Cold War Universities: Tools of Power or Oases of Freedom?

The essays collected in The Cold War and the University take as their theme the effects of the Cold War on academic life and thought in America over five decades. The authors speak from their own experiences, many through autobiographical narrative and personal testimony. They speak, too, from the perspective of their disciplines, clustered in the social sciences-history (David Montgomery and Howard Zinn), political science (Ira Katznelson), anthropology (Laura Nader), sociology (Immanuel Wallerstein)- but also including evolutionary biology (Richard Lewontin) and the earth sciences (Ray Siever), linguistics (Noam Chomsky) and English literature (Richard Ohmann).

Although the volume does not purport to be a comprehensive history or to reach a set of common conclusions, it has a clear thrust. Situated all along the spectrum of the left, its authors share a critical stance toward the academy, a commitment to political engagement, and a belief that the academy cannot and should not stand apart from the urgent problems of the social order. They tend to regard the university as an instrument of the power structures that control the world and one that perpetuates its oppressions and repressions. They believe that universities were complicit in the Cold War and that, while continuing to claim to be places of intellectual freedom, in reality they further a conservative agenda. The ideal university of the authors' vision would serve as a corrective to such evils.

The individuals in academia who stood apart from their universities and opposed the Cold War, the authors believe, shaped the intellectual currents that have carried into today's approaches to scholarship and education, opening up broad areas of study and thought and transforming whole disciplines. The most interesting reflections in The Cold War and the University trace the intellectual history of disciplines and new objects and forms of academic attention. One need not agree with every proffered Cold War explanation to appreciate this introduction to the controversies, crises, and changes in the terrain of intellectual theory and debate that have animated the intellectual history of the academic professions over the last five decades.

The account is more vivid for the personal odysseys the authors describe. Montgomery and Zinn follow the career of the revisionist approach to traditional interpretations and the emergence of new areas of study in the field of history. Nader reconstructs the passionate battles in anthropology, while Katznelson analyzes the shift away from the consensus view in American political science. Wallerstein treats the creation of the new fields of area studies as a distinctively Cold War development and contrasts their origins with those of interdisciplinary fields, such as women's studies and African-American studies, that came into being later. Ohmann describes the transition in literary studies from the New Criticism to critical theory, multiculturalism, and other "isms."

But surveying the current scene, the authors see the gains won by dissidence and dissidents, resistance and revisionists, as under attack. The foe is a resurgent right that many of them think of as having blazed up from the embers of the Cold War. New culture wars are under way. While the authors would say that the ranks of the righteous have swelled, so that the contest is less lopsided than during the height of the Cold War, the soul of the university and the rightful role of the intellectual are again at stake.

LOOSE AND BAGGY MONSTER

The dreaded "Cold War" of the title remains ill-defined throughout the collection. Was it a historical period, a state of mind, a climate of enforced conformity, a system of thought, a security and foreign policy, a domestic political condition, a global conflict and its shadow, or some compound of these? The Cold War for the authors is an entire history; it is as if all that took place in the context of those years, from ideas and attitudes to institutional developments, could be attributed to the superpower rivalry.

And the Cold War is made both a cause and a symptom of a military-government-industrial complex. Richard Lewontin goes so far as to assert that if the Cold War had not existed, it would have had to be invented. He maintains that it allowed the government to intervene, in the face of the American tradition of anti-intervention, to sustain and expand an economy that would otherwise have suffered severe decline after the end of World War II. Citing the need for a vastly heightened defense against the Soviet Union and international communism, the federal government pumped taxpayer dollars into universities and research and training. National security demanded, government officials emphasized, not only superior technology but a better-educated citizenry, wider knowledge of other areas of the world, and more trained experts in crucial fields.