Strange Species: The Boomer University Intellectual

"As historians, we do take opposing positions, but we seem to be united on one thing: a reluctance to debate" controversial topics in American history. So said Richard White, president of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), recently. Worried about scholarly timidity and "a prickly overprofessionalization," White notices there has been "a culture of caution—that has begun to influence all of us. We have become each other's hostages" in a university system that exists to minimize controversy, and where a new genteel ethic rewards cautious historical interpretations and scholarly demeanor. "Politics" has been shorn from informed historical critique, and academics hide behind the authority of credentials. On the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the OAH, White believes, "In a profession where we should wear our wounds proudly and confront our critics gladly, we prefer to be safe and guarded and fear that we have enemies who can cost us our reputations. . . . We should celebrate scholars who draw strong reactions," he worries. "Instead, we shy away from them." Certainly, this development is not new regarding the place of intellectuals within both the American university system and society at large. The critical writings and political stances of academics have consistently elicited internal and external pressures since the post–Civil War emergence of the modern university, especially during times of conservatism, social upheaval, war, or anti-intellectualism. Writing more than forty years ago, Laurence Veysey explained how university administrators worked to maintain the integrity of their institutions, where dignity "was a jealous master. It required, first of all, a certain solemnity of countenance; it frowned upon the humor born of irreverence. . . . Still more importantly," noted Veysey, "dignity urged that the institution, no matter how torn with dissent, appear united and harmonious to all who look upon it from the outside. . . . If unfavorable publicity prevented such a posture, then dignity insisted that the leadership take visibly stern measures against the threat to its authority." Much like the recent past, the early modern university "had little room for troublemakers in its midst." Provocative historical writing today, notes one scholar of the profession, usually leads to undue scrutiny by special interest groups, dismissal from the university, or both. Whether this is a problem of "quality" of product in public intellectual work or not, historical criticism can become relevant only when present questions of political concern lends understanding to the past.¹

Eric Lott's The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual examines the generational gap in the American academy during the last fifteen years with fighting words and bold claims, revealing an impaired radicalism on the academic Left he calls "boomeritis." Lott charges university-affiliated and independent boomer scholars with wimpy reformist thinking in his construction of recent intellectual history, and he targets scholars such as Richard Rorty, Todd Gitlin, Paul Berman, Michael Lind, Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Crouch, Greil Marcus, Sean Wilentz, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., among others. Boomer intellectuals write and speak "in the service of a new ideal of social democratic reform" and "lament the rise of 'divisive' new social movements—often described as 'identity politics' or the 'cultural left'—and the decline of a liberal Americanism that is in most of its versions explicitly nationalist, racially revanchist, and at best Clintonian in its address to social class" (p. 2). The author finds the radical spirit of university intellectuals reared during the 1960s and 1970s lacking in critical vision, defining the condition as "little more than political complacency with a relatively youthful face" where one can "see boomer liberalism in all its aspects as a kind of 'progressive osteoarthritis' of the mind—a boneheaded degeneration of the radical spirit and one of the chief obstacles to a reconstruction of social and political life in the twenty-first century" (p. 2). Even though Lott is himself a cohort of the baby-boom generation, scholarly circles under age forty will likely respond with quiet enthusiasm to the author's accusations disguised as informed criticism. This may be true because...