"Politics by Other Means"

ELT 36:4 1993 "Politics by Other Means" David Bromwich. Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. xvii +257 pp. $30.00 Francis Oakley. Community of Learning: The American College and the Liberal AHs Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. x + 230pp $24.00 Terry P. Caesar. Conspiring with Forms: Life in Academic Texts. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. xxix + 186 pp.Cloth $30.00 Paper $15.00 THESE BOOKS exhibit considerable learning and seriousness of purpose, exemplifying, in the best sense of Bromwich's title, "politics by other means." Uniformly rational, often witty and original, they offer a well-above-average sampling of the current state of discourse in and around English and the Humanities. They also encourage a step beyond the academic and media circus of "political correctness," offering hope that some intellectual good may come of it all. Their range of opinion keeps largely to the middle of the current partisan ordering. David Bromwich pronounces a pox on both the old fundamentalists of the tradition-prescribing right and the "new fundamentalists " of the censorious and censoring left. Francis Oakley wards off the current of abuse that academics have received from both sensation -seeking journalists and statistics-juggling educationists, while offering food for thought on where the Humanities have been and where they might productively be going. And Terry Caesar issues a most unusual and very welcome report from the soldiers in the ill-rewarded posts at the less prestigious colleges and "universities," providing valuable data for a history of everyday academic life in late twentiethcentury America. Reading these books, we may hope to become better balanced in our political thinking, broader in our historical perspective on higher education, and more sensitive to the point of view of those in the profession who are rarely heard from but who constitute its vast majority. Bromwich, Professor of English at Yale, takes up many of the corrosive forces that have created the academy's mottled appearance today. These include the official and officious conservatives who have spread principled distrust of new ventures in curriculum and interpretation; they also include the disgruntled men and women of the left who, for want of a firm place in American political and social institutions, have made their classrooms a venue for ideological manipulation and selfexpression . Bromwich's most probing lancet exposes the strain of collec516 BOOK REVIEWS tivist mentahty that substitutes for independent thinking and regard for individual value: the "group thinking" that measures curricula by norms of proportional representation and literary works by their utility as collective expression. His positive note is sounded in behalf of the liberal imagination that was once synonymous with progressive politics and learning and that is now derided as one of the established values that must be set aside in the quest for multicultural justice. In an atmosphere of importunate demands for group recognition, culture itself again becomes open to the second thoughts that Lionel Trilling once directed toward it. Bromwich articulates an option that may have suggested itself to detached observers of the present "culture wars": one's perspective may honorably become non-cultural, even anticultural , if culture is taken simply to represent the "social aims of a group." In common with many of the writers we have been inclined to teach, we may take a more independent stance: "if literature has held, in many times and places, a single common end it is that of breaking up every such group image. ... It would be better not to teach literature than to teach it as one among the many available techniques of mass persuasion." Politics by Other Means should, if it is to uphold the intellectual virtues of the liberal tradition from Mill to Trilling, exhibit the high seriousness and largeness of mind of its models. In the intensity with which it dissects its samples of the current discourse, in the moderation of tone with which it conducts the inquiry, the book admirably fulfills its exemplary function. But even liberality may become a vice if it extends its purview to the ephemeral and the second-rate. The twentysix -page analysis of the educational thought of George Will...