BRIGITTE BERGER
525
been in the academy. In America's pluralistic situation and with university
credentials becoming increasingly important for entrance into the posi–
tions of high income and status, education based on the achievements of
the individual has served a vital integrative function. Regardless of social
origin - as defined by ethnicity, religion, or social class in the American
experience - social status and economic success has been an individual
achievement. In the jargon of sociologists: status in the American experi–
ence is not ascribed but achieved. While our reality has frequently fallen
short of the ideal, as any social scientist is prepared to demonstrate, this
ideal has served as the lodestar of American politics, to the same degree
as it came to be an article of faith to successive waves of immigrants and
aspiring individuals, wherever they were located.
Again, it is all these singular achievements multiculturalists are sport–
ing to dispense with. In advocating for group preferences in lieu of crite–
ria for individual achievement; in insisting on the celebration of group
experiences instead of providing a record, as texts from "the canon" aim
to
do, of how individuals can rise above their groups; and in seeking to
replace the systematic application of a cognitive rational mode of analy–
sis, along with the carefully cultivated distance from the object of analy–
sis, multiculturalism opens the academy's gates
to
distortion, to a dis–
placement of academic standards, and, ultimately,
to
a misappropriation
of the American creed. It also signals the end of the modern university as
we know it.
Let me come to an end of these reflections with a question: What
are the chances that an academy deconstructed by multiculturalists will be
able not only
to
develop a new basis for an adequate view of the history
ofWestern civilization and the American experience, but also to establish
intellectual and ethical principles powerful enough to guarantee cohesion
to our progressively multicultural nation? The thinkers of the
Enlightenment - philosophers, scientists, and politicians standing on the
shoulders of a long line of giants - were able to offer such principles,
which found their embodiment in the modern university. They were the
beginning; we are the end. My question is, what has multiculturalism to
offer us in this age of transition? Of course, I cannot answer it. But I
would recommend it to my colleagues and to all men and women of
intelligence and good will. Experience shows us that those who ask little
tend to be accorded nothing - an observation which may well become
the epitaph of the twentieth-century university.
With culture moving at an ever faster pace these days, the fissioning
and fragmenting of our cultural heritage appears
to
many to have be–
come inevitable. People tend to read fewer and fewer of the same books
and listen to fewer of the same authorities. A media hailed by many as
the new unifier is out of bounds, contentless though technologically
