Customer Reviews

Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life

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Kronman's book is very much needed in today's culturally- and spiritually-bereft age. He advances the argument that higher education has largely become a technical finishing school, where students are groomed for careers in their chosen profession like gears in a machine. Meanwhile their spiritual and emotional needs go un- or undernourished and the only forces that have moved in to take the place are science, to which many of the more educated types have a blind allegiance, and religious fundamentalism, which requires blind allegiance and a relinquishment of independent thought. Kronman advocates the humanities as they used to be taught, before the influx of 60s and post-60s revisionism and PC-curricula, as the answer. Furthermore, rather than apologizing for endorsing the allegedly "rigid, Eurocentric thinking" of Dead White Males, he demonstrates how the curricula of their works is actually more open and tolerant than much of the PC code of the last 30 years or so. It's a well-crafted argument, although of course he tends to idealize his side of the debate while showing us the worst of the PC side.

Kronman traces the route of higher education in America from the founding of the earliest colleges and universities to post-civil war instruction to the 60s revolution that ousted most of what came before it. The problem is that the deconstructionists, after they were finished deconstructing, didn't offer anything in place of what they had dismantled, at least beyond the hazy philosophy of cultural relativism and a reluctance to evaluate *anything* qualitatively. (Everything is equally good and equally valid; where you come down is merely a matter of taste and personal cultural prejudices.) We've heard this before. But then Kronman offers an ingenious insight and twist: the humanities, already under pressure in the post World War II rising tide of science and specialization--quantification and analysis--felt insecure and was already headed in the direction of measurement and other "objected" criteria. It felt uncomfortable making moral or ethical judgments. In order to save its own relevance and compete in the burgeoning environment of the social and natural sciences, it was adopting their modes of quantification and "objective" observation. If humanities couldn't tell you the meaning of life, in other words, it could at least measure aspects of life and report on them. That way it too would seem more like a scientific discipline and less like pie-in-the-sky thought.

Thus it fell over when the multicultural attacks began. Humanities professors felt almost embarrassed to defend the subjective assertions of Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, Goethe, et al, in the midst of accusations that they were just artificial constructs created to allow certain groups to remain in a state of cultural ascendancy.

Thus, in the last 30 or so years, religion and all sorts of "spiritual" movements have moved in to fill the emotional void left by the shrinking influence of the humanities. And colleges and universities have gone from being places where one went to feed one's soul to places one goes to get vocational training for law, medicine, business, or some other career. Educational institutions now feel it is not their job to deal with the state of students' souls. That is too personal and open to too many cultural and socioeconomic interpretations and stratifications. Rather than even make an attempt, they just abandon the mission altogether.

Kronman believes a reestablishment of the traditional humanities is vital if we are to escape the moral malaise we have been in for the last several generations. Yes, every generation talks about its moral malaise. F. Scott Fitzgerald's accounts of the 20s sound a lot like Tom Wolfe's accounts of the 80s. But at least in the 20s, if one wished, one could find a much stronger and broader program of, for lack of a better term, "the classics," than one can find at most universities today. Kronman passionately argues that a return to qualification as well as quantification--a balance--is the only answer to a truly educated mind and soul.

My problem with Education's End is not Kronman's argument, but his writing. He repeats, over-explains and takes many paragraphs to make a simple point. This book could have been half to a third of its length. Or, alternatively, if he's gunning for this length (about 270 pages) he could have dug deeper and gone further. I found myself reflecting on many of his observations and finding examples of them in real life--examples he himself could have examined. For example, the quantification obsession in colleges and universities, even in the humanities, could arguably be illustrated by the quality of entertainment we are getting. Every year artistic programs such as NYC's Tisch School of the Arts, USC's Peter Stark Producing Program, Julliard and Curtis music conservatories, and others, turn out robots who can leap the technical hurdles of their field while displaying no great gut feeling for it. We get folks who go into, say, film and television who can head production companies or turn out "product" for various "windows" of distribution, who can run numbers and predict what programs will rate the highest return, via all sorts of "scientific" focus groups and statistical compilations. How well does this approach work, ultimately? Well, open the movie page of your newspaper and take a look--there's the answer. The movie moguls of the past--the Warners, Selznicks, and Zannucks--didn't have these "scientific" marketing tools, and it didn't matter one bit. We aren't turning out people with an understanding of or a passion for the philosophy behind art--there's passion for their own aggrandizement, but that's something different. The film programs of today could never contain a Fellini, a Bergman, a Truffaut, a Coppola, or a Welles, and some graduates who originally had promise, such as Spielberg and Lucas, instead have turned into the cold, calculating technocrats themselves. (Compare their 70s output with more recent works.) A Yo-Yo Ma plays with more technical security than a Casals ever could. Ditto an Emmanuel Ax vs. a Cortot or an Edwin Fischer. But guess who I would rather listen to.

Kronman's book never explores where this brave new world of preparing young minds has taken us, and there are examples everywhere you look. Instead the book reads like it was dashed off from some notes in a few short writing sessions. There is some poor and awkward wording that makes me wonder if he even went past the first draft--as an educator at Yale, would he have accepted such a half-baked paper from one of his students? I hope not.

