Read the Times Literary Supplement's review of Academic Questions

Jonathan Rauch calls AQ "a live wire"

In 1987, a group of disgruntled academics formed an organization whose aim was to fight what it saw as the menace of political correctness. Called the National Association of Scholars, the group maintains affiliates in thirty-two states, issues position papers, and holds national conventions. Academic Questions is its journal, a counter-counter-cultural quarterly which defends anti-PC traditionalism in the sort of feisty, underdoggish tone more often associated with insurgent causes and opposition parties. True to form, the indignant PC people are fighting back with an anti-anti-PC group of their own, called Teachers for a Democratic Culture.

For a ring-side seat on the right-hand side of the campus culture wars, you could do no better than Academic Questions, which is now in its seventh volume. An example of the journal's spirited style is Ward Parks's review or a book by Gerald Graff, who, it turns out, is the leader of Teachers for a Democratic Culture. In his Beyond the Culture Wars: How teaching the conflicts can revitalize American education (1992), Graff argues highmindedly that universities should rise above sludge-slinging in the PC mud-hole by (in Parks's words) "making our very conflicts the organizing structure in our curricula". But Parks is having not a bit of it: universities should teach knowledge, not politics, and they should teach scholarly arguments internal to teach discipline, not trendy arguments peddled by social activities.

Though written mainly by scholars, it is a missionary journal, not a scholarly one. "American higher education has been profoundly compromised in the past two decades", declares the journal's statement of purpose, printed next to the masthead in every number. "A critique of the academy by academics themselves, Academic Questions will uphold will uphold the traditions of humanism and academic freedom." Each issue begins with a tub-thumping editorial. "From the emptiness of relativism emerges a peculiar totalitarianism that rejects all views except those asserted by radicals as necessary to promote their 'progressive' agenda, thunders one none-too-subtle leader by Herbert London, Editor-in-chief.

And so Academic Questions hammers away at the politicization of academic life. "The university is not a political institution and must not be misused as such", declares the historian C. Van Woodward in what could be taken as the journal's motto. But how dire is the threat? Irving M. Klotz, in an article on the politicization of scientific-misconduct investigations, compares them to the activities of the science-police of Nazi Germany. Philip G. Davis, in his article on the rise of New Age neo-paganism in feminist scholarship, warns of parallels with fascist ideology. John Attarian mischievously illustrates similarities between quotations from leftist academies and statements by Communist ideologues. Jerry L. Marlin ends his useful analysis of the PC worldview with a quotation from Mussolini.

Although parallels between PC excesses and mad dictatorships are worth noting, after a while this sort of thing becomes oppressive. Yet if Academic Questions can be relentless, it also shows flair for spotting and dissecting the latest forms of high academic weirdness. Just when you though things could go no further, along comes feminist neo-paganism. "Far from lagging behind", writes Dais in "The Goddess and the Academy", "universities have become major vehicles for the spread of the Goddess movement." Elsewhere, the anthropologist Clement W. Meighan (in a piece called "The Burial of American Anthropology") argues with passion that ethnic activists' campaigns to "repatriate" and re-inter Indian remains are playing havoc with science.

The journal's articles divide about evenly between scholarship ("Steven Greenblatt's New Historicist Vision") and pedagogy ("Multicultural Studies: Can They Be Made to Work?"). Though the scholarship is interesting enough, the articles on pedagogy strike more sparks. When Andrew J. Kleinfeld, a federal judge, is critical of law-school graduates whose "Law and . . . "courses (Law and Literature, Gender and the Law, etc.) have taught them much about politics but little about law, he speaks powerfully and from the heart. "I have not yet had the occasion to need a law clerk's work on feminist hermeneutics", he says. "Bribery corrupts on a retail basis, but politicization corrupts wholesale."

Gerald Early, the director of Washington University's African-American studies programme" "To be real and effective, black students must drop the very elements that it now mercilessly exploits. The only reason it can now give for its existence is as therapy for both black and white students." The language in Rita Zurcher's examination of multiculturalist surgery performed on two classic art-history textbooks swoops into metaphor: "the feminist and multiculturist 'transformations' of the academy are really no more than pale sparks thrown up as scholarship's flaming brand sinks, hissing, into an all-engulfing sea of mediocrity." You won't find that sort of passion in the American Political Science Review. If at times hectoring, Academic Questions is that rare and useful thing among journals - a live wire.

Jonathan Rauch
March 18, 1994