ETHNIC STUDIES, CAMPUS GHETTOS

Universities make room, these days, for many more kinds of people than they did a generation ago: Catholics and Jews, blacks and women, Puerto Ricans and Chicanos, Asian Americans and American Indians, Poles and Italians—a long and varied list of groups whose backgrounds present to the study of the humanities in America a fresh and unprecedented experience of what it means to be human: religions not commonly studied before, literatures not ordinarily read, histories not regularly examined. In due course the women began demanding women’s studies; the Jews, Jewish studies; the blacks, Afro-American studies. And the universities complied. But, like so much else, what has happened is an academic fraud. Let me explain.

Once universities had opened their doors to much larger and more diverse social and ethnic constituencies than they had ever known, the question confronted faculties and students alike: What do we do now? The answer that developed was that students would seek to study what was familiar in their own background. This was quite natural and just as students had always done. The old Americans had always known what was theirs—Classics, after all, was a gentleman’s hobby, English literature belonged to the descendants of English immigrants, and American history was the history written by the old Americans’ great-grandfathers. A certain snobbery, of course, protected these scheduled subjects; people absorbed the prejudice that, quite naturally and indisputably, these were things any educated person should know. Knowing these things, this list of selected books (the one hundred books for the one hundred families that count)—that knowledge defined education. Hence a core curriculum and general education seemed possible. No one needed to ask about the excluded hundreds of thousands of books, classic to the excluded groups, and the millions of excluded families, out of which students now came. Everybody knew what was what: what was of worth and represented taste, what shaped thoughts worth thinking, what defined values worth adopting. And, it should be added, people who knew these worthwhile things also could look forward to careers of worth and standing: in banks, law firms, corporate offices, hospitals, universities, and the other protected preserves of those who knew the scheduled subjects and came from the right castes.

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Universities make room, these days, for many more kinds of people than they did a generation ago: Catholics and Jews, blacks and women, Puerto Ricans and Chicanos, Asian Americans and American Indians, Poles and Italians—a long and varied list of groups whose backgrounds present to the study of the humanities in America a fresh and unprecedented experience of what it means to be human: religions not commonly studied before, literatures not ordinarily read, histories not regularly examined. In due course the women began demanding women’s studies; the Jews, Jewish studies; the blacks, Afro-American studies. And the universities complied. But, like so much else, what has happened is an academic fraud. Let me explain.

Once universities had opened their doors to much larger and more diverse social and ethnic constituencies than they had ever known, the question confronted faculties and students alike: What do we do now? The answer that developed was that students would seek to study what was familiar in their own background. This was quite natural and just as students had always done. The old Americans had always known what was theirs—Classics, after all, was a gentleman’s hobby, English literature belonged to the descendants of English immigrants, and American history was the history written by the old Americans’ great-grandfathers. A certain snobbery, of course, protected these scheduled subjects; people absorbed the prejudice that, quite naturally and indisputably, these were things any educated person should know. Knowing these things, this list of selected books (the one hundred books for the one hundred families that count)—that knowledge defined education. Hence a core curriculum and general education seemed possible. No one needed to ask about the excluded hundreds of thousands of books, classic to the excluded groups, and the millions of excluded families, out of which students now came. Everybody knew what was what: what was of worth and represented taste, what shaped thoughts worth thinking, what defined values worth adopting. And, it should be added, people who knew these worthwhile things also could look forward to careers of worth and standing: in banks, law firms, corporate offices, hospitals, universities, and the other protected preserves of those who knew the scheduled subjects and came from the right castes.