n re-election narrowly by campaigning in his suburban Detroit district six times in 1992. Ford also rediscovered his own political inner child values not from the 1960s but from the 1940s. He had gone into the navy during World War II, met people of many different backgrounds, gone to college on the GI Bill and discovered "Christ, I'm just as smart as these rich guys. It changed my whole life." Ford, in essence, saw Clinton's New Democratic approach as a return to the FDR/Truman Democratic Party, the party of old World War II movies in which Joey Brooklyn learns to love Tex Hayseed because he throws himself on a grenade.
On June 16 Segal called Clinton to tell him that the House committee had voted with the president  that is, against targeting the money toward the
poor. Clinton the man attacked by Republicans Carter-Mondale-Dukakis liberal clenched his fis pumped it in the air. Next time Clinton saw For, president of the United States went over to the authoritarian committee chairman . . . and gave hug. "Damn good victory," Clinton said, lifting Fc the floor with his embrace. "The guy is a really enth tic young man," Ford says.
In the end, the White House did win a key allowing middle-class and rich kids to get the benefit as the poor. They won a partial victory on tl of the scholarship; the final amount was $4,725 per   far cry from the $10,000 they originally sought, but j bly generous enough to attract a variety of kids in program. As a result, Clinton may get middle-class lies to feel invested literally, financially invested  proving their communities and understanding   who are different from them. The White Hous succeeded in structuring a highly flexible prograi can subsidize existing charities like the Red Cn Habitat for Humanity; urban and environmental professional corps like Teach for America, which recent college graduates to teach in disadvantagec munities; and even "service learning" efforts that porate service into high-school curricula. By Augu Summer of Service had illustrated the tremendous tial of the approach: volunteers in Atlanta set up ar school program for 250 poor kids; 87 volunteers in Texas went door to door and brought 100,000 scho in for immunizations.
But the White House lost, without even fighting, critical issue of whether to favor local programs th races. As Summer of Service showed, racial an nomic diversity won't happen unless organizers m; prominent goal. The administration passed the legi swiftly, but merely postponed the day when Clinti have to decide: does he want racial progress to be to his national service program, and is he willing the heat from those who disagree?
For all his inspiring rhetoric, John F. Kennedy at to his Peace Corps a narrow group of mostly whitt educated Americans. Clinton's plan is far more ami seeking to regenerate fragmented American comm and break down rock-hard barriers of the heart. B Clinton must confront the emotional issues of ra class, he is more likely to fail. But should he st Clinton will have accomplished something far me nificant than his hero ever did.
234
The value of the canc
Irving Howe
Irving Howe is at work on a book about the novel titled Elected Short Subjects. His Selected Writings: 1950-1990 vas published in 1990 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Odll the disputes agitating the American campus, the one that seems to me especially significant is that over  the canon.  Udi at should be taught in the humanities and social sciences, die61 T 'nt' <Miuctory courses? What is the place of ,e c How shall we respond to those professors      hurocentrism  and advocate  multicultur-ism This is not the sort of tedious quarrel that now then flutters through e academy; it involves Matters of public urgency. I Propose to see this dispute, a hrst, through a narrow, ten sectarian lens, with the  Pe that you will come to Ccept my reasons for doing so.	 
st ^re>	are the lines of division. On one side
and (too often, fall) the cultural  traditionalists,  q 0 may range politically across the entire spectrum.
Pposing them is a heterogeneous grouping of mostly W tt achers, many of them veterans of the 1960s, lch includes feminists, black activists, Marxists, de- nstructionists, and various mixtures of these.
t some colleges and universities traditional survey ourses of world and English literature, as also of social  ught, have been scrapped or diluted. At others they Ue ln Peril. At still others they will be. What replaces .. ern *s sometimes a mere option of electives, sometimes ^ulticultural  courses introducing material from ird World cultures and thinning out an already thin arnpling of Western writings, and sometimes courses geared especially to issues of class, race, and gender. Giv-n ^he notorious lethargy of academic decision-making,
there has probably been more clamor than chan if there s enough clamor, there will be change.
University administrators, timorous by incli are seldom firm in behalf of principles regardir cation. Subjected to enough pressure, many o: will buckle under. So will a good number of pro who vaguely subscribe to  the humanist traditio: are not famously courageous in its defense. Acs liberalism has notable virtues, but combativeness often one of them. In the academy, whichever goes on the offensive gains an advantage. So: those who are now attacking  traditionalist  h ities and social science courses do so out of si persuasion; some, from a political agenda (what first solemnly and now is half-ironically called politically correct); and some from an all-too-h readiness to follow the academic fashion that, f< moment, is  in. 
