In Plato's Cave

In the process of giving readers an ebullient, sometimes mordant account of his distinguished four-decade career in academia, Kernan (The Death of Literature) also cracks wise--in both senses of the word--on the culture wars and their effects on U.S. higher education. Reflecting on a long career (literary critic, provost, dean and professor of English at Yale and Princeton), Kernan illuminates the contrast between the old style of meritocratic, elitist education and the much more democratized contemporary American college or university--accessible to everyone, consumer oriented, relativistic in its conception of knowledge and overtly politicized. In Kernan's opinion, curriculum changes made to satisfy minorities, women and other ""special-interest pressure groups"" on campus have contributed to lax educational requirements, polarized student bodies, more bureaucratic administrations and built-in grade inflation. He doesn't think much of computers, either, lamenting that, because of them, information has become prized over knowledge. His lively and witty close-ups of such figures as Harold Bloom, Lillian Hellman, William Buckley and Paul de Man are sprinkled with tart opinions on deconstruction (""a dogmatic theory, impervious to argument"" that nevertheless hits on some truth about ""the slipperiness of language""), academic specialization and rampant careerism. And yet Kernan is not wholly reactionary and in fact shows that he has achieved an impressive perspective on the changes in the culture and practice of higher education: ""Though my heart is with the old academic order in which I was trained, my argument is not that this radical change is, as many of my contemporaries believe, an educational catastrophe.... But things will not be the same, ever again, as they once were, and this entails loss as well as gain."" (Mar.)