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PARTISAN REVIEW
To some degree, the growth of the social sciences within the uni–
versity has raised the question of politicized scholarship in earlier periods.
For while maintaining the authority of the sciences, it was evident in
many areas that the inquiry was determined by political and social atti–
tudes. Yet the characteristic university resolution was to aim to ensure
that the social scientific results would meet the standards of an apolitical
sCIence.
In the present situation, a politicized faculty abdicates the role, or at
least reneges on some of the historical terms of the understanding of the
university as the seat within the culture of its highest intellectual author–
ity. This change of role is most explicit in those literary and philosophi–
cal approaches that currently have academic popularity, which combine
extreme relativism on matters of truth or knowledge in any area with a
high degree of commitment to political purposes . Nietzschean-Marxism,
for example, is one of a number of ways in which the claim that any
intellectual authority is arbitrary is combined with political expression in
education.
This transformation of the university is not complete. As with any
institutional change, relics and survivals of the older way coexist along–
side the new trends and dominant style. Accordingly, the implications of
the politicized university for the educational system, for the other cul–
tural institutions, and for the society are not fully apparent. Yet it seems
evident that such an historical change in one of the most conserv:ng in–
stitutions of Western culture does have important social consequences.
Multiculturalism has not, of course, been the only movement which
has contributed
to
the politicization of the university. Many of the mo–
tivations for the movement, and much of its aspiration, are independent
of the tendencies to politicization. Yet in the current condition of the
universities, it is a powerful instrument, precisely because of its intrinsic
and irresistible attractiveness, in the advance of the politicized university.
FRED SIEGEL
Anti- rationalism
Who
now reads R. D. Laing? Who for that matter remembers that ear–
lier movement for diversity, anti-psychiatry?
In
the name of intellectual
equality for the mad, Laing and other anti-psychiatrists convinced them–
selves and others that schizophrenia was a social and not a medical disor-
