ABSTRACT
Recent years have witnessed an intensification of debate over the role and function of universities in North American society. A central feature of this debate has been an attack on scholarship which, in one way or another, could be described as “critical.” The view that too much academic work was being politicized (that is, preoccupied with questions of race, gender, and class) or trivialized (that is, by a fascination with public culture) was made both by the conservative chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and later Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, William J. Bennett, and by Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind.
