Editor's Note
This is one in a series of posts on the common readings in Stanford’s 1980s “Western Culture” course. You can see all posts in the series here: Readings in Western Culture.
In Western Culture, everybody had to read Plato’s Republic. Some enjoyed that more than others. Since my Fall Quarter section leader was writing a book on the Republic, I think his enthusiasm caught on for our group. We spent a lot of time discussing Socrates’s views on education and his displeasure with poets, his ideas of virtue and who is fit to rule, and of course we made hay with the cave allegory. I mean, these are the highlights, right? After a week or two on the Republic, you have become an Educated Person.
Advertisement, Mutual of New York, Life, 20 Feb. 1970, pg. 17.
Perhaps because we had already discussed the homoerotic passion between Achilles and Patroklos, we spent little if any time, as I recall, revisiting the topic in connection with pedagogy as envisioned by Socrates – or, rather, by “Socrates” as a character in Plato’s text. The translation I have chosen to read for this series – Grube, revised by Reeve – includes a helpful footnote in Book III: “The best discussion of the kind of erotic relationships between an older man and a younger boy to which Plato is referring here is K.J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).” I am assuming that there has been further and perhaps better discussion of the topic since then, and I’d be happy if any of our readers who may work at the intersection of classics and queer theory, or pedagogy and queer theory, could point me to it.
However, my interest in this aspect of classical pedagogy is less in how it played out in the ancient Mediterranean than in how it has been valorized more recently. Among “conservative” defenses of the canon in the 1980s, one strand of thought seems to me to be connected with the conservation of some remnant of some homosocial space in academe that would (or might) allow for the cultivation of these kinds of “classical” pedagogical relationships. This strand of thought shows up for me as a peculiar kind of misogyny.
I think Allan Bloom is a good example here. But it’s very tricky to discuss his low-grade resentment of how women’s presence in the classroom (never mind on the syllabus) altered the dynamic of higher education without giving any quarter to homophobia or “gay shaming,” which I certainly do not wish to do. In A War for the Soul of America, Andrew Hartman wrote with perception and sensitivity about both Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind and Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, alluding only in passing to what had been a highly controversial aspect of Bellow’s book at the time: the outing of Bloom as a gay man. Did Bloom’s sexuality as it may have been expressed in connection with his pedagogy inform the tenor of his declension narrative about higher education? Did it inform other people’s declension narratives? Those questions are awkward and difficult, and they may be irrelevant.
Richard Genter’s marvelous book Late Modernism included a wonderfully nuanced exploration of masculinity, gay identity, feminism, and (some) gay men’s misogyny. He did this via a discussion of, among others, Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns, Norman Mailer and James Baldwin. Some of these men valued femininity in themselves and others; some of these men disparaged and disdained femininity in themselves and others. So I’m sure I need to return to Genter to find the way to name and discuss possible connections between anti-feminism/anti-womanism as expressed or embraced by some gay and straight men, and a conservative defense of “the canon” and the university against the encroachments of women.
Still, I could really use some help with this – including, perhaps, a critical intervention along the lines of, “This is not a useful avenue of thought to pursue.” That very well may be the case. I’m still debating whether or not there is any there there when it comes to this avenue of inquiry.
But then I see Andrew Sullivan’s recent column on the #MeToo movement, featuring his defense of men’s predatory behavior as “natural” and suggesting that patriarchy as a problem cannot definitionally exist in the sexual and romantic world of gay men. Unlike many of the conservative culture warriors of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Sullivan’s voice and views continue to be regarded as important and well-informed by not only libertarian conservatives but also many mainstream liberals. (The contrast here would be people like Dinesh D’Souza, William Bennett, and Roger Kimball, who are all still working the hustle, but doing so among a politically and culturally narrower spectrum of readers/listeners than was the case before.)
Sullivan somewhat contradictorily asserts that “men behave no differently in sexual matters when there are no women involved at all. In fact, remove women, and you see male sexuality unleashed more fully, as men would naturally express it, if they could get away with it.” Men are men and are the same around women as around men, but somehow men are more manlike when there are no women around. If this oxymoronic state of existence is “natural” – biologically determined, Sullivan suggests (of course he does!) – then I suppose it would hold not only for sexual relationships, for romantic relationships, but for all male relationships in all men-only spaces. This line of thinking – men can be more themselves when women are not around – is not restricted by any means to gay culture. Indeed, “remove women” – or don’t let them in, or don’t let them start setting the cultural agenda or tinkering with the all-male reading list – ran like a low-grade fever through many a defense of the canon or the Great Tradition or the university.
