The Last Intellectuals American Culture In The Age Of Academe by Russell Jacoby

Author:Russell Jacoby [Jacoby, Russell]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

The New Left on

Campus II: The Long

March Through

the Institutions

I

WHEN THEY ENTERED the universities, last generation intellectuals sometimes reflected with nostalgia on the demise of bohemian and independent thinkers-their own past. Even as professors, this generation retained its commitment to a larger public. The New Left sprang into life around and against universities; its revulsion seemed visceral. Yet New Left intellectuals became professors who neither looked backward nor sideways; they kept their eyes on professional journals, monographs, and conferences. Perhaps because their lives had unfolded almost entirely on campuses they were unable or unwilling to challenge academic imperatives.

Younger professors, however, did not accept passively the academic disciplines they found. By establishing a credible body of radical, feminist, Marxist, or neo-Marxist scholarship, they assailed the venerable, sometimes almost official, interpretations dominant in their fields. The extent of this literature, the outpouring of left academics, is extraordinary, without precedent in American letters. In several areas the accomplishments of New Left intellectuals are irrevocable.

Yet it is also extraordinary for another reason; it is largely technical, unreadable and-except by specialists-unread. While New Left intellectuals obtain secure positions in central institutions, the deepest irony marks their achievement. Their scholarship looks more and more like the work it sought to subvert. A great surprise of the last twenty-five years is both the appearance of New Left professors and their virtual disappearance. In the end it was not the New Left intellectuals who invaded the universities but the reverse: the academic idiom, concepts, and concerns occupied, and finally preoccupied, young left intellectuals.

"Professors Woods, Perry, and Hocking are moderately talented and enterprising young men with whom philosophy is merely a means for getting on in the world," declared Professor E. B. Holt of several younger teachers in his department. "I do not respect them; I will not cooperate with them; and I am happy to be in a position now to wipe out the stigma of being even nominally one of their `colleagues.' " With this statement Holt in 1918 resigned from Harvard University and moved to an island off the Maine coast.'

The sworn enemies and bitter critics long produced by academic life, however, cannot simply be dismissed as failed or rejected scholars. Max Weber, very much a successful professor, once suggested that all prospective academics should answer the following question: "Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief?" He added, "I have found that only a few men could endure this situation."Z

The two most savage attacks on American university life are steeped in the muckraking of the early part of the century. Both Thorstein Veblen's The Higher Learning in America (1918) and Upton Sinclair's The Goose-Step (1923) denounced the heavy hand of business stifling universities. Chapters with titles such as "The University of Standard Oil" (University of Chicago) and "The University of the Steel Trust" (University of Pittsburgh) composed Sinclair's book. Yet a cataloging of corporate control

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