ABSTRACT
The recent spate of studies decrying the state of American education testify to continuing doubts about whether America’s schools can reliably inculcate the values and skills that are imagined to hold us together as a nation. Universities figure prominently in various recent accounts of the crisis of school and society, whether in conservative argument or left-progressive analyses. For conservatives, elite universities and a reconstituted traditional curriculum, purged of contemporary distractions and faithful to the Great Books of Western Men, must serve as the cultural-intellectual pinnacle of a squalid, though necessary, social pyramid (e.g., Bloom, 1987). For left-progressives, universities are the locus of a gilded defeat, the site and sign of a dissolution of democratic discourses and possibilities, as public issues and political concerns have been fractured and rendered opaque in the ‘New Latin’, the specialized jargons of academic exchange (e.g., Jacoby, 1987).
