EDUCATION BEYOND POLITICS
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those who saw reasoned discourse as the e'ssential quality of the university.
At the New School, those debates don't matter at all. The older stu–
dents I deal with want exactly what students have always wanted: the
credentials that get jobs in order to become consumers of American
goods and services, instruction in the legacy of their own heritage. So in
a perverse way, the demise of high culture may solve the political prob–
lem.
Roger Kimball:
It would seem to me a tragedy to wait for this solu–
tion.
Sondra Farganis :
I'm not presenting it as a solution. I think it's the
way history may play itself out. I think tight economic situations could
solve political correctness. Because if cuts are going to be made they will
be made in the newest areas of the curriculum, the most interdisciplinary,
the most multi-disciplinary and the most costly.
Roger Kimball :
I don't know.
It
seems to me there's such vested
interest in women's studies programs and in black studies programs; there
would be a real political fight to save them.
Abigail Thernstrom:
Last year at Harvard, before Skip Gates came,
almost no one concentrated in African studies, and there was only one
tenured professor, who was white . That would have been a very good
time to merge that department into the regular disciplines, but nobody
had the courage to do it.
It
wasn't even raised as an issue.
Wilson
Moses: When I was in Mrican-American studies at Brown, we
decided not to encourage more than three or four majors per year. In
effect the program discouraged African-American studies majors, as such.
We had a policy that Mro-American studies must, in effect, be offered as
part of a double major. That is, students could not concentrate in Afro–
American studies unless they had the equivalent of a major in some other
discipline, political science, or chemistry, or foreign languages, for exam–
ple. The policy was enacted by black Americans, especially the program
director who preceded me, and I saw no reason to change this policy,
when I became director of the program. Now the reason we did this
was that some of us were parents, and we tended to believe we should
run the black studies program from a parents' point of view and function
in loco parentis,
even though, as you can imagine, this kept the students in
a constant state of indignation. A couple of years ago all four of the
people who graduated with the joint major in Afro-American studies
were white. Sometimes the issues around black studies become confused