Can we find a neutral term to designate the traditionalists? I can t think of a satisfactory' one propose an unsatisfactory one: let s agree to call the insurgents, though in fact they have won qi few victories. In the academy these professors are called  the left  or  the cultural left,  and that is many of them see themselves. But this is a comic m derstanding, occasionally based on ignorance. Ii half of both their self-awareness and a decent c of debate, I want to show that in fact the soc and Marxist traditions have been close to traditioi views of culture. Not that the left hasn t had its sha ranters (I exclude Stalinists and hooligans) who, ii name of  the revolution,  were intent upon jettisonin culture of the past; but generally such types have bt mere marginal affliction treated with disdain.
Let me cite three major figures. Here is Georg Lui the most influential Marxist critic of the twentieth cen
Those who do not know Marxism may be surprised at t respect for the classical heritage of mankind which one finds the really great representatives of that doctrine. (Empha; added.)
Reprinted by permission of The New Repubtie, February 18, 1991, pp. 40-44, 46-47.   1991 by The New Republic.
9. UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL PLURALISM
Here is Leon Trotsky, arguing in 1924 against a group of Soviet writers who felt that as the builders of  a new society  they could dismiss the  reactionary culture  of the past:
If I say that the importance of The Divine Comedy lies in the fact that it gives me an understanding of the state of mind of certain classes in a certain epoch, this means that I transform it into a mere historical document. . . . How is it thinkable that there should be not a historical but a directly aesthetic relationship between us and a medieval Italian book? This is explained by the fact that in class society, in spite of its changeability, there are certain common features. Works of art developed in a medieval Italian city can affect us too. What does this require? .. . That these feelings and moods shall have received such broad, intense, powerful expression as to have raised them above the limitations of the life of those days. (Emphasis added.)
Trotsky s remarks could serve as a reply to those American professors of literature who insist upon the omnipresence of ideology as it seeps into and perhaps saturates literary texts, and who scoff that only  formalists  believe that novels and poems have autonomous being and value. In arguing, as he did in his book Literature and Revolution, that art must be judged by  its own laws,  Trotsky seems not at all p.c. Still less so is Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, whose austere opinions about education might make even our conservatives blanch:
Latin and Greek were learnt through their grammar, mechanically, but the accusation of formalism and aridity is very unjust. ... In education one is dealing with children in whom one has to inculcate certain habits of diligence, precision, poise (even physical poise), ability to concentrate on specific subjects, which cannot be acquired without the mechanical repetition of disciplined and methodical acts.
These are not the isolated ruminations of a few intellectuals; Lukacs, Trotsky, and Gramsci speak with authority for a view of culture prevalent in the various branches of the Marxist (and also, by the way, the non-Marxist) left. And that view informed many movements of the left. There were the Labor night schools in England bringing to industrial workers elements of the English cultural past; there was the once-famous Rand School of New York City; there were the reading circles that Jewish workers, in both Eastern Europe and American cities, formed to acquaint themselves with Tolstoy, Heine, and Zola. And in Ignazio Silone s novel Bread and Wine we have a poignant account of an underground cell in Rome during the Mussolini years that reads literary works as a way of holding itself together.
My interest here is not to vindicate socialism or Marxism that is another matter. Nor is there anything sacrosanct about the opinions I have quoted or their authors. But it is surely worth establishing that the claims of many academic insurgents to be speaking from a left, let alone a Marxist, point of view are highly dubious. Very' well, the more candid among them might reply, so we re not of the left, at least we re not of the  Eurocentric  left. To recognize that would at
least help clear the atmosphere. More import might shrink the attractiveness of these people i is perhaps the only area of American society wh< label of  the left  retains some prestige.
What we are witnessing on the campus tod strange mixture of American populist sentime French critical theorizing as they come together half of  changing the subject.  The populism p: an underlying structure of feeling, and the the provides a dash of intellectual panache. The po releases anti-elitist rhetoric, the theorizing r highly elitist language.
American populism, with its deep suspicion making of distinctions of value, has found exp not only in native sages (Henry' Ford:  His bunk ) but also in the writings of a long line c lectuals indeed, it s only intellectuals who c; full expression to anti-intellectualism. Such sent have coursed through American literature, bi recently, since the counterculture of the 1960 they found a prominent place in the universit
As for the French th