I’m back in the US, spending a quiet Christmas with my family. Until my uncle Thomas, and my cousins Frida and Alex arrived, I spent much of my time the last few days in the Bartlesville, Oklahoma library where my sister works, making slow progress on translation and catching up on various journals that I subscribe to that pile up at my parents’ house. As a break, I sometimes pick up interesting looking books from the nearby shelf. My most interesting recent find is the bookThe ISI Guide 2004: Choosing the Right College: The Whole Truth About America’s Top Schools. I didn’t notice when I took the book off the shelf that the phrase “the Right” was a different color from the rest of the title, nor should I have, since the Intercollegiate Studies Institute is described as a “a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational organization”. The cover and back of the book also professed an objectivity that I would find growingly amusing as I flipped through the contents….
The first entry I came across was for BYU (Brigham Young). The book went into great detail on the degree to which the Mormon religion permeates student life at the university and has occasionally become an issue of controversy. I was initially impressed at how frank the book was about something like this and looked forward to what it would have to say about other schools, including those I was applying to. I soon discovered that the book would spend a considerable amount of effort exposing any of what it considered the evils of multiculturalism or any left wing political slants in the universities that might lead to “censorship” and “discrimination” against conservatives. And as far as religion was addressed, BYU was to get worse treatment than any other religious schools I saw.
For example, we are assured that Christendom College in Virginia was a “hotbed of diversity” and no worse than standard “doctrinaire liberal” universities. Some religious school called Wheaton University is lauded in glowing terms under the heading “for Christ and his kingdom.” We are told that if you know the bible, it is probably sufficient for admission. Wheaton feels that diversity must be understood in biblical terms, but that, “overall, Wheaton is a safe place for students of all political persuasions” It concludes that, “in an age of moral and intellectual relativism, Wheaton stands out for its conviction that truth exists, that it can be known, that it is binding on all men and women, and that ultimately, it saves.”
A lack of religion seemed to have damned Oberlin. It is lamented as having, “lost sight of its original Christian mission. Liberation theology has replaced traditional Christian doctrine…” The school is described as a, “hotbed of political radicalism promoted in the name of social justice” and that campus debates feel like they are betweeen “Trotsky and Lenin.”
In its introduction, the book notes that it wanted to combat a “dismal lack of cultural literacy and a troubling grasp of ethics” and wanted to help students find a, “genuinely liberating education – one that provides the inward freedom that only develops by having wrestled with the great minds, ideas and questions…” Hmm…what minds, ideas, and questions might they have in mind? Well, of course, Western Civilization, with a big capital WC, “the great texts of our culture have endured because they have repeatedly revealed their value to all kinds of people over centuries in very different cultural settings….often today they are approached – when they are not merely dismissed – as instances of past prejudices of various kinds.” Presumably these “different cultural settings” include all the settings that colonization and empire brought it to. So who is “dismissing” our great civilization as past prejudices? “One of the ways that often happens today is through a movement called multiculturalism. Spurred by the alleged biases in Western thinking against women, the marginalized, the non-white races, multiculturalism offers non-Western cultures as an antidote…” I am not one to deny that multiculturalism as a movement has its flaws, but I don’t recall it using any particular culture as an antidote to the biases of our own, or “using another culture as a weapon on our own”. The book is a call to arms, and that our enemies, ” should not be allowed to obscure one of the West’s greatest cultural achievements.”
The book leaps to the defense of Western Civilization by reviewing a few hundred universities and especially how well the classics are taught there. It ends up spending just as much time attacking any effort to broaden the liberal arts education by including anything about the rest of the world. For example, under the entry for Clemson University, its notes scornfully, “It recommended an international education program for humanities majors to ‘help students appreciate and embrace the cultural differences of our global society.’ And it recommended that business majors be more exposed to foreign languages and have the opportunity to gain ‘increased international cultural awareness’ To the unitiated, all that may sound innocuous enough, but those who have heard such language before know that it portends evil times for the traditional liberal arts.” (p. 243)
Columbia University, where I got my masters degree in International Affairs, does fairly well, “‘Major Cultures’ is the only element of the Columbia core that deviates from the curriculum’s focus on Western Civilization. In fulflling this compenent, undergraduates can choose from a wide variety of options…Given the exemplary nature of the rest of the core, as a sop to the multiculturalists this requirement is fairly tolerable and can even be fulfilled with excellent courses, such as ‘Ancient History of Mesopotamia and Anatolia’ and ‘Egyptian Archeology'”
Of course, we wouldn’t want students studying about African, Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern and Native American cultures. The departments are seen as strong but the, “propagandistic African-American studies, Middle East languages and cultures, and women’s and gender studies departments are the exceptions.” Yes, that means you Jai. The students are less high quality, at Columbia, apparently, “only 7% of undergraduates voted for Bush,” but that is ok, it says, there is “still intellectually stimulating debate” to be found there and most students indifferent to “activist shenanigans.”
NYU is less lucky, and it warns that, “if going to a college nestled between gay bars and drug dealers bothers you, NYU is not your school.” At Duke University, apparently, “two topics seem to dominate discussion: Marxism and sexuality” and the school is singled out for its, “enthusiastic endorsement of postmodernism”. Stanford, we are told, should list “‘academic decadence’ for its general requirements” There is no need to include anything from the book on Berkeley, the book would have you believe that the school is Mordor itself.
I was also amused by the book’s appendix, which, under “asking the right questions” (about universities you are interested in) we find listed things like: Must all students study western history and literature? Can a student be assured of a single-sex dorm? Are bathrooms coed? Is there any mandatory student orientation that exposes students to sexually explicit material or graphic explanations of sexual practices? Are there speech codes, ostracizing or punishing students for speaking their minds when they disagree with received academic opinion? Is there a politicization of the curriculum, for example literature courses that focus on topics other than great works of literature, such as colonialism, “marginalized voices” or popular culture that often conflate politics with scholarship?
While these questions are interesting, they were strangely all absence from the list of questions I had in mind when I was thinking about schools to apply to both for my undergraduate and graduate education.