Dr. Spivak went on from Cornell to play St. Paul to Derrida’s Jesus; together, their success in transforming literary studies in North America was indeed a remarkable millennial movement. But now that we are into this new millennium, we can see that their success was bittersweet, because the economists and businessmen who control our universities have taken deconstruction to heart and have deconstructed English as the foundation for a liberal arts education – the kind of education I experienced at Pomona. The administrators are now doing to English what a previous generation did to Classics as the foundation for a Western Civ curriculum. There are now no jobs for Ph.D.s in English, the number of graduate students is shrinking, and the few required classes of English that remain for the freshmen headed for law and business schools are being staffed by post-doctoral lecturers who are forever denied full benefits and access to tenure. In the new disliterate culture of the United States – one in which sports, politics, and the celebrity arts are glorified in the spotlights of the State of Entertainment – the economists and businessmen have found that the deconstruction of the critical liberal arts and the construction of costly sports facilities provide a greater return on their investment for the enspirited alumni who will become future donors.

Jesse Jackson – a good and charming man who should know better – now chants at demonstrations and assemblies, “Hey Ho! Western Civ has got to go.” But the question remains, if we erase the post-war curricular movement of Hutchins and Conant, with what do we replace it? Do we replace it with the equivocating vacuity of Homi Bhabha and an endless teetering back and forth between an ironist metropole and an enraged subaltern former colony? Or do we locate culture in something deeper than the constructed discourses of domination?

Planetary Culture and Complex Dynamical Systems
When I was here at York in 1969, I was invited to one of the Couchiching Conferences in Southern Ontario, where I met Ivan Illich for the first time. He gave one of the most mind-altering lectures I have ever heard. I became fascinated with his idea of the “counterfoil institution,” and when my time for sabbatical came up in 1972, I decided to look at all these intellectual alternatives to corporate globalization that were appearing around the world. I went to the Research Foundation for Western Science and Eastern Wisdom in Germany, met with Paolo Soleri at Arcosanti in Arizona, White Bear Fredericks in Old Oraibi in the Hopi Nation, and with Carlos Castaneda in Los Angeles, and visited Esalen and Zen Center in California, Auroville in India, and Findhorn in Scotland. When I returned to York in 1973, York generously promoted me to full professor at the tender age of thirty-five, but I knew I could not continue to work within the post-industrial form of the suburban university, and York was becoming less open to intellectual innovation and more committed to its economic niche, what I snarkily called at that time “Yorkdale University.” So I quit and went down to New York to establish my own counterfoil institution.