Insight Magazine
Posted 10 June 2002
By Stephen Goode
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The occasion was the 10th National Conference of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), the first following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The theme, "Higher Education and Democracy in Peace and War," sounded fittingly academic and a bit abstract, but the often eloquent talks and sometimes heated discussions were not.
For the nearly 300 academics and others who met at the Washington Marriott Hotel in June the questions at hand were serious ones worthy of their best efforts: What is patriotism? What is the responsibility of academics in the war on terrorism? Will our universities and colleges, as NAS Vice President Carol Iannone put it, learn that "the long mental holiday from truth is over" and that, "post-9/11, the old questions of good and evil, of what's noble and ignoble, and what are virtue, honor and self-sacrifice must be addressed."
Those words did not fall on deaf ears. NAS set up shop 15 years ago at a small office in Princeton, N.J., in large part the brainchild of Stephen Balch, then a professor at John Jay College of the City University of New York. Insight covered its first national conference at New York City's Roosevelt Hotel in November 1988, and heard there the same unofficial NAS motto it heard at the 10th national conference — when the organization, with its very dedicated staff, has 4,300 dues-paying members nationwide. This slogan, "Resist the Zeitgeist," means "Stand against the times" — particularly when those times mean, as the NAS has claimed for 15 years, an era of sloppy, dishonest scholarship, of loud anti-Americanism and a politically correct attitude on many campuses so aggressive that it happily would suppress all opposition if it could.
It is a time, too, when the academic world, according to many at the conference, has weakened higher standards it once set for itself and prefers triviality and self-absorption to the more serious matters once taken up by higher education. "We define this conference as debating 'Is higher education compatible with patriotism,'" quipped Gertrude Himmelfarb, the noted scholar of 19th-century England in introducing the panel discussion she chaired. But "there are some of us who believe a better question is, 'Is higher education today compatible with higher education?'"
For Himmelfarb and many others at the meeting no recent event better summed up what defines the current crisis in academia than actress Goldie Hawn delivering the commencement address this year at American University in Washington (see "The College Cats Get Liberal Tongue," June 24). "Listen to the sounds of your own heart, the college of your own heart," Himmelfarb quoted Hawn as saying, then asked: "Is this not a thoroughly narcissistic statement?" Another participant in the conference later summed it up as a statement from "the university of me."
Indeed, in his opening remarks NAS founder/President Balch warned about the dangers of political correctness and academic self-absorption in time of war. How educators teach — the spirit in which they communicate — the ideas and information they convey, he said, are of utmost importance.
Professors can fortify "the overall health of society" by emphasizing "the heritage of understanding on which ... civil community — in our case a free and democratic society — is based," said Balch. Or they could undermine the health of that society. Sounding a theme taken up by other conference speakers, Balch warned that colleges and universities are not separate from the rest of America and certainly not morally superior to it — a presumption, he noted, held by many academics and conveyed to their students.
Balch, who has a doctorate in political science from the University of California at Berkeley, proposed that instead of an attitude of "aristocratic hauteur" toward mainstream society it might be better to adopt an attitude of "republican humility." He declared: "We should fall into rank beside our fellow citizens and contribute with them whatever we can to the enterprise of our republic." According to Balch, "It is through example that we can most appropriately teach the rising young. More than guns, ships and aircraft, the future of democratic civilization depends on it."
No one disagreed, least of all Todd Gitlin, probably the most left-wing of the speakers at the conference, who in the 1960s was a president of the radical Students for a Democratic Society — the infamous SDS. Gitlin now is an educator at New York University with the title of professor in the departments of culture and communication, journalism and sociology. This worthy argued that patriotism and higher education, far from being mutually exclusive, "are more than compatible." Their unity is necessary if we are to survive, he said, for "our country needs the best of our hearts and minds." Gitlin even praised conservatives: "It is conservatives who deserve credit for taking ideas seriously over the past 20 years," he noted. He was critical of his fellow leftists, denouncing "the intellectual slovenliness of much of the left" and its isolation from the rest of America. The left, he said, "does not consider that dialogue with conservatives matters — and they are wrong."
Gitlin was very critical of universities today. "The shallowness of our academic life! The narrowness of it!" he exclaimed, citing rampant grade inflation and the mass abandonment of foreign-language requirements, regarded as undesirable "speed bumps on the way to get an education." But Gitlin argued that the universities should be allowed to reform themselves. "We don't need police," he said — a claim that surprised critics who wondered aloud how an academy in the terrible condition that Gitlin had described could reform itself.
"How to, and How Not to, Study Other Cultures" was another big issue taken up at the conference, and perhaps the most immediately pressing. How do we learn to read other cultures well enough to anticipate terrorist attacks such as those of Sept. 11?
How indeed? NAS Chairman Stanley Rothman (see "Picture Profile") pointed out that postmodern "culture studies" are useless because those who do them know the conclusions they want to reach at the outset and teach us nothing. Harvard University's great Russia/Soviet Union expert Richard Pipes warned against errors he believed Americans are very likely to make. One is to assume that human nature is everywhere and always the same. If that is true, Pipes asked, why study other cultures? Second, he said, never assume that "if something is different, it is inferior" because such an assumption will ensure that you're unable to read your opponent's strengths.
China expert Arthur Waldron, Lauder Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, also spoke on misreading other cultures. China suffered a catastrophic famine in 1959-61 that was brought on by the excesses of communism, he noted. At least 40 million people died, perhaps as many as 80 million. But the ravages of that particular disaster went largely unremarked in the West because China "experts" in the United States and Europe didn't want to say anything bad about Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese communists or because those "experts" simply didn't have the wherewithal to understand what was happening.
