At a quasi-festive faculty gathering last winter, I had an illuminating exchange with a colleague in the social sciences whom I’ll call “Blume.” Despite the considerable gaps between us in age (Blume is nearing retirement, while I am in my 40s), field (I’m a humanist), and girth (Blume outweighs me by a good 50 pounds), we’ve been on friendly terms since my arrival on the campus in 1985. I had not sparred with him for more than a year and looked forward to his customary pull-no-punches approach. Obligingly, after a few opening jabs, he went straight for the target.
“This faculty used to have some balls! Now we allow faculty business to be managed by the administration and its anointed interest groups.”
“What’s new about that?” I countered. “The administration has always tried to manage us -- and usually succeeded. The problem is that we don’t talk to each other the way we used to. Hell, you and I never agreed about much, but we’ve always gotten along, haven’t we?”
“I suppose,” he allowed, but then his expression hardened. “No. We can’t now. Not if you’re going to support those people. In a war you have to take sides.”
“So this is Vietnam?”
“No, but it is a fight. The administration no longer shares our values.”
“Which values, exactly?”
“Well, for one thing,” Blume’s voice now dripped with disdain. “In my day, we didn’t have mentors. And we didn’t do workshops.”
The culture wars on my campus, a liberal-arts college in the Midwest, had apparently been fading since the mid-1990s. As its membership (and collective hairline) began to recede over the past decade, the Old Guard had lost a series of battles over, among other archetypal flashpoints, extending the canon in our core curriculum beyond the white, the Western, and the male; establishing interdisciplinary majors in environmental and gender studies; and instituting “diversity” and “multicultural” requirements for graduation. But the Old Guard did not fade quietly. Over the past year or so, its lamentations over the direction of the college and its own marginalization had swelled into a campuswide din. At faculty meetings, Old Guardians, along with several younger (male) recruits, contested each initiative advanced by the administration. My conversation with Blume merely confirmed that rumors of the Old Guard’s demise had indeed been exaggerated.
It would be easy to write off Blume and company as a Marxian case study in class interest; for at one level, the Old Guard’s views would appear transparently self-serving. The hue and cry over falling standards, bogus postmodernism, the barbarians inside the gates, and so forth, would seem barely to mask the desire of elders to regain academic turf they have lost. In my nastier moments, I’ve joked that the stakes at my college seem to be nothing less than the survival of (mid) Western Civilization.
Yet, having been trained by Old Guardians, I retain a filial affection, if not piety, for the several Blumes of my acquaintance. More disconcerting still is that I find myself sharing some of their views. I remain somewhat skeptical, for example, about whether we really mean what we say about diversity and multiculturalism. Do we truly embrace a diversity of class (or student work habits) on our elite campus? Would we sanction a multiculturalism that secured equal time for religious fundamentalism? Like many of my elders, I found myself put off by the more sanctimonious advocates of our new graduation requirements as well as by the pragmatism of the administration, which seems driven as much by catalog copy as principle.
Moreover, the Marxian critique reduces the Old Guardians to unreflecting, two-dimensional caricatures and fails to take their powerful sense of rage and betrayal seriously. Surely, the Old Guard’s narrative (to employ the postmodern term) of the culture wars is neither more nor less self-serving than that of the younger generation. Nor, come to think of it, is the younger generation always so young or the Old Guard so old. Not only have some Young Turks aligned with their elders, the “younger generation” is in fact populated in part by professors well past 40.
In truth, Blume’s parting shot had jarred my thinking in a new direction entirely: Perhaps our campus schism is less over class and generation, as I originally thought, than over gender. Or, to be more precise, over masculinity. Blume was right. Faculty “mentoring” and especially “workshops” are relatively new to campus culture and seem favored primarily by the gender-studies and multicultural types. It is significant that both of those innovations place a premium on communal cooperation as opposed to individual competition -- indeed, on conventionally feminine as opposed to masculine virtues. As I revisited the Old Guard’s narrative in these terms, everything suddenly seemed to fall into place.
Workshops, in the Old Guard’s narrative, appear to represent all that is intellectually flaccid, so to speak, in the academy. “Supportive” rather than combative, workshops bespeak a mutual dependency as opposed to the putative intellectual autonomy championed by the likes of Blume. The proponents of workshops seek to relax standards as opposed to keeping them (it?) up; they flout the weighty, timeless truths discharged by the Western Canon through its “seminal” works in favor of the trendy, the lightweight, and the postmodern. They are inclined toward process as opposed to content, “skills” as opposed to knowledge. Indeed, they view knowledge as something created through egalitarian collaboration between professor and student rather than something imparted by the knowledgeable to the uninformed. They embrace groupthink and cooperation with authority (the administration) as opposed to manly opposition to the powers that be. They are, in a word, soft as opposed to hard. In fact, they tend to emerge from what many in the academy hold to be “soft” disciplines -- psychology, sociology, anthropology, the foreign languages -- as opposed to the “hard” sciences and the more rigorous (pre-postmodern) humanities and social sciences.
I don’t mean to suggest that Blume and his fellow culture warriors scorn their female co-workers or would have them replaced with men. What they despise is not women per se, but rather what they instinctively deem effeminate; and they despise such effeminacy above all in men. In that light, I could easily imagine how our faculty must appear to Blume and company. In one corner reside the standard-bearers of academic machismo: the hard-nosed male professors of math and physics, economics and politics, as well as those stout-hearted men in English, history, and philosophy who have fought the good fight. By their side stand several equally stalwart women -- the tough-minded, the blunt-spoken, the widely published; in short, the women “with balls.” In the other corner reside “those people": the politically outspoken women -- feminists, multiculturalists, and the like -- in French and Spanish, psychology and anthropology, environmental and gender studies, who have dragged the campus into its current morass of soft, mushy interdisciplinarity (read “undisciplinarity”) and -- workshops. And by their side stand (however limply) those emasculated men who occupy the bottom rung on Blume’s ladder of academic virility.
