Summary
Author of The Closing of the American Mind, named in essays 33 and 34 of Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and Other Essays as the most famous instance of the case against the widened canon: in essay 34, a long diatribe against Nietzsche, feminism, Marxism and Black Studies arguing for educating a small, carefully prepared elite (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.369).
Details
- Essay 33 instances the book’s success, with Alvin Kernan’s The Death of Literature and Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, as suggesting that the work of widening awareness in the study of culture is scarcely finished or secure (PDF p.361).
- Essay 34 gives the book as one of the most famous and commercially successful books of the past decade; its author had been a professor at Cornell University when the university was shut down for a short time by a group of armed African-American students, and was so embittered that his book argued frankly for the university’s freedom to educate not large numbers of the deprived and disadvantaged but a small, carefully prepared and instructed elite, only a handful of Greek works and some French Enlightenment philosophers surviving its tests of inclusion (PDF p.369).
- Said’s answer: the prescription is worse than the malady, since freedom about the academy is not mainly about exclusion but about inclusion; professors such as the book’s author have no difficulty accepting money from corporations and foundations outside the university who espouse their deeply conservative views — a double standard (PDF p.369-370).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Academic freedom, Edward Said