“I thought that I might have gone a little overboard with this answer, but I was wrong—the TAs just ate it all up,” Mike noted. “It seemed as though they really liked it whenever I put negative-sounding phrases near the word ‘Western.’” In his essay (which typifies the entire exam), the West is “imperialist,” “arrogant,” “providing a pittance,” and “oppressive,” and the non-Western !Kung provide the positive counterpoint: They are a culture with “traditional roles” that build “self-esteem,” and naturally have nothing to gain from their “exposure to Western ‘progress.’” The more black and white the analysis, the more favorable the TA's response; critical thinking and fine distinctions, apparently, could only hurt one's grade.
Keeping these priorities in mind, Mike also had to contrast a neo-Marxist with a more moderate analysis of the urban poor, and was certain to come out with the right answers:
Bourdieu and Lewis present two different paradigms for understanding the phenomenon of urban poverty worldwide. Bourdieu's analysis is far more radical, arguing as does Fanon that the Algerian peasants he studied, and by extension all oppressed peoples, can achieve revolutionary consciousness and fight back, even though in reality the peasants often depend on their oppressors even as they curse them [yes (TA's comment)]…. Lewis would have us believe that the poor don't mind their condition, thus assuring their inability to achieve revolutionary consciousness. Bourdieu's critique of the Algerian lumpenproletariat reaches a more sensible conclusion, that the oppressed resent their oppressors, but their dependency on them holds them back.
Although seemingly unrelated to a question regarding “the construction and expression of groups and personal selves,” Mike felt that the invocation of a global environmental apocalypse would not hurt:
Babcock's article on Helen Cordero's “Little People” demonstrates the connection between object and self. Cordero's created objects become an extension of herself, the clay people identify her and her connection as a human being to the earth [check mark]…. Western man has a hard time understanding the connection of man to nature…. One can only hope that we learn this before our planet is destroyed.
Mike denied believing any of the things he had written, but explained that it was the easiest way to ensure that he would pass the class and meet two of his distribution requirements. Even so, he was stunned to learn that his final grade in the course would have been an A. “My only regret was that I didn't take the class for a grade,” Mike concluded.45
Those who questioned the prevailing orthodoxy were less fortunate. Senior Chris Aguas received a lower exam grade (a B, quite a low grade in a class like Anthro 1) for arguing that referring to the !Kung as “Bushmen” did not constitute an act of cultural imperialism (Professor Mahar had declared that “Bushmen” connotes something “primitive,” and therefore creates an unwarranted imputation of cultural inferiority). Chris argued, consistently with multicultural principles, that the belief that the “primitive” is undesirable itself constituted a cultural bias: If one could not impose one's cultural standards on other societies, then how could one infer that the claim that something is primitive means that it is less desirable? This argument was apparently too sophisticated for the exam grader, who dismissed these observations with the conclusion, “But it's still wrong to call them ‘Bushmen.’”46 Although Chris Aguas may have understood anthropology better than Mike Newman, Mike Newman understood Anthro 1 far better than Chris Aguas.
