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PARTISAN REVLEW
covering themselves are no less urgent than they ever have been. But the
perennial search for identity and commitment now leads in multiple di–
rections - and one result of this scattering has been the balkanization of
the university.
Students and faculty are being pulled into separate enclaves where
one may lay claim, with the approval of one's peers, to a respectable,
quasi-private history and practice a kind of corporate politics of resent–
ment. What my generation does not seem to have learned is that the
psychic satisfactions of anger are fleeting. Some even seem to believe that
a faculty must be a kind of representative assembly, mirroring the segre–
gated identity-groups of the students of the moment.
These impulses have been strengthened in proportion to the weaken–
ing of the common civic culture . It now seems clear that what died in
the sixties is what Quentin Anderson once called "the associated life" -
the notion that an individual life can be redeemed by positive commit–
ment to the public world. The new mood of "political correctness" is,
in other words, essentially separatist, not reformist; defensive , not mili–
tant. As Andrew Sullivan has recently put it in an eloquent essay arguing
(on grounds of Enlightenment universalism) for "full civil equality" for
homosexuals, the particular identity "politics . .. of gay radicalism" has
become "essentially theatrical" - a politics "in which dialogue with
one's opponent is an admission of defeat." Sullivan argues that the radi–
cal politics of "performance, not persuasion," which are also typical of
contemporary academia, can do little to open up human possibilities in
the long run for adult members of society. "Separatism," he says, "is ...
not a [real] option" for gay soldiers, business persons, construction
workers, indeed for most nonacademic professionals , whose ambitions
and desires for personal happiness remain unfulfilled because of their fear
of contempt and stigma. His point, although specifically about gay radi–
calism, may serve, I think, as a generalization about what passes for poli–
tics in academia - whether based on sexuality, ethnicity, or gender. This
kind of "politics" (one of the most discouraging sights on campus is the
clustering in dining halls and in the back rows of classrooms of black or
Asian or Hispanic students) is built on a "doctrine of separation and dif–
ference"; it promotes the satisfactions of feeling victimized; it tends to
avoid discussion of responsibility or civic obligation or human connect–
edness. Most important, it leads nowhere , except to bitterness and divi–
sion, in a society based on the idea of individual freedom within a polity
held together by public consent.
What is to be done? My own understanding of the situation has, I
suppose, a certain determinist flavor; academic ideas tend to be more re–
sponSIve than formative with respect to the larger culture, and for this
reason I feel a hint of optimism in the air. If our political leadership
