Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts can Revitalize American Education.

• Author: Young, Cathy

The debate over the politics and standards of American higher education began with a frontal assault by traditionalists--Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, Dinesh D'Souza--that made "political correctness" a household word. The academic left, stunned by its sudden exposure to the harsh glare of glasnost, was rather slow to respond, except in somewhat incoherent invective about fascists and reactionaries.

Now, Gerald Graff, a co-founder of Teachers for a Democratic Society, finally offers the lay audience an intelligent and engaging response to the attacks on the radical academic culture. Intelligent and engaging, however, does not always equal convincing.

The premise of Beyond the Culture Wars, summarized in the subtitle, "How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education," is simple enough. Graff, an English professor at the University of Chicago, argues that quarrels over the content and purpose of education--Are the traditional classics "the best which has been thought and said" or merely "privileged texts" by and for white males? Is art the work of individual creative imagination or a socially produced "inscription"?--are clearly a part of today's academy, whether we like it or not. So far, both academic radicals and academic traditionalists have responded by denying any validity to the other side. Instead of this mutual bashing, why not have a dialogue and get the students involved? Why not "teach the conflicts themselves, making them part of our object of study and using them as a new kind of organizing principle to give the curriculum the clarity and focus that almost all sides now agree it lacks"?

Far from undermining the vitality of the classics, Graff asserts, such debate can reinvigorate them. He offers an imaginary discussion between an older male professor, "OMP," who complains about his students' indifference to Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" (in which the poet urges his love to withdraw with him into a private idyll far from the "struggle and flight" of politics), and a young female professor, "YFP," who scorns the poem as "phallocentric discourse" relegating women to the function of consoling pompous males.

Is the poem an expression of universal human yearning, a male fantasy, or neither? Graff's point is that OMP's bored students may actually become interested in "Dover Beach" if they see that the poem is a subject of debate. He suggests that even the vague and bland notion of the "universality" of some values can be brought into sharper focus by challenges that force its defenders to come up with arguments rather than...