682
PAl~
TISAN REVLEW
She argues that one can incorporate gender, class, and race into the
study of our culture and, in so doing, help change the nature of the
American identity; that the "multicultural enterprise," as she calls it, will
strengthen the democratic ethos and help create a transformation of the
culture in which we all participate .
The specifics, unfortunately, do not give us grounds for optimism.
In
his book
Politics
by
Other Means: Higher Edllcatioll alld Grollp Thinking,
David Bromwich relates what happened to Professors Jeffrey Wallin and
Norman Holland at Hampshire College two years ago. The professors'
contracts were renewed by committees of their own disciplines. The
president of the college, however, resubmitted their appointments to a
committee developing a third-world studies curriculum. This committee
voted to reverse the decision to renew their contracts. When the duo
took their case to the college faculty committee on academic freedom,
it voted to support their appointment. The president then created a new
third committee, in order to gain a second negative vote. What was the
great offense of the two professors, Bromwich asks, "that they taught
poorly, or lacked the necessary intimate knowledge of their subjects?"
No, it seems that Professor Holland is a Panamanian American who, de–
spite his Hispanic roots, taught European literature and refused to adopt
the PC politics of victimization. He had sinned, Bromwich writes, "by
opening himself to the charge of
Ellrocentrism."
Holland's adversaries ac–
cused him and Wallin of fai ling to "mount a 'Third World' challenge
to the canon."
In
particular, Bromwich notes, Holland did not
"characterize European literature as a virus, against which students were
to be inoculated in suitably small doses and with elaborate warnings."
In
a different epoch, such judgment would be condemned for what it is -
McCarthyism. Of course, to use that term would be to acknowledge
that there is a McCarthyism of the left, yet to any politically correct
professor, this is a virtual non sequitur.
What can we expect? This past year the Nobel Peace Prize was
awarded to Rigoberta Menchu, a Guatemalan woman who is pro-guer–
rilla and favors neither peace, reconciliation, nor intellect. Her own
much-heralded book, added a few years back to the greatly-debated
Stanford curriculum, was ghostwritten by a French Marxist feminist.
Perhaps the award was given in error to Menchu: After all, Dr. Abaiel
Guzman, the now-imprisoned head of the Peruvian Shining Path, was
unavailable to travel to Stockholm to get the prize. Am I too facetious?
Perhaps, but judging by the recent full-page signed petition on Guzman's
behalf that appeared in
The Village Voice,
some of our New York far left
intellectuals, such as Stanley Aronowitz of the City University of New
York and Bertell Oilman of New York University (along with the great
