368
PARTISAN REVIEW
When I looked recently at the Rutgers University affirmative action
progress report, I realized that in some places percentages are given and
not in others. Indirectly, you also find out that between 1978 and 1990
the number of faculty decreased by approximately 1,100, while the non–
instructional staff increased by about 1,200. Now this is for the Rutgen
system, but I'm sure we're not unique. A lot of staff positions, I think,
have to do with mandated reporting, with reporting on faculty, on
achievements, with the therapeutic mission you've been talking about,
with feeling better. I had no idea, for instance, that we did have such a
large black support staff on our campus, until Skip Gates came for a talk.
And I didn't realize that they would be so interested in what he had to
say. But this might point to the fact that media events make for reputa–
tions, and that they help perpetuate the so- called multiculturalism. Thus
it's difficult to filter things out, because there's a constant movement in
and out. Many people who are in fact going along with this line do so
because they feel pushed. Maybe if more of us were to talk up, we
might
be getting some of them back on our side.
Ronald Radosh:
I agree with Mr. Shanker on ceding the term "multicul–
turalism." It is a very confused term. But the problem is not one of our
curriculum not being multi- ethnic. The problem is that addressing tradI–
tional values immediately brands one as being a fascist. The people who
have the upper hand in the universities are not the ones supporting tradi–
tional values, not among blacks, Jews, or gentiles. The fact is that in today's
American university there is no sense of commi tment to traditionalism.
Edith Kurzweil:
Don't you think that some of this has to do with the
fact that when you talk against this phenomenon you're called conserva–
tive, and this makes you tend to pull back? I felt I had to defend Arthur
Schlesinger against the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities,
because I had asked them for money to have today's meeting.
Wilson
Moses: Really?
Edith Kurzweil:
Yes. This was a few months ago, shortly after he came
out against the Sobol Report. I got angry when I was told by the
foundation representative that at least I ought to invite Sobol. I said that
I didn't want to replicate the discussions that have been taking place, and
that I thought it was outrageous to throwaway a man's lifetime record,
to call him a conservative because he wanted kids to learn something.
Of
course you, Mr. Schlesinger, were the example, but I think
all
of us have
been in this pOSItIOn. A number of us, at least in my network, are
sociologists. And we all went into sociology in order to protest