Still, I recommend it for the cogent argument, one that more educators ought to be brave enough to make. But Kronman gets an "incomplete" from me until he polishes his writing style, chops the redundancy and fleshes out his argument to give it more strength and relevance. Class dismissed.

Professor Kronman's book fills a lamentable gap in the literature pertaining to higher education, to the extent that most of what is written on higher education today is rather empty. This is the kind of book that a thoughtful person, having finished college, would come across and, after having read it, would realize that they were utterly misguided in their undergraduate career. That being said, I feel the book should be required reading for anyone considering graduate school regardless of the field of study. His analysis of the "modern research ideal" seems to me right on. I would, however, agree with some previous reviewers that the book could have been shorter, and at times I found myself painfully aware that he was making a point he had aready sufficiently made. Nonetheless, the final chapter is quite profound and alone worth the cost of the book.

Yet, as a side note I find it striking that no mention of St. John's College in Sante Fe and Anapolis was made in the book. The "great books" programs at Yale, Columbia, etc simply cannot begin to compare with that of St. John's College. This omission is difficult to reconcile considering that the author sees the "great books" tradition and its secular humanism as the best way out of the current education crisis, and, quite simply, no other college or university better represents secular humanism than St. John's.

Review:

Kronman is an intensely literate & learned Yale law professor (who also has a philosophy degree); he's also a political liberal (who worked for the SDS in the sixties & who currently supports Obama). This work, however, is a work of cultural conservatism.

Few will argue with Kronman's critique of higher learning. Both cultural progressives & cultural conservatives in the humanities will concede that college & university culture has one goal in mind: to train young minds to think professionally--that is to master a set of competencies (lexical & methodological norms) that will allow them to succeed in their chosen fields. That sounds rational enough, but the problem with this is that the professionalization of the humanities has also meant the mechanization of the humanities into a set of procedural norms that are no longer spiritually nourishing.

Kronman, who has also written a book about Max Weber, argues that the university's current predicament is the result of a long process of secularization. Kronman claims that there is a resurgent need for spirituality at the present time & that the humanities once again need to provide not just professional but spiritual guidance.

Kronman is not suggesting a return to any specific religion, what he is suggesting is a return to basic questions & concerns ( ie what is the meaning of life ?, what is the best way to live?) that he (somewhat arbitrarily) calls "spiritual" into the matrix of higher learning. This is his suggested cure not just for what ails higher learning, but for what ails humanity.

A return to basic questions & concerns sounds like a fine idea, but Kronman opens himself up to a number of problems when he equates globalization with westernization & a return to basic questions with a return to the canonical texts of western civilization (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill). Kronman is not exactly dismissive of multiculturalism for he believes that students should learn about other cultures, but he believes that ones primary loyalty should be to one's home culture. In other words, Kronman believes that students will not find fulfillment in "superficial multiculturalism" but by immersing themselves in strictly western ways of being/knowing/valuing/believing.

Kronman obviously means well, but he simply doesn't account for the fact that the modern classroom is full of students & teachers with roots in many different cultures & traditions. To be fair to Kronman, he does respect other cultures & traditions, and he thinks that we need to learn about them, but what he fails to acknowledge is the possibility that we may learn something from them as well. As smart as he is, Kronman's anglocentric bias prevents him from seeing the world (or the classroom) as it is: a multicultural contact zone. And he fails to see that contact with cultures & histories & traditions other than western ones does not entail a loss to the existing tradition but an addition to it.

I think Kronman, and those cultural conservatives like him, believe that their way of life, the western way of life, is threatened by multiculturalism & globalization. So Kronman reacts by writing a book that suggests we institutionally defend the west against encroachments from the nonwestern world. But the best of what has been thought in the west is not in any danger when we amend or compare & contrast those thoughts with the best that has been thought outside of the west. In fact, studying other traditions simply adds to the number of ways we can ask & answer the basic questions that concern all of humanity (and not just that portion of it that we call western).

The best possible future will be fashioned not by those who formulate east/west or west/other relations as a contest for superiority between separate worlds, but by those who have the imagination to build upon the best of what has been thought regardless of that thoughts national or hemispheric origin.

Many cultural progressives & conservatives agree that the idea of the university is in trouble. Kronman's book is valuable for diagnosing what ails the modern university and the modern world, but his prescription is overly conservative, short-sighted, and does not engage the imagination in the way that a much more comprehensive and much more far-sighted (and much less anglocentric) set of higher learning reforms would.

Editorial:

I think the idea of a return to basic questions & concerns is a good idea, but I think that the problem with education today is even more basic than that. Kronman is a lawyer & an academic who is enlivened by argument & thus he no doubt enjoyed producing this text which is an intervention into a lively debate with a long history. The problem with Kronman is that he assumes that others will be enlivened by the same things that enliven him. The problem with academia is that too many academics assume that what interests them will & should interest 18-22 year olds. Very few academics really make an attempt to understand what interests & enlivens young people & why, and so many well-intentioned academics fail to recognize that the classroom is a stifling place for many creative-minded students who are not spiritually enlivened nor fulfilled by this or that academic's version of educational life. I'm guessing that a concentration on western texts will alienate more students than it will assist or spiritually nourish. I think I am safe in saying that most students who read Kant do not find themselves to be having anything like a religious experience while doing so. What makes most people feel spiritually enlivened, I'm guessing, are things like love & hope & possibility, and not Plato & Kant & Mill.

