664
PAR.TISAN REVIEW
American Indian poetry that had been collected and translated at the
beginning of this century. The new multiculturalism - will it teach the
Yiddish poems written in America about the "African-Americans" whom
the emigres from Vilna and Warsaw watched with fascination on the
subways? I long to sneak a few subversive texts into an American litera–
ture or civilization course. What I have observed at City College, how–
ever, is that most of the Jewish faculty is far too "assimilated" to find the
cause of teaching Jewish texts in the literature courses appealing. (Only
the Holocaust is a subject which is politically attractive.) They sympa–
thize with "multiculturalism" but with little devotion to the culture
they knew once upon a time. For many academics who have lost interest
in their own scholarship, the promise of a new reading list that will
bring a political awakening, a renewal, to the department is irresistible.
The lapse in standards embraced by the universities at the beginning
of the 1970s has made it more difficult, not less so, to address real prob–
lems in the education of minorities in the United States. We have had
not just "affirmative action" in employment but also "affirmative educa–
tion," a euphemism for passing problems along. Standards at City
College in the 1960s were too rigid, and there was no question in my
mind that strong steps had to be taken to enrol l more minority students.
This is not the place to discuss open admissions at length.
It
has to be
apparent to most intelligent citizens, however, that when you are trying
to bring more students up to a certain level, it makes no sense
to
lower
that level, claiming to have accomplished the wonderful when a signifi–
cant number are able to hurdle a depressed bar. An educational bureau–
cracy downtown watching numbers and teachers with their eyes on in–
dividual students and classes have different perspectives. Several times in
my capacity as a professor of English, I have been asked while marking
placement examinations to assign a minimum grade to a student who has
simply left a blue book blank or inscribed a single sentence, touching in
its honesty, "Me no speak English." It may well be that this student is
literate in another language. (There is a graduate-level mathematics semi–
nar at Harvard, I am told, which is held entirely in Chinese.) I question,
however, whether without special dispensation one can assign a class in
remediation to such a student at a college. Generations of immigrants,
my father among them, enrolled in elementary school, although they
were well beyond the age of the rest of the class, in order to gain the
proficiency in English and in American history to study at a college.
It
may well be that the elementary and high schools of American cities
were a more serious place then, because of that enrollment. Have we
badly confused social and educational goals in not insisting that most
remedial work be carried out before college? Looking at the blank blue
book which is certainly a sign of despair, I am troubled.
In
the freshman
