ANDREW DELBANCO
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continues to become less repugnant to academic intellectuals (respectful
of gays, responsible toward and inclusive of women, and less free to exert
power on the international scale), the huddling mood of the university,
under a Democratic president, a Vietnam dissenter born after World War
II, is likely to be at least somewhat dispelled. In some respects, the
fighter for "political correctness" has already begun to resemble a
shadowboxer. There are also signs, especially among undergraduates, of
the natural recoil of the young from any prevailing orthodoxy - which
is what "political correctness" has inevitably become. At the same time,
the equally natural conservatism of parents (combined with the ex–
ploding cost of education) is beginning to exert a healthy accountability
for preparing students to compete in a culture that still rewards people
more for what they can do than for who they are. Liberal education
remains the best way I know of pushing the society further toward
achieving this latter ideal.
As for our day-to-day obligations, I would say a couple of simple
things. Within our departments, we have to match our own willingness
to vote for tenure candidates whose work may be at odds with our
own, with an insistence that this attitude be mutual - that intelligence
be recognized as implying some degree of self-doubt and therefore open–
ness to other points of view. I expect brashness and confidence as natural
attributes of brilliance in prospective colleagues, but I also look for the
capacity to revise positions,
to
grow - and, especially, to treat intellec–
tual adversaries with respect.
But the key battleground is, of course, the classroom. There I find
myself teaching more and more texts in the American pragmatist tradi–
tion - Jonathan Edwards, Emerson, William James, Richard Rorty. The
common value of these figures is that they all share the sense of revulsion
toward settled "truths" that is the animating emotion of current intel–
lectual life; they see history (as much as Foucault and Gramsci) as a con–
test among metaphors; some of them have even given up, as most of us
have, on the idea of transcendence. But, at the same time, they insist on
a principle that seems to be forgotten by many in the academy: if one
throws out the old metaphors (for example, the individual, God, truth,
family), one incurs an obligation to propose new ones and to test their
consequences pragmatically. One has, in other words, a responsibility to
face the human consequences of overturning the pieties by which preced–
ing generations lived, however "constructed" and oppressive they may
seem to us now.
In this pragmatist spirit, I find myself these days deliberately using cer–
tain discredited words in class like "republic" and the Trillingesque "we"
- if only to provoke students into thinking about what it means that
these words now sound odd, that there seems too little common ground
