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Wednesday, November 24, 2004
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YET ANOTHER RESPONSE TO UD'S POST ON
LIBERAL DOMINANCE OF THE UNIVERSITY. Its author is Ryan Cordell, a student of UD's last year, and now a graduate student in English at the University of Virginia: "Dear UD -- I would like to respond to, well, to your respondents' comments about the liberal bias in the academic community. Granted, I am only embarking on my own graduate education experience, but my career thus far has been markedly different from Professor Blogger's, and my classrooms have not exactly reflected those depicted by Mr. Gress. For purposes of full disclosure, I must admit that I do not consider myself a conservative; however, I would also reject the labels Marxist, Environmentalist, Colonialist, Anti-Colonialist, among myriad others. It is not that I do not care about, say, the environment, only that this topic registers as an extraordinarily minor blip on my proverbial radar. Other schools 'o' thought, such as Marxism, are so far removed from my experience they barely register at all. My primary concern, day to day, is reading literature. What may surprise some of your readers, is this seems to be the primary concern of the majority of people I have encountered here, both graduate students and professors. Of the four classes I attend this semester (three as a student, one as a grader for an undergraduate course), only one has any notion of a political project, and that one I took with full knowledge of these implications; I could easily have avoided it, and halfway through the semester began wishing I had. However, my three other classes are decidedly traditional in their approach to literature; we are encouraged to read the text and analyze its content in a nearly formalist way, paying some attention to its place in history and the general sweep of American or British Literature, and most attention to the words on the page. What is not given preeminence is the forceable yoking of ideology -- Marxism, Feminism, Queer Theory --to the texts. The professor I am grading for, teaching British and American Romanticism, is a public academic, and publishes about a return to traditional modes of literary education. He even dares to assert that good writing might mean something, and rejects much Critical Theory outright as a misguided path for literary scholarship. Another professor, teaching American Fiction, urges us in nearly every class to avoid thrusting modern political viewpoints onto, say, Moby-Dick. Did one of the students in my class want to discuss the Environmental consequences of that work? Yes. Did this discussion shape the classes' analysis of the work overall? Absolutely not -- in fact, few other students seemed terribly interested in it, and it passed by without damage to Melville or any of us. If I were forced to characterize the voting habits of these two professors, I would probably imagine they vote Democratic. They have hinted at such affiliation, but these were at best hints, and neither seems at all inclined to enforce such a viewpoint on his students. In fact, in the undergraduate class, that professor engaged the students just before the election with the question -- "Who would Emerson vote for?" While this seems like a typically sneaky professorial trick, designed to allow him or her to proffer a liberal answer to the question, no such moment occurred. His opinion was never ntroduced, and the classroom (at least, those in the classroom who were willing to share) seemed quite divided in its response. Those people who argued for President Bush, and there is plenty in Emerson to support such an argument, were treated with respect equal to liberal respondents. The only critic this professor has recommended this entire semester is one, he admitted privately to me, he does not entirely agree with, Alan Bloom. He recommended Bloom because, in terms of educational theory -- the idea of a return to more a more traditional university experience -- he believes Bloom has much good to say. He also hopes a few students will read Bloom and be forced to think about their political and academic stances by engaging with that conservative voice. This is certainly not the willful dismissal of alternative viewpoints that your respondents describe. What is important is that these professors are not hiding in the department, which they perhaps did during the heyday of ideologues described by Professor Blogger, but publicly standing against such a system. Are there such professors in the department? Of course; next semester one is offering (ironically, of course) a seminar entitled "Anti-American Studies," which by the course description will justify every broad liberal stereotype one could assign to the academy. However, what is notable to me is that for every graduate student I spoke to who registered for said course with a broad grin on his or her face was another, such as myself, who was repulsed by the idea of such a course. And this is the real marker of change, the graduate student community. Of the close friends I have made thus far, and perhaps it is my own nature leading me to these particular people, none would classify his or herself as a Marxist, or any other "ist." In fact, one of my most interesting colleagues (interesting as in "stimulating to speak to," not as in "strange" or "exotic") is an avowed, albeit subtle conservative politically and a formalist in literary approach. I am not trotting him out to point and say, "Look! a conservative!," but because he is quite comfortable in the department. His papers have been well received (he is further along in the process than I), he has worked with several prominent professors on projects, and, though many people in the department certainly disagree with his politics, they have not encouraged him to seek education elsewhere. My department also assigns first year graduate students, such as myself, a mentor who has been with the program a few years. My mentor, a fifth year student in the midst of his dissertation, is simultaneously an English Ph.D. student and an evangelical Christian. What's more, he teaches Sunday school (horror of horrors, eh?) at his church, and this is well known within the department. His dissertation is an un-ironic discussion of faith and Christianity in Swift and Defoe, and his readers and advisors are excited about his job prospects. The market, perhaps because it was so swelled with Marxist readings and the like, is shifting to allow academics to advance without ascribing to one ultra-left ideological stance. What is important to note here, however, is that my advisor has not been shunned by the department for his refusal to abandon Christianity, or embrace Deconstruction, nor does he "secretly sneak off to church." In fact, he invited me to come with him, which I have several times, and I also have made no attempt to hide such attendance, and have not been mocked or avoided for such actions. I am not trying to claim some wholly balanced political field in the academy, and certainly not in English departments. There are certainly professors and graduate students still primarily concerned with decrying America, reading social policy into every novel or poem (if and when they actually read novels or poems, and not political tracts), and promoting politics to students. However, these people seem fairly marginalized, and the majority of students and professors I have encountered, beyond the few examples offered in this screed, are concerned primarily with their narrow field of study, and only passingly interested in politics and its bedfellows. Even the politics of the field, the dominance of Critical Theory, seem to be shifting. As my advisor said to me just last week, "Critical theory is nowhere near as important today as it was ten, or even five, years ago." This statement was followed with, "but you still need to know it," but the fact that such an admission was made, in this case by a man fairly invested in the products of that system, confirmed my opinion that the era Professor Blogger describes is most assuredly waning. Perhaps in four years my opinion will have changed, but my experience thus far has been one of decided openness to both liberal and conservative viewpoints, even when the professors in question voted for John Kerry or even, gasp, Howard Dean." |