Kakki wrote: > To those who > will challenge me about > Marxist teachers gaining hold in the 60s I have two > prominent names for you: > Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis
As both teachers and intellectuals, Marcuse and Davis were quite influential in certain circles in the 60s, including significant portions of academia. But that was then and this is now. Understatement alert: the 60s were a pretty unusual time of great political and cultural upheaval. While some significant changes were set in motion during that period, I think it's overstating the case to say that Marxist doctrine is dominant or even significantly influential in the postsecondary education of most Americans. The huge numbers of business majors churned out by American colleges and universities is alone enough to refute that fact. Two relevant points to shed light. First, the well-documented disconnect between American academia's two functions (research and writing on the one hand, teaching on the other) means that the most famous of America's Marxist and otherwise leftist academics do not necessarily have a lot of direct classroom contact with undergraduates. The longstanding American obsession with "practical" education (cf. Tocqueville) means that U.S. postsecondary education today is by and large better characterized as training. The inculcation of skills--whether lower- or higher-order--doesn't allow much room for the coincident inculcation of ideology. (Though a Marxist might argue that such a focus is inherently an inculcation of capitalist ideology--division and alienation of labor, etc.) Second and more importantly, Marx's body of work is large and full of several distinct core principles that do not necessarily on their own link to a communist or (especially) a Stalinist ideology. For example, the idea that "consciousness" (ideas, opinions, perspectives) naturally and necessarily follows from "material conditions" (economic and political structure) has evolved into a school of literary criticism that in no way implies a necessary *critique* of any *particular* material conditions (e.g. the American status quo). Other Marxist ideas--that capitalism as a system, dependent on growth and profits, must inexorably expand--have been borne out by history, and it would be difficult to find even neoclassical economists who would disagree. My personal opinion is that Marx did a better job than anyone in history of diagnosing the source and nature of capitalism's problems--he just did a pretty shitty job of prescribing a solution, and left plenty of loopholes for megalomaniacs like Stalin to exploit. The point? That even self-identified Marxist academics display a wide variety of opinions on many topics. Not only does this diversity undercut fears of some monolithic influence on the academic system, it also means that an anti-American stance emphatically does *not* naturally follow from their particular Marxist perspective. Whew. --Michael NP: Rufus Wainwright, _Poses_ ===== ___________________________________________________________________________ "[Naipaul] is devoutly read wherever literacy in English prevails, as well as in parts of America." --Gavin McNett, "The Black Sheep." http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/10/14/naipaul/index.html Make a great connection at Yahoo! Personals. http://personals.yahoo.com
