By Robert Watson
Chris Johnson’s exploitation of the firemen killed at the
World Trade Center, as a weapon with which to club dissent of any
kind, is all the more contemptible for being so predictable
(“Leftist
influence deteriorates education,” Viewpoint, Nov.
16).
The firemen were doing their job, which is one I have always
admired. My daughter proudly wore her little firefighter hat long
before Sept. 11 made it fashionable.
In higher education we have a different job, which is the
challenging of assumptions. Let me reiterate my primary point,
which Johnson somehow managed to miss: if you decide to
characterize as radical-leftist the determination to ask hard
questions about the things a society has been most comfortable
assuming, then, yes, a large proportion of those who have devoted
their lives to intellectual inquiry will appear to you to be
radical-leftist.
If I devote my life to literature, with its remarkable ability
to transport readers into the experience of people whom they would
otherwise have disdained, whose differing world-views they would
never have understood, then I’m likely to be the kind of
person who tries to provide an alternative voice to what the most
privileged people and most powerful institutions like to tell
us.
I can assure Johnson that the English department does indeed
teach the works of great conservatives such as Edmund Burke. The
notion that our bias is exposed because we neglect to teach the
“works” of that illustrious “author”
Clarence Thomas ““ a man notorious for his sullen silence in a
career that is non-literary anyway ““ is ludicrous.
Intellectuals tend to oppose. Totalitarian Communist regimes
resented their scholarly dissenters, whom they decried as
right-wing subversives, at least as much as this capitalist society
resents its perceived leftists. Communist and Nazi governments
alike hated and even systematically exterminated professors for
failing to cheerlead for the party’s policies and leaders.
Fortunately, American universities have thrived, like the society
as a whole, because we have a system for resisting the natural
tendency of the authorities to want to dictate beliefs.
Just as you don’t need the First Amendment to protect the
right to praise mom and apple pie, you don’t need
universities to assure Americans that their nation is always and
entirely virtuous, and that the laws are fair and fairly applied
““ the government will do that. Or that big corporations are
kind-hearted and good for everyone ““ they hire publicists,
they own the media outlets, and they buy the legislators.
Incidentally, Johnson’s “independent”
think-tanks for “true intellectuals” (American
Enterprise Institution, the Ashbrook Center, the Heritage
Foundation) impose a much stricter ideological litmus test than any
major university department would dream of.
Though he has to admit he can’t find it in my article,
Johnson is pretty sure I lack “an appreciation and patriotism
for this nation” ““ a nation for which my father’s
ancestors fought for, in both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. My
father was no less a patriot in fighting a wave of right-wing
hysteria fifty years ago.
I believe it is patriotic, on however small a scale, for me to
spend another Saturday afternoon at this keyboard debating the
ideals of freedom; and I respect the same devotion in Johnson.
But the scholarly community demands evidence and logical
deduction; here, a waved flag is no substitute for a reasoned
argument. Johnson claims that my writing is “Characteristic
of the new left’s frequent neologisms,” though he fails
to identify a single one. The closest I can find is
“jingoism,” which has been widely used since the 1870s.
And how he deduces, from my suggestion that intellectual dissent
has social value, that I must therefore believe that firefighting
(or anything else) does not, is baffling.
He also claims that, since we wicked leftists seized control of
UCLA and other campuses in the 1960s, we “shun the flying of
the American flag on campus, and the playing of the national anthem
prior to university sporting events.” We must be very
careless traitors, though, since for decades I’ve seen the
American flag flying on campus every day, and heard the national
anthem before every game.
To support his brief for the “dispassionate pursuit of
knowledge,” he belittles me for failing to have died in the
WTC collapse. To support his endorsement of a “proving ground
of ideals, utilizing diverse philosophies,” he offers an
unsupported blanket condemnation of any “multiculturalist
curriculum.” He even casts me ““ a lifelong devoted
teacher of Shakespeare ““ as part of the sinister conspiracy
to destroy Western-cultural things like “year-long courses on
Shakespeare.”
And if Johnson is so sure that, until the leftists ruined
education around 1969, everyone at Yale would have had to master
Latin and Greek, I suggest he try a classics pop quiz on President
George W. Bush ““ or at least try looking more carefully at
the real history of higher education.