To the Editor:

There can be no doubt. Gertrude Himmelfarb [“Academic Advocates,” September 1995] does not like postmodernists, de-constructionists, political advocates, or those who get personal in the college classroom. She has made this plain in so many words and in so many venues. There are many of us in the academy who can and do find these points of view troublesome, but whether the integrity of the university is threatened by their existence is entirely unclear. What is a bit clearer, at least to this writer, is that the tone and approach of Miss Himmelfarb belie the very thing of which she complains. How is it possible to deny any value to these positions unless one has a lock on the “truth” from the outset? (Whatever happened to good old American pragmatism and its hard-headed approach to the idea of “truth”?) It is true that there is nothing more unnerving than having to listen to someone speak what seems to be utter nonsense. Unfortunately, the wisdom of the present very often was the raving of the past.

I sympathize with Miss Himmelfarb’s desire to set out a kind of canon of correct thinking, but how do we begin to construct such a canon? She would reply that there are some things which are beyond discussion. If I understand her position correctly, she has conceptualized the character of the university in a way that would contradict the very ground upon which she bases her argument. She states that we need an “ideal—of truth, or objectivity, or disinterested knowledge” in order to judge scholarly merit. As a sociologist, I would reply that there is an interest at stake in the development and distribution of all knowledge. We must make a case for the superiority of our interests. Some of us ground the superiority of our interests in the finer consequences which result from the success of those interests. Others base their belief on their faith, be it religious or philosophical. Whatever the basis or the grounding, no individual’s interests are per se superior simply because such a claim is made.

Compared with Miss Himmelfarb’s uncompromising “objectivity,” the medieval doctrine of knowledge through faith and reason taught by the Church seems downright open-minded. . . .

Marvin Prosono
Southwest Missouri State
University
Springfield, Missouri

_____________

To the Editor

. . . Gertrude Himmelfarb distinguishes between a professor who engages in the “scholarly pursuit of truth within the university” (a phenomenon which, she argues, increasingly belongs to the past) and one who “expresses his political views within the classroom, without regard for either scholarship or truth.” This is indeed a justified criticism, but it seems to me that Miss Himmelfarb misses the most astoundingly ridiculous aspect of postmodernism: its blatant hypocrisy. Postmodernists claim that truth is an outmoded concept while in the same breath they expound their trendy-Left causes. The logical question then becomes: if there is no truth, . . . why should we believe in the things they advocate? . . .

So many in the politically-correct movements of the day would have it that those who disagree with them are hateful and intolerant. Well, as one such hatemonger, I frankly am intolerant of ideas that I find intellectually and morally unsound, and this certainly includes the ideas of deconstructionists, feminists, postmodernists, multiculturalists, et al. I admit my lack of tolerance for such points of view. The above-mentioned groups feel the same way about my opinions, but the difference is, they do not admit it. . . .

Andy Nowicki
Atlanta, Georgia

_____________

To the Editor:

Gertrude Himmelfarb’s persuasive article, “Academic Advocates,” goes to the heart of what ruined the humanities at well-known universities like Stanford. . . .

Any teaching, e.g., multiculturalism, that begins by abandoning the very idea of and quest for harmony is doomed from the beginning. Even politically righteous and gullible students today are often bored with the shallow, dutifully “correct,” and tasteless ideological fare they have been given. So at Stanford the humanities, the traditional core of the university, . . . are rapidly disappearing. Almost all that is left in the humanities is an obscene, politically-obedient façade. . . . What mostly remains in the university at large is a cold, dehumanized machine of social engineering, brittle legalism, illiberalism, technology, and careerism. . . .

Robert Greer Cohn
Stanford University
Stanford, California

_____________

Gertrude Himmelfarb writes:

In reply to Marvin Prosono: one does not need to have a “lock on the ‘truth’” in order to criticize those tendencies that sanction political advocacy in the classroom. One does, however, need to have a sufficient respect for truth (truth without quotation marks)—the truth that scholars aspire to, knowing that it always eludes them.

There is a world of difference between “good old American pragmatism,” which subjects any claim to truth to the “hardheaded” test of reason, logic, and evidence, and the absolute relativism and subjectivism of postmodernism, which denies not only truth but reason, logic, evidence, and reality itself. It is precisely the demeaning of knowledge—the idea that the quest for knowledge is nothing more, as Mr. Prosono sees it, than a reflection of one’s “interests”—that permits political advocacy to flourish in the university.