New Haven, Connecticut -- Donald Kagan is hurrying across the campus of Yale University.
Mr. Kagan, the dean of Yale College, is on his way to an appointment, but he stops just long enough to draw a visitor’s attention to the contrasting architecture -- beaux-arts, neo-gothic, classical, late modernistic. He nods at a small white building (classical) that houses the president’s office. “That’s very Yale,” he says. “The administration building is very small, very insignificant.”
The same could hardly be said about Mr. Kagan, whose outspoken views in favor of the study of Western civilization and against all that falls under the label of “political correctness” have made him one of the more controversial scholars to serve as dean of Yale’s undergraduate college.
On a campus where civility is as much a part of the tradition as the elegant residential colleges (neo-gothic) with their quiet courtyards, Mr. Kagan has eschewed the historical role of dean as consensus builder. Although the athletic-looking, silver-haired dean is by many accounts personable, straightforward, and even charming, consensus is not his goal. He’d rather be a provocateur. An activist dean.
“My role is to raise important educational questions,” Mr. Kagan says. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for a dean to be forced to be some kind of silent bureaucrat. My idea of what a dean is has to include the capacity to speak the truth about issues that are controversial, and will inevitably lead to disagreements with the faculty.”
To say there are disagreements would be an understatement.
Mr. Kagan, who is also a professor of history and classics and the author of a highly acclaimed four-volume work on the Peloponnesian Wars, has held the job two years now. (He’s planning on three more.) But only recently has he emerged as a national figure, an ally of traditionalist scholars who contend that higher education has become dominated by a left-wing orthodoxy.
In the academic year just ending, he gave a much-publicized speech to the freshman class about the need to study Western civilization; published an article that sharply criticized the humanities at Yale; appeared on national television to condemn what he described as a hostile climate for dissenting opinion in academe; defended what critics decried as an ideological nomination to the National Endowment for the Humanities advisory board; and basked in the announcement that Yale had received a $20-million gift to support a special Western-culture curriculum and endow 11 faculty chairs (including one for Mr. Kagan, who has a reputation for being an excellent teacher).
All the activity has catapulted the dean to a level of national prominence that he says he never sought, and that some Yale scholars aren’t at all happy about. Yale hasn’t experienced the nasty battles over the curriculum and free speech that have played out elsewhere, these scholars say, but Mr. Kagan makes it sound that way.
“Everyone knew he was controversial and outspoken when he was appointed,” says David Marshall, acting chairman of the comparative-literature department. “But many faculty are puzzled over why he is sounding the alarm, when in fact Yale should be a model of a place that has had sensible, middle-of-the-road curricular evolution. Western civilization is a central part of what we do.”
Some scholars also accuse Mr. Kagan of politicizing the dean’s job and complain that he did not consult with the faculty on how the $20-million gift from Lee M. Bass, a Yale alumnus and heir to a Texas oil fortune, would be used.
At a recent faculty meeting, several humanities professors -- still smarting over the article Mr. Kagan wrote in the winter issue of Academic Questions, a journal published by the National Association of Scholars -- asked Mr. Kagan to address faculty concerns about the article. It was based on comments that Mr. Kagan (who is not a member of the NAS) made at the association’s meeting last year.
In the article, called “Yale University: Testing the Limits,” he described the opposition to his appointment from students and scholars who thought he would be hostile to their concerns. He lamented the lack of a common curriculum at Yale, but said he had no intention of trying to introduce one. Not only would the faculty not approve it, he wrote, “it would be far more terrible if the faculty did approve it. Consider what a core constructed by the current faculty would look like, and the consequences that would ensue if they also had the responsibility of teaching it.” He added that most were too narrowly educated to do so.
Mr. Kagan, who sits on key faculty-appointment committees, also wrote that Yale was looking carefully at departmental searches to make sure there was no discrimination against conservative scholars. Describing Yale as “top-heavy in the humanities,” he advised like-minded academics to form an alliance with scientists, who, he said, believed in truth and reason. “On the other hand,” he wrote, “the woods are full of humanists who doubt these things.”
Not unexpectedly, humanists at Yale were fuming, and have been coming out of the woods to defend themselves ever since. (One might have assumed that copies of such an article would have been circulating in faculty mailboxes within days of its publication, but the academic pace being what it is, it took several months.)
Now “there are some very angry people around here,” says Michael Holquist, a comparative-literature professor who directs the Soviet and East European Studies Center. “Everybody who’s read that article is angry.” Angry enough to talk of forming a faculty senate -- a concept that at Yale, he says, would be akin to employees at a company with friendly management forming a union.
Mr. Kagan later apologized for some statements that, he said, had been seen as more far-reaching than he had intended.
