As what was popularly termed the culture wars reached their height in the 1970s–1990s, critics and self-styled aesthetes argued that writers whose works engaged civil, women's, lesbian and gay rights, and did so with forms deemed unaesthetic, were incapable of creating a “universal” literature and were eroding academic excellence. In addition to Christopher Clausen, quoted above, Dinesh D'Souza in Illiberal Education (1991) feared that Homer, Aristotle, and Shakespeare were being exiled to make room for Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Ntozake Shange. William Bennett and Lynne Cheney would join the chorus, bemoaning the eschewing of classic literature for the literature of identity politics. Self-acclaimed protectors of scholarly and artistic rigor were on the defensive against attempts to create a more representative canon. Hershel Parker's assessment of the 1990 edition of the Heath Anthology of American literature shows how readily efforts to broaden conceptions of canonical literature were chastened with the yardstick of literary merit: “The most visible innovations in the Heath anthology are the new selections by writers from racial minorities, especially blacks and Indians – selections where literary merit has plainly not always been the chief criterion” (15). Parker was editor of multiple editions of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. While no one would dispute his right to his assessment, the ready equation of race and artistic inferiority makes one question the unstated values behind standards of literary evaluation.