Customer Reviews

What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and "Bias" in Higher Education

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In her Amazon review of this book below, Ms. Malter chooses to dismiss its entire contents based on her own personally negative view of the Middle East Studies Department at Columbia U (which see portrays in so monolithic a manner as to defy reason). This reductive approach to what is ultimately an impressively sane and balanced consideration of the type of liberalism prevalent in most American humanities departments (as a member of one of them, I have to say that the descriptions are dead-on), seeks simply to shut down the extraordinarily useful and humane conversation that Berube is seeking to begin here. It therefore demonstrates precisely the sort of anti-intellectualism that Berube argues is threatening both the American university and democracy more generally. In a sense, Ms. Malter has proven Berube's point. I can't speak positively enough about this book, and I hope especially that it will be engaged by leftist and rightist extremists and not only the classic-liberal readers that Berube has tended to attract.

In "What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?", Michael Berube, a literature professor at Illinois and Penn, throws punches at conservative critics of higher education (guys like David Horowitz), paints a picture of the modern state college campus in the Midwest, and summarizes two of the courses he teaches.

The first portion of the book is mostly a summary of the conservative arguments against state sponsored higher education and his responses to them. Mostly his target is Horowitz, a verbal critic of higher education and the "liberal" bias. I found Berube's responses to be very well constructed and rational. His arguments (rightly) make Horowitz look like your standard Bill O'Reilly-style foolish conservative. He moves on and paints a fairly general overview of the standard political environment among college students (although, I found him somewhat unfair to Ayn Rand).

From there, Berube goes into extreme detail of the two courses which he teaches - a general literature course and an advanced postmodernism course. I found this part of the book painful and tough to work through, particularly for someone with a limited background in Postmodernism (67 pages on his postmodernism class alone). The function of these chapters, I gleaned, was to credit his students for being capable of digesting philosophical complexities and applying them to the modern world. In turn, crediting the liberal higher education system for it's success even in the face of students with often conservative views (such as a student, Stan, who wrote a paper in disagreement with Berube, but still received an A). These chapters also establish Berube as an antifoundationalist and humanist.

He tries to put all the pieces together in the final chapter, forming a moral argument for liberalism in general, and in-turn liberal higher education. After reading his extensive diatribe about postmodernism, his finale fell very short of being conclusive and, I feel, mostly rendered the entire previous 200-some pages as a waste. After presenting all of his arguments against (mostly) Horowitz, describing the educational environment, explaining his courses in extreme detail, and giving a primer on postmodernism he eventually just lobs out a moral argument that we all owe a debt to one another, and that's why public higher education is essential.

The entire second half of this book could have been greatly abbreviated - I felt that his arguments in favor of public higher education in the first half of the book were *better* then the final summary of liberalism that he concludes with and his in depth synopsis of his postmodernism class.

The first eighty or so pages of this book are well-worth reading. The author takes on many of the specific claims about the "liberal bias" in education and refutes a few of the attempts to paint colleges as dangerous places for students to "come out" as a conservative.

Then the author moves into a discussion of some of the books he teaches, but the literary criticism is only tangentially related to the topic of classroom politics or bias, or, for that matter, liberalism.

The material on postmodernism is interesting and has a political element, but would be better placed in a primer on pomo.

Finally, the last chapter is a ringing endorsement of the sort of liberalism that has been out of fashion since the Kennedy era but that is nonetheless safe. Thus pages applauding Social Security (the folks down at the local book club will nod and smile) but no comments about affirmative action, US military adventures, gay marriage or other more current issues. Their absence is conspicuous. The far left is dismissed as either a collection of lunatics or Bush fans in disguise (voting for Nader being equivalent to voting for Bush). And, of course, none of this has a thing to do with the liberal arts or charges of bias.

The book is at times well-focused and cogent. In other places, it is chatty, diffuse, and self-indulgent. This book would be twice as good if it were one third shorter.

On page 96, Professor Berube makes this false and terribly unfair comment: "Canadian professor J. Phillippe Rushton's belief in the genetic superiority of the white race." Rushton is the author of a scientific monograph, "Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective", in which he discusses what is know about race differences and how they evolved, and offers a theory to explain the observed pattern of physical and behavior differences observed in whites, blacks, and Orientals.

