March 19, 2007
Who Blames America First? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:45 AM EST John Steele Gordon writes approvingly of Michael Barone’s condemnation of (in Barone’s words) “our schools and, especially . . . our colleges and universities. The first are staffed by liberals long accustomed to see America as full of problems needing solving; the latter have been packed full of the people cultural critic Roger Kimball calls ‘tenured radicals,’ people who see this country and its people as the source of all evil in the world.” Agreeing in part with Barone that anti-American professors have infected undergraduates with a reflexive hatred of all things American, Mr. Gordon believes that it is difficult “for even the most sensible college students to resist the daily drumbeat of anti-Americanism from so many professors who are, of course, supposed to be experts in their fields.” I followed the link that Mr. Gordon provided to the Barone article, expecting to find some sort of empirical study demonstrating rampant anti-American bias in college classrooms and curricula, but I found no such thing. The article that Mr. Gordon finds so interesting claims with impunity that “on campuses, students are bombarded with denunciations of dead white males and urged to engage in the deconstruction of all past learning and scholarship.” It’s an oft-repeated conservative lament, but like most critics of the treasonous academy, Barone doesn’t bother to provide an iota of evidence. So who blames America first? I’d like to know. Let’s get a thread going on this site—one that engages with evidence. I hope that readers will chime in with their own experiences. I would be the last to deny that many liberal academics teach and write American history in a way that casts a dim light on America’s institutions and leaders, from Founding Fathers to present. But Barone’s article goes wrong in several places: First, and I repeat, Barone’s article is without evidence. From a purely anecdotal standpoint, as one who has attended and taught at several American colleges (Swarthmore and Brown as a student; Harvard, Brown, University of Rhode Island, and Rutgers as a professor or instructor), I have found no such bias in the teaching of history or literature. “Dead white men” are still given more than a fair hearing, as is America. During my time at Brown in the 1990s, classes on American colonial and Revolutionary War–era history, nineteenth-century American intellectual history, and the Vietnam War were among the department’s most popular offerings. None of these classes betrayed any bias “for” or “against” America; they simply provided a balanced overview. At Harvard, the respected History and Literature Program retains its special affection for nineteenth-century American letters. (I would venture that the average Hist & Lit student at Harvard has read more dead white American male authors than Barone, but that’s just a guess. I don’t know much about Barone.) As an undergrad at Swarthmore (1992–1996), I took popular seminars on the politics and culture of the Progressive era and American political history, and wrote an undergraduate thesis on Thaddeus Stevens, a nineteenth-century congressman who was unquestionably white and, by the time I studied him, unquestionably dead. I’m not claiming that my own experience is paradigmatic, but in the absence of a good study that suggests otherwise, why should I take Barone at his word when he claims that our universities are programming students to hate America generally and dead white men more specifically? Second, Barone runs the risk of confusing critical history with treasonous criticism. Should we avoid topics like slavery and nativism because they make America look small? Political campaigns are for flag-waving; college classrooms are for critical thinking. Barone derides the “deconstruction of all past learning and scholarship,” but this is precisely what a liberal arts curriculum is supposed to do: teach people how to think and assess a body of work. If we followed Barone’s advice to the letter, students would still read William Dunning on the Civil War and Reconstruction, rather than James McPherson and Eric Foner. Third, are women, working-class people, African-Americans, and immigrants not Americans all? Studying their daily lives, political culture, and struggles is as much a celebration of America as it is a selective condemnation of its institutions and traditions. Ignoring these topics impoverishes our understanding of the nation’s history. Fourth, conservatives are no less critical of America than liberals and leftists. When right-wing intellectuals like Robert Bork accuse America of “slouching toward Gomorrah,” or condemn the sexual, social, and cultural decisions of millions of its citizens, they are no less elitist or anti-American than the most extreme New Left professor. They are simply coming at their criticism from a different angle. Barone’s article projects something of a love-it-or-leave-it attitude. By the same logic, if Robert Bork and Ann Coulter aren’t happy with America, they should be invited to love it or leave it too. Bork might feel more comfortable in Taliban-controlled regions of Afghanistan, where the sexual and cultural ethic is conservative and where community standards trump rampant individualism any day of the week. So, I pose the question, who blames America first?
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