COLLOQUY

"Are the culture wars over?" is a decidedly American question, emanating from our tendency to set culture apart from the larger society. Even some of the staunchest

ALSO SEE: Join the debate: Are the culture wars over? If so, who won? (The responses) "A Truce Prevails; for the Left, Many Victories Are Pyrrhic," by Todd Gitlin, 3/6/98 "If Harsh Realities Prevail, We All Will Continue to Lose," by Annette Kolodny, 3/6/98 "Struggles Are a Small Price to Pay for Diverse Universities," by Lawrence W. Levine, 3/6/98 "The Vision of the University Is Still at Stake," by Gertrude Himmelfarb, 3/6/98 "Battles Are Far From Over in Culture's Private Clubs," by Nell Irvin Painter, 3/6/98 "The Spotlight Is Shifting to Students of Color," by Evelyn Hu-DeHart, 3/6/98 "Too Many in Academe Stayed Grandly Above the Fray," by Ray Suarez, 3/6/98 FOR SUBSCRIBERS: A special section containing eight years' worth of stories and opinion pieces about the culture wars

defenders of the humanities are prone to view the struggles over culture as ephemeral matters, divorced from the "real" world. It is not surprising, then, that we periodically hear hopeful proclamations that the culture wars are finished and that we can, finally, concentrate on more-relevant issues, such as finances and government.

What we have come to call the culture wars have been with us throughout our history and are hardly likely to be over unless we become a much less complex and heterogeneous nation than we have been since the outset. The colonial period was marked by cultural interactions and struggles between settlers from Europe and the native peoples of North America; between Europeans and the Africans they brought here forcibly; between settlers from different parts of Europe (such as the English and Germans in Pennsylvania); and among groups of English settlers themselves (witness the futile and often brutal efforts of the Puritans in New England to preserve the cultural isolation they felt they needed to build their "City on a Hill" against the incursions of such outsiders as the Quakers).

Those encounters were the forerunners of the cultural struggles that have characterized our postcolonial history. Cultural differences inevitably interacted with, and helped set the stage for, political and economic conflicts. The creation of very different cultures in the plantation South and the industrializing North led to struggles over organizing territories into states, building the transcontinental railroad, and determining the powers of the federal government and the very nature of freedom itself -- struggles that reached their apex in the Civil War. Similar confrontations have continued in this century, fueled by the growing diversity of the population and exacerbated by the cultural differences between small-town, agrarian America and urban, industrial America.

As long as American universities were small, privileged enclaves, they remained relatively sheltered from the cultural turmoil taking place around them. But this idyll was not to last past the mid-19th century, because of what Walter Lippmann once called the "acids of modernity" -- industrialism, urbanism, science, secularism, internationalism. Those forces transformed the United States, and in turn, the educational institutions that served the nation. All of the major cultural controversies on American campuses in this century -- from the fight over Darwinian evolution in the 1920s to the struggles over civil rights, Vietnam, social mores, and, most recently, gender, race, and ethnicity -- have touched issues central to the larger society simply because that society and the university are no longer distinct entities.

The challenge we in the university face is how to address productively the relevance that modernity has bestowed upon us. Demographically, we have come an almost unimaginable distance since the early 1800s, when colleges were a haven for affluent, white, Protestant males. But have we climbed the same heights pedagogically? We have to develop curricula that remain true to our educational ideals and missions without ignoring the cultural and social backgrounds of those we teach, or the complex fabric of the broader society.

As long as we comprehend and address such issues with honesty and openness, we will diverge from higher education's former preoccupation with a narrow stratum of culture and continue to shape the academy in ways offensive to those who long to recreate the mythos of the university as an exclusive sanctuary standing above the motley, materialist society around it. The culture wars thus will continue; they are a small price to pay for the contemporary university's increasingly cosmopolitan, inclusive curriculum and diverse faculty and student bodies.

Lawrence W. Levine is a professor of history at George Mason University and professor of history emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History (Beacon Press, 1996).

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