Academics will better serve their students when they better understand student needs. And the quickest way to do this is to pay attention to what they spend their time doing: constructing & editing their MySpace & Facebook pages. MySpace or Facebook might seem like a foreign & irrelevant universe to academics but if they take the time to understand why these sites are so appealing to students they might better understand their students. MySpace & Facebook allow students a rare opportunity to express themselves; and to connect with distant and not so distant others; and they provide a unique way for students to produce & manage their private & social selves & worlds. If academics understood this then they might find better ways to understand & connect with students and, more generally, understand how contemporary individuals cope with contemporary realities. Discussions of common fears, hopes, & desires as well as discussions of contemporary ways of expressing & coping with common fears, hopes, & desires might prove more interesting & useful & satisfying than a seminar on The Republic, Critique of Pure Reason, or On Liberty (though these texts, of course, have their place as well). But if the university truly concentrated on basic real-world questions & how real people answered them then a university would cease to be a place that accredited people according to professional ability and instead a place that accredited people according to their value to each other and their community. And that, sadly, isn't a reality. The reality is that real life & real people simply do not get the respect that Plato & Kant & Mill do and that is why professors value & teach Plato & Kant & Mill and that students share not their own selves & thoughts but their critique of the great thinkers (whose realities & concerns may or may not coincide with their own). This overvaluing & overpraising classic texts & undervaluing & underpraising self can be dehumanizing. Status at the university level is conferred upon those who publish books & not upon those individuals who connect with students. The university used to attract an attractive type: the gentleman scholar with one foot in the library & one foot in the street. Nowadays most professors are seasoned professionals more attuned to the realities of their profession (which means the realities of publishing) than the realities of living & functioning in the world that most of us live & function in. To rehaul the university and make it a more inviting & enriching place to spend four or more years will take more than a return to basic questions, it will take a reconsideration of what it is we truly value about the humanities, how best to teach them, and what kind of people are best suited to take on this invaluable role.

Kronman writes a compelling argument as to why college humanities and traditional liberal arts programs should provide the necessary spiritual and moral direction for our maturing youth. The reader should expect his argument to be compelling, he was the Dean of the Yale Law School and he teaches the Directed Studies Program at Yale. The book is compelling and captivating. Most people would struggle with a book so focused on such a seemingly esoteric subject. But Kronman's subject is is compelling and while lengthy - his arguments are almost alarmist in tone. The reading flows rapidly along throughout most of the book!

Kronman takes on political correctness, constructivism, and religious fundamentalism (American grown as well as the Islamic brand), and warns us of the potential for threats to our culture and a more subtly, to civilization. While I don't question the validity of his arguments, I do question of the relevance of some of his points. He is advocating sandbagging, but the river is already out of its banks. He argues we could contain the crest of the flood despite the flooding today. (My simple and inelegant metaphor - not his).

His history and tracing of the evolution in collegiate philosophy and development are accurate and insightful. His assesment of the vacuum in spiritual teaching and direction on America's college campuses is on point and certain to irritate humanities professors across the nation (as well as evangelicals and a few priests). He avoided political connections that could be made,the facist nation state and Nazi Germany - but the connections are there for anyone with familiarity in German or European history. The book is topical, virile,and provoking. Humanities departments would be well served to devise a study of the book and include it in their course offerings! But make no mistake, it is more exciting than any college course book. It is worthy of your time and consumption ant any age.

This is an important and carefully thought-out book. It's not for the faint of heart, or for anyone looking for a quick, punchy exposé of the current college scene. Rather, it is a deeply reflective and philosophical exploration of the differences in the intellectual objects of the sciences (both social and hard) and of the humanities. By appropriating the "research ideal" of the sciences, one that makes knowledge instrumental to a measurable goal, the humanities have lost sight of their traditional and more important aims, ones that are intrinsic rather than instrumental, that involve learning for its own sake and that bring meaning to life. The substitution of cultural relativism (called here "political correctness") for the pursuit of truth is a second siren's song that has distracted the humanities from its honorable mission. Both these points are important and well made. The book reads like a man's intellectual life's work. His heart is in it.

Kronman's study, however, is limited by the narrowness with which he defines the humanities. A law professor and Philosophy BA from WIlliams College, he seems chiefly to be talking about his own undergraduate major, Philosophy (see the appendix where he offers a sample curriculum), which has as one of its clear aims the understanding of "what living is for." That formulation of the central question of the humanities -- and it repeats throughout the book until it becomes almost grating -- is finally a limited (and I might add instrumental) one, that applies less to those branches of the humanities that encompass the arts than it does to Philosophy (or Theology). Much study within the humanities, rather than asking and answering quasi-ecclesiastical questions, offers the pure pleasure of satisfying intellectual curiosity, preserving culture, or simply engaging individual creativity. These also very important functions fall outside of Kronman's analysis, which is therefore not as comprehensive as it might be.

