True Multiculturalism: Setting No Boundaries

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Higher education continues to reap the effects of the social reforms of the sixties and seventies, both encouraging and discouraging. More students, from a wider range of backgrounds, are going to college. With this wider range of students, the call for "cultural diversity" has properly meant a heightened concern for multicultural perspectives in the curriculum. But, not so properly, it has also sometimes come to mean, with the rise of "multiculturalism," a subordination of academic to political concerns. Earlier, campus protesters were primarily students, with some faculty supporters. Their demand--for civil rights or against the Vietnam War--was to extend the basic rights and responsibilities of the democratic heritage, insisting upon a reconciliation of the ideals of Western civilization with the practices of that civilization as they knew it. Now, many of the protesters are on the faculty, and the enemy is not government or business, but the "canon" of Western civilization.

How does the curriculum get involved? At least some of the appeal of the ideology of multiculturalism is that it serves a different kind of "victim's" revolution on campus. Enter those who insist that Western culture is inherently hostile to women, blacks and other minorities, and homosexuals. It is "institutionally" racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, ageist, ableist, speciesist, and looksist. And enter those who offer a new discipline," one that invalidates the knowledge and methods of those in tenured teaching positions, who are unable to deconstruct, revolutionize, or de-phallogocentrize the …