JOHN R. SEARLE
Is There a Crisis in American Higher
Education?
There is supposed to be a major debate - or even a set of debates - go–
ing on at present concerning a crisis in the universities, specifically a crisis
in the teaching of the humanities. This debate is supposed to be in large
part about whether a certain traditional conception of liberal education
should be replaced by something sometimes called "multiculturalism."
These disputes have even reached the mass media, and several best-selling
books are devoted
to
discussing them and related issues. Though the ar–
guments are ostensibly about Western civilization itself, they are couched
in a strange jargon that includes not only "multiculturalism" but also
"the canon," "political correctness," "ethnicity," "affirmative action,"
and even more rebarbative expressions such as "hegemony,"
"empowerment," "poststructuralism," "deconstruction," and
" patriarchalism. " I myself have contributed to this "debate" in an article
I wrote for
The Nell! York Reviell! oj Books.
I find the debate at best
puzzling and at worst disappointing, not to say depressing.
Among its disquieting features are at least the following. First, it is
conducted at a rather low level. It tends
to
be shrill and vindictive, and
the level of argumentation is not entirely appropriate
to
the presentation
of a philosophy of education. The best-selling books - and here I am
thinking of the books by Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and Dinesh
0'
Sousa - are without exception defenses of a traditional conception of
higher education, but they are weak in articulating exactly what that
tradition is and how it might address itself to the specific features of our
present historical situation. On the other side, opposing the tradition, are
authors from a variety of points of view: Marxists, feminists, deconstruc–
tionists, and people active in "ethnic studies" and "gay studies," as well as
many 1960s-style student radicals who are now middle-aged university
professors . Most of these opponents of the tradition, in spite of their di–
versity, are of the left-wing po litical persuasion, and they tend to write
in tones of moral outrage - the outrage of those who are exposing vast
and nameless oppressive conspiracies - that we have come to expect from
the academic left since the 1960s. I wou ld not like to think that this is
the best that American academics can produce by way of a debate about
the nature of higher education: On the one side, for the most part,
journalists and politicians; on the other, resentful radicals. I am also dis-
Editor's Note: An early version of this essay was published in different form in
the Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, January 1993,
Volume (XLV, No.4.