More revealing still are the anomalies in Blume’s paradigm: those card-carrying feminists who have earned a grudging respect from the Old Guard by virtue of their scholarly rigor; the male professors of “soft” reputation (or discipline) who have raised their stature by standing guard over the Western Canon and taking up arms against the administration. In other words, the polarity of masculine versus feminine, manly versus effeminate, would seem to illuminate the pecking order of Blume’s universe much more readily than class, generation, or even sex.
The same polarity, coincidentally, also helps delineate the place in Blume’s world occupied by men such as myself: men whose capacity to raise the standards or keep them up has not been questioned; men whose scholarly prowess, as measured by publications, remains at least moderately elevated; men who don’t actually do workshops themselves (well, I did one but felt like an athlete trapped in the wrong locker room) but nonetheless defend the right of others to do them as they please. Unlike the workshop guys, whom the culture warriors regard with contempt, or the workshop women, whom they view as natural foes -- even respected foes if they are in some way “hard” -- men like me are gender traitors, that is, nonworkshop guys who have gone over to the other side. I could now see why Blume and I could no longer “get along.”
In sum, I have become convinced that “the social construction of masculinity,” as the gender-studies folks say, is the key to understanding how the culture wars have unfolded on our campus. Apart from resolving obvious anomalies such as why the camps fail entirely to divide by generation or sex, it offers a compelling explanation for the deep-seated anger of the Old Guard. Our sense of what is properly masculine or feminine, bequeathed to us by family, history, and culture and reinforced daily by what we read and watch on our ubiquitous electronic screens, saturates the stories of self through which we make sense of our lives. Who the “good guy” is defines for us, whether consciously or not, what we view as “good”; what is manly becomes what is right and true. We cling to our sense of manhood -- and womanhood -- tenaciously, for we cannot let it go without letting go of ourselves in some real way. The Old Guardians, to be sure, will scoff that I’ve launched yet another soft-minded, relativistic attack on the timeless universals they have sought so fiercely to protect. Perhaps they are right. Yet, don’t gender-rooted values also feel universal?
How far, one might reasonably ask, can this interpretation of the culture wars be applied beyond my own circumscribed academic island? First off, I’d note that at least since Aristophanes charged Socrates with converting the young men of Athens into “effeminates and fools,” male intellectuals in the West have evinced a special need to affirm their masculinity and a special fear of being judged effeminate. More immediately relevant, however, is the recent demographic transformation of the American academy. In terms of class and culture, the makeup of the faculty has surely not changed much over the last 20 years: The obvious gulf between the tenured and the untenured aside, we are all molded by more or less the same elite institutions. As for race, our conspicuous homogeneity remains a continuing source of embarrassment. As for sexual preference, I would venture that the change on campuses is not one of composition but of visibility -- which, to be sure, has opened important new fields of study. But what has clearly shifted is gender. Between the early 1970s and the mid-1990s, the proportion of women holding full-time academic positions rose from less than 25 percent to nearly 40 percent of the profession as a whole. Surely that percentage will be nearing the 50-percent mark by the end of this decade.
How women have experienced that shift has been eloquently chronicled by such feminist scholars as Carolyn Heilbrun and Linda Hutcheon. How men, and especially the Old Guard, have experienced it might be gauged somewhat unscientifically by the spate of campus novels that have appeared since the mid-1980s. David Lodge’s Nice Work (1987), Richard Russo’s Straight Man (1997), Phillip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), and James Hynes’s The Lecturer’s Tale (2002) come to mind. In each, the newly minted female scholar -- typically attended by a male-feminist sycophant -- plays the role of small-minded interloper in an endangered, if equally small-minded, masculine domain. Neither side comes off well, but the underlying narrative of masculine rage is unmistakable.
The emergence of women and feminism into the academic mainstream surely represents the most profound makeover of the social and intellectual landscape on our campuses since World War II. That shift underlies the saga of masculinity-in-crisis I have outlined -- the overwhelming sense of the Old Guardians that, since the 1980s, something of value to which they are fundamentally attached has been severed. Indeed, it is that shift, I suggest, that underlies the culture wars themselves.
Even assuming that I am in some measure right, if only on my home campus, where does that leave us? Perhaps it is time to take an unblinkered, gender-aware look at whether there are still some values faculty members might hold in common. I could imagine a profitable conversation about which conventionally masculine values -- say, the work ethic, tough-minded criticism (and self-criticism), elevated standards of excellence -- both sides might at least provisionally affirm as universals, and which -- say, ritual intellectual combat and the uncritical worship of publication -- they might not. (Similarly, while one might fairly ask if workshops are always a worthwhile investment of institutional time and money, surely the conventionally “feminine” ideals of cooperation and mutual support, long practiced by the “hard” sciences, might be granted some merit.) In my centrist fantasy world, in short, I envision a broad-based summit between the Old Guard and the New on the topic of gender and shared values on campus. We could call it a faculty. . . symposium.
Paul M. Cohen is chairman of the history department at Lawrence University and the author, most recently, of Freedom’s Moment: An Essay on the French Concept of Liberty From Rousseau to Foucault (University of Chicago Press, 1997).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 13, Page B10
