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A. One of the most important things to human beings is the capacity to recognize rank order, or decent people, or moral people, or intelligent and wiser people. Without those kinds of elites, we don't have leaders. This kind of greatness inspiring one to human perfection is the central perspective of education. If I were all that man is, it would be very boring to be man . . .
Q. Your scathing depictions of the influence of blacks and women's groups on campus place them well outside your definition of "natural elites." You contend, for example, that "the latest enemy of the vitality of classic texts is feminism. In its view, all literature of today is deemed to be sexist. The muses never sang to the poets about liberated women." You disdain affirmative action as having created "this little black empire" and perpetuating something of an institutional fraud in the form of "permanent quotas, financial preference, racial hiring of faculty and difficulty in giving blacks failing marks." Aren't you yourself treading close to the line of sexism and racism?
A. The two groups are, of course, quite different in their programs and goals, even though there is now an alliance between them that favors getting rid of the Western thought that enslaved both. The main distinction is that black aims generally do not challenge the basic curriculum, but radical feminism is arguing that there has been an entire misinterpretation or an evil % interpretation throughout history that has led to women's enslavement. There is now a demand for the suppression of all such literature, and that goes directly to the heart of the curriculum.
Radical feminism tends to be present in the universities more than within the general society. That's one of the things people don't realize. You have to read their literature, which regards the natural relation between man and woman as only an invention of males. There is a whole language of the phallocentric society. There is a mystique around all the related issues, requiring that men have to change. This is an agenda, and it has entered the university as a huge theoretical network. It is overwhelming in its power and its very angry passions. The radical feminist argues that such differences are not capable of being mediated because all intellectual life is power. That is a direct attack on the premise of universities as a common ground of reason on which people can meet.
These kinds of ideology mean that there are no possibilities for a man to transcend himself: there are things that only women can understand. Only blacks can teach black civilization. There is a tremendous bombshell here because the whole principles of science and modern democracy suppose that we are a common humanity.