JOHN R. SEARLE
709
nority, the minority person is given preference. The basic change is that
originally race, sex, and ethnicity were grounds
Jor encouraging someone to
coli/pete;
now they are among
the criteria Jor judging the competition.
There
is a traditional term for such policies; they are called racial and sexual
discrimination.
It
is not the aim of education to make the student feel
good about himself or herself. On the contrary, if anything, a good edu–
cation should lead to a permanent sense of dissatisfaction. Complacency
is the very opposite of the intellectual life. The dirty secret of intellectual
life is that first- rate work requires an enormous amount of effort, anxi–
ety, and even desperation. The quests for knowledge and truth, as well as
depth, insight, and originality, are not effortless, and they certainly are
not comfortable.
DAVID SIDORSKY
Multiculturalism and the University
The
key to understanding the great debate over multiculturalism in the
American university is that it is taking place on two different levels. Only
on one level is it a debate about curriculum. For the curricular debate
which appears to be about inclusiveness and pluralism carries within it a
decision about the nature of the university. Multicultural claims for in–
clusiveness raise anew the question of
why
a book is required reading in a
prescribed curriculum. The answer involves the issue of
how
any text is to
be taught in the university classroom.
The terms of the debate thus shift away from the question of includ–
ing one or another book from more pluralistic cultural sources to the
legitimacy of using texts as instruments for consciousness-raising, cultural
sensitization, or political initiation. The issue is then not the desirability
of some curricular changes but the nature and desirability of the ongoing
transformation of the university. Only if the debate about multicultural–
ism is identified as confrontation about the politicization of the uni–
versity, rather than as disagreement about the breadth of reading lists, can
the polarization that it has generated be understood.
