Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration 1969-1984, and: The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, Liberation, and: The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses (review)

Reviews 201 this paradox is one in which criticism rises in curricular esteem (and becomes more democratic) while the "literary culture of the wider community" (35) outside the university faUs apart. Pre-professional literary study was "unredeemed drudgery carried on in the name of archaic social ideals," Graff writes, yet because of its "very class restrictions" it "had the advantage of coherence" (50). Graffs arche and telos are defined by the term "coherence." At times it signifies "unity" or "self-consciousness." In this sense theory can render the curriculum coherent by getting us to talk openly among ourselves. At other times, however, coherence means something like "maintaining contact with the wider community, with 'outsiders .' " In this sense (which is also a second meaning of "insititutional") theory seems less admirable, for it leaves us talking only among ourselves. The endpoint of this second narrative sets the more strenuous task of achieving new or renewed contact with the outside. Though a less exclusively discursive understanding of institutions would have urged Graff toward greater appreciation of how "outside" and "inside " are already intermingled, and thus toward more precision in defining what he desires, a little imprecision does not disqualify the enterprise. Graff himself seems undecided whether it can succeed, whether coherence in this stronger sense is attainable or not. He speaks, for example, of "the impossibiUty of superimposing unity or coherence on an inherently refractory and ideologically conflict-filled professional and cultural setting" (173). On the other hand, he also suggests that his professional utopia became historical reality at least once, in the pragmatist-led philosophy department at Harvard: "They needed a conception ofcoherence not based on an intellectual and cultural common ground, a conception that did not presuppose a unified humanistic culture, which no longer existed, but based itself on the very conflicts that now existed inside and outside the university over the place of culture in America" 013). This description of the motto "coherence without consensus" raises another problem. It tries (Uke Weber's "ambivalence") to draw social strength from the cultivation of incertitudes that never quite dare to be the poUtical issues of American society itself, but withdraw into theoretical self-reflection. Even Harvard's pragmatism, in this view, exploited only "the contradictions in /7s sense ofits relations to American society" (113). Leave out the italicized words and the project looks different. That both of Graffs narratives lead into practical projects and "matters of institutional organization" (242-43) is characteristic of the best in our current "institutional" mood. The effort (which Weber shares) to make room for such matters by "distinguishing between professionalism as such and the specific forms professionalism has taken under the pecuUar circumstances of the new university" (13) is among the most promising routes to a renegotiation between criticism and its "outsiders." BRUCE ROBBINS Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration 1969-1984 by Ira Shor. Foreword by Paulo Freiré. Critical Social Thought Series. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986. pp. 238. $9.95 (paper); $29.95 (cloth). The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, Liberation by Paulo Freiré. Trans. Donaldo Macedo. Introduction by Henry A. Giroux. S. Hadley, Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey, 1985. pp. 209. $9.95 (paper); $24.95 (cloth). The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses edited by BerteU Oilman and Edward Vernoff. Volume 2. New York: Praeger, 1984. pp. 182. $10.95 (paper); $23 (cloth). For the past twenty years, leftwing students and faculty inspired by the political upheaval of the late 1960s have been writing intensively about the nature of the educational system in late capitalist society. Now that many veterans of the radical movement of those years 202 the minnesota review have completed graduate school and commenced academic careers, increasing attention is also being directed to the achievements and dilemmas of Marxist scholars working in the university environment. By 1987, there exists a rather large body of literature on these subjects. Recurrent topics include the elaboration of techniques of radical pedagogy, usuaUy inspired by the writings of Brazilian educator Paulo Freiré; calls to advance Marxist theory, especially regarding the complexities of class, gender and race; and arguments for a more subtle dissection of the dynamics of domination and resistance that...