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There were a lot problems with this article, beginning with the historical context.
Maybe the problem I have with this article is that UCB went through all this long ago. Reagan was elected governor right in the middle of the 60s specifically to clamp down on campus radicalism. While his direct police state methods failed miserably, adding gasoline to fire, his reactionary institutional policies managed to stay in place and amounted to the establishment war of attrition through budgets, administration plans, policies, and of course promotion and tenure. In our UCB student services project, we were fighting every damned budget cycle all through the 70s and losing. By the end of the 70s the base line student population had shifted way over to the moderate-liberal end and as far as possible away from any notion of radical change. They were definitely career oriented and completely cleasned themselves of any ideological trappings.
Maybe the mid-west and east coast schools were slower to change. Maybe it depends on which departments, etc.
But I have some additional thoughts here. Whatever the results of the so-called radicalization of US academia, the embedding political economy was hell bent on getting rid of all that and succeeded long ago. These last decades of reactionary moves by the established order have also managed to kill off most of the more creative forces of the culture at large. I suspect the creeping death of neoliberalism and rightwing political ideologies has taken hold of all the more technical domains as well. I don't mean there is a rightwing physics, or that the engineering trades are conservative. I mean that in depth advances in the US have mostly stopped and the centers of creative contributions have shifted away from the US. This was certainly the case for the arts and humanities several decades ago. They were the miner's canaries---feet up at the bottom of the cage on the first whiff of rightwingism. But the US culture at large didn't bother with all that since we are a supremely technocratic culture. So I am suggesting even our core, our technocratic core is now dying off from the same poisonous air.
Probably need an example to see. Go back to the quote above and read it again. What's wrong with the model that West and George debate the great books? The problem isn't their differing views. The problem is with the books themselves. How about debating the intellectual currents of the post-WWII world? In other words, a creative discussion involves our realities, not antiquity's. The great books model is always-already reactionary in advance of any debate. Where are the discussions of the impact of advanced technical thought on our culture at large, that is to say the advancements or lack thereof of modernity itself?
We all grew up deeply embedded in this culture and slowly became aware of its differences with other eras, peoples, places---and that historical self-concieousness and its consequences are the source of most of our creative impulses. My theory and hidden assumption here is that it's our perception of difference that enjoins a potentially creative impulse, mostly because that difference can be seen as a disjoint between differing world views. (I know this is a little vague...) This disjointedness is linked to the whole question of a relativity of values and world views---which is also exactly what reactionary intelligencia need to erase.
That is what has been lost in this endless rehash the righwing has constantly bombarded us with for the last forty years---and what is proposed as a continual return through the model above.
Another example. Global warming. By returning over and over to question whether global warming is real, the rightwing effectively stalls out any advance in a larger public understanding of this phenomenon, any advancement in dealing with the consequences---and certainly skews any policy overhauls necessary. The latest thread on Penn and his skepticism is a perfect example of this sort of bullshit. We've known about climate change for almost forty years and watched it systematically for all that time. The only wider public advance was on the question of which way it was headed--toward colder climates or warmer ones. By the early 80s the public awareness of the underlying science shifted to studying warmer climate phenomenon since that was the concensus on direction. The scientific debate returned to questions of causation and heavy hydrocarbon combustion was the most likely candidate by the late 80s, i.e. the same culprit that spurred the earliest anti-smog policies, etc, etc. Christ, they teach this stuff in Berkeley's grade schools now... What's the question?
Another example. The endless circle of creationism v. evolution.
I am desparately looking for a technical metaphor here. Let's take the idea that Euclidean geometry has privilage of place in virtually all our concepts of space, all our culturally determined preconceptions, and most of its axioms are deeply embedded in our language below any conscieous understanding. In short we live in a Euclidean world. It is a great shock to finally realize that the Euclidean plane and its motions are not the only frames possible and that these are in fact likely not to be the fundamental basis for physical reality. It was this understanding that launched modern physical science. The implications have percolated through the culture at large many times over, kicking up foundational questions almost everywhere. Its linkages to multicultural worlds created an astonishing variety of reactions. So here we are.
The righwing is essentially advocating a return to the simplicity of the world of Euclid where only orthogonal transformations are allowed. These are suggestively called an orthonormal basis, i.e. the n-unit vectors in a euclidean space of n-dimensions. The closing of the American Mind, indeed. I think it is significant that Allen Bloom called his book Closing, when in fact he performed a reactionary redux, which I always think of as a conformal inversion, that amounted to a re-normalization to an orthonormal basis. In other words, he turned the world inside out and claimed this mirror convolute was reality. Sure, it could be. But the very means used, betrays exactly the range of potential transformation classes possible.
I have no idea if any of the above is intelligible, but that's the way I think of what has happened to us. Short form. Whenever we examine rightwing reactionary worlds we are essentially looking in a fun house mirror. No wonder George Bush looks like an exclamation point turned upside down...
CG
Happy 4th of July.