But some critics weren’t appeased. They say they are especially concerned that Mr. Kagan’s seeming distrust of certain types of scholarship may spill over to decisions about the university’s academic priorities. Yale, like other private universities anticipating a future budget crunch, is currently assessing its academic programs to determine its future priorities. It may decide to consolidate or even eliminate some programs.
Says Margaret Homans, an English professor active in the women’s-studies program: “I used to view previous deans as benign functionaries, but I view him as someone who’s opposed to most of my academic aims.”
Some critics also suggest that ideology may have played a role in several recent tenure or appointment decisions -- particularly one involving a film-studies professor who was unanimously recommended for tenure by his program but turned down by a committee on which Mr. Kagan sits.
Mr. Kagan says such charges are totally unfounded, and adds: “The reason we have this system is that departments aren’t infallible.”
As for other criticism, he says he welcomes the debate. “There’s always going to be someone who’s dissatisfied,” he says.
To some professors, the most pressing issue may be preserving civility on a campus not accustomed to having the outside world view its soiled laundry. “This is a matter that, if publicly debated, could really harm the institution,” says Vincent Scully, an art historian who is about to retire. While he found parts of Mr. Kagan’s article “appalling,” he says, “it’s important that we not attack each other. We live by collegiality.”
In his 22 years at Yale, Mr. Kagan hasn’t exactly been unopinionated. He criticized Yale’s climate for free speech after William Shockley -- a Stanford physicist who argued that blacks were inferior to whites because of genetic differences -- was prevented from speaking on the campus in 1974. He later argued that students who had erected anti-apartheid shanties should be punished.
That Mr. Kagan was actually chosen as dean surprised some, but his candidacy didn’t: He had been chairman of the classics department twice, served on numerous university committees, and shown a deep interest in undergraduate education. He had also served a year-long stint as acting athletics director (at the time he called the National Collegiate Athletic Association a “fig leaf that covers the obscenity underneath”), working closely with Yale’s president, Benno C. Schmidt. He was the “loyal opposition” -- a good Yale citizen, even if his views, as he himself acknowledges, didn’t conform with those held by a majority of the faculty.
Indeed, the idea of citizenship intrigues Mr. Kagan. “I think a full human being must participate in his own government,” he says, noting that in Roman republics, each citizen was expected to play a role.
Mr. Kagan was a history enthusiast early on, but attributes his interest in ancient civilizations to a single professor at Brooklyn College. He was the first in his family to go to college. Born in Lithuania, Mr. Kagan and his sister were young children when they immigrated to the United States with their mother, a widow. She worked in various factories, eventually opening her own shop.
After college, Mr. Kagan earned a master’s degree from Brown University and a doctorate from Ohio State University. He taught at Cornell University, then went to Yale in 1969. He and his wife, a retired schoolteacher, have two sons.
Mr. Kagan isn’t a single-issue dean, though it may seem that way at times. When he took the job, he wanted to continue efforts to improve Yale’s science programs, develop an interdisciplinary major in international studies, and make the tenure process more “uniformly rigorous,” he says.
Frank M. Turner, Yale’s provost, says Mr. Kagan has devoted far more time to those issues than to Western culture. The new major will be introduced in the fall, along with a special course designed to make science intellectually exciting to talented freshmen. It will be team-taught by top Yale scientists, who will tackle different scientific problems each week.
All along, though, Mr. Kagan was forming opinions about what he calls the nationwide “assault on Western civilization.” He considers the turning point to be the freshman speech he gave last fall, in which he warned students “not to let our separate heritages draw us apart.” He quoted a passage from W.E.B. Du Bois that included the lines: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I walk arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas . . . I summon Aristotle and Aurelius . . . and they come all graciously . . . “
The speech angered some minority students, who later asked Mr. Kagan to speak to them. (He did.) It also caught the attention of Mr. Bass, who announced his gift in April. Most of the money will endow chairs for professors already at Yale, but part will pay for an intensive sophomore survey course -- set to begin in 1993 -- in Western civilization. The optional course will draw on literature, history, and politics to examine recurrent themes in Western culture.
If some faculty members have their way, the course, which must go through the normal curriculum-review process, could lead to a heated debate over how Western civilization is defined and taught.
But others say the controversy is overblown. Roberto Gonzalez-Echevarria, chairman of the Spanish and Portuguese department, is among those awarded an endowed chair. He suggests that his appointment (he is a deconstructionist and scholar of Hispanic literature) means that “Don is not as close-minded as some people think.
“It sounds like war here, and it’s not,” he says.
But neither is it peace. An academic detente, perhaps?
Observes Georges May, a professor of French who has also served as dean of Yale College: “There are no ivory walls to our tower. The world outside the university is divided, and that division is reflected at Yale.”