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PARTISAN REVIEW
and procedures of rationality, the view cannot be subjected to rational
(as distinct from political) criticism. If the test of a theory is its effective–
ness in producing desirable social change, then any critique will be con–
demned as reactionary. Any counterargument will be seen as oppressive.
It is already considered "antifeminist harassment" for male students to
pick at flaws in feminist arguments. The door is closed to further debate;
the new orthodoxy cannot be questioned. You may freely embrace the
transformationist argument, but, having once embraced it, you are never
again free to question it. Allow this argument to shape the university,
and no one will be free to question it.
Advocates of using the university for social transformation will be
unmoved by these considerations. Yet what if they are wrong? Given the
limitations of perspective they have themselves emphasized, they may have
misread history and misargued epistemology. Racism, sexism, and
economic inequality are complex phenomena. It is easy
to
condemn
them but difficult to analyze them correctly, and more difficult still to
determine the best solutions. Knowing that the analyses and prescriptions
which represent today's most advanced thinking may be tomorrow's
debunked myth, would it be wise to stop questioning,
to
give up the
search for truth, to banish competing views from the curriculum, to
close off further inquiry, and to substitute for these activities the training
of students to become agents of a political ideology? Could a rational
person freely choose such a course?
DAPHNE MERKIN
Notes of a Lonely White Woman
On ce upon a time, there was a white upper-middle-class woman
(although
to
hear her tell it she felt if not poor, then at least strapped
for money most of the time), who was heterosexual (although she has
recently been made to understand that such proclivities are no more
fixed than the evening tide) and Jewish (an ethnic minority historically
associated with victimization and literary talent, now held
to
be under
suspicion on both these scores). This woman was also a mother (paid lip
service to as a socially useful occupation, but mostly seen as a demo-
