Humanism Betrayed: Theory, Ideology, and Culture in the Contemporary University

Alexander D. Gregor is director of the Centre for Higher Education
Research and Development at the University of Manitoba and co-editor of
Postsecondary Education in Canada: The Cultural Agenda.

The past decade has seen a flood of books and articles deploring the
decline and/or perversion of liberal education. Some critiques are the
jeremiads of traditionalists who see things moving away from what they
were; others reflect concern over the introduction of ideology and
“political correctness”; still others argue that the esoteric jargon
and rational convolutions of new critical theories render the liberal
disciplines opaque and irrelevant. Graham Good, a professor of English
at the University of British Columbia, is driven in part by all three
concerns. His contribution to the ongoing debate lies in providing a
reasonable and comprehensive overview of the forces that have
contributed to the present failure of liberal education. The current
illiberal situation, he notes with irony, is curiously amenable to the
“managerial” style of contemporary university governance.

In separate sections, Good considers the entry into the humanities
curriculum of four sets of social, cultural, political, and
epistemological issues: gender, race, and sexual orientation; Marx,
Freud, and Nietzsche; Constructionism, Ideology, and Textuality; and
Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and Postcolonialism. The study opens
with an examination of the 1995 McEwen Report on the UBC political
studies department. Subsequent chapters lead to an identification of the
two basic choices facing the contemporary university: the “carceral
vision” (culture as constraint) or the “liberal humanist vision”
(culture as freedom). Good makes a compelling case for the latter vision
(exemplified by the educational philosophy of Northrop Frye), but
regrettably offers little evidence that such a vision can be attained in
the current context or in any mass education setting.