Was this particular strain of misogyny connected specifically to the desire to preserve (or fondly remember) the pedagogical situation as ripe with the possibility for homoerotic relationships unhampered by women’s presence? Or was this a more general assertion of one of the privileges of patriarchy, designating the most valued and valuable knowledge as the province of men alone?
I would greatly appreciate any feedback or suggestions for further reading or clarification of my still-inchoate thinking on this question.
13 Thoughts on this Post
S-USIH Comment Policy
We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name. As our primary goal is to stimulate and engage in fruitful and productive discussion, ad hominem attacks (personal or professional), unnecessary insults, and/or mean-spiritedness have no place in the USIH Blog’s Comments section. Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood.
Fundamentally, I think Sullivan’s problem (and perhaps, by extension, the rest of it) is his intentionally flattening definition of patriarchy as “just male supremacy” or “just misogyny” rather than a system of social organization in which patriarchs are legally permitted to act and non-patriarchs are required to accept their dicta because they are resources for the patriarchal “family” rather than individuals in their own right. Dominance dehumanizes the submissive, which doesn’t require gender; patriarchy has always affected men as subservient members of the family.
I think these are very worthwhile questions, and certainly point to a real phenomenon. My first inclination is to push the conversation back about twenty years to the moment when many of the Ivies went co-ed. I’ll be drearily self-promotional and link to a review I wrote of the very interesting recent book on this history, Nancy Weiss Malkiel’s Keep the Damned Women Out!. As I read your post, I thought about this anecdote: “Men could treat almost any adjustment as an injustice, as women found out when a Yale faculty member harangued the new ‘co-eds’ that they were responsible for the abolition of that most sacred male prerogative: to be able to stroll naked in the gym!”
One thing that seemed to filter through a number of these anecdotes was that what men felt they were losing was less the opportunities for homosexual experimentation–though there may have been some of that, as I suggest in the review–but rather the loss of a kind of specifically homosocial attention economy. If women were around, men would be paying all their attention to the “girls,” and would basically ignore other men. This could lead both to a loss of intimacy–men’s friendships would become less intense–but also to a diminution of the competitive spirit that was so deliberately cultivated at these places. Competition over women diluted the “purer” forms of competition that existed solely within a realm of men: getting a girl to bed was about sex, but beating out other young men for the editorship of the lit journal or for admission into a secret society was about honor–kleos, if you will.
How this all translates into the culture wars, I’m not sure about–you obviously would have a much better knowledge of that. But I do think that some of the patterns were probably laid down in this moment around 1970.
On Malkiel’s observation: “Men could treat almost any adjustment as an injustice.” …If I could count the number of times I’ve seen this, particularly in relation to the Boy Scouts, circa the late 1980s and early 1990s. [Full disclosure: I was Scout even into my teen years, and a camp staffer through my early years of college.]
Andy, thanks so much — this is great, and just what I needed.
The reason the illustration for this post comes from 1970 is because I’m starting my narrative there, because I need to explain the re-emergence in the 1970s of “Western Civ” courses/general ed requirements that were abolished in the ’60s. I see this as a reaction to the increasing presence of women on the tenure track (thanks to Title VII and class action lawsuits) and the proliferation of women’s studies, women’s history, and Black history courses.
And yes, as you so smartly explain here, it would also have been a reaction to the increasing presence of women undergrads at elite schools and in formerly all-male spaces.
As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, for 9/10 of its existence, the university was a homosocial space, a domain of men and for men. The history of women in higher education is a blip on the radar screen compared to the long history of formal education. In terms of institutional time, we’re really still near the beginning of this absolutely momentous change.
Considering the #MeToo movement in academe, including recently raised allegations about predatory behavior dating back decades, I’d like to put your comment alongside Jonathan Dresner’s comment and think about the ways that women’s presence in higher ed affected how patriarchy worked, and whom it worked upon. Women’s entry into higher education did not introduce the possibility for predation where there had been none before — it just compounded and complicated the practice and the social significance of it.
