Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking [Hardcover]

Professor David Bromwich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 23, 1992

Liberal education has been under siege. Far-right ideologies in journalism and government have pressed for a uniform curriculum that focuses on the achievements of Western culture. Partisans of the academic left, who hold our culture responsible for the evils of society, have attempted to redress imbalances by fostering multiculturalism in education. In this book, David Bromwich criticises these positions and calls for a return to the tradition of independent thinking that he contends has been betrayed by both left and right. Under the guise of educational reform, says David Bromwich, these groups are in fact engaging in politics by other means.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this examination of the current volatile debate about liberal arts curricula, a professor of English and director of Yale's Whitney Humanities Center assails partisans of both right and left for fomenting "politics by other means." A respect for tradition intertwines here with a concise history of the collision of ideologies that began in the Reagan years, resulting in a compelling call for the return to "true education." In Bromwich's thesis, education teaches critical thinking, self-knowledge and tolerance for conflicting views, rather than adherence to a specific culture or support for intellectual conformity. He pays homage to such progenitors of these ideas as Mill, Hume and Burke, witheringly criticizing the present-day conservative stance and its spokesperson, George Will. But "institutional radicals" take their licks, too, in an instructive look at divagations in the study and teaching of literature. Well-written, deeply felt and far-reaching, Bromwich's examen addresses an issue of concern to many, with particular relevance for his peers and for students.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 296 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; First Edition edition (September 23, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300057024
• ISBN-13: 978-0300057027
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,761,813 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Important Study, August 23, 2010

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This review is from: Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking (Paperback)

This is a thoughtful book that will be of growing historic interest. Bromwich is examining aspects of American higher education from the vantage point of one in-between. Standing in the midst of a `movement' or cultural trend he records his concerns and speculates on that movement's etiology and future.

The movement is usually encapsulated now by the word `Theory'--that alteration of more traditional literary study under the influence of political or quasi-political thought, some of it traditional leftist thought, some of it more narrowly Nietzschean thought as mediated by a succession of French writers.

The subject of Bromwich's book is broader--higher education and group thinking, but identity politics and multiculturalism have proceeded hand-in-glove with the changes in the study of literature (or the substitution of quasi sociology for more traditional literary study).

From the present perspective we would probably say that Bromwich is an educational conservative but not a political conservative. One of his principal subjects here is tradition and its importance. He is a Burkean and asserts the importance of both Burke's vision of tradition and its importance for our professional and political lives.

He speaks at length of the current within literary thought that privileges the voices of the `unempowered', to the point that that view depreciates the thought of the empowered, without regard to the content or quality of that thought. In other words, he is examining a pattern that, ultimately, denies (or at least severely limits) freedom of speech and judges importance by the nature of the group issuing the thought rather than studying the thought itself on its own merits. This also, of course, has great implications for notions of individual identity. Judging people principally as members of the group to which they have somehow been assigned is ultimately a form of anti-intellectualism as well as an assault on our notions of the individual. Marxists, of course, have always been interested in seeing individuals as, first and foremost, members of classes and modern activists anxious to protect demographic perks resist the notion of people thinking of themselves as unique persons. Add the academic maneuvers on behalf of (fill in the blank)-Studies departments and the origin of something that appears odd at first glance becomes clarified.

Bromwich is particularly strong on our actual historical tradition. He notes that many of the positions taken by contemporary scholars (as of 1992) are based on an opposition to a previous tradition which, essentially, never existed. The forms of professional and individual behavior which constitute the great strawman against which contemporary voices react is just that, a strawman. Bromwich studied within the belly of the putative beast--at Yale, when Yale was not only the top English department in America but also the supposed flash point for a lot of the cultural change that has been alleged. It just didn't happen; it just wasn't that way, Bromwich argues, and as one who was in graduate school just prior to that time, with closer links to the `past' than Bromwich I can say that he is absolutely correct. The humanities professoriate, particularly the literary professoriate, was not some group of defenders of the hegemonic West, silencing all other voices in the interest of protecting privilege. It was, just as he argues, a vaguely chaotic group of heterogeneous individuals pursuing multiple approaches, mostly historical, some more formalist.

Bromwich's arguments are subtle and incisive, eschewing extremisms of the left and right and offering a clarifying vision of both what we have lost and the dangers and limitations of what we have, almost unconsciously, chosen in its stead.