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PARTISAN REVIEW
"traditionalists" are usually men and usually in their fifties. They seem dis–
proportionately ethnic, as if still marked by the streets of Brooklyn .
Hard-nosed realism and cynicism color their outlook on the world, de–
spite their success and academic acheivement. They tend to share an "old
left" disposition; they long ago gave up their radical politics, but they
retain a preference for strong organization, discipline, and the standards
they believe they have mastered. Otherwise suspicious of idealism, they do
believe passionately in merit, a principle, they feel, only recently acheived,
but now increasingly threatened . Convinced that they may be the one
and only generational cohort to benefit from a relatively open system,
they approach university debates in a tone verging from hysteria to resig–
nation. They find the class of professional grievance managers - those
who speak for the excluded - loathsome, for, from their point of view,
they are standing in the way of all those aspiring minority children who
ought to be able to test themselves out in the marketplace of ideas
without hand-holding.
New-class college presidents find such people difficult to work with,
not only because of their intellectual intensity, but also because they are
so focused on meritocratic principles.
If
college presidents were chosen
for the depth and reputation of their scholarship, they might not mind
an emphasis on merit, but the criteria that go into their selection are far
murkier than this. Indeed fundraising often involves having the right
connections and traveling in the right circles, criteria that emphasize
conditions of birth rather than achievement. Nearly all college presidents
these days govern a faculty t,lr more accomplished than themselves with
respect
to
the business of the university, not a situation conducive to an
emphasis on the rewards of merit.
But merit is also suspect among those who advocate the incorpora–
tion of a race-class-gender perspective. From their perspective, advance–
ment within the university involves the representation of groups, not as
the accomplishment of individuals . Merit, like so many other concepts
brought under the scrutiny of a postmodern consciousness, is understood
to be an artificial construct imposed by those who have power upon
those who lack it. A liberal college president of impeccable WASP
background and a black militant advocating Afrocentrism have this much
in common: both, having gotten to where they are in
some
part due to
circumstances of their birth, think that merit is not necessarily the most
important criterion in making academic judgements. They are more
likely to understand each other than either can understand the insistence
of the traditionalists on standards and the importance of objectivity.
For all these reasons - the institutional conservatism of political radi–
cals, the triumph of therapy over intellectuality, and the impact of differ–
ent historical experiences on different academic cohorts - university ad-
