Similarly, we find in Gates' book that these conservatives feared that the women and people of color who were entering traditional literary institutions would disrupt the canon of literary values and force what they called "tribal" or "parochial" cultural traditions on Anglo-American culture.

Because the culture of the majority had "masked itself as universal," Gates says, its canonization was justified. "[T]he strong poet will abide," a character in one of stories says. "The weak will not. All else is commentary. Politics has nothing to do with it."

But Gates exposes the partisan nature of he canon defenders' supposedly apolitical agenda. "[C]onservative critics," he says in the Introduction, "have never hesitated to provide a political defense of what they consider the 'traditional' curriculum: The future of the republic, they argue, depends on the inculcation of proper civic virtues."

Gates actually agrees in a sense. In "Integrating the American Mind," he says "Allan Bloom is right to ask about effect of higher education on our kids' moral development, even though that's probably the only thing he is right about." In fact, this sentiment is at the core of the central programmatic tenet of Loose Canons--that we must create an educational system that fosters "a civic culture that respects both differences and commonalities." This will be a system "that seeks to comprehend the diversity of human culture" since (and this is the Gates mantra) "[t]here is no tolerance without respect--and no respect without knowledge."

Practically, this means "a required Humanities Course that's truly humanistic," Gates says, building on his belief that in the past "the humanities' has not meant the best that has been thought by all human beings"--just by white men.

At some baseline point for Gates, focusing on the hybrid and the multicultural is really just acknowledging reality. Drawing on postmodern views of culture as a variegated pastiche, he argues that today, "[m]ixing and hybridity are the rule, not the exception.

In this sense, then, "[v]ulgar cultural nationalists...like Allan Bloom or Leonard Jeffrey...are whistling in the wind." Whether they falsely assert Anglo-American culture as universal (a la Bloom) or "lay claim to the ideal of 'blackness' as an ideology or a quasi religion, totalized and essentialized into a protofascist battering ram supervised by official thought police" (a la Jeffries), they fail to ready the young for the world they will face.

Gates says in Chapter 2 that the goal must be "to prepare our students for their roles as citizens of a world culture." The ever-defended "West" of Bennett and Bloom is properly conceived as part of a "larger whole" without a gelatinized, fixed canon but with a "porous, dynamic, and interactive" culture.

At one point he notes that we are all ethnics of one sort or another. The goal, then, is to destroy all forms of "ethnic chauvinism." The right must recognize, he says late in the book, that multiculturalism resulted from the fragmentation of American society, not vice versa.

Oddly enough, at some points Gates offers his own "traditional" justification for all this--from the writings of Cardinal Newman to the "age-old ideal" of mathesis universalis to simple "common sense" (which is used by the right to defend the Anglo-American canon "common sense," for example, might say that Shakespeare is "better" than Zora Neale Hurston).But in this case, Gates says, "[c]ommon sense says that you don't bracket 90 percent of the world's cultural heritage if you really want to learn about the world." Good point.

GATES SKEWERS THE LEFT as well, although here we can find more to complain about. Much of his critique centers around carving out a role for the evaluation of texts by literary critics like himself--as opposed to trashing all evaluation as a tool of capitalist, white male oppression.

But Gates says while "[p]eople often like to represent the high canonical texts as the reading matter of the power elite," it's not that simple. Can you imagine Vice President Dan Quayle 'leafing through the Princess Cassimassima"? Gates can't either.

No, canonization itself is not the problem, Gates believes. He says that "The mindless celebration of difference for its own sake" is no better than "the nostalgic return to some monochrome homogeneity."

And anyway, we each have a canon--a place where "we have written down the texts and tiles that we want to remember." For society to do so is inevitable and desirable. Gates speaks several times of personally helping to edit a new canon, in fact--the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. But doesn't all of this mean he's just selling out like Slade?

Perhaps. It seems to me that his defense of canonization makes the debate simply an academic one among scholars who will use their own subjective criteria to determine what is "better." Bloom and his cronies will always decide Shakespeare and Austen are "better" than Kerouac and Toni Morrison.