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IN 1988, a debate played out on the Wall Street Journal editorial page about whether Stanford University ought to assign John Locke or the anticolonial theorist Frantz Fanon. At the time, such a debate made sense to the nations reading public. American institutions of higher education were in the grip of the culture wars. This was particularly the case in the humanities-history, literature, the languages, philosophy-where the promise of American life was a focal point of the curriculum. Did Locke or Fanon better help young Americans understand this promise?
Such a debate would be nonsensical now. Instead, we are currently inundated with glowing features of the "problem-solving" technocratic mind at work. Now, Locke and Fanon find themselves on the same side-and it's looking more and more like the losing one. On the winning side? Books about leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, disrupters, visionaries, game-changers. Sadly, even the almighty Western canon, whether in a traditional guise that includes Locke or in a revised form that embraces Fanon, seems feeble up against the cult of business. Defenders of the humanities are voices in the wilderness. The philistines are on the march.
During the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, left and right shared a commitment to the value of the humanities as a crucial element of American higher education. The humanities were more than a mere luxury. They were vital to higher learning. What left and right disagreed upon, often ferociously, was how to define and teach the humanities. Conservatives contended the humanities should accord with traditional hierarchies and that all American college students should read the Western canon as they defined it-limited to a core group of texts authored by dead white men such as Locke. In contrast, academic leftists sought a more inclusive, multicultural humanities curriculum and argued that students should read texts that challenged traditional hierarchies, such as Fanon's polemic The Wretched of the Earth (1961).
The culture wars that dominated discussions of higher education in the 1980s and 1990s had enduring historical significance. Shouting matches about academia reverberated beyond the ivory tower to lay bare a crisis of national faith. Was America a good nation? Could the nation be good-could its people be free-without foundations? Were such foundations best provided by a classic liberal...