BRIGITTE BERGER
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institution, it is charged with the special task of acting as a trustee of the
cognitive culture distinctive of modernity. In that the modern university
is a "fiduciary system," in the terminology of Talcott Parsons, its func–
tions go far beyond the educational and professional preparation of fu–
ture elites. The university must be seen as the intellectual guardian of an
entire civilization. By definition, it favors the development of cognitive
rationality in individuals on the one hand, and on the other the rational
organization of knowledge (by means of the collection, testing, verifica–
tion, and systematized ordering of knowledge in a cumulative way) by
individual scholars or teams of scholars. While the university provides an
"open space" for all sorts of disagreements and challenges, and indeed
encourages skepticism and quests into new terroritories of thought and
knowledge as essential for the life of the mind, it is intrinsically bound to
standards of scholarship based on cognitive rationality. This cognitive
style compels scholars to carefully define the concepts used; to differenti–
ate sharply and argue cogently; to constantly examine and reexamine for
adequacy and completeness the data used and measure its plausibility by
the hand of empirical reality; to critically assess whether and to what de–
gree data can be "falsified"; and above all, to know that this knowledge
is always open to challenge and modification, or in more technical
terms, is "true until further notice."
All this multiculturalists are eager to dismiss as rules established by
dead white males and as therefore tainted, biased, and to be done away
with. In its place they want to put vague and impossible-to-define ap–
proaches to the study of materials selected on the basis of their class-spe–
cific political convictions that, by and large, reflect an almost total re–
liance on criteria of intuition and emotion. "Compassion," an identifi–
cation with the lot of "the poor," "the oppressed," "the outsider," and
other such groups (however self-contradictorily defined) now is advo–
cated as the desired mode of inquiry and the only moral one as well.
What we are dealing with here, then, is something quite beyond the
long-overdue correction of the academic curriculum advocated by multi–
culturalists, which sounds so eminently reasonable at first blush. Rather
than being a reasoned case to provide room in the curriculum for writers
like James Baldwin or Zora Heale Hurston, to pay respect to "non–
traditional" lifestyles of whatever kind, or to advance the cause of
"oppressed" minorites however defined, the multiculturalist agenda is in
fact far more radical and perhaps even revolutionary.
It is one of the ironies of intellectual life that in advocating to stu–
dents a particular, empathic approach as the only true and moral one,
multiculturalists themselves fall prey to new forms of cultural imperialism.
Rather than pursuing their much-propagated agenda of inclusion, they
become guilty of exclusion to the point of setting before us a monocul-
