Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [11]
Change was slow, but by the late 1970s and early 1980s, many of the undergraduates from the 1960s had received PhDs and were slowly infiltrating classrooms. Affirmative action and diversity initiatives transformed faculties in ways that should have been predictable but many educators and administrators found surprising. Young faculty members started to implement the changes their teachers had refused to make. Strategically cunning, they took over programs such as Asian Studies, Soviet Studies and Middle Eastern Studies and turned them to their own ends. As the number of younger faculty members slowly increased, their ambitions grew, and new programs reflecting the changing faces of both the faculty and the student body emerged.
New faculty and different students, however, were not content with creating supplementary programs; they were determined to rewrite the traditional curriculum. By the mid-1980s, heated debates about what was described as the Western canon broke out within the academy and eventually attracted media interest that brought the controversy to the attention of the wider public. One side argued that the traditional curriculum was Eurocentric and represented the interests of powerful white middle-class and upper-middle-class men who saw their mission in life as the extension and protection of the American empire. From this point of view, the canon had to be either overthrown or revised to include individuals and groups who had been marginalized far too long. The other side countered that this criticism of the Western tradition was an assault on the very beliefs and values that had made America great. What was needed, they argued, was adherence to the tradition and more rather than less study of dead white men and their achievements. This academic debate launched the culture wars, which two decades later still divide the country.
The reaction to the changes on college and university campuses intersected with another current circulating just beneath the noise generated by sex, drugs and rock and roll. The personal promiscuity and social unrest created by the youth culture provoked calls for a return to traditional family, religion and values. In their campaign for inclusiveness, so-called tenured radicals consistently overlooked one important and growing minority—religious, social and intellectual conservatives. While committed to an ideology of difference, the leadership on most college and university campuses was not then and is not today politically and ideologically diverse. In some ways, campus liberals did conservatives a favor by excluding them. Left to their own devices, conservatives created alternative institutions like the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute, which support research and underwrite a broad range of policy initiatives. More media savvy than their liberal counterparts, these conservatives launched important publication programs and sophisticated media projects designed to advance their political agenda by shaping public opinion.
The flames of the burgeoning culture wars were fanned by one of the most unlikely best sellers of all time—Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. Though laden with lengthy discussions of dense Greek and German philosophy, Bloom’s 1987 book became a sensation that ignited a national debate about higher education in the United States. The book sold nearly half a million copies in hardback and was number one on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for four months. At the time of the book’s publication, Bloom was a little-known professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. The Closing of the American Mind, written at the urging of Bloom’s friend and colleague Saul Bellow, was intended as a philosophical critique of the intellectual