Emory Report

August 23, 1999

Volume 52, No. 1

Book in review In Plato's Cave Alvin Kernan, Yale University Press reviewed by Walter Reed Alvin Kernan has had a distinguished career in higher education. But he is not inclined to any high-minded nonsense about it. In his experience at a number of elite colleges and universities (Yale and Princeton at length; Columbia, Williams, Oxford and others more briefly) the groves of academe look more like the cave of the unenlightened in Plato's famous parable--hence the title of his book and its epigraph from The Republic. Kernan is currently a senior advisor in the humanities at The Mellon Foundation. He has served as dean of the graduate school at Princeton University and provost (associate and acting) at Yale. He is a distinguished scholar of English literature, an expert on Renaissance drama and the genre of satire, and he has been an influential teacher of distinguished scholars in his field. But he believes his day is over now and that the American university he knew and loved and hated has become something else, something not nearly as noble or compelling or exasperating to those who are now passing through its precincts. There are two tones of voice that run through this bluntly written and often amusing academic memoir. There is the sardonic voice and indignant tone of the satirist, a figure Kernan has written about in several books. We learn of senior faculty who tyrannize their junior colleagues with petty errands, faculty wives who are condescended to by one and all, university presidents who are political opportunists (sorry--you'll have to read the book to get the names) and students who make a virtue of their complete lack of interest in learning. The fact is, Kernan lets us know, the halls of higher education have more than their share of fools. But there is also the voice of the common-sense democrat, an attitude Kernan brought with him from his boyhood in rural Wyoming and his military service in the Navy during World War II, after which he arrived on the doorstep of the Eastern academic establishment under the G.I. Bill. His refusal to be impressed with the white-shoe gentility of a university culture that still served the well-to-do in the '40s and '50s becomes a refusal to be impressed with the tie-dyed radicalism of the '60s and '70s. His insider's account of the Black Panther trial in New Haven in 1970 gives an unflattering sketch of all the players in that piece of academic and political theater. Kernan never presents himself as a hero or martyr in these affairs--rather as a bemused half-outsider, even though he was clearly a person of influence all along. He makes one believe that the power an academic wields at any level of the institution is considerably less than the responsibility he or she bears. This is in itself a considerable accomplishment in our current culture of institutional suspicion, and it will no doubt be greeted with suspicion for this very reason. Kernan acknowledges from the start that his view of the university is particular and a local one, but he lays claim to a wider vision as well. He writes from his departmental and disciplinary home ground of English literature, but he invokes a friend who once advised, "If you want to know what is actually disturbing a university, visit its English Department." He writes from his own particular experiences in prestigious Ivy League institutions, but he aims to show the huge "tectonic shifts that [have] change[d] the purpose of higher education in the last 50 years." Such tensions between personal and historical perspectives are built into any memoir, of course. Finally, one might say, In Plato's Cave is parochial in the honorable sense of the word, derived as it is from "parish," etymologically "the dwelling of those who are strangers to the world." What impresses this reviewer is the melancholy of Kernan's narrative as he chronicles the transformation of the university in his lifetime, his lament over "the vanity of human wishes," as Samuel Johnson--one of Kernan's scholarly interests--called it. Academics tend to pride themselves on being above the vanity of the less reflective segments of the society that supports them, but Kernan lets us know that this too is vanity, if not vexation of spirit. Walter Reed is professor of English and director of The Center for Teaching and Curriculum. Return to August 23, 1999, contents page