It's official. A new study reveals that many more professors think it's more important to teach students how to be "agents of social change" than to teach them the classic works of Western civilization:

According to the survey, 57.8 percent of professors believe it is important to encourage undergraduates to become agents of social change, whereas only 34.7 percent said teaching them the classics is very important. Observers say the difference results from influences as diverse as conservative criticisms of curriculum and Barack Obama's call for social activism during his presidential campaign.

The survey found that, on the issue of classics and change, professors' opinions also vary by rank. Full professors are more likely than assistant professors to say teaching the classics is important, and assistant professors are more likely than full professors to say encouraging undergraduates to become socially involved is important.

A report on the survey, "The American College Teacher," was released Thursday by the University of California at Los Angeles's Higher Education Research Institute. The institute questioned 22,562 professors across many disciplines at 372 colleges and universities in the 2007-8 academic year about their goals for classroom instruction, and asked them how they spent their time and how satisfied they were with their jobs. The institute completes the survey every three years (The Chronicle, September 16, 2005).

Sylvia Hurtado, a professor of education at UCLA who directs the research institute, said the gap between those who value teaching Western civilization and those who value teaching students to be social activists reflects a shift in emphasis from the abstract to the practical. "The notion of a liberal education as a set of essential intellectual skills is in transition," she says. "It's also about social and personal responsibility, thinking about one's role in society, and creating change."

Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, says he believes faculty members should teach the classics. "I teach American literature all the time, that's what I do," says Mr. Nelson, who is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

But he says that to many professors, teaching the classics has become part of a "conservative agenda" that they don't want to be part of. Conservative critics of academe, he says, "have poisoned the well for these subjects because they've gotten politicized and become symbols of a reaction against the progressive academy."

But Peter W. Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, attributes the gap between Western civilization and social change in part to the influence of Barack Obama's campaign. He suspects that many professors have long believed that teaching students to be agents of change is more important than teaching them to value the classics. Few, however, have openly acknowledged that, he says. "There used to be something a bit shameful for a faculty member to take such an anti-intellectual position," he says.

But the 2008 presidential campaign, he says, changed that, giving "a sense of legitimacy to the idea that political action could and should trump traditional forms of intellectual inquiry."

So much for intellectuals behaving intellectually. So much for academic freedom. If the professoriate really is such an affectively volatile candle in the wind, then there should be no academic freedom--because there can be no possibility of rational self-governance. Freedom--academic and otherwise--is predicated on the ideals of reason and rational thought. The academy has a particular obligation to live up to that ideal. Oh well.

The other thing I notice about this study (and I confess I have not looked at the study itself, only the article, so perhaps the issue is with the reporting and not the study) is the false dichotomy between reading works that educate students about social change and reading the classics. The classics are works about social change, in one way or another. That's true of Greek tragedy, of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Defoe, of enlightenment philosophers, of romantic poets, of Victorian novelists, of modernist writers. Some register upheaval in their form, some in their content, some do both. Some try to provoke change, some try to register and reflect on it, some try to resist it. But great literature is always hooked into the great tensions of its time--even as it is also hooked into a longer tradition.

There is no conflict between teaching students about social change and teaching the classics. Or there shouldn't be. Has the academy's intensely visceral hostility toward "conservatism" reached such a point that professors can no longer think straight?

UPDATE: More at Joanne Jacobs, one of whose commenters observes that "The simple fact is that many of these 'progressive' teachers have not read much classic literature." That may rankle. But all you have to do is look at K-12 curricula, college general requirements, and even humanities major requirements to see where that impression comes from.

Bonus points for looking at graduate programs in the humanities--which also regularly enable people who come in with huge, gaping holes in their knowledge to protect, preserve, and rationalize them. No one is going to say at that point, "Hey, young aspiring scholar! From your past coursework, and from your own accounting, it looks here like you've never read a play by Shakespeare--and that you would not know a Biblical allusion if it came up and smacked you. I know you think it doesn't matter because you aim to become a scholar of twentieth-century whatever--but it really does. Start reading!" By grad school, students should be ready to specialize. But too often, they are very far from being ready for that. They need remediation--but that's an unspeakable recognition when it comes to talking about curricular rigor at the graduate level. So everyone just plays along and acts like incoming students know more than they do. The results are not pretty, nor are they particularly intellectually honest.

I was very lucky, looking back. My public high school English classes were coherent and really rich: in ninth grade, we did tons of grammar, plus genre surveys, studded with the odd accessible classic (a prose Odyssey, a modernized Canterbury Tales, Romeo and Juliet, Great Expectations); in tenth grade, we did a spectacular survey of American lit, from Puritan sermons through Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Miller, and Williams; in eleventh, we surveyed English lit -- from before Beowulf through Conrad (I suspect we ran out of time there); in senior year, we read, cover to cover, the Norton anthologies of world literature, volumes one and two. I think I've mentioned that here before -- they took us from Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides through Old and New Testament, to Dante, to Shakespeare and Jonson, to Moliere and Pope, and onward, with special stops for Madame Bovary and even some Brecht. My English major at Berkeley required a year-long survey of English lit from Chaucer through now, a Shakespeare course, a course on the classics, plus study of American lit, genre, and--this one was very cool and important--single authors (I liked that one so much I did it twice, once for Woolf and once for Austen). This was in the 80s, and it was just the regular thing you encountered in public school. Things have changed a lot.