EDUCATION BEYOND POLITICS
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neither he nor Betsy could be with us today. And he mentioned that
Betsy had built a superb women's studies program of high intellectual
and professional quality with absolutely no line. Betsy, of course, is a
radical and yet had invited conservatives as well as leftists to participate in
colloquia, even a few conservative men. "Well, you guessed it," Gene
said. The university caved in to a few left-wing extremists and has forced
her resignation. "Matters are much worse than people are willing to
say," he went on, "and they are destined to get worse." You all know
that Gene is a Marxist. I don't know where that leaves us, but I think
we should be able to recognize that such things happen in some places.
William Phillips:
I want to add a footnote , a political point. The lit–
erary magazine organization that I started under the aegis of the Na–
tional Endowment for the Arts, which Roger Stevens used
to
head, de–
teriorated terribly. It became vulgar, it became populist. A magazine
called
Flick
YOII
got a grant. That was a magazine of the arts. That
probably was the low point of the organization. But I wanted to add
that this started under a Democratic administration. And when a
Republican administration came in there was no change. In spite of all
this Reagan- and Bush-bashing, under their administrations there wasn't a
single change in the administration of the arts. We continued with the
same nonsense, funded the same junk, went on with the same stupidity
with no change whatsoever.
Edith Kurzweil:
Maybe I should add one more footnote. I thought
the culmination of it was reached when, one year, the elected council of
the literary organization I mentioned decided to be really democratic.
Some magazines had asked for five hundred dollars, and others for be–
tween ten and twenty thousand dollars. Yet it was decided, in the name
of democracy, to divide the pot, to give everybody nine hundred and
fifty-three dollars.
William Phillips:
That's democracy in action.
Jean
Elshtain :
Like Gene Genovese we've all come to recognize that
the intellectual climate, the political culture of the academy is sort of
fragile. It doesn't take very much for determined people to take it over.
People like myself, when I call myself a militant moderate, easily are la–
beled right-wing. I'm concerned about what happens to students: it en–
courages a kind of timidity. They watch which way the wind is blowing
and often jump on this bandwagon or that one. What gets lost in this
process, once things have taken that kind of turn, is what the academy is
supposed to be all about, which is the staking out of positions in an
