For those who have followed the problem with the attention it demands, both the nature and the scale of the crisis that has overtaken the study of the arts and the humanities in our universities have now been made vividly and painfully manifest. The subject has become a matter of (albeit muddied) debate in the media, it has won the attention of government agencies, it has produced some best-selling books, and—it is my impression, anyway—it has caused a more acute feeling of anxiety, at times amounting to panic, among the educated parents of high school- and college-age students than anything that has occurred in American life since the Vietnam war. (It is this widespread feeling of panic among educated parents that accounts, I believe, for the huge sales of such books as The Closing of the American Mind and Cultural Literacy.) Not even the fears generated by the onset of the sexual revolution of the Sixties had quite this effect on American middle-class society, for—correctly or not—the hazards of sexual liberation were generally not seen to constitute an impediment to either a successful career or a good life. Just the contrary, in fact—except, of course, among the diehards who still refused to give up the idea that morals should somehow play a crucial role in such matters. On the campus itself, this crisis over what is being taught in the name of the arts and the humanities has likewise caused a greater degree of demoralization and conflict among faculty members than any development since the Vietnam war, and among gifted students it has probably already resulted in a greater number of defections from the professional study of the arts and the humanities than the war itself caused. This issue is such that it has now raised a fundamental question as to whether the universities in this country will have any but a negative, disabling, and destructive role to play in the formation of the intellectual life—and hence the social character—of the generation now entering higher education.

In the report Humanities in America recently issued by Lynne V. Cheney, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the second Reagan administration, Professor Walter Jackson Bate of Harvard University is quoted as having declared in 1982 that the humanities were then, in his view, “plunging into their worst state of crisis since the modern university was formed a century ago.”¹ Yet the situation is far worse today—and not least, by the way, at Harvard—than it was seven years ago, and going downhill at an ever increasing rate of speed. One important sign of this rapid deterioration can be seen in the extent to which the study of the arts and the humanities is no longer entirely distinguishable from the reign of the social sciences, which nowadays bear little, if any, relation to the spirit of scientific inquiry and are more than ever an openly acknowledged program of political indoctrination. Among the many current attacks on the arts and the humanities in the American academy, none in fact is more conspicuous or successful than the assault that has been mounted on these fields—which are so precious to us for what they are in themselves and so central in transmitting from one generation to another the very idea of what our civilization is—from this quarter. That the social sciences have met with so little resistance in their imperious drive to annex the arts and the humanities to their own domain is now, more often than not, the most distinguishing feature of entire disciplines—literary study, art history, history itself—that were formerly so fiercely jealous of their intellectual autonomy and so rigorous in defending it.

So advanced and widespread is this surrender of the arts and the humanities to the social sciences—and to the radical political agenda of the social sciences—that we now have reason, I believe, to look upon the social sciences as a kind of academic Gulag to which, on one campus after another and in one learned journal after another, the arts and the humanities have been sent for what, in other parts of the world, it is customary to describe as “reeducation” or “rehabilitation”—in other words, brainwashing. There are, to be sure, certain pockets of resistance to this runaway trend, but by and large what we are seeing in the academy in America is a wholesale capitulation to an idea and an ideology that has as its goal the complete destruction of the arts and the humanities as independent and autonomous fields of study which derive their standards, their methods, and their vision from the artistic and humanistic achievements that called these intellectual disciplines into existence in the first place.

It is not my purpose here, however, to provide another detailed description of the melancholy fate that has befallen the arts and the humanities in academic life.

