THE IDEA OF THE UNIVERSITY
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people doing their fighting. So this notion that all the social historians
are pernicious, are trying to set us up for the next round of the 1960s is
nuts. But in line with history, there's something called Vietnam. People
here talk about the 1960s, or the infusion of radicalism into the universi–
ties, but the Vietnam War was going on then, and if anything delegit–
irnized the old university system, it was the fact that the George Bundys
were part of the Vietnam War. And I think that when Robert Alter
mentioned this morning the migration into the universities in the late
sixties of radicals, or when Hilton Kramer mentioned it yesterday, you
left out that there was a war on, a terrible crisis - the worst we'd ever
had since the Civil War- and it made the university system and in fact a
great deal of American life look bloody awful. And that's what fostered
radicalism as much as anything else.
Mary
Gordon:
I'd like to speak to two points, and they are linked. I
think Professor Berger has a very bizarre historical sense of the women's
movement: perhaps the most important issue for poor women right now
is day care.
Brigitte Berger:
Are you sure about that?
Mary
Gordon:
As sure as I can be about anything.
Brigitte Berger:
They want to be with their children.
Mary
Gordon:
Well, they can't afford to be with their children right
now. So the issue of employment for women, which includes giving
them the skills they need to be employed and places for their children, is
good day care in the here and now, not on some fantasy cloud Cuckoo
Land where Mom and the kids can be home. This is one of the most
important political issues adopted by both parties, and it has its genesis in
the women's movement.
Secondly, you never examined what you mean by the rational. I
heard nothing in what you said that would define or elucidate what you
meapt by the rational, and therefore I found your analysis wanting. In
the era that you laud as the "golden age of the university," many irra–
tional practices were tolerated which the sixties undid: quotas for Jews,
quotas for blacks, segregated dormitories - all of that does not exist
anymore because the "Children of Caliban" described some evils which
were silenced, tolerated and valorized in the "golden age" of the post–
Enlightenment liberal-thought curriculum that you seem to, I think
rather uncritically, extol.