What's wrong with Berube's characterization? First, the race differences Rushton writes about are a matter of scientific observation, not "belief". Second, he writes number of separate physical and behavioral traits, not of overall superiority or inferiority of any one race. Third, according to Rushton's analysis, whites are uniformly intermediate between blacks and Orientals! [See Table 1, on page 19 of the Abridged edition, searchable on this website.] It would take a great deal of special pleading and tortuous logic to extract a "genetic superiority of the white race" out of this data. Needless to say, Rushton does not attempt this task.

Liberals like Berube may find repellant the empirical fact that significant race differences exist in such matters as intelligence and brain size, but it is not kosher to shoot the messengers who report such news.

This is a strange book, a hodgepodge of topics, a little bit of autobiography, a little bit
of worry that the secret police will come to take away his son, some philosophical debating,
assorted academic anecdotes, and even some words about the apparent topic of the book.

The author is also strange. I have never before noticed an author post replies to reviews.
This is not necessarily bad, but it is unusual. Perhaps this review will draw a comment, also.
Perhaps it will stop the comments, by pointing them out.

The title is "What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?" and the question mark is part of the title.
The subtitle is "Classroom Politics and 'Bias' in Higher Education" and the inner quotes are
part of the subtitle. I've seen lots of attacks on liberal educators, some of which seemed
justified and some of which turned out to be false. The quoted "bias" seemed to indicate a
debunking or counterattack, so I was immediately interested.

Chapter one is personal. The author had an outspoken conservative student in a class. He is shown
as disruptive. The author treated him fairly. In chapter two, the author debunks three claims
of liberal academic misbehavior. So far he has me convinced there is at least one fair liberal
professor and no more than 99.44% of the conservative complaints are justified. Well, it's a
start. Maybe there will be more.

The author is a skilled writer and rhetorician. Here and through most of the book he lines up
a few facts or beliefs as if the next line was going to be "therefore <conservative person/idea
is <wrong/bad/evil/whatever" but he does not write that. He just goes on as if he had. He has
plausible deniability.

There are published reports that professors are far more likely to be registered Democrats than
registered Republicans, and far more likely to consider themselves liberal than conservative.
The reports are attacked because the sample consisted of "famously liberal" schools and subjects.

The author spends over 200 pages on chapters entitled "In the Liberal Faculty Lounge," "Students
In and Out of Class," "Race, Class, Gender," and "Postmodernism," where we learn he once gave
an "A" and a strong recommendation for grad school to a conservative. I found most of them
interesting but not relevant to the topic. Notice the "once" earlier in this paragraph. That is
a mild example of the tactics in this book. Stupid comments in class are only from conservatives.
Republicans, religious folks, and the residents of the benighted communities in red states that
are not college towns get adjectives in front of their names, including "Knuckle dragging." They
do not have ideas or aspirations; they have delusions and fantasies.

The final chapter gets rough. Any attempt to keep Social Security solvent is an attempt to
destroy it. Conservatives hate Social Security. It is immoral to oppose government run and
funded health care. Liberals are the only ones that want clean air and water, and good schools.
We have "the deliberate malice of conservatives" ... in various departments. "...religious
conservatives believe that a just and omnipotent deity will consign the liberals to unending
torment in hell, where they belong." The omitted words do not change the meaning at all.

The book ends with a change of topic, reasons to defend and cherish the ideals of liberalism as
they once existed, a search for truth, the examined life, a willingness to consider different
viewpoints, and many other virtues. This is not the liberalism that needs defending. Few are
attacking it, and many would argue that most of them are members of the radical left. Rather,
it is what those bothered by ultraliberal professors are being accused of attacking.

The author gets credit for admitting Ward Churchill and a few others are guilty. But he also
claims school administrations don't count. Perhaps that is why FIRE is not in the index. They
have sued over 200 schools for speech codes and other illiberal behavior and win 90% of the cases.
There is no discussion of stolen conservative newspapers, with administration support. There is
no mention of shouting down conservative speakers.

So, there are good reasons why many people are upset about some schools, and some of the attacks
are false. I'd like to know about more false attacks and details about gray areas in other cases.
Instead I was told that liberal educators are close to perfect and conservatives are immoral,
evil, and wrong in every way, except for one that got an "A". Michael Moore and Howard Dean can
tell me that in fewer words.

