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It is sometimes claimed by liberals and leftists in the academy that recent attacks upon the way the teaching of the humanities has been politically corrupted in our universities either are much exaggerated—meaning: there is no cause for alarm, everything is pretty much the same as it was—or are written from what are called “political motives.” Thus, Louis Menand, who teaches English at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, complains in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books about “indiscriminate attack[s] on academic thought from political motives,” quite as if his own blistering attack on David Lehman’s Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man—the book ostensibly under review in his very long piece—had nothing whatever to do with “political motives.” It is also Professor Menand’s view that “many assaults on the university by people who are outside it [do not] distinguish among different tendencies in contemporary academic thought; [do not] understand the purpose of theoretical inquiry; and [lack] historical perspective.”
Yet something very odd occurs in the course of Professor Menand’s attempted demolition of Signs of the Times. When, after fifteen columns of type and thirty-one footnotes, this academic in good standing comes to his final sentence, he writes: “Although I think his complaint is ineptly made, I believe that Lehman is right in feeling that academic literary study has lost its way.” So there is something rotten going on, and while those outside the universities cannot be trusted to tell us what it is, those inside the universities will keep their mouths shut until the alarms and attacks can no longer be safely ignored. We wonder if this is what Professor Menand means when he writes that people outside the universities do not “understand the purpose of theoretical inquiry”?
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from The New Criterion, December 1991
Was the "attempted demolition" of his valuable book dictated by the Anglophile top brass at the NYRofB? — Jonathan Gelb