One of my earliest and more memorable lessons in historiography, conveyed by William Galush at Loyola University Chicago, is what I call the “Plausibility Test.” In reading any text of history, and in assessing its argument and evidence, Galush taught us to ask whether the story is plausible. With most academic texts, even those that stretch your mind and assumptions, the answer is almost always yes.
In Making the Radical University, Kalbfleisch attempts to stretch our minds. She argues that present-day social, cultural, and political strife in the United States has a deep connection with identity politics. Citing Richard Rorty’s assertion in Achieving Our Country (1998), about the obvious influence of an “academic Left” formed in the 1960s, the author asserts that it started in higher education, and that leftist “academic curricular activism had a profoundly transformative effect on American culture” (p. 2). The phenomenon arose in the 1970s and 1980s from intellectuals and theorists (some of whom were also academics) who influenced a wide range of professors. Those professors, in turn, then promoted radical leftist agendas through a “focus on identity” in classrooms devoted to literature, literary theory, women’s studies, ethnic studies, Black studies, and the humanities (p. 2).
Kalbfleisch praises this transformative change as “noble, progressive, and on the right side of history” (p. 2). She also, however, brackets as troublesome the “academic-activist hybrid pedagogy” of leftist faculty. Their indoctrination of countless students came to thoroughly infect American culture and politics. Kalbfleisch asserts that higher ed’s “focus on identity had an enormous effect on American culture … that almost cannot be overstated” (p. 2). The author is convinced, furthermore, that “in the canon wars lay explanations of some crises the humanities and the larger culture were facing in 2014” and after (p. ix).
The book’s four chapters take us from the formation of an academic left to battles of the canon wars in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The first chapter covers “curricular activism” and its “Leftist revolutionary spirit” in the 1966–71 period (pp. 7, 21). The author focuses on organized efforts to make this spirit real—e.g., the Students for a Democratic Society’s 1966 Radical Education Project; the 1968 New University Conference; influential essay collections (1967’s Dissenting Academy and 1970’s Liberation); and the founding of Black, ethnic, and women’s studies programs. Through these developments, the revolutionary ideas of the 1960s “migrated into the university generally, the humanities specifically, and more specifically still English departments” (p. 21).
Chapter 2 centers on “new methodological and hermeneutic approaches” in research and writing during the 1970s and 1980s, and how they contributed to identity politics (p. 31). This work “sought to break down barriers of theory and praxis in pursuit of social change” (p. 31). It came from the writings of Erikson, Fanon, Friedan, Millett, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray, Firestone, Lorde, hooks, Rich, and others (pp. 32–61). The result was an expansion of “cultural criticism” that highlighted language, identity, and politics and that eventually commandeered English departments, studies programs, and the humanities (pp. 31, 39, 42, 47–59).
Chapters 3 and 4 cover canon wars and identity politics at Stanford and at the University of Texas-Austin, mostly at the former. The chapters total fifty-five pages, but only seven of the thirteen in chapter 4 cover events in Austin. This imbalance is somewhat unfortunate, because what happened in Texas has not been deeply addressed in other historical texts that discuss canon wars, curricular reform, and literary theory in this period. Kalbfleisch’s coverage of the Stanford Affair, however, is solid, utilizing primary resources that rarely appear elsewhere. This includes a close look at the activities of Carolyn Lougee, chair of the Stanford faculty’s Committee on Undergraduate Studies from 1976 through the 1980s (pp. 74–89).
The coverage of Stanford and Austin leads to questions regarding the absence of many relevant works. Excluded are pertinent primary and secondary works that overlap with Kalbfleisch’s topics, including Gerald Graff, Professing Literature (1987); Henry Louis Gates Jr., Loose Canons (1992); Lawrence W. Levine, The Opening of the American Mind (1996); Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity (1997); Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (2011); Tim Lacy, The Dream of a Democratic Culture (2013); and Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America (2015). Relevant historiography on higher education is also absent, including Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University (1996); Thomas Bender and Carl Schorske, eds., American Academic Culture in Transformation (1997); and Ethan Schrum, The Instrumental University (2019). These works, taken together, definitively show that the concerns outlined by Kalbfleisch have a longer history in the twentieth century and are wider than merely “identity politics.”
Kalbfleisch’s overall argument is one that is taken as common sense by conservative and middle-of-the-road critics of higher education. They are haunted by a vision of polarized society created, somehow, by an extremely small number of radical leftist humanities and liberal arts professors. The assertion, however, runs contrary to the regular practices and “business” of higher education as documented in numerous critiques, as well as to concerns raised almost daily in publications like Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Courtesy of accreditation norms, marketplace competition, budget concerns, trustee oversight, Department of Education policies, the consumer desires of students and parents, and the diversity of competing faculty voices in any institution, there are, really, no radical universities in the United States. There may be a tiny number of religious or mission-driven colleges that meet some criteria of being radical, but the process of becoming, and staying, a university requires acquiescence to a number of normative values. Most of our colleges and universities are ordinary institutions dedicated to regularly turning out normal, credentialed graduates who go on to live decidedly unradical lives in the workforce.
The central argument from Kalbfleisch also depends on a number of contingent factors. First, the author provides a few samples of radical syllabi in chapter 1 but leaves open how consistent they were with other syllabi across the entirety of higher education. Second, the reader must take for granted that students have read, understood, and remembered the assertions of thinkers covered in chapter 2. Third, the book requires us to believe that student radicals produced by the universities also acted on this learning. Finally, the reader must believe that the radical leftist social desires of these students and their professors, if they acted on them, were effective enough to cause the factionalism present today in American society. (“The syllabus made me do it!” those students will later claim to their would-be interrogators.) The chain of practical consequences outlined here, in the words of my past professor, William Galush, is simply implausible.
Despite my serious criticisms and reservations, this brief book does, at a minimum, introduce the reader to a story worthy of review (i.e., the rise of identity politics in higher ed humanities, English, and literature curricula). All members of the academy, and those interested in its history, need a thorough understanding of these developments on campus. Kalbfleisch’s work acquaints one with how that story is associated with literature and English departments.