That a reviewer can label his review, as does the guy below me, "thesisless": that a reviewer can so use the commonly false argument that "dis has nuttin to do widdat": indicates the failure, in fact, of the teaching of the liberal arts, and, this failure is due, I fear, to Berube's Rortyan conception of what liberalism means, which is shared by many professors.

First: to use "thesisless" as if "thesis" were an ordinary reifiable signifier, as if it makes sense to speak of a "good" paper as being thesisful, just chock full of thesis (uncountable noun? theses? or shall it be theseses? o dear) indicates that, unfortunately, the reviewer stayed awake in a typical, all too typical, English class, in which the teacher said something brutal, such as "I can predict your grade based on your thesis", and in which thesis was ripped from its Hegelian and dialectical context, in which you can sensibly speak only of an antithesis and an *aufhebung*: a context on which most State College philosophy professors, and some English professors (but not Berube, to be sure), are clue-challenged.

It was indeed at demi-universities such as Roosevelt University and DePaul that professors scrawled on my papers, "dis has nuttin to do widdat", "dis is not relevant", and "philosophy doesn't care about dis". It was at Princeton, where I sort of wormed my way in through the woodwork in my thirties, that Gilbert Harman wrote instead on my paper that philosophy was interested in everything.

Trivially, everything has everything to do with everything else, as Wittgenstein implies in the Tractatus when he asks how can logic, all-embracing logic, which mirrors the world, content itself with such crotchets and conveniences.

Ecologically, in 1969, underarm deodorant had little to do with the South Pole and the ozone hole.

To Berube's credit, he does note how the teacher of literature has to be interested in things like how to catch whales: everything, in fine. There is a form of reading which closes the door, in which Emily Dickinson's valves of attention are closed; Jane Austen-ism, in which Mr. Napoleon is only most inconvenient, comes to mind: I think it's a mistake, but Berube doesn't make it. It seems to be a feminist specialty, fostered however not by feminist ideology but by the elective system in which students are less forced to read the canon.

Yet a grade and pre-wealth centered educational system continues to churn out corporate servants who have learned only to reify and "focus" and who are suckers for late-middle aged returns to conservatism because their "liberal" professors can't defend liberalism.

Berube's defense of liberalism is based on Rorty who had to do great violence to a text (Shakespeare's Measure for Measure) to make his case in "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature". Rorty presented Isabella's phrase, "glassy essence" as something which liberals can no longer appeal to but to my knowledge took no responsibility for discussion of what it means, in figurative language to be sure, to have a glassy essence which Clarence Thomas apparently violated in Anita Hill, or one which would prefer people not to die through lack of health insurance.

If liberalism is a lifestyle choice, there is no need to pursue health insurance when the going gets tough, and one has TIAA/CREF. If liberalism is a life style choice, if it cannot be argued all the way down, the conversation can always turn (in the words of New York conceptual artist, Jenny Holzer) to living long enough to have fun.

If on the other hand, liberalism is a Unitarian piety based on religious belief its shelf life depends on affiliation with a fashionable church.

What if liberalism were the whole deal? What if coherence of speaking and thought depended upon liberal decency all the way down? What if a consequence of neoconservatism was the burning of libraries while US troops protected the Oil Ministry? What if androgyne ways of thinking, concern for the environment, and rejection of the corporate/consumerist lifestyle were the glassy essence?

What if Zizek is right, and the saint is one who follows his desire only to find it in the desire of others? Zizek would be locked up were he damnfool enough to seek tenure in America, but this simply indicates, to me, the triviality of an American conversation about What It All Means, a conversation conducted by people not protected against the tragedies of life, perhaps, but one nonetheless supported by a tenured economic security: a conversation which ceases, in my experience, when that security is withdrawn (you seldom see former English profs turned car salesmen that continue to be liberal).

Simply put, liberalism cannot without strain support anything BUT liberalism, democratic socialism, and William F. Buckley's genteel conservatism. For liberalism, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly are abominations who need nothing more than the tolerance afforded them under an original reading of the United States constitution; men on whom the cops should be called if they or their followers get rowdy in a university. Students who spout their garbage should be flunked.

