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...provokes fluctuated over four decades, none has been resolved. The United States is no more beyond the culture wars than it is beyond tornadoes and hurricanes. Unable to put such phenomena behind us, we instead march and stagger in changing ranks from storm system to storm system. An obvious example: the struggle over the nature of the United States and its role in the world is still passionate, but it is now less over Vietnam than over the memory of Vietnam and its historical narratives, "globalization," and, after September 11, the complex relations of the United States to terrorism.
The diversity of American higher education--nearly four thousand institutions, each with its own history, "mission," sources of revenue, and systems of accountability--makes many generalizations about it suspect. One is safe: higher education has been prominent in the culture wars, at once source of dissent and experimentation, a strategic target, and a provider of warriors for the Right, Left, and center. Higher education has mattered because it maintains and produces masses of intellectual capital and because it recruits and trains human capital, including a national and international elite.
Haunting the culture wars has been the question of the next elite generation. Who will belong to it and what will be their political and cultural leanings? How will they think and behave? How will they define American values? And, some ask, will they be able to define values at all if they carry the virus of antifoundationalism, antiessentialism, or, more colloquially, relativism?
Diane Ravitch's work usually pays much more attention to primary and secondary education than to higher education. So does her Doedalus essay. However, passages poke and prod at colleges, universities, and their ancillary institutions.
Like nearly all of her work, this essay has a sharp eye for human failure and folly, especially when we fail to make the necessary effort to combine political democracy with a rigorous liberal learning for all students. Because of her sturdy intellectual independence and integrity, Ravitch exempts no sect, ideology, or school from failure and folly. Here she lumps together "feminists," "multiculturalists," and "the religious Right" as censors of educational...
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A view from the schoolhouse.(Elementary education), June 22, 2002
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