And it probably added one more arena of competition for kleos (nice!) — who could dazzle the most or the most desirable coeds into bed via a display of “brilliance” or “intellectual charisma.” This was but one possible but particularly damaging outcome of the larger “cult of brilliance” or “cult of the heroic intellect” that was part of the prestige economy of academe at that time. And of course women went about wrecking that too with their Title VII complaints and Title IX complaints and their demand that universities advertise job openings rather than depend on the old boys’ network and all those other assaults on tradition.
Anyway, thanks a million for the book recommendation — I will check it out!
One aspect of this that interests me — perhaps too local in the disciplinary sense to carry into all fields — is the matter of the all-male canon. In Anglo-American literary studies, and especially the British strand, it is and has been since the inclusion of Romantic and modern eras in the curruculum difficult to erase women entirely from the picture. In fact, the nineteenth-century British fiction specialists were particuarly disadvantaged if they wanted to walk the line of celebrating the male “heroic intellect” as they could only do so by weaving around Austen, the Brontes, Rosetti, and Eliot and ignoring their looming presences. American literature folks had somewhat of an easier time in the New Critical period as the construction of Melville as the definitional heroic artist of the American Renaissance involved the deletion/demotion of female authors, above all Stowe, from the canon: in her case, the sin of activist political motives for fictional creation, allied with a certain kind of aesthetic gatekeeping that disliked feminine civilizational pedagogy (an attitude famously represented in Huckleberry Finn), was enough to have her quietly removed to the margins. Nevertheless, Dickinson could not be treated that way, and later on neither could Edith Wharton.
This disciplinary peculiarity didn’t mean, of course, that women had an easier time of it in that corner of the academy. And the assumption that only the “easier” periods of literary study (anything after 1750) allowed women to get doctorates at all persisted at least into the 1980s. My former advisor at UCLA, Barbara Packer, told us that when she went to Yale in 1968, she and the few other female grad sudents often picked medieval and other notably demanding courses primarly to push back at spoken and unspoken accusations that they wanted literary study-light.
Nonetheless, the fact of the matter is that even in its conservative manifestation the post-Romantic literary canon cannot be marketed as a woman-free zone. Has this had any discernible effect on the kind of defenses (conservative, but perhaps not only) mounted to resist attacks on the traditional structures and theories of the university, I wonder? It’s certainly noticeable that a kind of ‘master-narrative’ (mistress-narrative?) of, say, the growth of the Victorian novel can both center on major female authors and also suggest a mythos of heroic cultural achievement not unlike the one you describe in the post.
Anyway, some thoughts on . . . canons, I guess.
So, this is — as you know — far from my wheelhouse, but I entered Princeton in 1972, so the homosocial world was not far in the past. I wonder if part of the loss was the way single-sex environments allow their members to explore masculine and feminine sides of themselves. It’s a staple of discussions of women’s education that women are less deferential etc; are men more able to express the feminine in single sex environments?
I think there’s also a connection that could be made to the misogyny of some gay male clerical cultures, in both the Church of England (more than the Episcopal church) and the Catholic church. Some of the strongest opposition to the ordination of women in the C of E has come from Anglo-Catholic gay clergy. The appeal to tradition that grounds their position is similar to the defense of the canon.
My alma mater was one of the victims coordinaeducation and endured ruination in the process. 37 women’s colleges left and four men’s colleges.
Martin and Susan, thank you so much for these fruitful and fascinating comments.
Martin, on your observation re: the gendering of “the canon,” I should make clear that the only canon I’m talking about in these posts is that 15-book list that all students in the freshman-year Western Culture course (allegedly) read in common. That list included “a 19th century novel,” so of course there was room on that syllabus for Jane Austen or George Elliott–but no insistence that they be included. Harriet Beecher Stowe would have been out of the question, for precisely the reason that you cite — Mathiessen’s construction of the American Renaissance had no room for the 19th century’s most beloved and successful American novelists, scribbling women all. In practice, the Great novels assigned were mostly by men.
Your comment does bring up an interesting point about the difference between disciplinary canons and this interdisciplinary reading list that was part imaginative literature, part philosophy, part social science/social theory, and part science. This was by design — it was a core course that “everyone” (read: all humanities / social sciences departments) could arguably teach. But it ended up being a course that many people didn’t want to teach, For Reasons. More on that later.
