R.oNALD RADOSH
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announced that the meeting was about "graduate students' sexual prefer–
ences, and my sexual preference is graduate students."
At Wellesley College, one has the case of Tony Martin, Professor of
Africana Studies, who uses the Nation of Islam's anti-Semitic book,
The
Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,
as a text and whose defense of
his choice is to condemn his critics as racist and hide behind his First
Amendment rights to choose his own course material. What, one won–
ders, would happen on this or any other campus, if a Jewish professor as–
signed a text of the Ku Klux Klan as course material and used the same
reasoning in his own defense? To ask the question is to provide the an–
swer. He would be condemned, forced to rescind the assignment, or re–
moved from teaching responsibilities, not to say removed from his job.
Martin, we have learned, chastises Jews not only as being responsible for
the slave trade , but for organizing "the international prostitution of
(mainly) Jewish women, by Jewish entrepreneurs," and for participating
in "the extermination of the Native Americans." Who cannot be con–
cerned, when this is the kind of academic offering being presented in our
finest colleges?
This is hardly, Alfred Kazin has written wisely, a "tempest in a
teapot."
In
the name of class-gender-race equality, teachers and students
all over America are now being trained in such intolerance to defame
and exclude those who do not follow the party line. Kazin judges that
by now "the cultural damage is irrevocable," and that teachers should
nourish a desire in minority students to know the world outside of
themselves "instead of flattering them that many classics can be discarded
for books about their own experience."
Unfortunately, Kazin stands rather alone. The noted feminist histo–
rian Alice Kessler-Harris, the new president of the Association of
American Studies, has recently argued that the fight over multiculturalism
is a "tug of war over who gets to create the public culture." Rejecting a
"false search for unity," Kessler-Harris says the nation's culture will be–
come stronger if multiculturalism is adopted. Is she not, I wonder, vali–
dating what Robert Conquest has observed and shrewdly criticized, that
"everything is a struggle for power, or being empowered, or hegemony,
or oppression"? That, he notes, is mere "repetition of Lenin's destructive
doctrine." This is not surprising, given that so many former socialists have
moved to this new agenda for their political struggles in the nineties.
One must also note how close Kessler-Harris seems to be to Patrick
Buchanan, whose call during the last Republican Convention for a war
over the culture echoes her own, except that Buchanan wants to ex–
clude groups he does not like, particularly gays and women. Kessler–
Harris's view seems to be close to becoming the new perceived wisdom.
