The Academy on Trial

With a quiet fury against the many malefactors he sees everywhere in schools across the nation, Anthony Kronman, the former dean of Yale Law School, now submits to the public his brief for the prosecution against professors teaching the humanities in this country. "Education's End" (Yale University Press, 320 pages, $27.50) announces that these professors have failed, one and all, in their primary duty — that of teaching "the meaning of life." Surrounded as they are by the deep richness of Western literature, philosophy, and political thought, they have been blind to the magnitude of this bounty and have instead witlessly surrendered to the forces of political correctness, affirmative action, feminism, and vapid theorizing.

With lawyer-like diligence, Mr. Kronman builds his case carefully and patiently — but with one startling omission, to which I will turn. He describes the way in which higher learning in America has evolved — first with small colleges founded on religious principles and an awareness of moral responsibility, followed then by public universities dedicated to practical learning that would enhance the productivity of the individual states, and most recently by the advent of institutions of advanced learning based on the German model of scientific research. His prose is lucid, his patience exemplary, and his extensive scholarship elegantly preserved in 30 pages of footnotes.

Mr. Kronman's prosecution is fueled by his devotion to what he calls secular humanism and by his revulsion toward constructivism. Secular humanism is the perfect method "to explore the meaning of life in a deliberate and organized way even after its religious foundations have been called into doubt." Constructivism, the instrument of surrender to which all humanists have co-signed, affirms "the artificiality of all human values and the absence of any natural standards by which to judge them." Thus Western values wind up as no better than any others, there is no hierarchy of virtues, and power alone counts, but must be unmasked.

Mr. Kronman builds his indictment while again and again reminding his readers that "the meaning of life" has been cast aside by the many thousands he arraigns. He argues that the natural sciences and the "harder" social sciences, uninfected by relativism and lack of courage, have surged ahead to become the dominant practices of the academy. Heady with a sense of mission, these disciplines now command the admiration of the public. The humanities are no more than a "laughingstock."

Mr. Kronman ends his indictment with a bit of good news, namely, that in a program at Yale in which he himself teaches, the truly good books — the ones that ask the same question about the "meaning of life" that he was once asked as an undergraduate at Williams College by a kindly professor who taught in his home once a week and had on hand two golden retrievers and a wife who offered fresh cookies — are still being taught.

The one extraordinary omission in Mr. Kronman's bill of particulars is, alas, evidence. It is one thing to claim that humanists across the country have defaulted on what he believes is their primary duty — to teach "the meaning life." It is quite another to accumulate the facts — by analysis of curricula, by interviews with teachers and students, by a continuing exposure to what actually goes on within classroom after classroom, and by other forms of painstaking research. Then and only then can we ever know for sure what professors do.

Is it truly possible, even plausible, that the question about the meaning of life — the only real question, as far as Mr. Kronman is concerned — is never posed by any American professor? My own experience tells me that it is asked in thousands of ways, but often indirectly and only rarely at the outset of discussion. Smaller questions come first — how words work in books, who the characters are, what the sequence of action is, and what is at stake.

And might we not know more about all those classrooms if we could find out what questions are indeed being asked? Is Mr. Kronman's question the only one worth asking? If one were to teach The Iliad, might one not instead ask how to read the poem; or inquire about what heroism means; or investigate the nature of friendship, bravery, and loyalty? Might a humanist ask how wars start, and even what, in fact, is the dactylic hexameter? Humanists need not be confined to any one question — their education should be broad enough to stimulate many.

The great fault of this strange and impassioned book is, then, its avoidance of evidence. That is odd coming from a law professor. In the body of his book, Mr. Kronman does not name a single current teacher save himself and his Williams College mentor. Everyone else — those myriad unnamed John and Jane Does — are simply and categorically maligned. Hence the book, for all its care and insistent argumentation, is curiously abstract and airless. Good indictments don't work that way.

Mr. Chace is a professor of English and president emeritus of Emory University. His most recent book is "100 Semesters: My Adventures as Student, Professor, and University President, and What I Learned Along the Way" (Princeton University Press).