The narrowing of the humanities to the navel-gazing suggested by the book's subtitle "Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life" is thus unfortunate. The humanities (and even Kronman's analysis of them) are larger than this question implies. That might sound funny since what larger question is there than "What is living for"? But since it is a question so large as finally to be unanswerable -- and not finally the only concern of the humanities or only the concern of the humanities -- Kronman risks making a serious inquiry feel trivial.

Kronman points to a very real and important trend in modern higher education. He gives a very cogent half-diagnosis of the source as well - that of the urge within humanities disciplines to ape the research methods of the natural sciences and thus exclude any sort of prescriptive 'values' from the research paradigm. However, Kronman underplays an even more important part of the source of the problem - the fact that a socially all-pervasive 'free market' mentality subtley and overtly pushes all that cannot be assigned a quantified ('bottom line') demarcation to the periphery of what is viewed as important, and finally legitimate, in human life. This is much more broadly manifested than in academia (witness how completely political legitimacy and fund-raising totals are equated in the current election cycle) but it is certainly also manifest in the concerns toward which Kronman points. Interesting is the fact that just as many in the 'hard' sciences, confronting the connections between their research and such realities as our genetic future, global warming, radical consumption inequality between and within societies, our continuing addiction to war and militarism, and so on, are beginning to recognize that the 'value-free' research model has always been more ideal than real, the humanities folks now jump on the same paradigmatic bandwagon. Kronman puts his finger on a real issue, but his analysis is arguably more focused on a case in point symptom than on the real source of the problem itself.

This was a worthy read (especially the last chapter, "Spirit in an Age of Science," but I feel it was essentially an essay that got out of control. Kronman needed an editor. A respectful editor, since it's all good stuff; but there is an awful lot of repetition. How many times does he explain what constructivism is, what the research ideal is, what colleges used to be up to, etc.?

Also, the book suffers from a lot of general talk. Even though I agree with his core points, I found my eyes glazing over at times. He should have used more specific examples to liven things up.

If this were turned in in one of my classes, I would deduct points for the student's not having structured his argument efficiently! You could have cut at least 100 pages.

Everyone talks about nihilism, but no one does anything about it.

Kronman divides the history of the American university into three periods:

1.) Founding of Harvard in 1636 to the Antebellum period
2.) From the Antebellum period to the late Sixties
3.) From the late Sixties to the present

In the first period higher education was a very rigid curriculum primarily based on the Bible and the Classical authors. The second period Kronman calls the period of `secular humanism' in which the spirit of searching for profound Truth was kept alive but it wasn't necessarily anchored to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Of the final period, from the late Sixties to the present, Kronman writes:

"In this third phase, the question of life's meaning has ceased to be a recognized and valued subject of instruction even in the humanities. It has been expelled from our colleges and universities, under pressure from the research ideal and the demands of political correctness." (p46)

Kronman says this... and says this...and says this again... and then says it again. The most important ideas of the book are hammered home. I get the impression this is a lawyer writing to the general public, repeating everything he says four times as lawyers might do, so as not to be misconstrued, yet writing in plain English so civilized people like me can read it.

Nevertheless, it's a fine book with an important message. The idea that the humanities took a nosedive since the late Sixties is nothing new. Here is a quote by the scholar Joseph Campbell (1904 - 1987) who taught humanities at Sarah Lawrence College for thirty-eight years.

"For instance, in the colleges the liberal arts are sinking. And everyone's going in for the professional specialization which does not tell you how to be a human being, does not give you the rich information that comes from reading the classics: Plato, Goethe, Shakespeare - oh, what do we want with that? What's the relevance? You know the term - and all of this came in in the Sixties as far as my experience goes." - Joseph Campbell

- Myth as Metaphor, Lost Teachings, with Michael Toms


Kronman's descriptions of the causes of the problem are no doubt correct, corroborated by many other educators. But I think there's something that needs to be added. We are so caught up in the culture wars that we focus too much attention on PC, and the fear of offending someone by recognizing the superiority of DWEMs when such superiority exists. And I understand how the `research ideal' interferes with the sort of teaching that nurtures the soul. But if the development of the soul were valued the way it used to be, our universities would find ways around both of these problems. Simply introducing ideas from non-Western cultures, or from a female perspective, does not necessitate a shallowness of mind. In fact, it should enhance the quest for answers to those vital questions as we explore a greater variety of the human experience. But only if we take those vital questions seriously. So why don't we?

In the early part of the twentieth century university graduates represented a small elite segment of society. There was a great expansion after the GI Bill, but an even greater expansion in the Sixties with a flood of baby boomers into higher education. The percentage of American adults with Bachelors and Graduate degrees quickly reached between 25 and 30 percent where it remains to this day. The fall of the humanities, as Kronman describes it, happens to coincide with the great expansion of higher education resulting in more educated people competing for a smaller proportion of quality jobs. Perhaps this isn't supposed to be a problem for elite schools such as Williams and Yale. Who cares what is happening at the majority of those `vocational-type' universities. But I think it must have some affect. It's something that has been tugging on the whole society. Soul searching weakens a young person's competitive edge. And so we have become generally more practical, more competitive, more efficient, more productive, more knowledgeable - and less wise.

