with, was in no way large enough to meet the pressing needs of institutions bursting at the seams. To pick up of the slack, the gates had to open to newly and quickly minted academics. Frequently underprepared, lacking in scholarly dispositions, and highly critical of the traditional nature of scholarship and its purpose, the sixties generation arrived on campus still reeling under demands for which the academy was not prepared. Like the bewildered student body they were appointed to teach rather than to educate, the new professoriate simply transposed the package of assumptions and
habits acquired during their tumultuous youth in the activist years of the sixties onto an academy in limbo.35
In the eyes of the traditionalists, these young “radicals” proceeded to gain tenure not only through opportunities brought about by demographic change, but from the natural retirement of elder faculty and the attrition due to the alienation experienced within increasingly large bureaucratic structures.
In short, social and demographic changes
allowed the rise of esoteric studies to be complemented by a rise in power, which in the eyes of the beholder seemed to legitimate their position. Robert Alter noted:
This general movement of aggressive esotericism is intimately allied with an unprecedented preoccupation of power on several levels. It has proved, first of all, to be a highly effective means for consolidating power within the academy. If you are, say, a Marxistant critic or a deconstructionist, you belong to a highly defined prestige network of likeminded critics in which status is established by the persuasive emulation in phrase and intellectual gesture of one or two or three models. With a little luck, you may be able to stack a department with adherents of the same sectarian trend, enabling you to dominate the curriculum, influence students, isolate or marginalize colleagues who do not follow the party line. And since the academic market responds rapidly and sensitively to what is fashionable in the eyes of its faculty constituency, the material rewards of dedicated trendiness can be substantial. It is perhaps not even ironic that literary Marxists have become some of the great entrepreneurs of the American academy, commanding three or four times the salary of the academic proletariat (the assistant professors, the “conventional” scholars at less prestigious institutions), enjoying endowed chairs with generous perks and in some instances their own journals or research institutes.36
As the positions of multiculturalists came to be supported not only by administrative power but by increasing scholarship in the Marxist, feminist, and deconstructionist fields (all of which, ironically, focused not so much on ideas but on the process of empowerment – whether economic, sexual, or creative), so too the legitimacy of multiculturalists took on new dimensions. The thought of the multiculturalists was not only taken seriously, but they took themselves seriously. So much so that, like the traditionalists, the multiculturalists undertook a moral commitment not only to educate their students in such findings, but also to spread their new gospel to the world- at-large.
The irony is, while the young radicals were at work institutionalizing their thought and their agendas within the university, the world that had once been accepting of the new ideas and agendas changed. During the 1970s and 1980s, the national mood of America swung from the left-liberal policies of the Kennedy-Carter years to the right-conservative policies of the Reagan-Bush years. Thus, just as the tenured radicals were to embark on a crusade to save the world from the oppression of traditionalism and paternalism, the world once again embraced such claims. Armed with only an agenda that would fall on deaf ears, one might speculate whether these individuals, trained in the political tactics gained through university politics, might not have played the hand they were dealt hoping not simply to cut their losses but rebuild their cause on the foundation of their opposition.
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