The few who interpreted the disaster correctly, Waldron noted, came at it with no ideological bias. They knew the Chinese language thoroughly and were able to detect all of its nuances.
Middle East expert Daniel Pipes (the son of Russia expert Richard Pipes) brought up academia's chief current misreading — perhaps in many cases a willful misreading — of another culture. The word jihad means "armed conflict," said Pipes. "It should be understood in a military context." But today most academics describe it in benevolent terms as meaning "self-improvement; becoming a better person." This "is a wholesale distortion of the concept of jihad" and a "corruption that goes to the very heart of the academic enterprise," he said. Such distortion also presents a danger to the United States since Americans are very unlikely to take it seriously if they're convinced it's some kind of course in how to win friends and influence people.
At its national conferences NAS bestows awards on scholars whose contributions to higher education it regards as solid, traditional and of outstanding merit. One award this year went to University of Massachusetts at Amherst sociologist Paul Hollander, the author of such classic works as Political Pilgrims and Anti-Americanism. In bestowing the award, NAS President Balch said that it was when he came to the end of his first reading of Political Pilgrims, a book about intellectuals enthralled by communism, that he decided to found the NAS.
Other awards went to Norman Fruman of the University of Minnesota and Macalaster College's Jeremiah Reedy. Harvey Mansfield of Harvard University, whose specialty is political thought, got this year's Sidney Hook Memorial Award — and supplied a couple of the conference's most memorable lines: "Diversity is the latest form of liberal permissiveness" and "Trendy people [such as those who pursue diversity and multiculturalism] tend to be weak."
He wasn't the only wry commentator in town. Harvard's Richard Pipes wondered aloud, smiling: "I do not know why we can't say our culture is the best in the world!" After all, the Muslims say that about their culture and the Chinese say it, too. "But we in the West cannot."
Of course Pipes wouldn't have hesitated to say it, nor would anyone else at the conference, but it was left to another speaker to offer reasons to prove the superiority of Western culture. Barry Smith, Julian Park Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and a philosopher, offered this argument in favor of the West:
First he noted that we in the West want people to do the right thing of their own free will. We don't want college professors, for example, doing good work under orders from others. We believe they do it better when they do it of their own free will. This shows that we put great value on freedom.
Also, it is true that we in the West learned, said Smith, to look upon what people do on Earth to improve our earthly lives as having significance. We believe that we have the freedom to shape our lives into a nontrivial pattern that works and has meaning. As he put it, "You can plan a future which can be shaped by you."
These beliefs in the significance of human freedom and in the opportunity of every man and woman to shape the future aren't shared by other civilizations, he argued. They are the West's alone, and that makes all the difference. Smith then offered two conclusions.
First, that "the sum total of meaningful lives in the West is greater than elsewhere and is getting larger all the time. Second, that terrorist suicide always has been the product of non-Western societies that place no value on freedom or the ability to shape individual lives.
Japanese kamikaze pilots; teen-aged Muslim suicide bombers. "All grew up outside of Western culture," said Smith.
What to do about the education of the young to assure in them an understanding of the greatness of Western values and the importance of patriotism? In what may have been the conference's most eloquent speech, Diana J. Schaub, an associate professor and chairwoman of the department of political science at Maryland's Loyola College, urged that the young study the "basic American documents" — the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the nation's laws. Schaub drew the idea from Abraham Lincoln's famous 1838 "Address to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Ill.," made when Lincoln himself was only 29. The future president of the United States made this recommendation as a way to teach young people American traditions at a time when the revolutionary fervor of the young nation long had since waned.
And in what probably was the feistiest speech of the conference, State University of New York trustee Candace de Russy called for "uprooting the multicultural lie." De Russy described multiculturalism in time of war as "a clear and present danger" and said "we cannot afford to be silent in the face of ... indoctrination in multiculturalism" because it undermines national unity in a time of crisis. She urged Americans to support a national policy that would make "the acquisition of a common sense of nationhood [among all Americans] an urgent priority."
Has NAS made a difference in academia? It is difficult to say. The hold the politically correct has on campuses still is strong. NAS members are far more likely to emphasize the difference the organization has made in their own lives than they are to cite changes it's made in academic culture as a whole.
"To have NAS around was a shot of mental health for all of us," Evelyn Avery, an En-glish professor at Towson State University in Maryland tells Insight. This magazine had interviewed Avery at the first NAS national conference in 1988 when she had been new to the organization. "To be able to be around a group of like-minded people who share our own ideas has been so very important in all the madness that's passed through academia over the years," she said.
What is genuine patriotism? It again was Lincoln who supplied the conference its best answer to that question. Quoting from Lincoln's "Eulogy on Henry Clay," delivered on July 6, 1852, American Enterprise Institute resident fellow Walter Berns caused many a head to nod in agreement. "Whatever he did, he did for the whole country," Lincoln said of Clay. "Feeling, as he did, and as the truth surely is, that the world's best hope depended on continued Union of these States, he was ever jealous of, and watchful for, whatever might have the slightest tendency to separate them."
The echoes of that statement, now 150 years old, were clear to everyone present: Academic fads such as multiculturalism and diversity separate Americans from one another as deeply as did the question of slavery, and are as dangerous to the future of the country.
Stephen Goode is a senior writer for Insight.
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