MARK
MIRSKY
663
school facilities that were rarely equal but certainly separate.
"Do you see multiculturalism as politically or intellectually moti–
vated?" The answer to this is the key to "political correctness." At the
university, watching hiring practices, it is clear that the struggle to teach
certain subjects is at one with the attempt to in crease minority represen–
tation on the faculties. No one can untangle the movement's political
and intellectual motivations. Since no intelligent American wants to see
discrimination in terms of the old political categories - preferential treat–
ment for men over women, for sons and daughters of the American
Revolution, Protestants preferred - it becomes very difficult to answer
the questions, "How strong is this movement?" and "What can - or
should - be done to oppose it?" To demand a truly political curriculum,
in literature for instance, is to mount a roller coaster. Are we to measure
the relative strengths of Haitian, Jamaican, West African, and Chinese
student populations, campus by campus, to determine a valid humanities
reading list? Are we to count women against men at the beginning of a
semester and revise our reading lists accordingly? "Why don't you men–
tion more women?" an aggrieved feminist asked me in the middle of a
graduate seminar in the writing of fiction. I began to reel off those I
had, whose influence I felt: Isak Dinesen, Cynthi a Ozick, Grace Paley,
Virginia Woolf ... but the student was not assuaged. I realize now
what was wrong - my attitude. This is one of the aspects of "political
correctness" that is most worrisome. Students imbued with an idea of
what is "politically correct" come to class not to learn from the instruc–
tor, or discuss, or argue, but to have confirmed an attitude they already
hold.
In
writing courses, students, especially if they are humorless, who dis–
cover that the teacher does not share their assumptions are prone to de–
fend themselves against criticism of their prose by asserting that they are
not being understood.
In
courses where literature makes up most of the
curriculum, students who have never been adequately prepared to think
about the classics of English and Western literature are sorely tempted to
bring the discussion around
to
texts that are closer
to
their own experi–
ence, espec ially ones they have read already. To recognize in the texts of
another culture one's own experience is what education at a great uni–
versity is all about. I was raised to believe that.
There were few if any books about the Jewish world I grew up in,
when I studied at Boston Latin Public School, Harvard College, and
Stanford University.
It
was not altogether "correct," and so I do retain
a sneaking sympathy for "multiculturalism ." When there were few
African-American students at C ity College, I was ass igning pages from
Zora Neale Hurston's
Mllies artd Mert
and photocopying pages of
