(4 of 5)
Proponents insist that the new thinking promotes only innocuous inclusion. University of Chicago literature professor Gerald Graff's Beyond the Culture Wars, a 1993 American Book Award winner, acknowledges that he favors "feminism, multiculturalism and other new theories and practices that have divided the academy" but insists that this can be a moderate position. Writes Graff: "The curriculum is already a shouting match, and one that will only become more angry and polarized if ways are not found to exploit rather than avoid its philosophical differences. It is important to bring heretofore excluded cultures into the curriculum, but unless they are put in dialogue with traditional courses, students will continue to struggle with a disconnected curriculum, and suspicion and resentment will continue to increase."
Persuasive as Graff can be, his book fights a battle that is largely won. Stanford's acrimonious debate on a compulsory course in Western civilization took place five years ago. Most campuses have long since rejected the idea of an immutable "canon" of indispensable Western classics in favor of recognizing the reality that, long before p.c., curriculum has always evolved in response to the changing marketplace of students. A generation or two ago, it demanded validation of America's cultural maturity. Today it demands diversity. The 1991 Heath anthology of American literature, widely used in colleges, begins with Indian chants and Spanish voyager poems, rather than Pilgrim ruminations. Next year's update adds more "Native American oral narratives." The Heath editors treat literature as of mainly anthropological value. The volume abounds in work by Asians, Hispanics and especially blacks and women -- there is more by Charlotte Perkins Gilman than by Hemingway -- and conspicuously stints Wasps and Jews.
. If at times excessive, the p.c. and multicultural movements arose out of real concerns. Says Siby Philips, a senior at the University of Texas: "Multiculturalism came about because a lot of people are ignorant about people of color, gay and lesbian people, or whatever. These groups feel like they are marginalized. It's more than validation for certain groups. It's validation for the whole of society rather than just some part of it." Many distinguished scholars, however, see firsthand evidence that the p.c. and multicultural movements are leading to a more general separatism, a fragmentation of the centrist consensus that built America. To study anyone's culture but one's own -- unless one is white, in which case it is necessary to learn about the oppressed others -- is to commit an act of identity suicide. Beyond this loss of interest in universal ideas, often expressed as disbelief that anything is actually universal, Duke political scientist James David Barber sees a growing attitude that reason and factuality themselves are European cultural artifacts. Says Barber: "I think a lot of 'impressionism' -- a detestation of reason in favor of emotion -- is happening now." Scholars who agree with Barber note that p.c. thinkers consider a claim of harassment essentially unchallengeable, regardless of fact, because the only meaningful perception of grievance is that of the alleged victim.