic Denial.
The transformationist university is by defini–
tion in conflict with the surrounding society. However, it depends on
that society for both financial support and whatever degree of autonomy
it retains. Transformationists would undermine their base of operations if
they were always open and candid about their goals and activities.
Therefore, in speaking to the public, it will be important to deny that
political standards are being enforced and to minimize the extent of cur–
ricular and pedagogical change. This may seem deceptive to those who
adhere to the ideal of disinterested truth, but for those who understand
that the idea of "eternally 'true' theory" must be replaced by "a kind of
rhetoric whose value may be measured by its persuasive means and by its
ultimate goal," speaking differently to the public than to each other is
justifiable.
III. The Argument Considered
Steps
1, 2,
a/1d
11:
Perspectives, Relativism, alld Objectivity.
It is not
difficult to locate serious arguments about realism, relativism, objectivity,
the meaning of truth, and so forth - the history of philosophy from the
Greeks to the present abounds in such discussions. But these discussions
differ in several ways from the transformationist view.
In
the past, philo–
sophical critics of such objectivist traditions as realism and rationalism
have not tried to derive a new political mission for educational institu–
tions from their critiques. Their philosophical critique has itself been an
intellectual project, with intellectual goals and methods, still very much a
part of the pursuit of truth.
Serious philosophical critiques of objectivity and realism have them–
selves been presented with clarity, precision, rigor, and a respect for
counterarguments, traits regarded by postmodernists as symptoms of the
tyranny of objectivity. One literary theorist, Robert Scholes, has pointed
out the postmodernist neglect of the referentialist tradition represented
by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Peter Strawson, and John Searle - a
tradition postmodernists nevertheless claim to have refuted. One finds,
instead, ritual invocations of Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty, unac–
companied by a close reading of their arguments, much less those of their
critics. Nevertheless, Kuhn and Rorty are taken to be conclusive and
to
license anything that can be called a paradigm shift or a conversation -
to license, in fact, a politicization of higher education that neither Kuhn
nor Rorty endorses.
Postmodern arguments against objectivity often make the bold and
inaccurate assumption that the only forms of objectivism are pristine
Cartesian rationalism or empiricist positivism (which, oddly enough, they
tend to equate). Since the more extreme forms of Cartesian and posi-
