ABSTRACT
This chapter examines academic politics in the United States around the issues of decline and loss. It looks at the late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century roots of a current worldview in the United States. The chapter argues that the Kantian notion of science and the Anglican notion of the university and canon as cultural preservation of culture and truth no longer hold. The decline of the Kantian notion of science and the principles that undergird this notion are best revealed in the United States in the science debates. Immanuel Kant outlines his ideal of the university in Conflict of the Faculties, For Kant, there is a lower and higher faculty. The chapter discusses what is meant by White loss, how academic work has been neglected in the new field of research dealing with White loss, and how White loss can help to interpret the terrain on which the Enola Gay exhibit and the science debates took place.
