ANDREW DELBANCO
537
breakup of common purpose had its origins, as Trilling sensed, in the
early 1960s - before the outbursts of visible anger that marked the end of
that decade. This was the moment at which the consensus that had gov–
erned American education for roughly three decades began to disinte–
grate. In the 1930s, the war years, and then, with augmented urgency,
during the Cold War, American colleges and universities had been
broadly conceived (by those within them, and by those who supported
them from without) as instruments of education toward citizenship in a
culture based on Enlightenment principles. Columbia's core curriculum,
and later, Harvard's General Education program, were devised, and sub–
sequently modified, as self-conscious responses to the disasters that had
ravaged Europe and that were threatening to do so again. Under the GI
Bill, American colleges were opened to a new kind of student whose in–
tellectual appetite had been quickened by service in a war in which ulti–
mate moral issues had seemed at stake.
The idea of liberal education was understood in these years - cer–
tainly in the mind of a teacher like Trilling - as a kind of inoculation
against barbarism. And to this end, the Anglo-American college plan
(expensive
to
conduct, fundamentally elitist, and basically a product of
the British imperial mentality) was to educate the ruling class of the
world's ruling nation in such a way that would nurture its ambition,
self-discipline, and a peculiar strain of democratic
noblesse oblige.
Critics of
"canonical" undergraduate education who situate it historically in this
way seem to me (even if I do not share their hostility toward it) to be
perfectly right.
Around 1960, the consensus that this sort of education was a good
and sufficient thing began to fall apart. At the time that Trilling was
shocked by his colleagues' indifference to Daniel Bell's report, there was
an incipient animosity stirring toward all forms of "retrograde and de–
priving authority" in American life. Why this happened is a complicated
historical question that I can't broach here, but I think it can be fairly
characterized in its early stages as a good-humored antagonism - a kind
of mild adolescent rebellion on a national scale. It had a tone of cajol–
ing irony that had begun
to
take form already in the fifties - in, for in–
stance, Norman Mailer's celebration of the hipster as "The White
Negro"; or, a little later, in Gore Vidal's affection for President Kennedy
as a man "watching with amusement his own performance ... an ironist
in a profession where the prize usually goes to the apparent cornball."
These writers set the tone for the new phase of our culture that
would come to be known simply as "The Sixties." As usual, the academy
was a little slow in picking up the new tune. It begins to be heard, I
think, with the rise of anthropology, which attained new prestige