It is not my purpose here, however, to provide another detailed description of the melancholy fate that has befallen the arts and the humanities in academic life and in the larger cultural and intellectual world outside the academy. Most of us have already heard enough and read enough about the horrors that are being visited upon these critical and scholarly disciplines as a matter of academic routine, and every day the newspapers and magazines bring fresh news from the front—as do, indeed, the phone calls from anguished friends and colleagues who cry out to us for help in warding off the still greater horrors that they see in store for them. The courses that now substitute Hollywood movies for classic texts, that scrap the study of Western civilization for a whole variety of politicized ethnic, racial, and gender studies—that systematically liquidate the very concept of art and scholarship in favor of a so-called materialist, which is to say economic and political, analysis of the conditions of their production—news of these developments reaches us every day in accelerating numbers, and all too often we follow these news reports with the same kind of sinking feeling, and feelings of helplessness, that we experience in following the news of devastating hurricanes and volcanic eruptions. We know very well what kind of destruction follows in the wake of these disasters, whether they occur at celebrated institutions like Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Columbia and Stanford and Duke or at many other less celebrated schools where the corpses of the defeated are buried without notice or regret.

Describing these ghastly developments is important, for with any plague that threatens to destroy something vital to our existence our first obligation is to gather as much intelligence about it as we can and issue information about the means of surviving it. But speaking for myself, anyway, and for some of my colleagues both at The New Criterion and elsewhere—for we are not entirely alone in this struggle—I think the time has come to move the discussion to another stage—the stage at which we must come to grips with the question of what can be done to reverse this spirit-destroying menace to the life of the mind itself—to the life of the mind as we in the West have traditionally understood it.

What, then, can be done?

I want to try to answer this question—or at least suggest the direction in which the answers are, as I think, to be found—by dividing the question into two parts: into what must, for obvious reasons, be called politics, and what, for reasons that might not be so obvious or agreeable to everyone, must in my view be called art.

At least as a strategy for intellectual combat, if not in other respects, the easier part of the question to discuss is politics. We all know—and certainly our enemies know—that the assault on the study of the arts and the humanities we are discussing is, above all, a political assault—an attempt on the part of the radical Left first to discredit and then to do away with what in our most exalted artistic and humanistic traditions may be seen to offer resistance, either directly or by implication, to the total politicization of culture and life. We know the assault is at bottom political, no matter under what other temporary banners the assault may at times be mounted and regardless of what unexceptionable virtues it may at times be mounted in the name of.

We know it is political, and if we have any sense of what is involved in the assault itself, we will also know that political means must be found to struggle against the goals that our enemies wish to see achieved. No one, I think, can accuse me of entering into the discussion of this question without a keen appreciation of its political dimension. My own enemies—whose attacks upon me, by the way, I cherish, if only because they confirm my conviction that I am heading in the right direction—have been vocal in underscoring my political approach to the question, and on this matter, anyway, they have not always been wrong. Yet I want to say here that I do not believe, and have never believed, that the real solution to the crisis we are facing, which, I repeat, is a political crisis, is to be found in politics alone, or even perhaps in politics primarily. The defense of what I wish to call art— a word I shall use here to represent what it is that the creators of high culture in every field achieve in all of the arts and humanities—the defense of what I am calling art can never be successful on any terms worth fighting for if it is completely and irreversibly subordinated to politics, even our own politics.

Art, as I wish to understand it—and this includes scholarship, too—must be defended and pursued and relished.

Art, as I wish to understand it—and this includes scholarship, too—must be defended and pursued and relished not for any political program it might be thought to serve but for what it is, in and of itself, as a mode of knowledge, as a source of spiritual and intellectual enlightenment, as a special form of pleasure and moral elevation, and as a spur to the highest reaches of human aspiration. Art must be savored and preserved and transmitted as the very medium in which our civilization either lives and prospers—prospers intellectually and spiritually—or withers and dies. To subordinate art to politics—even, as I say, to our politics—is not only to diminish its power to shape our civilization at its highest levels of aspiration but to condemn it to a role that amounts to little more than social engineering.

