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duction of a work into the contemporary prescribed curriculum virtually
guarantees immunity from criticism. Hence, the intensity of the struggle
for inclusion.
This intensity also derives from the previously mentioned thesis
(usually advanced in the contemporary context in the nco-Marxist
versions of Gramsci or Foucault) that the cultural product is part of the
intellectual superstructure which reflects and rationalizes the social
structure with its dominating ruling class. The current version, revising
Marx, stresses that access to that class has been restricted on grounds of
race, gender, and sexual orientation.
Although not always formulated in theoretical fashion, the con–
ceptual framework of many groups involved in multicultural curricular
revision is that the university curriculum represents traditional Western
culture as an expression of the historical domination and therefore an
instrument of the illegitimate hegemony of the West. University pre–
scription of Western classics is a kind of intellectual "occupation," and
curricular change is then revolutionary liberation. Such a framework also
provides multiculturalism with its characteristic response to the charge
that in the name of heightening sensitivity for victims, it is pursuing or
condoning the politicization of inquiry. That response is that all the
traditions of the university, including free inquiry and objective scholar–
ship, are tacitly political, since they derive from the forces of political
domination. Confronting and displacing these covert political traditions,
including their canon of great works, are actions by which institutional–
ized political bias is to be overcome with a more correct perspective of
the human condition.
The difference in the approach of multiculturalists and traditionalists
to scholarship and critical inquiry can be clarified, therefore, not so much
in the argument for the inclusion of the new works of cultural pluralism,
as in their approach to the classics of Western civilization. For if the new
works are to be sacralized as expressing the consciousness and the rights
of victims, then by parallel logic, the old works are to be demonized,
for they are inescapably reflective of the historic hegemony of ex–
ploitative male European aristocratic or capitalist culture.
The ways in which Aristotle and Shakespeare, to cite again these
master targets, are taught can provide confirmation. At a leading-edge
Southern university, the chairman of the English department stated that
Shakespeare could today only be taught in terms of "race, class, and
gender." At an
Ivy
League university's faculty seminar on the teaching of
a course which is widely cited as sustaining the values of the tradition,
every single one of the questions on Aristotle's
Politics
related to his
comments on sexual equality. The inference was that this would be the
