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| Re: Universiteite [boodskap #6186] |
Do, 11 April 1996 00:00 |
Willem Coetzee
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Geregistreer: April 1996
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Antonie vermeld:
The Dumbing Down of America's Colleges
knip
> Meanwhile, the total number of courses offered at undergraduate
> institutions has increased by a factor of five since 1914, and has
> doubled since 1964, but that doesn't mean more opportunities to become
> an educated citizen. The majority of these additional courses are on
> narrow and idiosyncratic subjects of interest to the professors but
> almost worthless to the students. The total includes such trendy and
> trivial courses as Stanford's "Gender and Science" (which purports to
> study science free from outdated male assumptions), and Georgetown's
> "Unspeakable Lives: Gay and Lesbian Narratives."
>
> Here are some examples of courses given at Yale University for which
> students can receive college credit: "Gender and the Politics of
> Resistance: Feminism, Capitalism and the Third World." "Gender and
> Technology." "Feminist Perspectives on Literature." "Lesbian and Gay
> Theater Performance." "The Literature of AIDS." "Contemporary Lesbian
> and Gay Arts and Culture." "Constructing Lesbian Identities." Such
> courses are just propaganda and entertainment masquerading as
> education.
>
> The result is that our best colleges and universities no longer turn
> out graduates who have an elementary knowledge of our civilization and
> its heritage. They do not learn the basic facts of our country's
> history, political and economic systems, philosophic traditions, and
> literary and artistic legacies.
knip
Van verwante en verdere interesse mag die volgende berig van John
Leo in U.S. News & World Report, 3 April 1995, wees:
How The West was lost at Yale
Campus culture being what it is these days, Donald Kagan's 1990 speech to
incoming freshmen at Yale College was amazingly controversial. He said the
study of Western civilization ought to be common and central. Kagan, then
dean of the college, said the West's flaws -- including war, slavery,
exclusion of women -- were common to other civilizations, but its
achievements have been unique, including great emphasis on law, equality,
liberty and conscience.
Naturally enough, he was widely denounced on campus as a backward-looking
white male and a racist. But in the wake of his speech, the then president
of Yale, Benno Schmidt, approached one of the University's wealthy
contributors, Lee Bass, and asked for money to establish a Western
civilization program.
Yale had many courses in Western thought and culture, of course, but the
idea was to offer an integrated program as an option to just picking
cafeteria-style among individual courses. Schmidt thought it could be a
model for programs at other universities. Bass gave $20 million, touching
off almost four years of academic wrangling that ended this month with Yale
promising to give the money back with interest.
Almost from the beginning a lot of faculty opposition arose. Most of it
claimed to be non-ideological -- the faculty hadn't been consulted, funds
were needed for other departments, the university was already strong in
Western studies. Interestingly, Prof. Harold Bloom, author of _The Western
Cannon_, agrees with this line of reasoning. "The dragon is out there, all
right," he said. "They've destroyed literary studies at all but four or five
universities, reading Alice Walker instead of Spencer, Milton and
Shakespeare. But it's not happening here. We have always been strong in the
study of the Western humanities and we still are."
_Multicultural smog_. Still, the conventional ideological opposition to the
West is there. Prof. Sara Suleri, a veteran West-Baiter, said: "Western
civilization? Why not a chair for colonialism, slavery, empire and
poverty?". Peter Brooks, head of the Yale Humanities Center, fretted about
other programs being pre-empted by something called Western civilization."
Historian, Geoffrey Parker, who teaches some of the Western courses that
Yale is so deep in, was quoted as observing that "the major export of
Western civilization is violence." And though the multicultural smog at Yale
may indeed be thin by the standards of other campuses, in 1991 the _Boston
Globe_ quoted one of Donald Kagan's "implacable enemies" as saying that
Kagan is 90 percent right about the damage done to Yale in the 1970's by
trendy fads like structuralism and deconstruction.
Whether because of ideological opposition or normal academic squabbling,
Yale went more than three years without implementing the program. The
original committee, dominated by Kagan's allies, disbanded when the
university refused to authorize money to hire four new faculty members for
the program. With
Schmidt gone and Kagan no longer the dean, Yale president Richard Levin
names a new committee made up of professors much less friendly to Kagan's
original plans.
Then an undergraduate, Pat Collins, published an article in a conservative
campus magazine _Light and Truth_, charging that "all serious efforts" to
implement the program had been effectively ended by Levin and that "a number
of faculty have even tried to have the funds redirected to their own
projects or departments after succeeding in killing the original proposal."
A _Wall Street Journal_ editorial picked up the issue and blasted Yale. It
reported that Michael Holquist, acting head of comparative literature,
believed there could be "fusion" between Bass courses and classes on such
issues as gender studies. In other words, the new Western civ program might
end up being part of the same multicultural mush it was supposed to counter.
The exasperated Bass apparently had lost so much faith in Yale (Bass, Levin,
and other principals in the case have declined to be interviewed) that he
asked for new insurances and made the tactical mistake of asking to approve
the professors named to the program. But no university can allow outsiders
to pick
faculty. This offered Yale a way out of it's self-created mess -- it could
reject the Bass grant on principle and spin the story to the press as if it
centered on a rich alumnus trying to tell Yale what to do. (The _New York
Times_ and the _New Yorker_ dutifully played the story this way).
The heart of the story is this: How is it that Yale which receives hundreds
of millions of dollars a year and funds hundreds of programs, singled just
this one program out for a four-year brouhaha? This was never conceived as a
closed or celebratory project -- it was expressly described as ranging from
the rise of Mesopotamia to the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust. And
unlike the mandatory multicultural courses on many campuses, the courses
here were optional -- any student could avoid them.
Yale gave up $20 million in funding, and perhaps another $20 million in lost
donations from disillusioned alumni, according to one source. Losing that
much money in one failed adventure may well cost President Levin his job.
It's a reminder of how far the modern university president will go these
days to avoid hurting the feelings of the campus left.
Groetnis
Willem F Coetzee
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