Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking

This is a thoughtful book that will be of growing historic interest. Bromwich is examining aspects of American higher education from the vantage point of one in-between. Standing in the midst of a `movement' or cultural trend he records his concerns and speculates on that movement's etiology and future. The movement is usually encapsulated now by the word `Theory'--that alteration of more traditional literary study under the influence of political or quasi-political thought, some of it traditional leftist thought, some of it more narrowly Nietzschean thought as mediated by a succession of French writers. The subject of Bromwich's book is broader--higher education and group thinking, but identity politics and multiculturalism have proceeded hand-in-glove with the changes in the study of literature (or the substitution of quasi sociology for more traditional literary study). From the present perspective we would probably say that Bromwich is an educational conservative but not a political conservative. One of his principal subjects here is tradition and its importance. He is a Burkean and asserts the importance of both Burke's vision of tradition and its importance for our professional and political lives. He speaks at length of the current within literary thought that privileges the voices of the `unempowered', to the point that that view depreciates the thought of the empowered, without regard to the content or quality of that thought. In other words, he is examining a pattern that, ultimately, denies (or at least severely limits) freedom of speech and judges importance by the nature of the group issuing the thought rather than studying the thought itself on its own merits. This also, of course, has great implications for notions of individual identity. Judging people principally as members of the group to which they have somehow been assigned is ultimately a form of anti-intellectualism as well as an assault on our notions of the individual. Marxists, of course, have always been interested in seeing individuals as, first and foremost, members of classes and modern activists anxious to protect demographic perks resist the notion of people thinking of themselves as unique persons. Add the academic maneuvers on behalf of (fill in the blank)-Studies departments and the origin of something that appears odd at first glance becomes clarified. Bromwich is particularly strong on our actual historical tradition. He notes that many of the positions taken by contemporary scholars (as of 1992) are based on an opposition to a previous tradition which, essentially, never existed. The forms of professional and individual behavior which constitute the great strawman against which contemporary voices react is just that, a strawman. Bromwich studied within the belly of the putative beast--at Yale, when Yale was not only the top English department in America but also the supposed flash point for a lot of the cultural change that has been alleged.