536
PARTISAN REVLEW
This is, I believe, a wrong way to think. In fact, bad effects in many
humanities departments often flow from good causes: the desire to reex–
amine prescribed curricula, to think historically about texts, and to work
toward human diversity in the composition of student bodies and facul–
ties. I have found myself, therefore, trying to take a retrospective view of
the problem in an effort to explain things to myself - an effort in which
I was recently encouraged by reading a posthumously published essay of
Lionel Trilling's which he had delivered as a lecture in 1974, the year
before he died.
Trilling's piece bears a somewhat portentous title, "The Uncertain
Future of the Humanistic Educational Ideal," and it has the forgivable
nostalgia of the reminiscing veteran. But it is fundamentally modest and
almost bewildered in making its report of what turned out to be the
onset of one of the worst features of our current mess: a "growing indif–
ference to the ideals of general education." As early as 1964, when
Daniel Bell presented a report on the core curriculum to the Columbia
College faculty, Trilling noticed in his colleagues a slackening of what
had, for more than three decades, been their "zeal" for thinking collec–
tively about the effects of a liberal education upon the "shape and dis–
position" of the minds of their students. He proposed no historical ex–
planation for this change, but spoke only, with a poignant sense of
helplessness, of "some persuasion of the Zeitgeist" that was sweeping
away the old consensus of what education had been all about.
This was, I think, the moment in which the seeds of the "PC"
movement of thirty years later were sown. Trilling noticed in his
younger colleagues an eagerness for "pressing upon [their students
1
the
solid substance and the multitudinous precisions of [their] ... particular
discipline," as opposed to a disinterested commitment to cultivate their
students' gifts for thinking critically about
all
ideas, including those held
dear by the teacher. When I read Trilling's essay, it was with something
like a shock of recognition, since in the nearly ten years I have taught at
Columbia, the conspicuous professionalism of literary study has enor–
mously increased (the preposterous self-importance that now infects aca–
demic criticism, along with its panoply of conventions and journals, is
best documented in the novels of David Lodge), while I can recall ex–
actly two sparsely attended department meetings in which the agenda in–
cluded discussion of the undergraduate curriculum. This does not mean
that my colleagues do not care about college students; in fact, many of
them are passionately committed teachers, and care about them more
than ever. What it does mean is that we no longer have a commonly
acknowledged pedagogic purpose to discuss.
It may be helpful
to
look for a moment at how this happened. The
