(2 of 5)
A University of Texas professor of American studies has constructed a course on 19th century writers to alternate between famous white men one week and obscure women the next, in part to illuminate "the prison house of gender." A woman who has been visiting professor at both the University of Hawaii and the University of Texas describes traditional liberal arts as prone to "a fetishized respect for culture as a stagnant secular religion." Mary Louise Pratt, a Stanford professor of comparative literature, has objected to "the West's relentless imperial expansion" and its "monumentalist cultural hierarchy that is historically as well as morally distortive."
Although most students at most colleges continue to take courses bearing at least some resemblance to what their predecessors studied, even the traditional curriculum is often read in new ways. Valerie Babb, an assistant professor of English at Georgetown, is teaching a course this semester called White Male Writers. Among them: Hawthorne, Melville and Faulkner. The title reflects one of the course's chief assertions: that just as women or black writers are studied as a class that shares a particular sensibility, so too should these white male artists be. However great their works might be, they speak merely as "one element of the large and diversified body of literature."
The flowering of new and at times exotic theory is in keeping with the great tradition of liberal-arts education. But many of the new critics have a hostile view of traditional scholarship and seem to judge ideas by their "political correctness" (abbreviated as P.C.) -- that is, on the basis of whom they might offend.
The University of Delaware barred Linda Gottfredson from accepting money for her educational research from the controversial Pioneer Fund because it had financed unrelated studies into possible hereditary differences in intelligence among the races. The review committee judged that by underwriting such studies, Pioneer had exhibited "a pattern of activities incompatible with the university's mission." The University of Michigan student newspaper condemned sociologist Reynolds Farley for, as he phrases it, "lack of ideological perspective, for not directly attacking gender and racial differences in wages." A male philosophy professor at Pomona College in California has been fighting a lonely and losing battle to get a course critical of feminist theory listed among women's studies. Several schools have punished students for expressing religious objections to homosexuality or, as at the University of Washington, questioning a professor's assertion that lesbians make the best mothers.