In the situation that we are facing today in the study of the arts and the humanities, the temptation to emulate our enemies in subordinating art to politics will inevitably be great, because such a course offers—or at least gives us the illusion of offering—the shortest route to short-term victories. But if it is our civilization that we believe to be at stake in this struggle, then this temptation to grasp at whatever short-term victories might be achieved must be resisted in favor of the longer-term objectives. Otherwise, I believe we shall merely find ourselves collaborating with our enemies on the destruction of the very thing we have set out to defend and preserve. Art must be defended and pursued and preserved for what it is rather than as a political instrument in the service of some other cause. The defense and advancement of art cannot be deferred to some hypothetical future when, as we might prefer to believe, the struggle will be less arduous and the conditions more propitious. The defense of art must not, in other words, be looked upon as a luxury of civilization—to be indulged in and supported when all else is serene and unchallenged—but as the very essence of our civilization.

If we approach the defense of art from this perspective, then the really compelling question at the moment is: How do we begin to do it? And in dealing with this very large question, we must be prepared to argue even with our friends, for it is my impression that there is no unanimity of outlook on this issue. The most we can hope for is that something useful and effective will emerge from an effort at argument and dialogue.

I want, in any case, to direct my own suggestions to the two fields I know best—the study of the arts and the humanities in college and university education; and the field of criticism outside the colleges and universities. About the first, the study of the arts and the humanities in the colleges and universities, I want to begin with a modest but radical practical proposal: that we get the movies out of the liberal arts classroom. We’ve simply got to throw them out. There is no good reason for the movies to be there, and there is every reason to get rid of them. They not only take up too much time, but the very process of according them serious attention sullies the pedagogical goals they are ostensibly employed to serve. The students are in class to read, write, learn, and think, and the movies are an impediment to that process. Students are going to go to the movies anyway, and to bring them into the classroom—either as objects of study or as aids to study—is to blur and destroy precisely the kind of distinction—the distinction between high culture and popular culture—that it is now one of the functions of a sound liberal education to give our students.

Following from this, I believe that all forms of popular culture should be banned from courses in the arts and the humanities. Typically today students arrive on college campuses already besotted with the trash of popular culture, and it must now be one of the goals of a sound liberal education to wean them away from it—or, if that is asking too much (I don’t think it is, but if that really is too much) then we can at least hope to educate our students to perceive what the differences are between high culture and the trash that impinges on so much of their leisure time. The study of popular culture may legitimately belong to the realm of the social sciences—that, at least, can be argued—but it has no legitimate place in the arts and the humanities. This field of study— the study of popular culture—is a curse we have inherited from Marxist-oriented sociology, where it began, anyway, as a means of studying evidence of the way capitalist society corrupted its members. The Marxists might not even be wrong about that—that is not the question I wish to pursue at the moment. But for the arts and the humanities to surrender to this concept—a social-science concept—of our civilization is a guarantee of failure for what it is the study of the arts and the humanities ought to give our students.

Following from this, I believe that all forms of popular culture should be banned from courses in the arts and the humanities.

It follows from this, moreover, that we must make an effort—though it is uphill work to do so—to rescue the study of the arts and the humanities from the baleful influence that the social sciences themselves continue to wield with such devastating results. This effort to draw the line between high culture and the social sciences will be, if anything, even more difficult to achieve than any attempt to expel the movies and other forms of popular culture from liberal education. For many critics that we admire, from Taine and Arnold in the nineteenth century to Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling in ours, have done important work—work that is central to our understanding of modern culture—by introducing the ideas drawn from the social sciences into literary study. We have all learned much from them—I certainly have—and they often offer us a kind of intelligence, about life, if not always about literature, we would not want to do without. Yet I think we now stand in such a radically different relation to our artistic and humanistic traditions than these critics did—our students, and probably much of our faculty, too, if the truth be told, are now so distant from and so ignorant of the central artistic and humanistic works that constitute those traditions—that I believe we must revise our ideas about the place to be accorded the social and economic history of the arts and the humanities, and concentrate a far greater emphasis on a study of the works themselves. The truth that must now be recognized, I believe, is that the social history of art can mean nothing but politics to minds that are basically ignorant about what art is in itself, and what it isn’t. It is the tendency of the social sciences to reduce the arts and the humanities to a level of materialist culture where distinctions between high art and popular culture and between art and politics are meaningless—and at that level what art is itself can no longer be discussed, for it is seen to consist of nothing but the sum of its social and economic attributes.

