You can critique, dismantle, and subvert the canon, but you still have to learn it.

THE ENEMIES, AND FRIENDS, OF THE HUMANITIES WHY DECONSTRUCTIONISTS DEFENDED THE CANON

by Mark Bauerlein

Afunny thing happened when Michael Novak brought Herbert Marcuse to lecture to his students. It was the early-1970s when campus rebellion had entered its darker phase, and Marcuse was an idol of the Movement. His theory of “repressive tolerance” served as an essential touchstone for protest, and his volatile mix of Marx and Freud seemed an edgy, relevant style of intellectualized activism.

Novak was a provost at SUNY-Old Westbury, a new experimental college in the state system caught up in all the higher-ed fads of the day. Students lounged barefoot in class and showed contempt for all authority, including that of the faculty and administrators. Younger professors indulged them, refusing to impose a set curriculum and questioning the appropriateness of grades. Sentimentality for the Vietcong was widespread.

Hearing students cite Marcuse while decrying bourgeois society, Novak thought it a good idea to bring Marcuse to campus for a day of discussion and lecturing. But the admiring conversation he expected to witness didn’t occur. Instead, Novak recounts in his 2013 memoir Writing from Left to Right,

After mingling with the students, he was affronted and disgusted. At his lecture he set aside his prepared notes and instead described the severe Prussian discipline of his own education: the classics he had to master; the languages he had to learn by exercises and constant tests. His theme was that no one had any standing on which to rebel against the past—or dare to call himself a revolutionary—who had not registered the tradition of the West. (p. 107)

We can imagine how the students felt hearing this denunciation, but what could they say? Here was a prophet of youth rebellion endorsing utterly disreputable ideas—classics, discipline, mastery, tradition, the West—and telling students fully convinced of their own supremacy that they had no standing to overturn anything.

Another defense of the classics by a guru of critique happened twenty years later. In 1990, Jacques Derrida, famed originator of deconstruction, sat for an interview with the Journal of Advanced Composition.

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