Multiculturalism is Mediocrity

Harvard University recently gave Oprah Winfrey an honorary doctorate, a depressingly appropriate award given that her taste in literature and vapid quality of thought trump the classics on most American campuses these days. One is far more likely to hear a recent college graduate gushing about the poetry of Maya Angelou (or any of Oprah’s other favorite authors) than the works of Dante or Shakespeare.

“Oh my goodness! I’m at Haaaaaarvard,” said Oprah. “I’m going to address my remarks to anybody who’s ever felt inferior, disadvantaged or screwed by life.” Such was the scholarly tone of her address. She informed the graduates that the goal of life is to be validated: “Theologian Howard Thurman said it best. He said, ‘Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.’”

The Ivory Tower with each passing year becomes more and more like a Tower of Babel in which Oprah-style trendiness, narcissism, and political correctness substitute for any real education. To those who wonder how academia sunk to this low point, the answer is largely found in multiculturalism, which remains a regnant doctrine at most American colleges and universities. Politicians, particularly ones from countries victimized by terrorism, will occasionally question the wisdom of the idea, but academics cling to it tenaciously.

By changing the end of education from wisdom to power, from intellectual quality to enforced equality, multiculturalism destroyed academic standards across the country. An education that aims at wisdom would empower students to see cultures clearly and pursue the truth wherever it leads. But that’s the last thing multiculturalists want.

Western Culture’s Got to Go

  “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s got to go,” chanted multiculturalists at Stanford way back in 1988. That seminal moment in the rise of multiculturalism on American campuses revealed the rawly political, anti-intellectual impetus behind the movement. It had nothing to do with studying varied cultures deeply and carefully.  Its goal was to topple the intellectual and moral standards of Western culture in particular.

As it spread across American campuses in the 1980s and 1990s, all academic matters were politicized according to that goal. The quality of a book, course, teacher, program, and so on was secondary.  The question, instead, became: Does it advance or impede “multiculturalism”? This had a ruinous effect on the intellectual life, depriving students of the opportunity to learn from many of the greatest books and thinkers in human history, since far too many of them had (unfairly) sprung from Western culture.  That historical accident alone was enough to doom a course or book, regardless of its value to a student’s intellectual growth.

As Dinesh D’Souza documented in Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, at first, the proponents of multiculturalism didn’t even bother to give the movement an intellectual patina. It was simply a political power play, designed to demote cultures deemed “oppressive” and promote cultures considered “victimized.” The Office of Academic Affairs at Ohio State, in a statement typical of universities across the country in the 1980s, instructed its professors:

All new course proposals will be reviewed to assess the extent to which they adequately address issues of race ethnicity and gender…. Special efforts will be made to assess the curriculum to determine its influence on the education of blacks and other minority students. Faculty will be encouraged to include in their syllabi contributions of minority scholars, women and men, in their respective fields…. Faculty will be encouraged to conduct research on minority issues and race relations….

 At Stanford, reported D’Souza, the classics program was damaged beyond repair on the grounds that it reeked of “Eurocentrism.” Capturing the anti-intellectual mood of the moment, Stanford professor Gregson Davis said, “To say the Zulus created no great works is deplorably racist.” So craven administrators at Stanford duly promised to study the Zulus and instead of dead white males. Wrote D’Souza:

 In a soothing message to the parents of Stanford undergraduates, deans Thomas Wasow and Charles Junkerman explained that the great books requirement had become a ‘pedagogic handicap’ because ‘it was conveying the message that works by women and minorities are inferior to those by men of  European descent.’ Race, gender and class now shape both the domestic and international worlds in which we and our children must live.’ A Rainbow Coalition cliché had gone from a protest existence on the street to official policy at Stanford University.

 A few intrepid professors warned that multiculturalism would prove impossible to practice in many fields, as certain non-Western cultures, for whatever reason, hadn’t produced any great works. Too bad, administrators replied.  Incorporate those cultures in your courses anyway. Besides, who is to say what’s valuable to study? This relativism on which they fell back when challenged made any non-politicized “canon” unsustainable.