I don't have the answer.

While reading Education's End, I was reminded of a story (frequently attributed to Steven Covey) involving a one-gallon, wide-mouthed Mason jar set on a table, about a dozen fist-sized rocks, a bucket of gravel, a bucket of sand, and a pitcher of water. The speaker carefully places the rocks, one at a time, into the jar. When the jar is filled to the top and no more rocks will fit inside, he asks, "Is this jar full?" Usually, an audience says yes, but then the speaker successively adds buckets of gravel, sand, and water, each time impressing upon his audience the jar is not full. Finally, he explains the lesson from the demonstration: if you don't put in the big rocks first, you'll never fit them in.

Education's End by Anthony Kronman, former Dean of Yale Law School, is an excellent analysis--I highly recommend it--of a critical issue that affects the framework of American society. A thoughtfully planned and carefully balanced argument about the role of the humanities in education, Education's End exposes the current shortcomings in higher education. For Kronman, the big rocks--the things of value--in education are the questions: What is the meaning of life? How should we spend our time? How can we succeed in the art of living? For much of our history U.S. education included the big rocks; they were part of a college education. Today, this is no longer true.

Kronman reviews what he believes to be an unfortunate path traveled by higher education in the U.S., breaking down the regrettable history into three eras. First, during the antebellum era beginning with the opening of Harvard University, there was a focus on God, a Christian perspective, and an emphasis on "the ancient model of virtue and order." Second, during the era of secular humanism following the Civil War, there was a focus on family and country, and an emphasis on "modern ideas of individuality and creative freedom." And third, during our modern era, there is a focus on political correctness and the research ideal. The research ideal places an emphasis on research that restricts scholarship to a narrow field of specialization, and it requires publishing something new with the understanding that any contribution will be superseded.

Chapter 3 (The Research Ideal) is excellent, but Kronman is really just beginning his critique. In Chapter 4 (Political Correctness), he skillfully, but tactfully, slays the three-headed monster of modern political correctness: diversity, multiculturalism, and constructivism (post modernism). After explaining why the natural and social sciences are better able to survive in the current environment, he peels away the layers of misguided intentions that appear to support political correctness exposing the problems for the humanities. For example, discussing why multiculturalism is unacceptable, he explains how "an internal dialogue" carried on by each succeeding generation of thinkers and authors throughout western history offered a unique teaching opportunity that is unavailable in other cultures. Highlighting the weaknesses with each aspect of political correctness, Dean Kronman argues that the status quo short-changes teachers, denies students, and deprives society of a value previously enjoyed during the era of secular humanism.

Kronman's arguments are frequently understated, but this book is nothing less than an indictment of how the humanities are taught today: we prepare students for careers, but not for life. Also, he does more than just lament this failure today to ask the big questions. He blames the academy for abandoning a trust respected during the era of secular humanism that it carried forward until the 1960s, keeping alive a continuity--through the humanities--of teaching a curriculum that reached back to the classical era. He explains that this tradition of arts and letters continued a legacy that allowed students to see themselves as a participant in the "great conversation." As part of that squandered inheritance, Kronman notes the diminished role of the humanities in education today. In the past, humanity teachers felt qualified and confident enough to guide their students through questions about the meaning of life and about how to spend their lives. Unfortunately today few, if any, humanities professors feel it appropriate to ask or instruct on the big question.

This is a passionate, personal book which every parent of a college-bound youth ought to read. It consists of philosophical arguments, so it's not easy reading. Here are the subject headings: "1. Humanities--Study and teaching (Higher)--United States. 2. Life. 3. Meaning (Philosophy)--Study and teacher (Higher)--United States. 4. Humanities--Philosophy. " You may not find a stronger, more straightforward description of how Political Correctness gained control of American higher education than Anthony T. Kronman offers here, nor a more convincing philosophical argument for the malignancy of Political Correctness. Kronman's desire to save higher education burns through the book even though his philosophical arguments are bolstered by few specific illustrations.

Kronman was Dean of the Law School at Yale while Richard Brodhead was Dean of Yale College, and Kronman now teaches in Yale College. Brodhead's name is not in Kronman's index and I don't see it anywhere in the book. One has to assume that Kronman's critique of political correctness in the humanities is derived in large part from what he saw going on in Yale College. The publication date of EDUCATION'S END is 25 September 2007, long after Richard Brodhead as President of Duke University had become the poster boy for Political Correctness gone wholly amuck during the false rape charges against three lacrosse players. Three weeks earlier, on 4 September 2007, Stuart Taylor, Jr., and KC Johnson published what will stand as the definitive first-generation book on the Duke case: UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT: POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AND THE SHAMEFUL INJUSTICES OF THE DUKE LACROSSE RAPE CASE. Brodhead's "moral meltdown" and his capitulation to the ferocious embodiments of Political Correctness, the Gang of 88, described powerfully here, was not news to bloggers and other followers of events at Duke. On 10 September 2007 NEWSWEEK described "a rush to judgment" in which "Brodhead and [rogue prosecutor] Nifong had an almost willful disregard for the facts." Brodhead's rushing to the wrong judgment in the name of Political Correctness had been public knowledge for many months.