Susan, thanks for weighing in here with your personal experience — and thanks as well for the astute observations about the “clerical class.” If you can believe it, I have a section in one of my middle chapters that talks about the Anglican hierarchy and the Book of Common Prayer. I didn’t connect it to the subject in quite the way you did, but I have written often of the “pastoral work” of secular scholars, and of course the University began as an outgrowth of the Church, mirroring and preserving some of the same types of hierarchies of prestige and authority.
I think the disenchantment of the University is all to the good. But sometimes in its functions and its values I see a pale shadow of a healthy body. It is a great human institution, but it lacks a lived knowledge of grace.
Still, I’m happy to find a home in it, if it will have me.
Sully? I suspect it’s possible he sexual harrassed some male employee that he suspected was gay at one or more of his stops in editorial life before independent or freelance work. This is a man who plumped for unprotected sex at the height of AIDS worries, and who has had other sexual pecadillos exposed.
So I agree strongly with Andy’s recommendation of Malkiel’s book for your period (and the kinds of elite American institutions you’re thinking about)–and she’s also written a good precis of the book here: https://aeon.co/ideas/coeducation-at-university-was-and-is-no-triumph-of-feminism and we discussed it on JHIBlog shortly before I left the blog: https://jhiblog.org/2017/05/03/writing-the-history-of-university-coeducation/ The kinds of wagon-circling of that period that a number of commenters here have raised have a long history. My dissertation is about the British case, in which that all happened over a period lasting roughly from the 1870s to WWII (thus the periodization Malkiel offers is, I think, of limited use outside the Ivy-plus institutions, though I think it broadly works for them–i.e. the context in which Bloom lived and wrote). In Britain in my period there were a lot of defenses of male homoerotic bonds as something intrinsic to and exceptionally valuable about male same-sex education, drawing their inspiration from–just as you say–a vision of classical antiquity that included love between men among the culturally elite gifts that Greece and Rome were supposed to be able to offer modern Europe. They weren’t mainstream, but they constituted a small counterculture that enjoyed outsized influence due to its popularity among teachers at elite schools and universities. One thing to note is that the men making recourse to these tropes wouldn’t have considered themselves “gay” in a modern sense–in some ways that was too troubling/dangerous/morally dubious, so they often used these really different models as a way of articulating (and legitimating) their desires. Unfortunately, this also had a side effect of legitimating erotic bonds between teachers and students, the latter of whom might well be children. There is no really good work on this particular dynamic/read of the situation that I know of, but I’ve been trying to write and think about it recently! But so I think these 19th/early 20th century Brits are a good parallel to Bloom in some ways (hence giving added meaning to the ‘outing’ of Bloom and how he might have understood his own sexuality…), and I’d be interested to know if he was reading/engaging with them at all.
I’m less up on where classicists’ understandings of paiderastia and the like in 5th century Athens are now than I am on the reception of those ideas in the modern period, but I think Dover is still an okay place to start. And actually I think my guy Symonds’ work (Studies of the Greek Poets, A Problem in Greek Ethics) still really holds up as a general layperson’s introduction–I have recently seen classicists refer to Greek Poets as still reliable. I know there is a fair bit of recent work that has challenged and revised Dover but I just really don’t know much about it. On reception and queer theory (largely in the British case) I’d highly recommend the work of Dan Orrells and Gideon Nisbet. Sebastian Matzner writes on the German case, also from a literary theory perspective, and his work is really good too.
I hope some of this is helpful. I’d be happy to talk further if it would be useful. What you’re thinking about w.r.t. Bloom sounds really interesting and I look forward to reading more!!
Thanks, Dr. Burnett, for this rich post, which brings up so many issues. As a classicist who has studied the academic culture wars, I agree that Bloom demonstrates an alarmingly strident hostility to feminism, and that this seems to be related to his (largely) Platonic notions of *paideia*. But I’m not terribly sure that Bloom’s Platonism is very typical among traditionalistic culture warriors of his era. Certainly writers such as Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball–who proved captious about queer theory–were not on the same page with Bloom here.
Nervousness about the Greek link between erotics and pedagogy goes as far back as the ancient Romans, whose ideal of *humanitas* overlaps in essential ways with Greek *paideia*, but which certainly wouldn’t have countenanced such “Greek” behavior on the part of male teachers and male students. Our own tradition of the humanities in the US, I think, owes more to the Romans than the Greeks, since the early Renaissance humanists were so obsessed with Cicero and his views on the proper education of the elite. Certainly the sectarian antebellum colleges in the US that relied heavily on a prescribed classical curriculum would disdain erotic relationships between teachers and pupils. So Bloom’s Platonic inspiration on this score seems to me out of sorts with much traditionalistic American thought on higher education.
