Closed Minds?: Politics and Ideology in American Universities

Notes

Chapter 1 1. A partial list of the antidiscrimination statutes that apply to universities includes Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (outlawing discrimination in employment based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin), Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (nondiscrimination in federally funded educational programs), Title IX of the 1972 Higher Education Amendments (discrimination based on sex in federally funded education programs, traditionally interpreted to mean athletic programs), the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (discrimination and accommodation for individuals with disabilities in federally funded programs), the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Age Discrimination Act, and Executive Order 11246 (establishing affirmative action for federal contractors). In addition, universities also face a host of state laws and regulations relating to human rights, immigration, and nondiscrimination. Chapter 2 1.A well-known indictment of this kind is Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Free Press, 1991). 2. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963). 3. Ibid. 4. Herbert Storing, Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1962). His critique drew a critical commentary from John H. Schaar and Shelden Notes 243 S. Wolin,“Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics: A Critique,”American Political Science Review, vol. 57 (March 1963): 125–50. 5.Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster , 1987). 6. The story is told in Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), chap. 2. 7. Ibid., p. 7. 8. Lynne V. Cheney, director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, later extended the argument and explicitly linked curriculum politics to real-world politics, asserting that“treating humanities texts as though they were primarily political documents is the most noticeable trend in the study of the humanities today. Truth and beauty and excellence are regarded as irrelevant.” 9. James D. Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991). 10. James D. Hunter,“The Enduring Culture War,”in Is There a Cultural War? A Dialogue on Values and American Public Life, edited by James D. Hunter and Alan Wolfe (Brookings, 2006). The discussion of traditionalists and orthodoxy is in Hunter, Culture Wars, p. 44. 11. Hunter and Wolfe, eds., Is There a Cultural War? p. 15. 12. Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars, p. 7. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., p. 8. 15. Mark Lilla, “Only Disconnect...,” in Our Country, Our Culture: The Politics of Political Correctness, edited by Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips (Boston: Partisan Review Press, 1994), p. 131. Lilla did not, however, take his own advice, rejoining the fray with an eloquent new book, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). 16. Thomas Bender,“Politics, Intellect, and the American University,” in American Academic Culture in Transformation, edited by Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske (Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 40. 17. Ibid. 18. See, among others, John Searle, “Is There a Crisis in American Higher Education ?” in Our Country, Our Culture, edited by Kurzweil and Phillips, pp. 227–43; C. Vann Woodward, “Political Fallacies in the Academy,” in Our Country, Our Culture, edited by Kurzweil and Phillips, pp. 292–98; Louis Menand,“The Limits of Academic Freedom,” in The Future of Academic Freedom, edited by Louis Menand (University of Chicago Press, 1996), chap. 1; Louis Menand, “Marketing Postmodernism,” in The Condition of American Liberal Education: Pragmatism and a Changing Tradition, edited by Robert O’Neill (New York: The College Board, 1995), pp. 140–44. 19. Woodward,“Political Fallacies in the Academy,” p. 297. 20. One of the present authors (Smith), then a junior faculty member at Columbia, was secretary of the organization, which was most active in the 1968–73 period. The diverse nature of the membership made for some difficulties, and national differences 244 Notes to Pages 9–14 prevented a cohesive definition of the organization’s mission. Even though most of the colleagues were cultural conservatives, they fractured on how strongly they should oppose such policies as affirmative action and how much government interference should be“normal”and even desirable in the...