The 1990s found the multiculturalists in a very different political setting, for example. First, their cause was no longer an isolated cause of a minority interest. Support for their positions could be found in scholastic writings and administrative positions. Second, having achieved tenure and having seen elderly faculty – who would normally have held their younger colleagues in check – retire, these faculty members could teach what they chose and direct their departments as they willed. This should have proven of great comfort, as they could go about the business of scholarship and teaching without fear of recrimination. Third, with such safeguards in place, the traditionalists – even with the support of conservative politicians – could make few inroads into the university system that would threaten the position of the multiculturalists. Student loan or other financial packages and governmental research grants might have continued to carry with them the loose strings
of political interest, but these had been around for decades and caused the multiculturalists no serious concerns, certainly not the concerns that would be generated through a serious
debate over the validity of ideas. So, again, why
risk the security offered by the ivory tower or by what they believed was the moral high ground of their cause, simply to enter the political arena and fight for the goods offered not by
knowledge and virtue but for the goods offered by power?
One reason might be the multiculturalists were no longer content to abide in the compromise structured around the myth of the ivory tower, a myth designed to ease the threat philosophers pose to politicians when they enter the political realm (think, Socrates’ continuous questioning) and the threat politicians pose to philosophers when political power challenges ideas (think, the use of death sentences when governments find rebel ideas threatening). No longer patient philosophers, the multiculturalists played to what were never patient kings. In this version of the play, however, they would create in the midst of their activity an unholy alliance with the traditionalists, structured through
conscious strategies and the unintended
consequences thereof.
Enter Politics
The script of the drama would suggest the multiculturalists might possibly have recognized the limitations offered by their world view and thus decided to engage the strengths of the traditionalist coalition worldview to push forward their personal standing. Engaging the conservative political forces in a debate about ideas, the multiculturalists could rest assured the conservatives would enter the debate. They could be assured of them entering the debate because conservatives had been working on and promoting education issues through the various and heavily endowed budgets of think
tanks created during the 1980s. (1987 annual budgets for various conservative think tanks were, respectively: Heritage Foundation - $14,300,000, Hoover Institute - $13,900,000, and the American Enterprise Institute - $9,087,000.) They could also be assured because traditionalists would see the inherent potential for fundamentally restructuring the university.37 And traditionalists did not disappoint. Operating through their various think tanks and funding sources, traditionalists set about attacking the position of multiculturalists with credentialed academics and researchers of their own. In doing so, both camps elevated their respective causes simply by attacking the other.
The first shot across the bow of the multiculturalists came from Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students and director of the conservative Olin Institute, who not only was a disciple of Leo Strauss and a mentor of Francis Fukuyama, but who, with William Bennett, served up more than their portion of academic credentialing for Reagan Administration policies. Soon, Richard Kimball, managing editor of the neoconservative journal The New Criterion, followed suit with Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our
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