ANDREW DELBANCO
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American republic - and this is the generation that is now moving into
the intellectual and administrative leadership of our universities.
We took our B.A.'s roughly between 1968 and 1975. While we
were in college and graduate school, we witnessed the return of Richard
Nixon and his not-quite-complete disgrace; the failed interregnum of
Jimmy Carter; and finally the rise to power of the ultimate American
political caricature, Ronald Reagan.
In
the meantime, however, univer–
sities continued to pursue the liberal agenda that had been initiated in
the fifties and accelerated in the sixties, and the result was an enormous
change in the social mix of students who entered our best institutions.
Instead of being finishing schools for families which essentially owned
them, universities found themselves on the frontlines of the struggle for
what was to be called "assimilation" into the normative American iden–
tity. Yet in the wake of Vietnam and Reaganism, many young academics
no longer believed there
was
a legitimate American identity. For this
reason , the function of education has become fundamentally unclear. The
unqualified word "American" is in some quarters no longer an accept–
able term, as the culture at large has all but lost its legitimacy - even as
the market and consumer energies that make it an object of contempt to
many academics have invaded and been welcomed into the universities.
Amid this sort of moral confusion, the natural resort is to pure ideo–
logical clarities.
In
the 1930s, when real economic deprivation was
known by many students as a fact of life rather than as an academic
topic, Marxism was the ideology of choice.
It
had a genuinely consola–
tory and prophetic force. Its techniques of dialectical analysis seemed ca–
pable of disclosing the source of evil.
In
the 1960s, when students were
personally endangered by the draft, Marxism still provided a conceptual
framework for understanding the "imperialist" war that was the immedi–
ate reason for the danger. But in the 1980s, this singular, omni-explana–
tory theory of evil was lost; although American academics still employ its
vocabulary, and some of its key ideas remain salient, Marxism in its dog–
matic form is over.
In
this post-Cold War era, our students feel more dispirited than
menaced, and they are without a sense of common cause even with one
another. They find themselves having either to choose among or to resist
an array of competing identity politics. These politics - organized ac–
cording to categories of gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation
("class," which is still part of the litany of "race, class, gender," is really a
grace note) - are in many cases an honest effort to come to terms with
the most difficult questions of life-purpose. Although the grand ideologi–
cal battles - as the Fukuyama "end of history" theory insists - may be
over, the pain and desire and confused pride of young people just dis-