To speak specifically of the two fields I am myself closest to—the study of art history, and the study of literature—the approach I am advocating will entail a return to the very disciplines that have been so much under attack in recent years—so much under attack that in many of our leading academic institutions they have all but disappeared. In art history, it means the revival of training in connoisseurship—the close, comparative study of art objects with a view to determining their relative levels of aesthetic quality. This is a field in which our country could once boast of great achievements. From Bernard Berenson to Alfred Barr to Sydney Freedberg, we have indeed produced some of the greatest connoisseurs of Western art the world has seen, and their achievements and influence have greatly enriched our institutions and our lives—enriched them, I hasten to add, with aesthetic intelligence of the highest order. But these great names represent a dying intellectual enterprise. It isn’t dead yet, but the prognosis is grave. In this respect, Sydney Freedberg’s departure from Harvard earlier in this decade was for many of us a symbolic event, for it marked something more than the exit of a single individual from the institution that had virtually created the concept of connoisseurship in American cultural life. It represented the collapse of a tradition and the takeover of that institution by minds determined to transform the study of art into a form of social science. Which meant nothing less than the annexation of art history to the political service of the radical Left.

In the study of literature, the situation is equally grim—perhaps even grimmer, in some respects—and in this field there must also be a revival of what constituted, I believe, the closest analogue we have had in literary study to the tradition of connoisseur-ship in the visual arts, the New Criticism. It used to be said of the New Criticism—it was a favorite war cry of the Marxists—that in the emphasis it placed on studying the internal structure and meaning of a literary work it woefully neglected the role played by history in the formation of literary style. From my own studies with Allen Tate, Randall Jarrell, and others, I know this not to have been true, and it would be nonsense to claim that Southern writers like Tate or Robert Penn Warren, who themselves wrote nonaction historical prose works early in their careers, were insufficiently aware of the role of history in the creation of great literature. The distinction that the New Criticism insisted upon—and which I believe the future integrity of literary study will depend upon—is the distinction that must always be made between text and context, between an understanding of the poem the poet creates (and I mean a line by line, word by word understanding) and an understanding of the world in which the poem is created and has its career. Without a revival of something like the emphasis, the priority, that the New Criticism placed on the analysis of the individual literary work and on works of the highest literary distinction, the study of literature in our universities can be little more than a study of rumor, reputation, and ideology. Without that emphasis on understanding the internal workings of great literature, its content-including its moral content—can only be taken on faith; and in the present context of literary study, that faith will inevitably be a political faith. It was for this reason that Brooks and Warren called their great textbook Understanding Poetry, for without a close, studied understanding of what the poem is and says, what is it that we can pretend we have understood about it? The New Criticism taught us to read the great works of our time and of all time, and in literary study there is simply no alternative to it.

In turning to the field of criticism of the arts and humanities outside the classroom, however, the situation we face is even more complex though no less dismal. For there is first of all so little that can legitimately be called criticism. Instead there is an avalanche of political discourse masquerading as criticism of the arts and the humanities. This being the case, I believe that criticism must be obliged to fight a two-front war—to advance the interests of connoisseur ship and quality in its analysis of particular artists, writers, and scholars and also to engage in whatever critical combat may be required to set the record straight about the way politics has been allowed to distort artistic judgment and destroy whole areas of intellectual inquiry. Once again, I am not suggesting that this problem of political discourse masquerading as serious criticism will be solved by substituting our politics for those of our enemies on the Left. Our task, wherever it may be possible, is to try to expel the politicization of the arts and the humanities in order to allow them enough free intellectual air in which to breathe and grow. But to the extent that our own criticism must perforce be a political criticism, too, we need to be acutely conscious of the fact it is not by political means alone, or even primarily, that the recovery of the arts and the humanities in our society will be achieved. Politics is the problem, but it is only in part the solution.