Emergent U.S. Literatures by Cyrus Patell

Author:Cyrus Patell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781479804498
Publisher: NYU Press

5

Multiculturalism and Beyond

In April 1988, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, William J. Bennett, publicly excoriated Stanford University for transforming its course on “Western Culture” into a course called “Cultures, Ideas and Values” that would include “works by women, minorities and persons of color.”1 More specifically, the plan set the modest requirement that each student study “at least one work each quarter addressing issues of race, sex or class.” Four years earlier, as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bennett had written a special report entitled “To Reclaim a Legacy” in which he argued on behalf of a panel of “31 nationally prominent teachers, scholars, administrators and authorities on higher education” that “the past twenty years have seen a steady erosion in the place of the humanities in the undergraduate curriculum.” The report contended that “the nation’s colleges and universities must reshape their undergraduate curricula based on a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, regardless of major, and on the study of history, philosophy, languages and literature.”2 Stanford’s curricular changes, however, were not what Bennett had in mind because they veered away from the teaching of the so-called “Western canon.” Bennett complained that the new course represented capitulation to the demands of a vocal minority: “a great university was brought low by the very forces which modern universities came into being to oppose: ignorance, irrationality and intimidation…. The loudest voices have won, not through force of argument but through bullying, threatening and name-calling.”3 The feminist literary scholar Nina Baym responded to a New York Times article about Bennett’s commentary by pointing out the courses “on Western culture and the ‘great books,’” rather than being an abiding part of a college education as Bennett had suggested, were instead “a curricular invention of the early 20th century, designed to counter the growing professional and technical orientation of the modern university.” Moreover, Baym argued that

scrutiny of the reading lists of such [great books] courses over time shows they are constantly changing, and are full of johnny-come-latelies like Herman Melville and William Faulkner, who obviously could not have been taught for centuries. If one responds that it is not a master-piece’s duration but its particular values that make a work valuable, then it becomes clear that “‘great books” courses are as political as Stanford’s alternative course.4

Some months earlier, Christopher Clausen, the chair of the English Department at Pennsylvania State University, had published a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “It Is Not Elitist to Place Major Literature at the Center of the English Curriculum” in which he wrote that he was willing to “bet that [Alice Walker’s] The Color Purple is taught in more English courses today than all of Shakespeare’s plays combined.”5 This ill-advised bit of hyperbole sparked a tumult of commentary and was taken as gospel by such conservative commentators as Dinesh D’Souza (author of Illberal Education) and David Brooks, who wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal called “From Western Lit to Westerns as Lit.

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