5/29/00 3:35 p.m.
"Art & Ideas" at the New York Times
Enter, stage left; and stay there.

By Damon Linker

ou’ve got to hand it to the New York Times. Realizing that the paper and its substantial readership would benefit from a weekly examination of "Arts & Ideas," the Times inaugurated a Saturday section under that name two years ago. But, alas, the pages devoted to the subject have proven to be little more than a regular place in the paper where every leftward advance in the culture wars can be catalogued and celebrated uncritically.

The problem is not just that the Times happily publicizes every faddish and intellectually bankrupt development in our nation’s increasingly farcical universities, from the establishment of Latino Studies departments at respectable institutions of higher learning to academic conferences on the supposedly "transgressive" implications of the most banal productions of popular culture. The problem is much more that they do so without subjecting these developments to the least bit of rational scrutiny.

Now, the Times would surely say in its defense that its job is merely to report the news, not to criticize those who make it. But as any good postmodernist would inform them (in one of the few matters on which they have good sense on their side), the Times does not simply find the news waiting passively for it in the world. Rather, it is itself largely responsible for determining what "news is fit to print."

This is especially true when the article concerns the relatively esoteric happenings in college humanities departments as opposed to, say, the actions and activities of the world’s political leaders. For many of its readers, the very fact that the Times has chosen to devote precious space in its pages to a story confers a seriousness upon the subject of the article that it would not otherwise have had. In the case of "Arts & Ideas," then, the ideal of impartiality is illusory. Every inch of the paper that is devoted to an uncritical account of the latest whimsical idea to arise in the university stands as a tacit endorsement of that idea––as an indication that the illustrious editors of the Times consider it to be worthy of serious thought and consideration.

Take, as one of many possible examples, the article from May 27 about how the hapless student protesters who recently sparked mayhem in Seattle and Washington, D.C., in order to disrupt meetings of the WTO and IMF have been "nurtured by politicized curriculums" on college campuses. To be sure, the story’s author (Chris Hedges) does tap literary critic Harold Bloom for a handful of harsh words about how such curriculums have "severely wounded humanistic education in the English–speaking world" by sacrificing "all aesthetic and cognitive standards" to "ideological prejudgment."

Yet 22 of the article’s 24 paragraphs are devoted to explaining and justifying the opposite view. The bulk of the article trumpets the virtues of "overtly political courses" taught primarily by professors of English literature who claim to possess expertise in something called "postcolonial studies." If this "movement" has led schools like Indiana University to drop their survey courses in English literature, that’s all to the good, since, Hedges explains, they have been replaced with classes that "chart the spread of English in relationship to empire" and expose the "damage" caused by "globalization" (what that "damage" might be is never mentioned).

Thus continues the article, conveniently sidestepping broader and more controversial questions about, say, the moral presuppositions of such highly politicized methods of study, or whether social protests encouraged by English professors are based on an intelligent and well–informed understanding of the complex political and economic issues that inspire those protests.

But perhaps it is too much to expect the Times to pursue such skeptical lines of questioning. How could they, when their editors and writers seem so thoroughly to admire the efforts of Barbara Harlow of the University of Texas, who is quoted in the article as saying that postcolonial studies has "`raised the hopes for a new radicalism’" in the country? But no matter. Thanks to the efforts of writers like Hedges, thousands of parents now wake up on Saturday morning to find weekly reports on the loony academic waiting for them on their front steps.

How long these parents will continue to subsidize institutions that use their sizable tuition checks to turn their children into the self–righteous hooligans who trashed Seattle is an open question. Maybe the "Arts & Ideas" page will prove to be useful after all.