In a telling essay on the 20^th anniversary of the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, Rachel Donadio writes – alas, all too accurately – that now “it’s generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars.”

 

But some prominent professors – not exactly noted for their past defense of the core – seem to be having second thoughts about the matter.

 

Stanley Fish, for example, now argues that academics should go about the business of teaching, not proselytizing. He calls “the invasion of political agendas” into the curriculum in the ’60s and ’70s was “extremely dangerous,” because it meant classrooms could become venues for political demagoguery.

And Tony Judt, laments that many young professors are no longer interested nor prepared to teach outside their narrow specialties. He avers how higher educators now “lack cultural self-confidence … the ability to say, ‘This is a good book and should be taught, this isn’t and shouldn’t.’” Judt also criticizes the balkanization caused by interdisciplinary ethnic studies programs. Multiculturalism, he notes, “created lots and lots of microconstituencies, which universities didn’t have the courage to oppose … [Higher education is] much more like a supermarket — kids can take pretty much any courses they like: Jewish kids take Jewish studies, gay students gay studies, black students African-American studies. You no longer have a university, but a series of identity constituencies all studying themselves.”

Ah, but, chers professeurs, where were you while the wars were being fought? Where were you before the academy succeeded in slamming the door shut on the American mind?