[This letter, sent to The Globe and Mail on June 12, 1991 in response to an article defaming university teachers of

English, was not published: newspapers which would hesitate to print similar comments about other professions
evidently feel that academics are fair game.]

[Index: Political correctness, Shakespeare, higher education]

[Date: June 1991]

Ray Conlogue's Apocalyptic Reveries

Michael Keefer

The Editor,
The Globe and Mail.

June 12, 1991.

One hesitates to intrude upon the apocalyptic reveries of Ray Conlogue (Cross
Current, June 11, 1991): it would be unkind to spoil the pleasure he evidently takes in
posturing as a defender of Shakespeare against a new breed of academic Philistines. But
only in his imagination are English professors, whom he seems to have trouble
distinguishing from Red Guards, engaged in smashing up the monuments of our culture.
As a Renaissance scholar and a teacher of Shakespeare, I honour Mr. Conlogue's
love of literaturebut not his more obvious fondness for academic gossip, threadbare
anecdotes, and cheap gestures of contempt. Samson laid about him with the jawbone of
an ass; Conlogue prefers to brandish that of Claude Rawson, whose abusive article in a
recent issue of the London Review of Books appears to be his principal source of
information about contemporary academic life. Mr. Conlogue also has a friend who is a
graduate student in English: rejecting her view of art and culture as a site of
contestation in favour of a more urbane comparison to a conversation among related
people, he promptly spoils the gesture by denouncing Jacques Derrida, the philosopher
and literary theorist, as a reactionary intellectual fraud.
That may be the way some of us talk to our relatives. But one can only regret the

intrusion of such language into what ought to be a reasoned debate over the role of the
universities in transmitting a heightened awareness both of our cultural traditions and of
the liberating potential of contemporary cultural and interpretive practices.
English studies have been revitalized during the past fifteen years by the work of
feminist, poststructuralist, new historicist, and cultural materialist scholars. In my
experience, and that of many of my colleagues, this work has made us more responsive to
the needs of our students, more sensitive to the interactions between literary texts and the
social contexts within which they are produced and interpreted, and more alert to the
ethical implications of our teaching. It has also given new energyI speak again from
experienceto such traditional areas of literary scholarship as textual editing and the
close reading of texts.
There have been and will continue to be lively debates among the exponents of
different modes of literary interpretation. Students of literature are exposed to a wide
variety of approaches by teachers who, whatever their methodological differences, share
a commitment to the inculcation of independent critical thinking. The notion that
university classrooms and lecture-halls have been hijacked for political ends is thus
both malicious and absurd. Equally fatuous, as a glance at the course offerings of any
North American university will show, is the claim that the literary classics have been
dumped from the curriculum.
Only in ill-informed or ill-disposed minds could the rich diversity of new voices
that is now evident in literary studies take on the nightmare shape of a monolithic, antidemocratic wave of political correctness.
Michael H. Keefer
University of Guelph
Vice-President and President-Elect,
Association of Canadian University Teachers of English