Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America.

WHEN Page Smith went to Harvard to begin his graduate studies, he found that the English department demanded too many 'irrelevant" languages. So he turned to the history department, where he stuck despite its contempt for one of his great undergraduate enthusiasms. Harvard's historians preferred fact to grand synthesis. That still rankles and, projected upon the academy as a whole, has grown in Smith's mind to the dimensions of a murder-one, namely, of the human spirit. He calls the villain 'academic fundamentalism" by which he means .. well, it is difficult to tell what he means by it.

The result is Killing the Spirit, in which Smith hitches his quirks and prejudices onto the train of publications pulled by the big engine known as Bloom. Yet Smith's critique of higher education has less in common with Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind than with the antirational romantic radicalism of the 1960s student revolts that Bloom includes in his indictment. To his disdain for "irrelevant" knowledge, Smith adds, in eerie echo of the Sixties, the New Left complaint that university research actually contributes-gasp!-to this nation's prosperity and defense.

Not that Smith is wrong about everything. He rightly deplores the publish-or-perish syndrome, the wrong headed attempt of the humanities and social sciences to ape the research style of the natural sciences, and the consequent sterility of intellectual life in much of the contemporary academy. Those factors produced a malaise on which the New Left fed, and they are even worse today. But Charles Sykes, in his recent book, Profscam, documents the dimensions of the current problem far better than Smith, who seems to echo Sykes even in phrasing. Both call the trend of paying faculty more to teach less "the flight from teaching," but Sykes said it first and gave you the numbers.

There is, however, a more serious problem with this book than deficient originality, namely its deficient logic. For example, in his chapters on the history of higher education in the United States, Smith relates instances of past political interference with university teaching, as if that excuses the present self-politicization of the academy. And he seems unable to distinguish spirit-killing pseudo-objectivity from forms of objectivity appropriate and even necessary to the humanities and social sciences. Consequently, he is unable to draw the line anywhere, even at overt politicization.

His flaccid response to radical feminism is an example. On the one hand, he sees its awful reality quite clearly. [Women's Studies] courses are, with

. . exceptions, unabashedly 'sexual politics."' "The existing situation ... is clearly out of hand.... The image women students carry away with them on graduation must be of a world hopelessly divided into exploiting males and oppressed females." But on the other, he cannot bring himself to oppose anything that brings passion into the schoolroom. In Women's Studies, he exults, "all pretense of objectivity (that precious icon of the modern university) has been cast aside. There is an air of excitement, of discovering new truths, a unity of spirit and purpose," etc., etc.

Does it not occur to Professor Smith that without some measure of objectivity, there can be no hope of distinguishing truth from fantasy, and, hence, no basis for any claim to have discovered new truths?

Smith is no Marxist, and he even seems to have the engaging idiosyncrasy of believing in God. But he assumes the Left's Manichaean view o the world as divided into perfect Good and perfect Evil. Radical feminists, by ranging themselves against a purported Evil, are Good; and, so, the cannot be guilty of any worse sin than that of going a little too far. Thou astounded by the reality" of Women's Studies, Smith declares himself to be basically sympathetic" to the project. So much for reality. Preferring illusion has become the Left's hallmark.

To excuse inactivity, Smith, like so many others, employs the tired metaphor of a pendulum having swung "too far the other way'-as if, left to itself, it will swing back again. But the politicization of the academy by radical feminists, and by others of the tenured Left, is not simply an overreaction to a preceding injustice. Those injustices are largely invented, and otherwise exaggerated, to ease radicalism's "long march through the institutions." If not opposed, radicalism will not go away.

Smith himself almost admits the point: Women's Studies, in their most extreme and imperialistic form, have become institutionalized, and we will have to live with this strange transformation for years to come." He adds, "The alternative is a fight that, in the present demoralized state of the university, no one has the stomach for (except the aging warriors of the National Association of Scholars)." Our author is right on the mark about lack of stomach and demoralization, but he underestimates the National Association of Scholars, whose rapidly growing membership is predominantly of academics in mid career and younger.

Conceptual confusion and leftist cant are not limited to the chapter on Women's Studies, but elsewhere those qualities are complemented by factual inaccuracy. An account of political science begins with the words, "As matters were explained to me," thereby confessing an ignorance of the field. As it happens, matters were not explained very well. Leo Strauss is misidentified as a "follower" of Heidegger and (simultaneously!) a member of the Frankfurt School. Someone should have explained to Smith that the Frankfurt School is neo-Marxist. In a typical example of academic argumentum ad Reaganum, Smith explains that "since Straussians incline to the political Right, any number found lodgments in the Reagan Administration, where they were almost impossible to distinguish from other run-of-the-mill reactionary ideologues." Pretty good for neo-Marxist Heideggerians.

The chapter on "The Inhuman Humanities" is worse. As I pursued my admittedly superficial researches," Smith confides, Derrida's name kept recurring. The enduring impact of Jacques Derrida's word play is, to say the least, doubtful, but Smith does not hesitate to declare that Derrida has "destroyed" professors' "illusion that they are engaged in objective, scientific investigation." Thus introduced, Derrida subsequently becomes a totem shaken in the faces of recalcitrant "fundamentalists." Smith pairs Derrida with Wittgenstein, another author whose work has apparently not yet been explained to him. One begins to gain a certain sympathy for those soul-destroying Harvard professors who wanted the young Smith to shed his enthusiasm and acquire a more "scientific" respect for the facts.