In an interview on Liberty and Morality

On the subject of liberal education, you’ve got another book about education but it’s a novel, Tom Wolfe’s 2004 book I Am Charlotte Simmons, one of very few novels to make our list. Why?

He’s on my list as a book that conservatives should read and non-conservatives should read. Everybody with an interest in sex, soul and higher education should read I Am Charlotte Simmons. Those are the great themes of the book.

This is a novel set at the fictional Dupont University as seen through the eyes of an ingénue named Charlotte Simmons, who comes expecting a great liberal education and finds things are very different?

Yes. Charlotte grows up in Sparta, Georgia, I believe, on the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She comes from red America and she’s a prodigy of red America – she’s the best student that her community has seen in living memory. She wins a scholarship to Dupont College and she’s sent off with great fanfare. What Wolfe explores is what happens when a prodigiously intellectually talented young woman, raised with a conservative sensibility, is parachuted and dropped into a representative, elite institution of higher education. What happens to her beliefs, what happens to her convictions, what happens to her cultural conservatism?

Is the answer that she finds herself in a conservative’s caricature of liberal academia or is it a bit more complex than that?

It’s a bit more complex than that, though I suppose some people on the left will say that it’s a conservative’s caricature. The truth is that many people who say that are people who have been out of university for a long time and are quite lacking Tom Wolfe’s ability to reconstruct scenes and situations, people lacking his journalistic flair. The university he describes is a university that is very familiar to me. The first wave of critics of I Am Charlotte Simmons dismissed the book as reflecting the prurient interests of an old man who could not come to grips with sex on campus of the younger generation. Of course that’s nonsense. For one thing, the sex lives of today’s young students that Wolfe describes is not that different from what you and I knew on campus in the late 70s and early 80s. There’s a great deal of continuity. It’s funny to listen to today’s 40-somethings wax indignant about descriptions that really can’t be unfamiliar to them…

In Dupont University learning takes a backseat to money and sex and status – and, in your view, there is more to this than just fiction?

Oh yes.

It’s a critique of modern university life and the unmooring of traditional, liberal education values.

Absolutely. What happens on the cultural level – the sexual lives of students, the hook-up culture in which sex and love are severed, sex and marriage are severed, sex and family are severed – is something perfectly familiar to all of us who came of age post-1965. And there is another dimension of it that’s very important. The other aspect that Wolfe brings to life is that the education that the students get in the classroom reinforces the de-romanticisation of our sexual lives. He focuses on two aspects in I Am Charlotte Simmons, the right aspects I think. One is the resolute determination to reduce all human conduct to our biology: biology is fate. The other aspect is the postmodern tendency to deny that reason is capable of identifying moral standards and making authoritative moral judgments. These two lessons of the university curriculum support what happens outside the classroom.