Yesterday I suggested that the hyper-politicized, intellectually shallow atmosphere of much of contemporary academe grows out of the overly systematized bureaucratic machinery of the modern university. Today I'll explore that idea a bit by way of Rick Perlstein's American Prospect essay, "The Historical Present."

The occasion for Perlstein's piece is the recent meeting of The Historical Society, an organization known for its methodological and political conservatism in the face of history's increasing fragmentation and debilitating political correctness. Invited to report on the meeting, the progressive Perlstein spends much of the article recounting his efforts to discern the agenda behind the invitation and to assess the agenda of the conference itself. The article is in this sense a piece of unwitting self-parody, as Perlstein searches vainly for the reactionary motives he just knows must be behind the conference and his all-expenses-paid presence there. There is a hint of inverted McCarthyism to it (instead of hunting for commies, he hunts for conservatives). There is also a hint of Sherlock Holmes ("If I just look hard enough," one hears him thinking, "if I just learn to detect and decode the signs, the reactionary truth of this conference will be revealed to me").

But in the end, Perlstein is forced to confess that the conference was very moderate indeed; that a variety of political and methodological perspectives were represented there; and that the atmosphere was nonetheless genial and tolerant: no one seemed to have a particular axe to grind. In fact, he notes, far from having the adversarial feel he was expecting, the conference was extremely warm, welcoming, and personable. Perlstein concludes that perhaps this warmth was itself the conference's primary agenda. His final assessment: the goal of this small, intimate conference was to mitigate the alienating effects of academic bureaucracy, which have become the single most defining feature of contemporary academic life. The culture wars are over, he suggests, and a new kind of struggle, one directed at bureaucracy itself, is under way:

The anti-bureaucratic, almost communitas way so many of its members were recruited: through personal phone calls from friends they trusted. THS is a close-knit group, smaller, grown organically from the specific interests of its members rather than from any outside imperative to behave this way or that. It's a quiet community of mutual respect.

The only thing holding the movement back, Perlstein suggests, is that academics have not realized that it is one; they are still too caught up in the terms of the culture wars:

THS seemed to attract scholars vexed by something in contemporary academia, though they had trouble describing what. They had clung to a familiar description -- of a profession riven by the politics of race and sex, reliant on theory instead of evidence, given to naval-gazing, obscurantism, and writing that reads like badly translated German -- but it didn't quite fit. Why did they -- do they -- not discuss the frustrations an excess of bureaucracy brings to the life of the mind? Probably the culture wars have stolen their words.

These 1960s-inspired culture wars may never truly end. But the sooner we stop using them as a crib sheet for explaining academia and its discontents, the likelier we are to draw fresh insights into the contemporary scholarly world -- not, that is to say, the academy of 1994, which might well have been characterized by the wrangling over political correctness.

It's an attractive proposition. The culture wars have been so divisive, after all. Plus they are old and everybody is tired of them. It would be so nice to believe in Perlstein's picture of a newly tolerant academic community united against the impersonal, soul-destroying machinations of bureaucratic process. But it would perhaps be more truthful to see the proposition itself as just another movement within the culture wars, a disingenuous characterization of a situation that is far more complex than Perlstein's pat formulation allows.

Perlstein's premise rests on two false assumptions: first, that bureaucracy is politically neutral (and therefore clearly outside the territory of the dreaded culture wars); and second, that because bureaucracy is neutral, it can only become a problem in an academy that has effectively overcome its differences. In other words, Perlstein's idea here is that the anti-bureaucratic flavor of the Historical Society meeting indicates, in and of itself, the end of the culture wars and the advent of a newly unified, if frustrated, historical profession.

The problem with this logic, though, is that bureaucracy is not at all politically neutral; it is, indeed, the engine of central planning, and as such is the far left's organizational mode of choice. As in socialism, so in the left-wing academy: the more entrenched the ideology, the more impacted the system.

During the 1980s and early '90s, the campus left fought to establish speech codes and sensitivity workshops; they fought for women's studies departments, ethnic studies departments, black studies departments, chicano studies departments, and even gay and lesbian studies departments. They strenuously defended ever more aggressive affirmative action and in the name of minority retention and campus harmony they instituted multicultural course requirements and separatist dorms for minority students. They hired their own and they converted the classroom, the dormitory, and the scholarly monograph into scenes of enforced political conformity masquerading as zones of heightened, historically-informed sensitivity.

In short, it's not that the culture wars have evaporated, as Perlstein would have us believe, but that they have been decisively won. Over the past couple of decades, the campus has effectively become what one scholar I know terms an "ideological fiefdom." Now the victors are busy administering it. Bureaucratic bloat is the predictable result.

I'll talk more about the unholy alliance between bureaucracy and the politicized academy soon.

to be continued...