Arizona State University now has a School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership — the brainchild of conservative state lawmakers determined to counter what they see as the liberal bias of university faculty and curricula. As I read this news in The New York Times, memory came sweeping back. Something very similar almost happened at Yale when I was on the faculty there. It would have happened had not the faculty, myself included, said no. We might be less successful today.
At a news conference on April 17, 1991, then President Benno Schmidt and his appointee as dean of Yale College, Donald Kagan, announced that the Texas oil billionaire Lee Bass would give the university $20 million for the creation of a new program in Western civilization. The announcement of a major new program before the faculty had even been told of it — much less been given the chance to consider it — was unprecedented. Something seemed out of whack.
President Schmidt cited as the inspiration for the new program and its funding a speech given to incoming freshmen the previous fall, in which Kagan argued that the civilization of the West should be at the heart of the Yale curriculum. The argument was not simply intellectual, but moral and political as well: that Yale must raise a banner for the promotion of Western values in a world of unrest and apparent transitions toward democracy. “It is both right and necessary to place Western civilization and the culture to which it has given rise at the center of our studies, and we fail to do so at the peril of our students, our country, and of the hopes for a democratic, liberal society emerging throughout the world today,” said Kagan.
Well: yes, but. Most of us on the faculty shared those values, taught them to our own children as well as our students. But was there a need to make them militantly part of the curriculum, as if in defiance of our enemies? One sensed that the Yale curriculum was being used for a skirmish in the culture wars typical of the 1980s and 90s. Many of us on the faculty made the point that the vast majority of courses in the social sciences and humanities at Yale could be described as belonging to “Western Civ.” A count showed more than 100 courses in that category. Yale itself is of course part, a proud part, of the history of Western civilization, an institution which from its modest and sectarian beginning in 1701 evolved into a center of research on American and European literature, philosophy, art, music.
One senses that ‘Western values’ really means raising a flag for unfettered market-based capitalism and its associated ideologies.
I think most of its faculty believed that you can study, teach, even celebrate the achievements of Western civilization without turning college education into propaganda for those values. In my 40 years on the faculty, I taught largely European literature, and the classics of Greece and Rome — these in the Directed Studies Program, an intensive set of freshman courses devoted to the Western tradition in literature, philosophy, and political thought. While interested in the rest of the globe, I was firmly planted in my own heritage.
It’s not radical “multiculturalism” (the common term of opprobrium of the time) to believe that college years should be a time for questioning of inherited values, and for learning about the ideas by which other civilizations live. If Yale wanted to put $20-million into enriching its curriculum (never a bad idea), there seemed to be plenty of areas (Asia, Africa, for instance) that had a better claim for the funds. But that was not the point of the Bass program: It was a banner raised in defense of “values” that its proponents saw as threatened — very much as Arizona’s legislators do today. “The new courses at Arizona State focus on Western thinking from the ancient Greeks to the Founding Fathers and beyond, with an emphasis on free-market philosophy,” according to the Times. Here, as in the proposed Yale program, one senses that “Western values” really means raising a flag for unfettered market-based capitalism and its associated ideologies.
I don’t think that we best teach the values we cherish by pulling up a drawbridge against other cultures. Nor do I think those outside the university should be telling it what to teach. If that doesn’t remain the responsibility of the faculty, one might as well abandon any idea of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. The curriculum will be simply a political battlefield, another site of our polarized ideological contention.
The Bass program at Yale never came into existence. A few Yale professors were designated as Bass chairs. A committee was appointed to implement the new program — but faculty opposition kept it from ever becoming a reality. There was also much turnover in the administration — first Dean Kagan then President Schmidt resigned, in good part because they had lost the confidence of the faculty. Frustrated by the delays, Lee Bass attached a rider to his gift: He wanted the right to approve all faculty appointments under the grant. This was clearly an encroachment on university autonomy. Yale by now had a new president, Richard Levin, who in 1995 announced that he would return the $20 million to Bass.
The press was predictably aroused. “How to Lose $20 million,” Time headlined its story, adding “After four years of fumbling, Yale returns a massive gift to a disgruntled donor.” For Newsweek, it was “The Fall of Western Civ,” with the cute gloss: “A $20 million Bass slips off Yale’s hook.” In U.S. News and World Report, John Leo titled his editorial: “How the West Was Lost at Yale.” Many journalists — and alumni — wanted to know how Yale mishandled things to the point that Lee Bass felt he needed to attach such a stipulation to his gift, and why that gift had not produced any curricular effect over four years. There had to be a story here of lefty faculty guerrillas overcoming administrative sanity. To Leo in U.S. News, it was the victory of “multicultural mush,” a president’s capitulation to “the campus left” who favored “more fashionable subjects such as lesbian studies.” Hilton Kramer in the New York Post informed readers that “tenured left-wing advocates of a multiculturalist, anti-Western agenda on the faculty” had carried on “open warfare” against the proposed program. The Times, on the other hand, stated that universities “must resist the temptation to solicit and accept gifts from donors with a strong political agenda.”
Yale of course is rich enough to lose $20 million without facing starvation. Arizona State (whose president, Michael Crow, says he welcomes the new School of Civic and Educational Thought and Leadership) has less freedom of financial maneuver. And it is not clear that the faculty at Arizona State, some of whose members have been critical of the new program, have the power to resist it. It’s not even clear that were something like the Bass affair to occur again at Yale the faculty would be able to offer the kind of resistance it did in 1991. The tradition of faculty governance in academic affairs remains stronger at Yale than at most institutions. But it has suffered everywhere. The university has come to resemble a corporation, with a larger and less accountable bureaucracy, and a greater attention to the bottom line and to public repute as measured by U.S. News & World Report. The idea that the faculty should deliberate without outside interference about what needs to be taught and learned still exists, but it’s been overburdened with all sorts of other considerations and requirements.
The right, of course, tells us that it’s lefties in the university who are responsible for the politicization of knowledge, and that the push to have more conservative views represented is just a needed reaction to the situation. Don’t believe it. University faculty may tend to vote blue — after all, voting choices outside as well as inside academe tend these days to correlate with years of education — but most of them are devoted to teaching what seems important for students to learn. That includes and will continue to include a lion’s share of Western Civ.
But the issue of faculty governance continues to trouble me. The proportion of tenured faculty is shrinking throughout academe as the number of contingent faculty increases. That means a diminished ability of the faculty to resist pressure from administrators and donors to say what gets taught and by whom. I understand that the tenure system enrages critics of the university. But as that system buckles under economic pressures, it means that administrators and donors gain relatively greater power to define the educational mission of the institution. We need to remember that the faculty stands at the heart of the university. Without its knowledge, its research agendas, indeed its wisdom, the American university would be a paltry thing.
Peter Brooks is professor emeritus of comparative literature at Yale University.
