The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas

This is supposed to be the riposte to all those bestselling conservative books attacking political correctness at universities--the shelf that begins with Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which was published in 1987 and whose title Lawrence Levine has chosen to mirror.

Levine, an eminent American historian, is at his best when he's debunking the debunkers of academe. He points out, first, that they paint with an extremely broad brush. The P.C. wars tend to pit lefty scholars against centrist-to-conservative popular intellectuals. Because the latter group, in pursuing its mission of upholding standards, doesn't have to meet academic standards of evidence, sweeping, unsupported generalizations--part of what Levine calls "a culture of hyperbole"--are the order of the day.

When Charles (Profscam) Sykes pronounces "tens of thousands of books and hundreds of thousands of journal articles" to be "worthless," Levine wants to know, legitimately, whether that's a conclusion he reached after reading them. In book after book, Molefi Asante, the engaging, voluble, and intellectually unreliable father of Afrocentrism, is unfairly presented as fairly representing the entire multicultural movement. All of social history--the effort to understand the lives of ordinary people in the past, whose practitioners include Levine himself--is typically caricatured as "victimology." African culture is discussed in shockingly dismissive terms, such as "the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe" (Hugh Trevor-Roper). Curriculum disputes are presented as historically unprecedented ideological assaults on what Levine calls "the Natural Order," when they are actually a "long-standing tradition in the academe" that conservatives have always taken part in too.

Levine presents what would be called in a university a "counter-narrative" to that of the anti-P.C. forces. The university curriculum, he points out, consisted exclusively of works from the classical period until late in the 19th century. Not only that, the writings of Homer and Plato were taught not as sublime explorations of humanity and morality, but as the basis of grammar lessons. Bloody battles were required to get Shakespeare and Milton into the canon and to have great books understood as literature. The notion of a "Western culture," whose main repository is a core of great books, dates only from the time of the First World War.

During the...