Editor’s Note: This review by Jeffrey Hart appeared in the April 30, 1990, issue of National Review. (You can access NR’s archives anytime here.)

Something is certainly stirring in academia, and it’s in the nature of a counter-revolution. All of a sudden, the awareness is general that our universities are being deconstructed, their curricula trashed and politicized, our moral and literary values forgotten. People outside the academy may think reports from the battlefront are exaggerated. An Ancient Mariner is telling them that books are being judged not on literary quality or historical accuracy, but on whether they are sexist, Eurocentric, or written by DWMS (Dead White Males). The texture of academic culture has unraveled before a sloganeering moralism. Disaster time.

The first counterattack came in The Closing of the American Mind, in which Allan Bloom called for a return to the real books and the major questions, and which evoked an enormous response, becoming a surprise bestseller. But more followed. We have had Jacques Barzun’s The Culture We Deserve, Peter Shaw’s The War against the Intellect, and Robert Alter’s The Pleasures of Reading, each of which did brilliant battle on behalf of the best that has been thought and said. We have had Charles Sykes’s Profscam, about the corruption of university teaching. I might mention my own Acts of Recovery, which engages these issues in a more oblique way by asserting acts of literary recovery amidst the academic devastation brought about by philistine ideology.

Now Roger Kimball weighs in with Tenured Radicals, another vigorous assault on academic radical chic. Mr. Kimball, managing editor of The New Criterion, certainly knows where the problems lie — at Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Duke to begin with, but also at other institutions across the nation.

It is no secret that the academic study of the humanities in this country is in a state of crisis. Proponents of deconstruction, feminist studies, and other politically motivated challenges to the traditional tenets of humanistic study have by now become the dominant voice in the humanities departments of many of our best colleges and universities… Their object is nothing less than the destruction of the values, methods, and goals of traditional humanistic study. This book is a chronicle of the progress of that destruction . . .whether one turns to Princeton University’s Elaine Showalter, who has called for a complete revolution in the teaching of literature to enfranchise “gender as a fundamental category of literary analysis,” or to University of Pennsylvania’s Houston Baker, who touts the Black Power movement of the 1960s as a desirable alternative to the white Western culture he sees enshrined in the established literary canon, or to Duke University’s Frederick Jameson, who propounds a Marxist vision of criticism that takes the “extreme position” that “the political perspective” is “the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation.”

What Mr. Kimball has written is the fifth book of Pope’s Dunciad, or else a guide to Swift’s Academy of Lagado. As Nietzsche said, “I philosophize with a hammer.” He meant that he was demolishing the plaster superstitions of his time. Mr. Kimball certainly wields his own hammer, often simply by quoting his targets in their own words. All of the really great literary critics have been masterful writers of prose, and, in the case of Horace, Coleridge, Samuel Johnson, and T. S. Eliot, of poetry as well. But Mr. Kimball can quote the following representative passage from the writing of professor Geoffrey Hartman of Yale. Be sure you are sitting down when you read this:

The fields of critical philosophy, literary theory, and history have an interlinguistic, not an extralinguistic, correlative; they are secondary in relation to the original, which is itself a previous text. They reveal an essential failure of disarticulation, which was already there in the original. They kill the original by discovering that the original was already dead. They read the original from the perspective of pure language, a language that would be entirely freed of the illusion of meaning.

Well, what can be said of Professor Hartman’s prose is that it certainly is freed of the illusion of serious meaning. And yet people actually get paid for this sort of thing.

Mr. Kimball knows, but does not quite spell out, that what lies behind all of this chic academic criticism is a vulgarly misunderstood moment in technical philosophy. Many of the major philosophers of the Enlightenment were concerned with defining the term “knowing.” Bishop Berkeley asked how we “know” that a tree fell in the forest if we did not hear it. David Hume asked how we “know” that a struck billiard ball will move. It does not suffice that it has moved a thousand times before; we do not “know” that it will move next time. All we “know” is probability. Descartes’s famous Cogito posits his existence on the basis that he thinks. He could just as well have circularly posited his thought on the basis of his existence. Locke wondered what color the world “is.” As we see it? As a dog or a lobster sees it?

But these were analytical questions in philosophy. They were not practical or prudential questions. Neither Hume nor Berkeley, in practical life, would have walked in front of a coach-and-six. They were aristocrats in analytical epistemology.

The academic critics Kimball crucifies are confusing the analytical question with the practical question, confusing realms. Because a poem is read by a reader, they claim the reading is entirely subjective; asserting, in fact, an imperial subjectivity. Only within that sort of subjectivity can one be a “Marxist” or a “deconstructionist,” or regard a male author writing with a fountain pen as committing some sort of sexual act, or speculate about what parts of the female anatomy inspired the novels of Jane Austen.

Literature exists in the practical realm, not in the realm of exquisite epistemology. Poems and novels exist, and not only in the reader’s own mind. How do we “know” that? Try a sampling of reader opinion. You’ll find that Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is not about the Chicago Cubs.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said a very interesting thing in the practical and prudential realm. He defined science as “intersubjectivity.” He meant that a scientific fact is establishable apart from the epistemological conundrums.

The real epistemologists, such as Descartes, Hume, Locke, and Berkeley, would have laughed at our present-day bogus epistemologists posing as literary critics. In fact, Hume probably (no pun) played a pretty good game of billiards.

But why are the academicians at the Universities of Lagado trying to use a misunderstood epistemology to evade probability? Because only if they entirely subjectivize the real can they play Marxist games, of different sorts, inside their skulls. “At a time,” as Mr. Kimball says, “when the student population at many colleges is becoming increasingly conservative, it is nothing less than an effort by left-leaning faculties and administrations to impose the politics and mindset of the Sixties by fiat.”

It ain’t gonna work, buster. Shakespeare and Keats have an existence much more potent than these new critics, and they’d better remember Ceausescu too.

<em>Tenured Radicals</em>, by Roger Kimball

(Harpercollins, 204 pp., $12.95)

http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0060161906

http://books.nationalreview.com/images/kimball_tenured.jpg