The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

In his reference to an essay of mine in the article “The Storm Over the University” [NYR, December 6, 1990] John Searle says I seem to have “no answer to the question, ‘What is to be done with those constituencies which do not happen to agree…that social transformation is the primary goal of education.’ ” This is a strange misrepresentation of my essay, whose whole purpose is to suggest an “answer” to the question “what is to be done” in the present conflicts over culture: namely, make the conflicts themselves part of our object of study.

These conflicts have an interesting history that would be instructive to students, they could provide a context that students now often lack for reading books, and they could be used to give the curriculum some of the coherence that many on all sides (including Searle) complain that it needs. Some campuses are already doing something along these lines. A case in point would seem to be the Stanford course called “Europe and the Americas” that Searle praises, where, he says, “Aristotle and Tocqueville are taught along with Frantz Fanon.”

Searle accuses me of countenancing the “immoral” practice of “using the classroom to impose a specific ideology on students” and of “politicizing the whole curriculum.” I of course did not mean to imply approval of teachers who force students to conform to their political views. But a large part of what the present debate is about is when and in what sense literature and the teaching of it are “political,” though one would never guess from Searle’s remarks that the issue is debatable.

Searle misrepresents the views of radical scholars in the controversy, few of whom argue, as he puts it, that the traditional canon “should be abandoned.” What these scholars do argue is that the traditional canon should be taught with far more candor about the political factors that have shaped it, as well as with far more attention to other cultural traditions which have been excluded. Searle’s misrepresentations help to make worse the poisonous atmosphere surrounding this debate, since they divert attention to the excesses of radical academics and away from the more reasonable questions these academics are raising about the extent to which questions of power may enter into even the most seemingly apolitical scholarly concerns.

Gerald Graff
John C. Shaffer Professor of Humanities and English
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois

To the Editors:

I would appreciate your printing the following letter in reply to John Searle’s recent review of, among other texts, an issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly that I co-edited:

John Searle defends truth and high intellectual standards in the abstract but otherwise has some trouble staying in their vicinity. Among other errors, distortions and superficialities in his report of current educational controversies, his skewed citations of my own words and swift dispatch of two thousand years of philosophical debate were, for me, notable.

“Puzzled” by the opposition to the “innocuous proposal” put forward by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. in his book, Cultural Literacy, Searle handles his perplexity not by considering the numerous arguments detailed by Hirsch’s numerous critics—to the effect that the book’s diagnoses of the nation’s social and economic ills are dubious and its proposed educational remedies both irrelevant and unworkable—but by ferreting out traces of those critics’ (presumably rabid) politics. The result is tendentious misrepresentation along familiar lines. Thus, contrary to Searle’s allegation, I do not, in the passage he quotes from my article,^* “respond” in “hysterical tones” to Hirsch’s “project.” Rather, as I indicate explicitly, I satirize there the inflated claims and Fourth-of-July rhetoric through which Hirsch promotes his List of names and phrases to the American public. Moreover, contrary to Searle’s eager interpretation, my observation that such rhetoric obscures Hirsch’s deeply conservative (as well as historically and otherwise questionable) views of American culture and society “reveals” nothing whatsoever about my own “preoccupations.”

As for matters of ontology and epistemology, readers of The New York Review of Books will be grateful to Searle for clearing up the issues so painlessly. No problem there at all: just remember that Reality is presupposed by all language, Reason by all argument, and that to deny either is thus impossible. Does anyone “deny” either? Is it not, rather, that the nature and meaning of such concepts have been recurrently questioned and subjected to diverse formulation? But never mind—forget Kuhn, forget Kant, forget Quine, forget Protagoras. With John Searle to set us straight, we do not need any Great Books.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Graduate Program in Literature
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina

To the Editors:

As one of the authors of the pamphlet, Speaking for the Humanities, which both Roger Kimball and his sympathetic reviewer, John Searle, seem to regard as intellectually contemptible, I feel impelled to speak out against Searle’s misrepresentations, implicit or otherwise. I find it sad and odd that Searle can talk about both Allan Bloom’s book and Kimball’s and end by finding only the pamphlet “smug.”