Therefore Kronman's silence about Brodhead as Dean of Yale College and President of Duke University looks strategic, a decision in which collegiality trumps specificity, especially when the publisher is to be Yale University Press. Kronman's fine arguments would have been far more persuasive if he had admitted that there was an Elephant loose in his book, a rogue Elephant he never acknowledges, Richard Brodhead.

The weakest chapter in EDUCATION'S END is "The Research Ideal," and I have to assume that Kronman derived his opinions of the research ideal from what he saw around him at Yale College. He could hardly have had a worse place to start from if he wanted to understand what scholarship in the humanities once was, still ought to be, and still can be. Instead, working (without citing examples) from what he sees around him, he denounces "the research ideal," seeing it as something that "devalues the communion with past writers and artists to which secular humanism attached such importance."

Kronman thinks that the fixation on research in American universities has wantonly destroyed a valuable "set of beliefs" that "secular humanism" had preserved from "the old classicist belief in the possibility of conveying to each generation the (timeless) knowledge" one needs to meet "the question of life's meanings." The "modern research ideal," Kronman says, drained this set of beliefs "of their plausibility and appeal" by "championing a new set of values that contradict the values of recurrence, connection, and closure on which secular humanism was founded." "Secular humanism" was based on "unoriginality," he says, in "a stable repertoire of values that form a recurrent framework of choice in each generation."

Kronman is sure that the "research ideal" wrongly "elevates originality to a position of supreme importance." He holds that the research ideal "sharply devalues the communion with past writers and artists to which secular humanism attached such importance." He exalts the "notion of a timeless conversation in which the great voices of the past still speak with undiminished authority, that never concludes and never changes." He opposes that notion to the terrible loss he thinks is suffered by those who live under the research ideal. He thinks this because he sees the research ideal as being based on "the ethic of supersession." Each scholar supersedes the last and is in turn superseded, according to Kronman. This whole chapter must seem baffling to anyone who does not know the history of "research" at Yale University and other great schools in the last half century and a little more.

I think Kronman does not understand what has happened to "the research ideal" and the practice of research in the humanities at his own Yale. He does not understand that what has been passed off as "research" since the early 1950s is not genuine research. He does not understand that conversations with the writers of the past may be enlivened whenever your research can liberate something about their form and meaning that had been suppressed and lost. He does not understand research as a grand cooperative in which you triumph by augmenting the work of others rather than superseding their work.

Yale was once the leader in Melville scholarship, in particular. Melville was "revived" in the 1920s. The first hardbound biography appeared in 1921, a careless one by Raymond Weaver, and a "critical biography" by Lewis Mumford (relying on Weaver) followed in 1929. In the 1930s a few people tried to clarify details about Melville's life, but Weaver pretty much went unchallenged, even though he all but ignored whole decades of that life. Then the Yale Professor Stanley T. Williams, having completed a two-volume biography of Washington Irving, made a momentous decision. Seeing that no one had done rigorous biographical research on Melville, he decided that he would put any good graduate student who came along onto episodes in Melville's life or other topics such as Melville's reading of classical literature or the Bible. You wanted to work on Emerson's sermons? Tough.

The War intervened, but over the decade of the 1940s and just into the 1950s a remarkable cadre of young men and women got their PhDs at Yale with Melville dissertations under Williams. Their only peers were Wilson Heflin, who got his PhD at Vanderbilt, and the ineffable, magnificent film scholar Jay Leyda. The great Yale students of Williams include Walter E. Bezanson, Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Harrison Hayford, Elizabeth Foster, William H. Gilman, Nathalia Wright, Merrell Davis--people who did basic archival research but also people who worked intelligently with philosophical and historical ideas. Bezanson read CLAREL all by himself, 18,000 lines, and understood it so that anyone else has only added and clarified and adjusted his emphases. Sealts showed what classical philosophy meant to Melville. Harrison Hayford, at the simplest level, listed Melville's known meetings with Hawthorne and described their relationship. Gilman worked on Melville's early life in relation to his REDBURN--worked with family letters in the New York Public Library and other collections, worked more rigorously than anyone else has done since then. I inherited the box of his dissertation notes, and long after his death found in them information he had not published about something as important as Melville's purchase not of a house in NYC but of "an indenture of lease" on a house. Davis worked on Melville's third book, MARDI, mustering sources and describing Melville's shifting intentions for it. Davis's dissertation was published by Yale UP. Davis and Gilman collected Melville's letters for an edition. Elizabeth Foster read that difficult prose book, THE CONFIDENCE-MAN. Nathalia Wright worked on Melville and the Bible.

