To the Editors:
I would like to congratulate Roger Kimball on his devastating exposure of ideological literary studies in the September issue of The New Criterion (“The Academy Debates the Canon”). I can only say that I felt proud that nobody from Berkeley was invited to the conference at Yale.
The gloomy thought occurs to me that there is some direct relation between the vehemence and intransigence of academic radicalism and the lack of any real political movement outside the campuses to support it (I would include even feminism in this generalization). The one glimmer of hope I see is that, despite the noise made by the sort of people Roger Kimball listened to, there is another world out there somewhere in academia that thinks differently. From my own experience lecturing at a variety of campuses around the country and speaking from the other side of the barricades, I can say that I have discovered a surprising degree of receptivity to a less ideological, more literary viewpoint.
Robert Alter
University of California
Berkeley, CA
