| Memo - Nov. 16 -
Culture Wars In 1992, the conservative columnist and then-presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan argued that "a cultural war" was raging in the United States--"a war for the soul of America...as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as the Cold War itself." The war erupted in the 1980s, led by critics who argued that multiculturalism and social changes wrought by the revolts of the 1960s were a threat to the fabric of American life and culture. One of the most important battlegrounds of the war was American universities, which had undergone a profound transformation in the 1960s. Before the '60s, college and university campuses were traditionally bastions of conservatism, but in the era of the civil rights protests and the Vietnam War, a new generation of students made their campuses sites of political and social action. As a result of the protests, by the 1980s many colleges and universities had established new curricula and resources, such as academic programs in African-American studies, Native American studies, and others, and they became powerful sites for mobilizing politcal opposition around issues such as American support for apartheid in South Africa and U.S. military intervention on Latin America. Critics charged that these developments reflected the emergence of a liberal orthodoxy on college and university campuses, which they called "political correctness" and characterized as an attack on freedom of expression. One of the most vocal critics was the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynn Cheney, the wife of now-Vice President Dick Cheney (he was then Secretary of Defense), who held that campus liberals had driven out time-honored ideas of "truth," "value," and "quality." (She is quoted several times in your readings.) Their opponents, not surprisingly, ardently defended how colleges and universities--and American life and culture generally--had changed since the 1960s. Our readings represent two sides of this debate. The first comes from The Closing of the American Mind (1987), perhaps the most famous (or notorious) published attack during the culture wars. Written by Allan Bloom, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago (which was home to many influential conservative thinkers), the book argues intolerance and relativism had come to dominate the social and intellectual life of the university, and that the foundations of Western thought (Plato, etc.) were being sacrificed at the altar of so-called "openness," (which he believes is really closed-ness, hence the title). Bloom and others conservatives singled out historians as especially malevolent because of the attention historians focused on slavery, Native Americans, women, workers, and other subjects that strayed from the traditional gung-ho, triumphalist depictions of American history. The other reading comes from a rejoinder to Bloom, called The Opening of the American Mind (1996), by the historian Lawrence Levine (whose article about Shakespeare in America we read earlier in the semester). He argues that a broader, more inclusive understanding of American history is not only not a threat, and not only more accurate, but also better for the richness and vitality of American life and essential to the promise of American democracy. The book began as a speech that Levine gave to a group of historians in 1993, when he was president of the Organization of American Historians, but addresses issues of politics, culture, and university life far broader than issues applying to professional historians.
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