When student protests in 1988 led the faculty at Stanford University to include books by women and non-Europeans in the school’s required first-year curriculum, Secretary of Education William Bennett denounced the changes as “regressive,” and the Wall Street Journal chided Stanford for continuing to “revere” the “dreams of the 1960s.”
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Why do modest reforms like these cause such apoplexy in the Wall Street Journal and among some professors and Reagan and Bush appointees? The intellectual fault line that divides proponents and opponents is the sanctity of post-Renaissance European culture. The opponents of the new courses generally echo the sentiments of Matthew Arnold, the Victorian poet who viewed culture as “the best that is known and thought in the world.” Curiously enough, that “best” almost always seems to revolve around the standards of post-Renaissance Europe–perspective in painting, tonal harmonies in music, and narrative intricacy in literature. Other cultures–from ancient Greece and Rome to present-day Asia and Africa–are then evaluated according to those standards; most are found wanting.
The very administrations that have done the most to narrow access to higher education by cutting direct federal expenditures and by slashing student aid have displayed an uncharacteristic concern with the “quality” of education when it comes to changes in the curriculum. Ronald Reagan’s Department of Education funded the study What Do Our Seventeen-Year-Olds Know? by Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn, which alleged a decline in high school students’ knowledge of essential humanities information. The study blamed the alleged decline on new critical methods in the humanities, like deconstruction. As director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney (who did her own doctoral dissertation on Matthew Arnold) has condemned school textbooks “recognizing the interdependence among people” and instead calls for students to read books “filled with stories–the magic of myths, fables, and tales of heroes.”
But even though the neoconservative agenda has been backed by the most powerful political and economic interests in our society, it has fared badly. Too many people see through its “golden age” mythology, about how wonderful the universities were before women and minorities appeared in significant numbers. Too many people hunger for knowledge about the voices they do not hear, and the realities they do not see reflected in the commercial mass media or in the speeches of politicians.
Neoconservative complaints about declining standards–and “contamination” of the curriculum with female and nonwhite perspectives–reflect a growing nervousness about aggrieved populations. There’s a lot of political capital to be reaped by exploiting that nervousness. In a November 1989 essay in the Village Voice Literary Supplement, Marshall Berman points out that Margaret Thatcher’s “new enterprise” policies succeeded not so much because she “brainwashed” people to vote against their own interests as because she “brain-scanned them, and transformed their latent envy, rancor, and avarice into policy.” And so it has gone with the American neoconservative movement: “By the end of the 1970s, there were lots of people out there who were ready, or almost ready, to say that they were sick of worrying about the blacks and the poor, who wanted to be congratulated for their own avarice instead of feeling guilty and having to hide it.”
Struggles over cultural meaning are also struggles over resources, struggles that help determine what is permitted and what is forbidden, who is included and who is excluded, who speaks and who gets silenced. A curriculum that goes unexamined and unchanged is no help to critical thinking; a university that has no arguments about its curriculum does no service to its students or to society. These questions are inescapably political, and they are asked every day inside and outside the university. The question is not whether the curriculum becomes politicized, but rather toward what ends.
