EDUCATION BEYOND POLITICS
359
and some of you here have £aced it.
But I think we must recognize that what has been known as
radicalism is what defines or determines the attitudes or the values of the
new culture, the new ideology of the universities. It includes extreme
feminist theories as well as the various liberation movements. Again, it's
not a question of whether gays should be tolerated; what we're talking
about is gay liberation, establishing itself aggressively at universities, and
then there's black studies. Nobody's opposed to normal or even exten–
sive studies of black literature or of women's literature. What one ques–
tions are the claims that are made, for example, by Afrocentrism, that all
our culture comes from Egypt, which is a black country. I don't know
how it's become black except by blood transfusions.
Now, it seems to me that people like us can engage in an intellec–
tual
debate with the culture as a whole that's being spread through the
universities, and with specific false attitudes, like the stupid things that
were written about Columbus, for example, the absurd things done in
literary criticism. Most of you are not literary people, maybe you don't
read the nonsense that's printed in the professional literary journals, but
it's unbelievable . By now it's become a degraded, watered-down version
of deconstruction, Freudianism, Marxism. There's a good deal of neo–
Marxism that has very little to do with the original Marxist traditions.
Marx himself believed in the past, in literary and philosophical traditions,
in the tradition of ideas.
Fred Siegel: I
want to disagree somewhat. In public forums held outside
academia, some of the most militant of the multicultists like Catharine
Stimpson and Gerald Graff run away from the previously held positions.
By
the time he and I finished a radio debate , Gerald Graff sounded
indistinguishable from a traditional American pluralist. Henry Gates has
similarly, and I think admirably, back-pedaled away from the "blood and
soil" implications of multicultism's search for racial authenticity. When–
ever I've pointed out that multiculturalism represents not pluralism and
tolerance but its antithesis, separatism and intolerance, campus audiences,
even with a large percentage of black students, have backed away from
what they had previously thought of as appealing.
We were on to something important a little earlier, however, when
we talked about the importance of high schools and academic adminis–
trators. While multiculturalism as an ideology is in full-fledged intellec–
tual
retreat, multicultism as an avenue for bureaucratic and administrative
entrepreneurship is flourishing. A small item in
The Chronicle of Higher
Edllcation
recently noted that there had been a five hundred to eight
hundred percent increase in the number of academic administrators during
the 1980s. Even if the numbers are high, the increase in the number
