Anti-Climacus

To filter an argument about academia through a different frame: for about six years when I was approximately teenage-ish, my family attended a (conservative) evangelical church (on the Willow Creek model, if that means anything to you). The church was good to fine in most respects, with the odd exception of its approach to culture. It had been a standard part of evangelical thinking up through the 90s that to be Christian meant to be not secular: one should only read books by Christian authors with explicit Christian themes, only listen to music performed by Christians about Christian themes (the discerning reader may have sensed a pattern already), etc etc. I remember sermons that specifically inveighed against Nirvana, and being told that listening to Jimi Hendrix was morally dubious, at best (let's not even get into their reaction when I read The Stand in junior high). I recognized even then that such a view was ridiculous, on practical as well as theological grounds. To hold such a view requires doing away with the notion of fiction--an author cannot create a character whose views the song, novel, etc then works to express: a work of art can only ever be an authentic representation of the beliefs of its creator. Which, as I mentioned before, is ridiculous, so I continued reading and listening to whatever I liked.* For various unimportant reasons, I stopped paying attention to the evangelical world for about four or five years, picking up again in 2003. What I found at that point was that the war against secular culture was over: almost all evangelicals accepted that consumption of at least some popular and high culture was consistent with Christianity (or, at least, not inconsistent with it). The result of this policy is much greater sanity on all sides.

I think there has been a similar generational shift regarding the culture wars, and I believe it has occurred in a similar time frame. Amongst the people I know who have PhD'd since, oh, 2005, the conservative political theorists have embraced at least some of what used to be the exclusive domain of the left: everyone reads Hannah Arendt, most will have some familiarity with Foucault and Derrida even if they are never used, and continental/phenomenological/postmodern approaches are seen as legitimate modes of inquiry, even if not frequently employed. Left/liberal theorists, meanwhile, all more or less accept the canon, or the idea of the canon, even if they would pick some particular figures to elevate and others to exclude. This is how you end up with programs like Duke where you have very conservative and very liberal grad students, all of whom read the work of everyone else, with the expectation that a serious academic conversation can occur despite vast differences on politics. Call it the triumph of the Organization Kid. This is, so far as I can tell, a generational effect: we don't really fight the culture wars anymore. What would be the point?

But, contra Phoebe Maltz (who I think is otherwise correct in her assessment of the state of the CCOA (thanks for the handy acronym, by the way)), what is true of people in my/our generation is not true of everyone in academia. I thought of two prominent conservative professors of my acquaintance who are very much in line with the CCOA, and who often tend to see the university as the site of quasi-Manichean struggles between liberals and conservatives. Just on a whim, I thought I'd see when they finished their doctorates--both did so in the mid-to-late 80s, at the height of the last great culture wars. Each generation does appear to be marked by the politics of the time in which they finish their PhDs. So I think it is true that anyone who attended a course on Gender Studies with an open mind would likely find it to be largely unobjectionable, or at least no more objectionable than any other portion of academic study; but I think the perceived force of the CCOA comes largely from those members of academia who assent to the critique.


*I much prefer the guideline my parents instilled, without ever intending to do so: what is (aesthetically) good and what is (morally) good for you are usually linked. The sorts of cultural rubbish that the evangelicals were rightly worried about could be more easily dealt with by pointing out that the average horror film or what-have-you is just not that good.