Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics.

Gross, David S.

Michael Berube's most interesting collection of essays deals with a cluster of issues which have put the humanities in American universities on the editorial pages of major newspapers and national news magazines throughout this decade. One of the author's theses is that liberal or leftist humanists in this country must get involved in public debates on issues which so strongly affect them, rather than ceding the field to the political Right, which, as Berube demonstrates, has carried on an effective smear campaign against the way that the individuals and institutions which make up what we call "the humanities" function in contemporary academic life.

The author has himself been one of the few liberal humanists to attempt to counter the George Wills and the Lynn Cheneys in large-circulation outlets. Several of the essays in Public Access first appeared in the Village Voice Literary Supplement, and as this review is being written in January 1995, a long piece by Berube on Cornel West and several other contemporary African American intellectuals has just appeared in the New Yorker. Berube argues that humanities professors must get over their reluctance to seek outlets for their writing outside the traditional refereed academic journals. He argues as well that such publications ought to be accepted as valid components in a tenure or promotion dossier.

Berube makes abundantly clear in well-documented essays that attacks on curriculum reform (especially the debate over the canon in humanities general-education courses), on race and gender-based area studies as intellectually insubstantial, on affirmative action programs - not to omit the annual ritual sneering in the Wall Street Journal or US News & World Report at MLA sessions, where the titles of certain talks are ridiculed and taken as symptomatic of research which is completely without value - are well-funded and carefully orchestrated endeavors to alter and even censor academic practice in the humanities. This often amounts to the very "McCarthyism" that is so often bandied about by the Right in attacks on some nonexistent PC thought police. Berube carefully refutes most of the best-known charges. Of particular interest is his revelation of the dishonest misrepresentations in the campaign waged against Lani Guinier and the destructive falsehoods (one of which led to the suicide of a Dartmouth student) in Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education.

The intellectual level here is consistently high. At one point there is a most interesting discussion of neo-Kantian influences in contemporary cultural theory, and many other sophisticated issues in poststructural and postmodern theory are carefully presented. Still, the prose style is very accessible, and often entertaining. During a discussion of the way the Right has presented a false picture of a monological united front in literature departments, where, for example, no criticism of affirmative action is allowed, Berube observes parenthetically: "The idea that conservatives on campus or elsewhere are somehow prevented from criticizing affirmative action is an especially strange notion, since in reality, criticism of affirmative action is one of the salient mating rituals of American conservatives, perhaps the primary means by which they recognize each other and bond as conservatives."

Berube's liberal perspective on the last four years of the "culture wars" is particularly relevant now, with current tacks on the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It is to be hoped that others will join him in defending academic freedom and the independence and integrity of the humanities academy in America against powerful enemies whose attacks he chronicles so well in this book.

David S. Gross University of Oklahoma