In any case, thanks for the thoughtful post!
Emily and Eric, thank you so much for your substantive comments. I am very heartened by the response to this post. I was not confident that I could articulate or explain this object of inquiry, but based on everyone’s thoughtful input on this post, it seems that we are all collectively approaching a real set of issues that many are interested in investigation from various angles.
Emily, I appreciate your book recommendations and will look at those forthwith. I think you’re right to point to the “small counterculture” among an elite cadre of academics, either in the time you’re working on or now. I mean, it is patently not the case that every expression of resentment/resistance to the encroachment of women into what was formerly an exclusively masculine sphere was some sort of defense of homoerotic potential. Indeed, most were probably just garden-variety sexism/misogyny. (Somebody really ought to hit that garden with some of Monsanto’s finest herbicides.) And Bloom belonged to another kind of “elite” (self-proclaimed) as a Straussian interpreter of Plato. I have no idea if there’s a significant overlap, or merely a coincidental overlap, or any overlap at all, between Straussians as one kind of exclusive elite group and pedagogic ephebophiles (?) as another sort of elite group. And again, I think you’re quite correct to suggest that this is an issue that perhaps ought to be considered apart from people’s sexuality as they understood it or as we might understand it in retrospect. To lots of readers, Saul Bellow “outed” Bloom as a gay man. But perhaps in Bloom’s view (had he been alive to read it), he would have seen himself as outed as a Platonist par excellence? Anyway, thanks for this great response.
Eric, your wonderful comment reminds me that I have your book sitting on my shelf, and that — to my shame! — I have not read it yet. But now I want to all the more. I have to confess that of all the has-been and/or still-at-it Culture Warriors, I find Roger Kimball by far the most intriguing subject. I started following him on Twitter a while back, before the election, and it was fascinating to see him pivot from staunch support of Ted Cruz to full-throated support of Donald Trump. Thirty years ago, he was making a splash in national discourse about the state of higher education; last year, he was unironically retweeting #MAGA accounts. He has to be the most unlikely pretend-populist in the history of American politics. I wish I knew which dark money multi-billionaire has him on their payroll, because nobody’s getting rich off of subscriptions to The New Criterion.
Kimball may not have been on the same page as Bloom about Plato or paideia, but they were both part of the same conservative network of mutually-logrolling book blurbers and book reviewers. Kimball reviewed Bloom, Bloom blurbed Kimball, etc, etc. Ellen Messer-Davidow’s journal articles on the PC wars and the conservative PC outrage machine from the early 1990s were among the first scholarly works to excavate the network of conservative dark money funders who basically created an alternative engine of (pseudo) scholarly legitimation from the ground up.
In any case, I appreciate your insight here — I need to take a closer look at the varieties of classicism embraced by traditionalist defenders of the canon.
And I need to read your book, sooner rather than later!
Thanks so much, L.D. (if I may), for your very kind response. I look forward to your thoughts on my book with some nervousness: as I suggest in my introduction, I try to see the good and bad in both “sides” of the academic culture wars, and this undoubtedly includes some positive assessments of arguments made by “traditionalists.” Although I also prove critical of many such thinkers, I’m surely more persuaded by some traditionalistic assessments of the academic culture wars than you will be. At the very least, the book should give you something to disagree with!
As far as Bloom and *paideia* are concerned, you may want to check out Harry Jaffa’s review of *The Closing of the American Mind*. It’s really appalling: Jaffa suggests that the chief problem with the book is that Bloom fails to identify the real scourge of contemporary American culture: homosexuality. Since Jaffa knew Bloom well (they even co-wrote a book together), it is hard to imagine that Jaffa didn’t realize that Bloom was a semi-closeted gay man. If this is so, it was cruel of him to argue in this way.
Others noted that Bloom in passing referred to an ex-girlfriend in the book, suggesting (after the whole *Ravelstein* affair) that Bloom was interested in misleading readers about his sexuality. I don’t think that was fair (Bloom dedicated a later collection to his partner), but in any case it points to the broader issue of Bloom’s partly Platonic views on education. To my mind, Bloom’s Platonism allows him to introduce some cogent criticisms of the contemporary university, despite all his book’s downsides.