PETER SHAW
Pseudo-reform in the Academy
Most academics and intellectuals were taken by surprise in the 1970s
when politicization of the academy got underway. Assault on the
Western classics, the championing of multiculturalism, and political in–
doctrination in the classroom went largely unchallenged for several years.
It was not until the mid-1980s that philosophical refutations of decon–
struction began to appear, and not until the nineties that the Western
canon of great books began to be defended. Once undertaken, though,
the intellectual counterattack had its impact. It exposed the politically
radical basis of the various assaults, which the press then reported on in a
critical manner.
As a result of the publicity, influential academic politicizers, who had
been able to work in relative obscurity, were forced to answer to a
wider public. This put them in an embarrassing position whether they
chose to defend or to deny that they politicized scholarship and
teaching. Accordingly, some of them began to hedge their positions. At
the very least they stopped denouncing Western "logocentrism" (logical
thinking) as a bourgeois plot to enslave the working class. As for the
great works of the West, which for years had been attacked as engines of
the same bourgeois plot, they sometimes were acknowledged to have a
defensible
raison d'etre .
The traditionalist counterattack led to other concessions as well.
Some disavowed political correctness - intellectual intimidation and the
willing or unwilling capitulations it brings about. As of 1995 it was fair
to say that even though the battle between the assaulters of tradition and
its defenders continued to rage, the assaulters were in retreat. '
On the other hand, this retreat did not stop the long march of anti–
traditional attitudes throughout academe. The dominance of poststruc–
turalists, radical feminists, and other beneficiaries of the assault on tradi–
tional understandings continued to grow. Professional organizations,
deans, and college presidents endorsed ever-new politicizations of schol–
arship. To raise money, it was sufficient to profess a heightened social
consciousness or status as a champion of one or another self-proclaimed
victim group . Deans and presidents sponsored institutes calculated to
overthrow traditional scholarship. Administrators installed new courses,
special academic divisions, and even departments calculated to advance a
radical agenda.