In addition to classes like CIV, Freshman English, Group Comm, Peace Studies, and Anthro 1, multicultural trendiness pullulates throughout the major departments. The OMD promised “to integrate multiculturalism in” (not just append it to) all programs of the university, and it is in such central courses that the multiculturalists have pushed their views onto the greatest numbers of students:
The class “19th-Century American History,” taught by Professor Estelle Freedman, devoted one-half of its class time to a study of women, as they had constituted one-half of the U.S. population during that time. As a result of these priorities, the class did not have enough time to learn about the War of 1812.47
Religious Studies 8, “Religions in America,” a class that can be counted towards three different graduation requirements, devoted whole lectures to Shamanism, the Peyote Cult, and the Kodiak sect, but not one to the Catholic Church. When discussed at all, Christianity was viewed from a feminist or gay “perspective” through such works as “Jesus Acted Up: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto,” “A Second Coming Out,” and “Beyond the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women's Liberation.”48
Class assignments for Feminist Studies 101 have included writing (but not necessarily sending) “a letter to our parents coming out as a lesbian,” according to Minal Hajratwala, a woman who took the class in 1991.49
At Stanford's Education School, future junior high and high school teachers are taught how to integrate a watered-down multiculturalism into their curricula.50
English Professor Regenia Gagnier had been scheduled to teach courses on Victorian political economy and 19th century fiction in Spring 1991. When the Persian Gulf War started, “Suddenly Victorian political economy didn't seem as relevant,” she told the Stanford Daily. Instead she developed an undergraduate course and a graduate colloquium on the “Literature of War.”51
History 61 devoted an entire quarter to “Social Movements of the 1960s in California.” The class studied “grassroots political activism and social turmoil stretching from student involvement in the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s to the early Gay Liberation Movement of the mid-1970s.” Class readings included Black Panther David Hillier's autobiography and Social Movements of the 1960s: Searching for Democracy, by none other than Professor Stewart Burns (of “History of Rights” fame).52
“Pop culture” is “gaining legitimacy as [a] supplement to course material,” reported the Stanford Daily in 1993. English professor Seth Lerer's Arthurian literature class, for instance, watched movies such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Sword of the Valiant, and Excalibur. David Schmid, a graduate student in Modern Thought and Literature writing a thesis on modern-day serial killers, also taught a Freshman English class, in which students viewed violent films such as Deathwish and Colors and listened to rap music.53
Not everything related to exotic peoples and social perspectives, however, is catnip at Stanford. A telling example of a class that could not be taught was “Nietzsche and the Apaches,” proposed by philosophy professor Walter Lammi in the 1989–90 school year to the Innovative Academic Courses (IAC) program at Stanford.54 At the time, IAC claimed to be seeking courses that would focus on “cross-cultural studies for multicultural education.” Professor Lammi thought that his proposed course fit this ostensible set of requirements perfectly. One of the central issues of Nietzschean philosophy concerns questions of human nobility, and part of Nietzsche's argument is that the conditions for such nobility may be found among “primitive” or “barbarian” tribes. Professor Lammi noted how closely the historic reality of Apache culture had fit some of Nietzsche's abstract notions, particularly in its emphasis on martial values in the development of what Nietzsche considered the superior human soul, in its tough initiation rites, and in the tenacity, heroism, and sometimes cruelty of its warriors. The IAC director and Stanford's administration rejected Professor Lammi's proposed course out of hand. Because Professor Lammi would have discussed the warlike nature of Apache culture, including ritual torture, Stanford students might have generalized and reached some negative impressions about other American Indians and perhaps “people of color” as a whole. An administrator informed Professor Lammi that his course might undermine the struggle of minority groups against the dominant culture, and IAC director Margo Horn told him that his proposal was “bizarre,” “offensive,” and “certainly not consistent with the goals of ‘education for difference.’”55
While “Nietzche and the Apaches” did not make the new curriculum, Comparative Literature 189, “Repres
enting Sappho: the Literature of Lesbianism,” abundantly met the criteria of “education for difference.” Offered by the English department for the first time in Spring 1994, the class sought, in the words of Instructor Terry Castle, “to resexualize lesbian history.”56 Shakespeare's As You Like It was identified as a “loci classicus of lesbianism,” and the remainder of the course readings were probed for “male and female representations of lesbian desire” and for “lesbianism as ‘symbolist,’ ‘decadent,’ ‘modernist,’ and ‘utopian’ literary motif.”57
“Representing Sappho” is not some anomaly on the margins of an otherwise terrific Stanford education. At least three other classes explored similar themes—Feminist Studies 295, subtitled “How Tasty Were My French Sisters”; Comparative Literature 110, “The Politics of Desire: Representations of Gay and Lesbian Sexuality”; and Law 587, “The History and Politics of Sexual Orientation: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives.”58
