706
PARTISAN REVIEW
were, they couldn't possibly survive. Yet they are essential
to
society.
Here I am thinking of such institutions as public libraries, public parks,
and museums. They could not survive on the basis alone of making a
profit or pleasing constituencies.
It
seems to me that universities are
clearly in this category, too.
If
it is just a question of earning a profit or
gaining votes, they can't make it, so there has to be some other set of
constraints. Quality, within the standards of a discipline, sets its own
constraints. The problem arises when the discipline's objectives and stan–
dards decay or collapse.
When institutional corruptions set in, when institutions lose a sense
of their mission, there are several forms of decadence . One is that they
become patronage institutions, ways of getting jobs for friends, relatives,
and other approved groups. I believe that certain forms of affirmative-ac–
tion hiring programs fall in this category. In cases where you think that
the results of your selection process really matter - if, for example, you
are selecting a brain surgeon to operate on your brain or a quarterback
to lead your team - you will select entirely on grounds of quality. Only
if you think the results do not much matter, will you allow considera–
tions other than quality to enter into the selection process. A second
sign of institutional loss of self-confidence appears when institutions ac–
quire a mission other than their official one, such as perhaps a moral one.
(Something like this is taking place in some churches. When clerics no
longer believe in God, they sometimes turn their churches into institu–
tions for social benefit.) Another sign of decadence occurs when the of–
ficial custodians of the institution are unable to repel assaults on it from
within and without. Some of these signs of decadence are visible in cer–
tain humanities departments today. For example, having lost their sense
of humanistic mission, various faculty members in the study of literature
have acquired a political mission which they regard as morally preemp–
tory, and even those who do not share this mission are rather feeble in
resisting the politicization of their disciplines.
For reasons that I do not fully understand, a fairly sizable number of
professors in literature departments have lost interest in the study of liter–
ature as it has been traditionally construed. Of two major lectures I
heard in the past year by famous professors of English, one was entirely
about Freud, the other about the power of the president of the United
States to initiate nuclear war. No one seems to find this odd. But it is
typical of the way in which a great deal of the contemporary study of
literature is not so much about literature as it is about other issues. My
guess is - and it is only a guess - that it may have been a mistake to
think there is an academic subject of literary
criticisl1I
in addition
to
such
old-fashioned subjects as literary history, philology, and stylistics. Another
