ALAN WOLFE
491
Composition at the University of Texas into a discussion of racial dis–
crimination, and a professor at the University of New Hampshire really
was brought up on charges of sexual harassment for a comment made in
the classroom. But that is only part of its weakness. The major paradox in
the cultural studies' defense against the critiques of political correctness is
this: in embracing popular culture so enthusiastically, how can cultural
studies defend an institution such as the university which exists, at least in
theory, to promote the life of the mind?
What might seem like a contradiction resolves itself when one ex–
amines the ways in which cultural studies makes its defense. Berube, who
argues that the left is ill-advised to defend an intelligent high culture
against a popular low culture, turns around and accuses the right of anti–
intellectualism because it is scornful of cutting-edge literary theory. Yet it
is surely an odd sensibility that elevates academic writing as better em–
bodying the life of the mind than, for example, the poetry of Eliot or
Pound. Paul Lauter writes that "it is because I have a certain faith in the
value of intellectual work and in the academy that I have helped begin an
organization called - perversely it seems to some - the Union of Demo–
cratic Intellectuals." But, it turns out, that even this "certain" faith is
compromised; for him, intellectual work "does not cease with the final
footnote . It takes us into communities, into politics; into organizing, in
short." Through arguments like these, what might have been a contra–
diction becomes no contradiction at all; cultural studies' defense of higher
learning is not a defense of intelligence, but of academic scholasticism on
the one hand and political organizing on the other. It is precisely because
such unintelligent things go on in universities that a movement such as
cultural studies, which prizes the low and dumb, can support them so
enthusiastically.
One of the most controversial ideas offered by an earlier generation
of intellectuals was the notion that Western societies had reached "an end
of ideology." For a 1960s radical like myself, the idea was ludicrous. Look
around, we said to each other in 1968, ideology is everywhere. The fail–
ure of our elders to notice was proof positive that they had resigned
themselves to neoconservatism. To this day, I remain uncertain whether
"the end of ideology" is or is not a reality, let alone a good thing. Advo–
cates of cultural studies do not share my ambivalence; for them, the end
of ideology has taken place and we ought to welcome its arrival. "The
mantle of opposition no longer rests upon the shoulders of an autono–
mous avant-garde," Andrew Ross writes in language resonant of the
1950s. "Neither the elite metropolitan intellectuals who formed the tra–
ditional corpus of public tastemakers or opinionmakers; nor the romantic
neo-bohemians who shaped the heroic Nietzschean image of the unat-