In 1993, six new “dialogue tutorials” in “American Counterculture Literature” also promoted trendy sexual mores. Lecturer Keith Gandal told the Stanford Daily that he organized the program to explore “the idea of alternative ethics,” a euphemism for radical 1960s-style experimentation: “You get a dose of [the Protestant capitalist tradition] growing up as a child,” explained Gandal. “When you arrive in junior high, there's a new ethic of exploration and rebelling against your parents.”59 English lecturer Wilfred Koponen's tutorial, “Gay Novels and Gay Identity,” spotlighted some of these “new ethics.” One assigned reading, Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool-Library, featured the theme of pederasty. A brief excerpt from the book is highly illustrative of what passes for great multicultural literature:
I was turning to leave when I spotted a lone Arab boy wandering along, hands in the pockets of his anorak, fairly unremarkable, yet with something about him which made me feel that I must have him. I was convinced that he had noticed me, and I felt a delicious surplus of lust and satisfaction at the idea of fucking him while another boy waited for me at home.60
“Gay novels offer insight into the construction of gay identity,” Professor Koponen (himself admittedly homosexual) proclaimed.61
Another of Stanford's X-rated English classes is “Representing Sexualities: Whitman to AIDS.” The syllabus warned that “Sexually-explicit materials, both hetero- and homoerotic, may be viewed and discussed in this class.”62 Scheduled readings included “A Posttransexual Manifesto” by Sandy Stone, John D'Emilio's “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” Henry Abelove's “From Thoreau to Queer Politics,” and Eve Sedgwick's “How to Bring Your Kids up Gay,” in addition to two videos, Voices from the Front, by the militant homosexual group ACT-UP, and Tongues Untied, a pornographic gay film. Although the course catalog identifies the upper-level seminar (numbered English 187 D) as consisting of “scholarly and critical studies of literary texts,”63 Professor Jay Grossman spent his first class session presenting an episode of the television comedy Cheers and then deconstructing the show as “homophobic.” “This course I imagine, or like to imagine, will bolster anti-homophobic discourse,” he explained. Such discourse also was bolstered, presumably, by the first reading assignment—several weeks of a cartoon strip in which a teenage character reveals that he is gay. For Stanford's English department, if the material is trendy enough, it does not even have to be literature.
When everybody defers to everyone else's judgement, nobody thinks for himself. And so, perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of the trendy curriculum is that it trains students to think with the herd rather than to think critically. The new curriculum may be described as the product of an echo effect, in which different people in the Stanford community, faculty and students alike, repeat one another's claims until so many people make the same claims that everybody starts to believe them. Such conformity can be psychologically overpowering, but it does not promise to yield the truth or to communicate anything significant.
Political science professor John Manley provided a particularly telling example in his Winter 1990 offering of Political Science 10, “Introduction to American National Government.” Professor Manley devoted much of the course to critiquing American society as hopelessly marred by divisions of race, class, and gender. He particularly emphasized “institutional racism”—defined as the existence of social institutions that unconsciously reinforce racial divisions in our society. One class discussion on institutional racism culminated with Professor Manley's inquiry of his students: “How many of you attended high schools in which a majority of the students are white?”64 The number of raised hands indicated that an overwhelming majority of the 200 or so enrolled students had. Here, then, if there could be any doubt about Professor Manley's claims, was the clinching piece of evidence: Only those students who attended predominantly white high schools in our society would ever get into good universities, whereas the rest of the students in our racially segregated school system would be denied the educational opportunity to hear political science lectures at Stanford. And this sort of racism was all the worse for its insidious character: Students, and American society at large, might not even recognize the existence of such unconscious institutional racism, at least not until they had been enlightened by educators like Professor Manley.
Whatever one's views on race relations in our society, the argument made by Professor Manley in Poli Sci 10 is simply an illogical assumption. On this occasion sophomore Jill Morganbesser broke his spell: “But, Professor Manley, since a majority of the high school students in America are white, wouldn't it follow that if our schools were perfectly integrated that you would expect everybody in class to have attended high schools in which a majority of the students are white?”65 Professor Manley had no response to this obvious objection. So committed was he to attributing America's social ills to racism that the broad range of alternative reasons why most Stanford students had attended mostly-white high schools had never occurred to him.