When novelist Saul Bellow quipped, “Find me the Tolstoy of the Zulus, or the Proust of the Papuans, and I would be happy to read him,” multiculturalists were furious. They responded to him not by pointing to a Tolstoy of the Zulus or a Proust of the Papuans but by accusing him of racism.  Yet Bellow had made the essential point: real education concerns itself not with the cultural origin of an idea but with whether or not that idea is true. What does it matter where a great book originated?

Education narrows, not broadens, under multiculturalism. It proves divisive, not unifying. The most “diverse” colleges today are the most self-segregating, overflowing with “Black” and “Latino” clubs. The less interaction between the races at a school, the more likely it is to have a multicultural curriculum—though it’s unclear which is the chicken, and which the egg.

Multiculturalism is little more than a cultural version of affirmative action that dictates all the books and courses from which students learn.  “Core curriculum” programs quickly disappeared under that imperative, giving way to only one core requirement: exposure to “ethnic studies.” And this exposure didn’t even mean that students would be encountering the best of those cultures. Usually, it meant that they would be encountering the worst of them.

“An examination of the greatest achievements of non-Western cultures would surely include the Analects of Confucius, the Confucian exegesis of Mencius, the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu, the Tale of Genji, the Upanishads and Vedas and Bhagavad Gita, Averroes and Ibn Sinha, the Koran and the Islamic commentaries,” wrote D’Souza. “But such an approach is not at all what the Stanford non-Western advocates had in mind.” They preferred to teach comically third-rate contemporary works like I, Rigoberta Menchu that conformed to their political goals. “Forget Confucius,” one Stanford activist said to D’Souza. “We are trying to prepare ourselves for the multicultural challenge we will face in the future.”

Multiculturalism brings with it many such ironies.  Lost on its proponents as they insist upon the inferiority of Western ideas, for example, is that multiculturalism itself is a Western idea. Their claim that Western ideas aren’t worth studying evidently doesn’t apply to their own. Western culture systematized the study of cultures, and yet it isn’t worth a core requirement in a multicultural curriculum.

The Only Culture You’re Allowed to Disapprove of is Your Own

 “The deal with multiculturalism is that the only culture you’re allowed to disapprove of is your own,” said the British novelist Martin Amis. Indeed, only Westerners are required to disapprove of their culture. Non-Westerners needn’t scrutinize theirs, no matter how many terrorist acts, honor killings, genital mutilations, and widow-burnings those glorious cultures sanction.

It is no wonder the Tsarnaev brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon chose a university town in which to nest.  The multiculturalists of Cambridge could be counted on to know absolutely nothing about Islamic culture. Adding color to the grim irony, the car that the brothers carjacked had a “Coexist” sticker on it. To proudly progressive Cambridge residents, who only suspect Westerners of evil, the behavior of these jihadists was baffling indeed.

“In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn’t translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse,” observed  Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She has, unlike most academic multiculturalists at Harvard, experienced Islamic culture directly and found it, after escaping a forced marriage planned for her, less than edifying.

Thomas Sowell, the African-American economist from Stanford’s Hoover Institution, has written on the peculiar treatment multiculturalism gives to its greatest obsession, slavery. Somehow it manages to ignore that it was the West, not the Third World, that abolished this evil practice:

The widespread revulsion which this hideous institution inspires today was largely confined to Western civilization a century ago, and a century before that was largely confined to a portion of British society.  No one seems interested in the epic story of how this curse that covered the globe and endured for thousands of years was finally gotten rid of.  It was gotten rid of by the West—not only in Western societies but in other societies conquered, controlled, or pressured by the West.

The resistance put up by Africans, Asians, and Arabs was monumental in defense of slavery, and lasted for more than a century.  Only the overwhelming military power of the West enabled it to prevail on this issue, and only the moral outrage of Western peoples kept their governments’ feet to the fire politically to maintain the pressure against slavery around the world.  Of course, this is not the kind of story that appeals to the multiculturalists.  If it had been the other way around—if Asian or African imperialists had stamped out slavery in Europe—it would still be celebrated, in story and song, on campuses across America.

Don’t expect Harvard to bestow honorary doctorates on Ali and Sowell any time soon. Their experiences and insights as people of color don’t count under multiculturalism. It aims not at truth-telling but navel-gazing subjectivity, a politicizing and infantilizing of the academic life for which Oprah is the perfect messenger.

George Neumayr is contributing editor to The American Spectator and co-author of No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom.