Yale Caves In To Campus Liberals

Campus culture being what it is these days, Donald Kagan’s 1990 speech to incoming freshmen at Yale College was amazingly controversial: He said the study of Western civilization ought to be common and central. Kagan, then dean of the college, said the West’s flaws - including war, slavery and exclusion of women - are common to other civilizations, but its achievements have been unique, including great emphasis on law, equality, liberty and conscience.

Naturally enough, he was widely denounced on campus as a backward-looking white male and a racist. But in the wake of the speech, the thenpresident of Yale, Benno Schmidt, approached one of the university’s wealthy contributors, Lee Bass, and asked for money to establish a Western civilization program.

Yale had many courses in Western thought and culture, of course, but the idea was to offer an integrated program as an option to just picking cafeteria-style among individual courses. Schmidt thought it could be a model for programs at other universities around the country. Bass gave $20 million, touching off almost four years of academic wrangling that ended this month with Yale promising to give the money back, with interest.

Almost from the beginning, a lot of faculty opposition arose. Most of it claimed to be nonideological - the faculty hadn’t been consulted, funds were needed for other departments, the university already was strong in Western studies. Interestingly, Professor Harold Bloom, author of “The Western Canon,” agrees with this line of reasoning. “The dragon is out there all right,” he said. “They’ve destroyed literary studies at all but four or five universities, reading Alice Walker instead of Spenser, Milton and Shakespeare. But it’s not happening here. We have always been strong in the study of the Western humanities, and we still are.”

Still, the conventional ideological opposition to the West is there. Professor Sara Suleri, a veteran West-baiter, said: “Western civilization? Why not a chair for colonialism, slavery, empire and poverty?” Peter Brooks, head of the Yale Humanities Center, fretted about other programs being pre-empted by “something called Western civilization.” Historian Geoffrey Parker, who teaches some of the Western courses that Yale is so deep in, was quoted as observing, “The major export of Western civilization is violence.” And though the multicultural smog at Yale may indeed be thin by the standards of other campuses, The Boston Globe in 1991 quoted one of Donald Kagan’s “implacable enemies” as saying that Kagan is 90 percent right about the damage done to Yale in the 1970s by fads such as structuralism and deconstruction.

Whether because of ideological opposition or normal academic squabbling, Yale went for years without implementing the program. The original committee, dominated by Kagan’s allies, disbanded when the university refused to authorize money to hire four new faculty members for the program. With Schmidt gone and Kagan no longer the dean, Yale President Richard Levin named a new committee made up of professors much less friendly to Kagan’s original plans.

An undergraduate, Pat Collins, then published an article in a conservative campus magazine, Light and Truth, charging that “all serious efforts” to implement the program effectively had been ended by Levin and that “a number of faculty have even tried to have the funds redirected to their own projects or departments after succeeding in killing the original proposal.” A Wall Street Journal editorial picked up the issue and blasted Yale. It reported that Michael Holquist, acting head of comparative literature, believed there could be “fusion” between Bass courses and classes on issues such as gender studies. In other words, the new Western civ program might end up being part of the same multicultural mush it was supposed to counter.

The exasperated Bass apparently had lost so much faith in Yale (Bass, Levin and other principals in the case have declined to be interviewed) that he asked for new assurances and made the tactical mistake of asking to approve the professors named to the program. But no university can allow outsiders to pick faculty. This offered Yale a way out of its self-created mess - it could reject the Bass grant on principle and spin the story to the press as if it centered on a rich alumnus trying to tell Yale what to do. (The New York Times and The New Yorker dutifully played the story this way.)

The heart of the story is this: How is it that Yale, which receives hundreds of millions of dollars a year and funds hundreds of programs, singled out just this one program for a four-year brouhaha? This never was conceived as a closed or celebratory project - it expressly was described as ranging from the rise of Mesopotamia to the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust. And unlike the mandatory multicultural courses on many campuses, the courses here were to be optional - any student could avoid them.

Yale gave up $20 million in funding and perhaps another $20 million in lost donations from disillusioned alumni, according to one source. Losing that much money in one failed adventure may well cost Levin his job. It’s a reminder of how far the modern university president will go these days to avoid hurting the feelings of the campus left.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Leo Universal Press Syndicate