The German philosopher Lessing defined dogmatism as “the tendency to identify the goal of our thinking with the point at which we have become tired of thinking.” The ideological commitments of the multiculturalists have discouraged them from reflecting critically upon their controversial claims. In Professor Manley's case, facts that are evidence of integration instead point to racism. The resulting dogmatism has more in common with the contradictory logic of the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland than with the ideal of a Western university:
Alice laughed. “There's no use trying,” she said. “One can't believe impossible things.” “I dare say you haven't had much practice,” said the queen. “When I was your age I did it for half an hour a day. Why, I've sometimes believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
The Victims’ Curriculum
The characterization of Westerners as chronic oppressors (“colonial addicts,” in Aime Cesaire's words) running through Group Comm, Peace Studies, and Anthro 1 is made more explicit in the many classes concerned with the “education for difference” described by Ms. Horn—that is, with focusing positively on those groups of people multiculturalists consider the “victims” of America and the West. In this spirit, Stanford's Faculty Senate expanded the university's requirements in Fall 1990 to include one course on race (misleadingly labeled “American Cultures”) and one on gender.66 The requirements were necessary, Peter Duus, chairman of the Faculty Senate Committee on Undergraduate Studies, told the San Francisco Chronicle, because CIV “did not go far enough in expanding Stanford students’ knowledge of non-European culture.”67 Many of the new courses that meet the race and gender studies requirements are taken directly from departments like Feminist Studies, Afro-American Studies, Asian-American Studies, and Chicano Studies, which Stanford had established in the late 1960s in response to an earlier wave of protests.68
Enrolling upwards of 100 students each quarter, Linguistics 73 is one of the most heavily subscribed courses fulfilling the new race studies DR. Entitled “African American Vernacular English,” the
class is premised on the notion that inner-city slang (of the type heard in rap songs) is a legitimate dialect of the English language, deserving scholarly attention rather than derision. “AAVE is not just a ‘careless’ form of speech in which ‘anything goes,’” explained the course syllabus.69 In Winter 1993, course activities included attending sermons at two predominantly black churches in Palo Alto (where students were advised to “dress nicely and bring two collections”) and presenting research projects at an all-day “AAVE happenin’.” Students viewed such films as Do the Right Thing, Putney Swope, or Daughters of the Dust each Friday, and could earn extra units if they tutored an African-American student in East Palo Alto. Typical of the class readings was a transcript of an interview with Foxy Boston, a 13-year-old from East Palo Alto:
F: Ahm, an’ if duh boys ain’ up on duh scoop dem girls be goin’, (sucks teeth) “Boy you bettah wake up an’ smell dat caffeine!” (laughter)
D: Smell what?
R: Caffeine. You know as in coffee?
F: Up on duh scoop. An’ you know, sometimes dey be sayin’ ahm, like if a boy say, “Girl, wha’ choo talkin’ about?” She go, “You don’ know what Ah'm talkin’ ‘bout? Boy you bettah wake up an’ smell dat big Sanka brand! Like that tell ‘im like that….say “Oh so you tryin’ to clown or so you try to dis’ me or some'pn?70
The gender studies classes hardly provide much better preparation for life after graduation. Director of Feminist Studies Sylvia Yanagisako, who was instrumental in pushing the Faculty Senate to accept the new requirement, defined feminist studies as the study of “how all institutions and relationships are shaped by gender…gender is not just what men and women do, it is a system, it is the culturally created differences between men and women.”71 This definition avoids the most important question, however—namely, what fraction of differences between men and women are biological in origin and what fraction are “culturally created.” Rather, this formulation adopts an extreme answer to a very complicated question: For feminists like Professor Yanagisako, there are no “natural” differences between men and women—all differences are culturally created.
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