In my post last night about a new clergy brigade enlisting to fight alongside the Democrats I commented — rather patronizingly and, I’m sure, offensively to some — that their sputtering complaint that the old meanie conservatives are “exclusive” and “judgmental” sounds like “the sort of things you’d hear a scolding mom say as she observed the blue collar play habits of some poor toddler in a rich kid’s sandbox.”
Now I learn through an excellent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that if I have become a curmudgeonly grumpy old man, at least I am not alone. Paul M. Cohen, a historian at Lawrence University, argues both amusingly and persuasively that the culture wars can best be understood, at least in many respects, as “less over class and generation … than over gender. Or, to be more precise, over masculinity.” Since access to his article may require a subscription, I will quote liberally from it. (Who says I do nothing liberally?)
Cohen begins by quoting from a conversation he had with a curmudgeonly friend and colleague whom he calls “Blume.”
“This faculty used to have some balls [Blume said]! Now we allow faculty business to be managed by the administration and its anointed interest groups.”
“What’s new about that?” I countered. “The administration has always tried to manage us — and usually succeeded. The problem is that we don’t talk to each other the way we used to. Hell, you and I never agreed about much, but we’ve always gotten along, haven’t we?”
“I suppose,” he allowed, but then his expression hardened. “No. We can’t now. Not if you’re going to support those people. In a war you have to take sides.”
“So this is Vietnam?”
“No, but it is a fight. The administration no longer shares our values.”
“Which values, exactly?”
“Well, for one thing,” Blume’s voice now dripped with disdain. “In my day, we didn’t have mentors. And we didn’t do workshops.”
Cohen continued:
The culture wars on my campus, a liberal-arts college in the Midwest, had apparently been fading since the mid-1990s. As its membership (and collective hairline) began to recede over the past decade, the Old Guard had lost a series of battles over, among other archetypal flashpoints, extending the canon in our core curriculum beyond the white, the Western, and the male; establishing interdisciplinary majors in environmental and gender studies; and instituting “diversity” and “multicultural” requirements for graduation. But the Old Guard did not fade quietly…. My conversation with Blume merely confirmed that rumors of the Old Guard’s demise had indeed been exaggerated.
Suddenly Cohen had a flash of insight.
Faculty “mentoring” and especially “workshops” are relatively new to campus culture and seem favored primarily by the gender-studies and multicultural types. It is significant that both of those innovations place a premium on communal cooperation as opposed to individual competition — indeed, on conventionally feminine as opposed to masculine virtues. As I revisited the Old Guard’s narrative in these terms, everything suddenly seemed to fall into place.
Workshops, in the Old Guard’s narrative, appear to represent all that is intellectually flaccid, so to speak, in the academy. “Supportive” rather than combative, workshops bespeak a mutual dependency as opposed to the putative intellectual autonomy championed by the likes of Blume. The proponents of workshops seek to relax standards as opposed to keeping them (it?) up; they flout the weighty, timeless truths discharged by the Western Canon through its “seminal” works in favor of the trendy, the lightweight, and the postmodern. They are inclined toward process as opposed to content, “skills” as opposed to knowledge. Indeed, they view knowledge as something created through egalitarian collaboration between professor and student rather than something imparted by the knowledgeable to the uninformed. They embrace groupthink and cooperation with authority (the administration) as opposed to manly opposition to the powers that be. They are, in a word, soft as opposed to hard. In fact, they tend to emerge from what many in the academy hold to be “soft” disciplines — psychology, sociology, anthropology, the foreign languages — as opposed to the “hard” sciences and the more rigorous (pre-postmodern) humanities and social sciences.
Cohen hastens to add that the Old Guard, or at least his friend, are not anti-female; they would no even want to replace all women faculty with men. What they are is anti-feminine. He describes the world as they see it:
In one corner reside the standard-bearers of academic machismo: the hard-nosed male professors of math and physics, economics and politics, as well as those stout-hearted men in English, history, and philosophy who have fought the good fight. By their side stand several equally stalwart women — the tough-minded, the blunt-spoken, the widely published; in short, the women “with balls.” In the other corner reside “those people”: the politically outspoken women — feminists, multiculturalists, and the like — in French and Spanish, psychology and anthropology, environmental and gender studies, who have dragged the campus into its current morass of soft, mushy interdisciplinarity (read “undisciplinarity”) and — workshops. And by their side stand (however limply) those emasculated men who occupy the bottom rung on [his friend’s] ladder of academic virility.
In case you’re interested, as I was, Cohen describes himself as sort of a fellow traveler of the feminine, one of the “bottom rungers” in effect, sympathetic to its goals yet critical of what even he sees as some of its excesses.
I remain somewhat skeptical, for example, about whether we really mean what we say about diversity and multiculturalism. Do we truly embrace a diversity of class (or student work habits) on our elite campus? Would we sanction a multiculturalism that secured equal time for religious fundamentalism? Like many of my elders, I found myself put off by the more sanctimonious advocates of our new graduation requirements….
It’s an excellent article. Read the whole thing if you can.
I don’t know if I agree with the hypothesis about gender (first and foremost because I refuse to discuss ‘gender’).
What I do know is that in the liberal arts courses I’ve taken, the emphasis has been more on how influential people and theories have shaped the current field than about anything else. From my perspective, I could honestly care less about what other people in any particular discipline do, I’m interested in what’s right. Moreover, I’m interested in theories that can be proven (and disproven) and are useful tools of prediction, otherwise it’s just a fancier way of describing what we already know.
Of course, I specialize in “hard” science and I live in the “real” world, so I have a more critical eye towards these things than people who never venture outside of their cloisters. I don’t think that this critical eye is somehow a masculine or a feminine trait, it’s just a trait of people who choose to exercise their brains. And, quite frankly I think the majority of people, male and female, aren’t interested in doing so.
Fortunately, we are getting to the point where real science is moving into areas traditionally associated with other “liberal arts” disciplines. I am hoping that in 50 years, these fields will cease to exist in their current forms. Whether that means they are made entirely obsolete like other pseudosciences or make an effort keep themselves relevant by adopting thoroughly scientific attitudes depends on the measure of the people in the field.