THE CORE CURRICULUM AS INTELLECTUAL MOTIVATION
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of the backlash he would get from his peers. In a way I'm encouraged to
see that this no longer happens. People like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele,
and Michael Meyers speak up. They're the ones who can truly help. I'm
teaching a core course to a most diverse student population and we all
read, among many other things, Shelby Steele, and
Invisible Man,
which
helps the students get into lively discussions. However, there is opposition
to the core curriculum from the faculty. Students understand the connec–
tions to identity formation by, for instance, Sylvia Plath, Freud, Marx,
Goffinan, George Herbert Mead, and Lasch, which are difficult to teach by
people who are taught in one narrow discipline.
The second point is on postmodernism. It so happens that I wrote on
French structuralism before either structuralism or postmodernism were
introduced in this country. But academics moved to one or the other with–
out differentiation. The French were either being praised or blamed for
postmodernism. But in fact postmodernism in America is not what it is
for the French. For example, in feminist studies, women's studies, there's a
reader by Marx and Courtivron that came out in 1980 at a time when in
Paris that type of feminism no longer was considered valid. The most
prominent women had turned to something else, had denounced it. So
we're really dealing with another phenomenon which in some ways-and
here I'm being very superficial-provided an intellectual way out for a dis–
enchanted part of the new Left.
David Pryce-Jones:
The Australian historian Manning Clark died not long
ago and one of his pupils wrote
in
his obituary, "He freed history from the
tyranny of facts." Nazism and Communism were both within living memo–
ry and the facts are more or less available. The first two speakers it seemed to
me-and this is where I'm rushing
in
where angels fear to tread-laid more
emphasis on objectivity and presentation of the truth rather than on moral
judgment. Professor Marcus spoke about the weakening of specific moral
gravity, I think he said, and when German historians, some ten years ago in
the
Historikerstreit,
tried to relativize Nazism the facts simply prevented it.
It
was impossible to sustain that Nazism was really a response to prior
Communism
in
the light of what the Nazis had actually done.
Lately, we have witnessed a failure in the academy the like of which I
think has not occurred since the Enlightenment, which is the failure of the
sovietologists. They proved to be today's equivalent of alchemists and their
presentation of the Soviet Union bore no relation at all, as we now see, to
what the reality of the Soviet Union as documented in the archives really
was. When the historian Robert Conquest wrote
The Great Terror,
he was
insulted as a disreputable figure. In fact, he scrupulously used demograph–
ic facts, later found to be understated. Similarly when a Soviet economist