These scholars were magnificent. They had to work independently to some extent, holding cards close to the waistcoat, since anything that became widely known could not go to make up their dissertation (Kronman is right about "originality" in this sense), but once they had their PhDs in hand they cooperated even more than they had done before. Then they put their work on hold for a decade, through the mid and late 50s, as they established academic careers and sometimes families, though Davis and Gilman pushed on until their LETTERS appeared (Yale UP) in 1960 and Hayford and Sealts pushed on with the manuscript of the unfinished BILLY BUDD, SAILOR until they published it in 1962 (University of Chicago).

In the late 1940s a revolutionary new approach to literature, the New Criticism, invaded English departments all over the country and by the early to mid 1950s had triumphed. Reacting to careless and sentimental use of biography to explain literature, the New Critics decreed that biographical evidence was irrelevant to interpretation. Teachers were to teach "the text itself" (whatever that was, I finally asked). One of the leaders of the New Criticism, Cleanth Brooks, was brought to Yale (where he lived to insist rightly that his own training had been scholarly and that he did not recognize himself in what he was later blamed for). The retirement of Stanley T. Williams from Yale in 1953 and his succession by Charles F. Feidelson as the chief teacher of nineteenth-century American Literature is emblematic of what happened to scholarship in English departments everywhere. Thereafter, through the 1950s and afterwards, critics of Melville talked about the unity of PIERRE and the unity of THE CONFIDENCE-MAN and gave "Readings" of this or that story. They wrote books on Melville's short stories in which they did not think of trying to ascertain the order in which they were written as distinguished from the order in which they were published (or rejected). They did almost nothing that I would call "work."

Yet generations of New Critics and their resurrections under new names have fostered the idea that they were doing "research" (even though they had repudiated scholarship) and Kronman buys into their terminology, even when he is skeptical of the results: "In some fields, such as history, scholarly research has produced valuable results--an accumulation of discoveries that has deepened our understanding of events and personalities. But in other fields, like literary criticism, it is not at all clear that the sequence of interpretations championed by scholars of succeeding generations constitutes a similarly progressive body of knowledge," what "a skeptic might describe as the product of fashion or fad." Yet Kronman talks about the practitioners of this literary criticism as "scholars" when he says that their work "fails to accumulate in the same incremental and progressive way" that research in the sciences can do, but instead merely moves "around in a circle." He does not acknowledge the difference between scholarship, which adds grains to the heap of knowledge, and criticism, which toys with information. What he thinks is scholarship is merely criticism. There has been too little scholarship in the Yale English Department in the last half century for him to recognize it or even to take note of its absence.

The repudiation of biographical information by the New Critics in the 1940s and 1950s and their successors through the New Historicists in the 1980s and 1990s, after half a century and more (when a New Critic teacher at Yale, say, might teach his own successor at Yale), led to a professoriate which far too often not only did not know how to conduct archival research responsibly but was skeptical that any new information could ever be gained from archival research. In the 1950's, critics considered biographical evidence irrelevant to interpretation; by the 1990s their heirs--direct heirs, their students or the students of their students--behaved as if no new discoveries could come from biographical research. Because of Yale's incestuous policy of hiring its own, students at Yale like Brodhead in ensuing decades were further and further from scholarship. In 2002 Brodhead (by saying that only I surmised the existence of Melville's volume of poems in 1860) made it clear that he did not believe anything could be learned from archival research in the distant past (almost all the now known documents about the 1860 POEMS were printed in 1922) and certainly did not believe I could have learned anything new for the biography by transcribing old letters. Assistant, associate, and full professors wasted their time, and some even wasted brilliant minds, over decades, while defending airy but airless theoretical constructs. (After suffering painfully in silence for five years I published an account of Brodhead's trashing my reputation as a scholar; see Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 62 [June 2007], 29-47.)

The Yale graduate Paul Lauter is the father of the HEATH ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, the ultimate in diversity (taking priority over quality) and general Political Correctness. I sought him out in the early 1980s because he was talking about reading widely in American literature, about wanting to see what was there out by a great variety of writers rather than hunting up one more neglected novel by a "major" writer to teach. I was with him when boxes of his RECONSTRUCTING AMERICAN LITERATURE arrived in the dark bowels of the Americana, and I possess the first inscribed copy of it. We parted company--over the issue of respecting quality (I want to spend most of my time on great writers); over the issue of politicizing literature (making Melville, for example, just exactly as up-to-date on racial issues as the latest critic thinks he or she is); and over the Politically Correct insistence on celebrating victimization (as part Cherokee and part Choctaw I refuse to say that reading a weak poem by a part Cherokee raises my self-esteem).

But Lauter told me a great story which he later put into print. In 1953 Yale students showed up for the American Literature class with notes on history, biography, and bibliography from Williams's old courses and found the notes were useless. That day Charles Feidelson talked about cloud imagery in Emerson or some other New Critical fetish. From that date, American literary scholarship was dead at Yale. Feidelson's students, I assume among them Richard Brodhead, never learned the basic aims and methods of scholarship, as opposed to criticism. Brodhead did not learn those aims and methods from his teacher R. W. B. Lewis, who (defying the dominant literary approach) wrote a biography of Edith Wharton.