I paid child support for twenty years and made no effort to evade my family obligations post-divorce because I'm a liberal; I could NOT use survival of the fittest "conservatism" as do many men to excuse myself. My kids weren't the atomic and "free, self-determining" actors of economic theory, no more than my wife was, saddled as she was with their care. Yet under Berube's Rortian perspective, liberalism is just a lifestyle choice. To declare that economic liberalism was inapplicable to child support was just me being fashionable.

That's nonsense.

Given "the evolution of productive forces", anything to the right of liberalism MEANS university thought control, war as the health of the state, and homelessness. Coherence is based on dialogic tolerance in which difference is acknowledged and if possible resolved.

I have no special brief for fashionable causes thought exemplary of liberalism. For example, insofar as feminism is implied by humanism, I'm a feminist. But I see no reason for allowing women permanent victim rights oddly sorted with dominatrix feminism out of the blue as it were, even if this were to be fashionable.

The possibility of narrative, the possibility of linking A to B (getting for example from Sartre's mid-century existentialism to an acknowledgement that Simone de Beauvoir's status was a Spaniard in the Works) isn't itself just another grand narrative which pomos can just reject as potentially Stalinist.

Instead, narratives grand and ungrand depend on the possibility of coherence.

Berube, in an excellent and readable book, fails to address a concern which SDS members like me raised in the 1960s but which has been drowned out by a post-Sixties reaction. This is the theory that universities have been co-opted and are permitted to thrive as a fourth estate only insofar as they produce "tracked" grades and levels of students, some of whom have learned that philosophy and literature are interested in everything, and go on to the Senior Executive Service at the CIA, able to undermine countries in ways deeper than damnation because they see relationships...and others who can write "thesisless" with a straight face in an Amazon review, or an employee performance review, as in "Mary's email was thesisless".

The conversation dies out because it is unable to address the elephant in the living room, and this is corporate power.

In the absence of a deep, historical defense of liberalism as the reason for the existence of a possibility of discussing liberalism in the first place, students will not bother to inform themselves of usage by reading, and understanding that it's probably a solecism to say thesisless. Basically, they will make their way through a fog of unrelated signifiers as best they can.

So far find it very readable for an academic book. Fascinating and credible.

Berube's book is useful not for what it claims to teach but for what it reveals about the deficincies of the leftist academic takeover he is defending. Like so many of his colleagues, he thinks he has discovered the wheel, only he gives it a long fancy complex name and fails to recognize the similarities to the old original.
Many English professors these days reject anything prior to 1968 as useful for any purpose other than to expose the sexism, racism, imperialism, and altogether evil "bourgois individualism" of earlier thinking and earlier texts. But if Berube was more than passingly familiar with the intellectual history of his own culture, he would recognize in his "Foundationalist" "antifoundatinalist" debate a recapitulation of the debate between Rome and the reformers in the movement that created bourgois individualism, the Reformation. Today, Derrida asks, "Is there a presence in the text." THen the issue was, is there a presence in the host? Catholics claimed that there was; Protestants said the wafer of communion was but a human wafer. The elites of that society stood with the traditional view because it buttressed their own social status: "Obviously, the wafer isn't Christ, but these are the lies you have to appease the stupid peasants with. Pass the vino, please." The reformers held out the hope that a true presence might be found, the very thing that Berube searches for in his final chapter when he tries to establish a basis for belief.
He quotes, for instance, on p. 258, a post-modernist who writes "Know and acknowledge thy situatedness." The old fashioned word for this situatedness that we need to acknowledge is "sin." No, sin was not about sex. It was instead a recognition of our total entrapment in conditioning, in what today Berube calls contingency. The Reformation debates over predestination were debates about this very contingency. And the fact that we are all programmed into believing and feeling things we know not what is why Jonathan Edwards called us all "sinners in the hands of an angry God." Everything the French post-modernists have to say about contingency can be found in Jonathan Edwards' 1754 "Freedom of the Will." That is where Berube's "theo-ry" course should have started, with "theo-logy."
But if Berube and his fellow travelers were to see this, they would have to admit two things they cannot face. 1) that the texts of the past, even the religious texts of the past, have already been there and done that, and we should be reading Calvin, Edwards, Augustine, not Derrida.
Berube briefly quotes Cromwell warning us that we "may be wrong," but he does not follow up on the implications. He can't. Otherwise, he would be forced to go back and teach the texts of dead white males like the Puritans, like Edwards, like Melville, Faulkner, Hawthorne. Can't do that! Ain't pc.
2) he would be forced to admit that his reason for rejecting the religious answer, a foundationalist answer, is that, just as with the high priests in the past, the benefits for him socially and economically are too great to give up the socially constructed reality he regrets is all we have. He claims, good progressive that he is, to want to "wriggle free of long conventional beliefs about caste and class, pharoah and slave, lord and serf..." Yet he never tells us about Tenured and adjunct. He himself sits at the top of a medieval hierarchy and benefits from it, and votes to keep those with whom he disagrees out of it, and then tells us how eqalitarian and "liberal" he is. So did the priests that Luther condemned.
Solomon was right: there is nothing new under the sun, just new ways of repeating the old self-serving crap. Students today do not need all this French snooty post-modern Francobabble. Let them go back to the roots of America's bourgois individualism, to the Reformation, and the debates which followed from it. The answer is less in a non-American textual discourse, but in a deeper appreciation of the real message of WASP male mainstream texts.
And this is the reason why the older Protestant discourse is preferable to the Francababble of post-modernism. THeirs was the language that informed our culture, both literary and political. THeirs is the way most of our citizens know these ideas. If the job of a teacher is to communicate to his or her students, then the language that the texts use and that a majority of the students already know and respect is a better medium than the elitist Francobabble of PostModernism which instead builds a wall of incomprehension between teachers and students.

