In Plato's Cave.

Alvin Kernan, In Plato's Cave. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. 309pp. $14.95 (cloth)

"This is all much more fun in remembrance than it was in fact," Alvin Kernan admits in the middle of this captivating intellectual memoir (93), but even the memories come with a certain pain that pushes beyond nostalgia and into the realm of anguish. The anxiety is both personal and professional, the former centering on doubts of a garlanded niche in the temple of America's great intellectual leaders, the latter focusing on the worrisome structural change in higher education. Vacillating between Hector and Jeremiah, Kernan entertains while he laments, confides while he ridicules. The mix is heady soap opera, at times, amazingly blunt and insightful philosophical history, at others, and always an intellectually stimulating read. This is an important book at the close of the millennium, since it offers an insider's view of the American system of higher education and takes no prisoners in its assault on the personal politics and careerist pasturing of colleagues who have left Kernan marveling that anybody who p asses through America's schools can recognize the shadows on the wall as something less than Reality.

The narrative follows the author's life, showing his impressive rise from a boyhood in Wyoming, through lots of elbow grease and some fortunate breaks, to his present position as senior advisor in the humanities at the Andrew W Mellon Foundation. The principal topics originate in Kernan's engagement with ideas, arid he charts the age in which he has lived by describing the influences that shaped his now rather conservative views. Beginning at Columbia University, which he did not like and where he remained only one year, Kernan comes alive at Williams College (1946-49). We are offered brief mention of sexual escapades and a marriage, but the life of the book is in the world of ideas. Thus, he reads Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture and remarks that it "changed [his] entire way of understanding human culture during an evening's reading" (1). The change is from an enlightenment concept of a universal human type to a phenomenological recognition of wildly varying cultures -- "Apollonian Zunis alongside the Di onysiac Dobu and the paranoid Kwakiutl, each acting out a different reality" (22).

It is an observation that readers of his book do well to recall, as he moves on to two years at Oxford, graduate school at Yale, and then to academic and administrative positions as Yale and Princeton. The fascination with diversity that informed his early years seems gradually to be replaced with dread and annoyance, even if couched in resigned tones of inevitability. In a nutshell, his book is an attempt to demonstrate, in a very personal way, his contention that "democratic tendencies in higher education, while praiseworthy in many ways, have gone too far" (299). The "different realities" that, first, various writers seem to be envisioning and, later, various ethnic and "politically correct" groups intensely champion, before long seem to keep him awake at nights not by their mind-expanding challenge to accepted paradigms, but by their troublesome naivete, ineptitude, unfairness, and tendency to successfully browbeat Kernan's employers. "Multiculturalism and ethnicity were already slouching toward New Have n" (66).

Kernan's description of these rough beasts (to complete the Yeats reference) and of others of their ilk is graphic and fair, but always lurking in the air is the whiff of something fascinating that has left the room. It is all couched in facts: between 1960 and 1995 college enrollments soared from 3.5 million to 12.25 million; women's share of the total number of enrolled students increased from 37 percent to 55.5 percent, and minorities from 12 percent to 25 percent; etc. By 1990 university presses sold only about 500 copies of new monographs, and these mostly to libraries. Something like 60 percent of adult Americans never read a book of any kind. In this process of educational change, ivory towers have been transformed into expensive trade schools; Eurocentrism has been upended; teaching and research are now "politicized and treated as instruments of popular reform" (xv).

Little wonder that he quotes with relish from David Lodge's hilarious academic novels, Chonging Places and Small World, which skewer the preeners and the pulers in the ivied halls. But Kernan demonstrates that reality is just as delicious as anything Lodge could invent (though, in one of the delights of Kernan's own book, he lets us in on the roman a clef arid reveals who's who in Lodge's novels, and in others of the sort). Plato's cave, in Kernan's fortunate and graced life, is peopled with scintillating thinkers, and the pages of his book provide an impressive Who's Who in academia in the last thirty years -- and he knew them, studied with them, debated them. So his method of contending with the issues in his book, while incorporating statistics where appropriate, is to give a thumbnail sketch of an individual's theories (Foucault, Derrida, Bloom, deMan -- you name it) that is marvelously clear, and then to show how someone else took a bit from here, a bit from there, and moved "forward" (though the reader is often left wondering about the direction, as Kernan wishes).

In Plato's Cave is especially compelling for those in literary studies, who may know many of the principals who have the misfortune to draw Kernan's fire: Tom McFarland, Maragaret Doody, Stanley Fish, Stephen Greenblatt, and the occasional benighted grad student.

His biggest regret, judging from this study, is the fact that contemporary education reflects the contemporary scene, where relativism has taken such a strong stand against received truths. In the days of Northrop Frye, Talcott Parsons, Margaret Mead, B. F. Skinner, et al., there was, he remembers, "an enormous optimism that energized the entire academic enterprise" because "it was possible to do something meaningful, to understand the totality of things. That feeling of great achievement is gone now, almost without a trace, disappearing into its own impossibility" (272). Such a description, and of himself as a "quite ordinary professor" (258), suggest that he recognizes the limits of that earlier age, but wishes (in a personal way forgivable in a memoir) that such a Camelot might have lasted.

JOHN C. HAWLEY teaches in the Department of English at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California.