I took a course from Hayford at Northwestern University in 1961 and in 1962 decided to do a dissertation on the politics of Melville and his family. As it turned out, my archival work on Melville and politics, and then my archival work on Melville in later decades, made me a belated member of the whole Yale group scholars who in the 1940s had set out to discover what could be known factually about Herman Melville (made me academic nephew to Williams's Yale students, but also a younger colleague of Wilson Heflin and ultimately the literary heir of Jay Leyda). I was uniquely positioned to understand how Yale (and by extension the Ivy League and all the imitative schools) changed from the 1940s beginning in the early 1950s up to the present.

When I went to the archives, starting in 1962, I found, repeatedly, that no one had asked to see certain documents since the 1940s. I should have realized what was happening in 1962, when I met two candidates for the PhD at Columbia. They were amused that Northwestern University was offering doctorates. They were curious about what kind of dissertation I was writing that would involve going to New York City. When I told them I was going to the New York Public Library or the New-York Historical Society every day to read nineteenth-century newspapers and copy out nineteenth century letters about Melville and politics they were dumbstruck. They saw they had a great story to regale their fellow students and Richard Chase with at Columbia, this guy from the Midwest going to the libraries every day and looking at old newspapers and manuscripts! In 1962, a graduate student going to the archives as if the New Criticism had never triumphed! Coming all the way to New York to do it! They were too polite to laugh outright, but the way they kept looking at each other and rolling their eyes showed they thought this was the quaintest damned thing they had ever heard. It probably was. The research required by my dissertation topic pushed me out of step with my sprightly contemporaries. I just didn't know how far out of step I was. I was too happy working in the archives to worry about how unfashionable I was, but over the next decades I sat next to fewer and fewer academics at the microfilm readers and more and more bookies and genealogists.

Kronman had no example in hand of how scholarship really works when he insisted that any good scholar always supersedes earlier scholars (wholly supersedes, he seemed to think). What really happens in scholarship is described in the article in Nineteenth-Century Literature cited above. There I expose Brodhead's sly insinuation that I invented THE ISLE OF THE CROSS (1853) and his outright lie that only I "surmised" the existence of POEMS (1860). These slurs, as I say in the article, were repeated even more viciously by Andrew Delbanco and Elizabeth Schultz, two other critics who had never done archival work on Melville. In fact, everyone had known about POEMS since 1922, when Meade Minnigerode published almost all the documents. I built, in the discussion of both THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS, on earlier scholarship. Hayford in 1946 had shown from old and newly discovered letters that Melville had started a book based on the Agatha Hatch story and that in April 1853 his mother had said he was far along with it. Hayford had no way of being sure Melville had finished it. In 1960 Davis and Gilman had Melville's letter to the Harpers in November 1853 which referred to the book he had been prevented from publishing earlier that year. Sealts in the 1980s worked with Leyda's documents to narrow the completion of the book to May and Melville's carrying it to New York from Pittsfield to June 1853. (All four of these scholars, I remind you, were Yale PhDs from the 1940s.) In 1987 I found the title THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and the day of completion, May 22. Leyda was in his prolonged miserable dying when I found the title, but I telephoned Hayford, then Sealts. Can you imagine their joy at my discovery? And can you imagine my joy at their being alive and alert to hear what I had found? That's what scholarship is, the building upon the work of your predecessors. Did I supersede Hayford, Davis and Gilman, and Sealts, not to mention Minnigerode and Willard Thorp and Leyda and others? NO, no, no. I vindicated them. You could have asked Hayford and Sealts, back then. They did not declare themselves superseded. Instead, they felt triumphant. This is the real "research ideal" in action.

In real scholarship when you add a valuable piece to a structure, even when you add, in Melville's terms, the capstone to an edifice, you are collaborating with great scholars of the past, you are not superseding them. It's just that very few people now do real research. And all of the great Yale Melville scholars of the 1940s are dead now, except Bezanson: the heroic exercise of reading CLAREL did him great good.

Kronman is misled by what passes for scholarship. What he sees around him at Yale is not scholarship, and of course he was in no position to know the weaknesses in the one book where Richard Brodhead purports to be doing something scholarly, the 1986 THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE. This book begins with a strangely convoluted excuse for the obvious Political Incorrectness of limiting the students of Hawthorne to famous male writers. Brodhead never asked, "Who attended the School of Hawthorne?" If he had, he would have found interesting women to write about as well as other men he did not know were in the same class at the school of Hawthorne. Brodhead wrote the book without doing the basic research--without reading widely in American fiction of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. This is not a case where you need to start with working through boxes of holograph letters in archives: first you just need to read a lot of novels by a lot of people, not just writers designated now as the greatest. The books were right there in Sterling Memorial Library.

You can see why Kronman would have been confused at Yale by what passes for scholarship and "the research ideal." To my mind "The Research Ideal" (Chapter 3) weakens the book, but the rest is so good that I urge everyone to read the whole thing. Kronman makes a powerful contribution to the study of the origins and the malignity of Political Correctness. May the next person to write on Political Correctness learn from EDUCATION'S END, amplify it, correct it, and not supersede it.