Music and the Last Intellectuals

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. 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 Closing of the American Mind. Both Bennetti and Bloom2 have argued against certain forms of criticism that became an important force in university life in the wake of the 1960s. These arguments can be read in the context of political cultures which, in the English-speaking nations of the northern hemisphere, have taken a marked turn to the right during the 1980s. role of universities is being seen increasingly by governments and funding agencies in terms of the rhetoric of human resources. Universities and the intellectual life they nurture are increasingly being inserted into the rhetoric of a narrow economic instrumentalism which can only conceive, or is only prepared to conceive, social usefulness and social responsibility in material as opposed to cultural terms. As Bill Graham, president of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, has observed: The university, according to the new mythology, is a key player in the on-rushing knowledge based, information economy. Post-secondary education becomes an engine of economic growth because universities supply much of the basic research needed for growth, and, along with colleges, they supply most of the 'human resources' as well.3