I'm a liberal, and I sympathize neither with the religious right nor with the irreligious right.

Michael Berube is intelligent, and I certainly would not mind having him for a teacher. But I do not like this book. And I do not recommend it.

The problem Berube seems weakest at addressing is the support of right-wing aggression by the political left. And the best example of this is the infamous Middle East Studies department at Columbia University. The people there often substitute dishonest propaganda for scholarly work. And that propaganda is in favor of a very illiberal cause, namely the obliteration of human rights for the Jews of the Middle East.

At Columbia, things got so bad that a movie ("Columbia Unbecoming") was made about it when university officials refused to address the problem at all. Not surprisingly, people on the political right have used this to score points. Well, there are many possible responses to that, and I like Berube's the least.

In the case of Columbia, a committee to look into the matter was formed. But it consisted mostly of friends or political allies of the members of the Middle East Studies department. Not surprisingly, the result was a total whitewash.

What will happen at Columbia? Well, some people who get accepted at several schools will have one more reason to turn down Columbia. Turning down Columbia is nothing new: I was accepted at Columbia as well as some schools that are ranked higher than it, and I picked the highest ranked school that would take me. On the other hand, had the Middle East Studies department at the school I picked been totally out of line (and even had I known that it were), that would not have stopped me from going there. Most people who want to go to Columbia will still go there. And they may be afraid to speak truth to power, but they will still speak the truth to each other. In the long run, Columbia will be somewhat weakened by the antics of its Middle East Studies department, but that is about it. And eventually, there will probably be enough of a reaction from within that Columbia will improve its Middle East Studies department.

But Berube doesn't say this. Instead, he defends the Middle East Studies department, implying that the whitewash report ought to convince us that it isn't so bad! And he shows strong disapproval of the organization Campus Watch for naming some of the people who were most guilty of such violations of academic standards in the department: after all, this could put these professors in personal danger!

While I do not want to put people in personal danger, I think it is an essential element of freedom of speech to be able to criticize published work and even to criticize the teachings of university professors. And that is all the more so when such teachings are dishonest and unscholarly. But that's not the only reason why I deplore what Berube says here. I also am aghast at the way he ignores this specific instance the danger of having university professors turn their classrooms into forums for spouting dishonest political propaganda (in other fields, he's certainly not in favor of such academic malfeasance). And if he's against allowing people to complain about this, I think he is guilty of the very thing he says he's worried about.

Moreover, I think I would like this book more if Berube had been honest about how serious the problem is with the Middle East Studies department at Columbia. Not only did he tell only one side of the story, he virtually omitted the fact that there was even another side. The overall effect was extraordinarily misleading. That kind of thing destroys Berube's credibility as far as I am concerned: on a topic I know plenty about Berube was way off, so I can't trust him all that much on topics I am far less familiar with.