None of us who wrote it wants to make very large claims for it, and it is remarkable that it has been resurrected so somberly and with such hostility, two years after it was published and had, for better or worse, done its momentary work. It was not a philosophical tract, nor even a defense of the positions Searle claims, by implication, that it represents. It was intended only to provide a small counter against the very popular and politically significant attacks on the humanities within the academy, which, its authors believed, impugned not only the intellectual quality of the humanities but their moral integrity as well.

The pamphlet was not a defense of philosophical “anti-realism,” an attack on “objectivity,” an attempt to politicize teaching, a rejection of bourgeois political repression, or any of the rest of that stuff. It was, rather, an effort to say that what is going on in the humanities these days is serious and valuable. It claimed that the humanities are being responsive to precisely the sorts of changes in the world and the student body that Searle reasonably describes (he might have been quoting us on these matters), and it argued that they do not claim to have the answers but that their business is raising the questions. Within its very few pages, the pamphlet attempted to address issues such as academic specialization, objectivity and ideology, the core curriculum, and teaching, and its conclusions are hardly startling. It even argued that the “canon” should continue to be taught, although one couldn’t infer that from Searle’s representations. It recognized that the canon is not and never has been monolithic, another point that Searle makes as though the pamphlet hadn’t made it already. It built its argument on the recognition that current debates about the canon are characteristic of the whole history of the humanities, whose function has consistently been—as it is at this moment—”critical.”

It would be disingenuous, to say the least, to suggest that the pamphlet did not have its biases, although it was, of course, a compromise document. But the authors all believed that one needs to be wary of claims of objectivity and disinterest because such claims are more often than not invoked in a way that disguises real interests. The pamphlet was not a political tract against “patriarchy” and male, white “hegemony,” or the other clichés of the theoretical left that disturb Searle. But the authors did make the point—and Searle seems to agree—that marginalized people should also be represented in what is read by all students, not simply because they are marginal but because their cultures are themselves interesting; moreover, as Searle himself says, you can’t know your own culture without knowing another. In addition, they argued that it makes sense to see as part of the reading and critical process essential to the humanities the ways in which social and political forces contribute to the meaning and development of all writing. Most of Searle’s recommendations at the end of his “review” are at least as banal as our own might seem. I, for one, would accept all of them, but I wouldn’t pretend, as Searle does, that this is all simple and that each of the recommendations would not be extremely difficult to work out in the real curricula of real students in the reality of their schedules and against the demands of specialized majors.

Searle pretends to be taking a position between lunacies. It would be a comfortable position, but it’s an impossible one. His distortion of the claims of the pamphlet is a minor matter. But his pretense that difficult issues are easy is dangerous. (Breathtakingly, for example, Searle suggests that the ontological question of “metaphysical realism” is not debatable, and he makes his case for that difficult position in a few easy and implausible paragraphs. I put aside here the question of the smugness of this argument, which has its own strenuous and unacknowledged history in Searle’s career. But hot after the authors of the pamphlet, Searle also would catch in this net such diverse philosophers as, say, Richard Rorty, or Bas van Fraassen, or Larry Laudan, or Hilary Putnam.) Searle implies that all the combatants in this “crisis” of higher education are loony except him and perhaps Hirsch, Kimball, and Bloom (the last two, to be sure, having their faults): all arguments (except Searle’s, of course) fall too far left or too far right.

But the pamphlet was directed against easy categorizing and easy solutions. It argued that there are reasonable grounds for not accepting the (now even more intense) conservative critique, and for valuing the critical work of the humanities in academia in these bad days. Its major point—directed particularly then against the politically significant arguments of William Bennett and the apparently popular ones of Allan Bloom—was that the humanities are a vital, critical, and creative presence in the university. I am sorry it seemed “smug” because much of it is devoted to arguing that the questions are difficult and unresolved.

George Levine
Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey

John Searle replies:

The letters of Gerald Graff, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and George Levine share a common feature. All three authors seem to be trying to distance themselves from the more unattractive implications of what they originally wrote. Graff and Herrnstein Smith originally presented their lectures in the cozy and somewhat self-congratulatory atmosphere of a conference that one of the principals described as a “rally of the cultural left.” In such an atmosphere their views must have seemed quite acceptable, even popular. But seen in the cold print of The New York Review their utterances look less appealing. They both charge me with misrepresenting their views, so let me remind them of exactly what they wrote.