Links
Archives
Friday, February 13, 2004
|
CONSERVATION
Katherine Anne Porter's rambling short story, "Holiday," is little-read today ("Pale Horse, Pale Rider" is the one that gets anthologized), but I've always admired its account of life on a German immigrant's Texas farm. And I like the sentiment in its opening paragraph: "At that time I was too young for some of the troubles I was having, and I had not yet learned what to do with them. It no longer can matter what kind of troubles they were, or what finally became of them. It seemed to me then there was nothing to do but run away from them, though all my tradition, background, and training had taught me unanswerably that no one except a coward ever runs away from anything. What nonsense! They should have taught me the difference between courage and foolhardiness, instead of leaving me to find it out for myself. I learned finally that if I still had the sense I was born with, I would take off like a deer at the first warning of certain dangers. But this story I am about to tell you happened before this great truth impressed itself upon me - that we do not run from the troubles and dangers that are truly ours, and it is better to learn what they are earlier than later, and if we don't run from the others, we are fools." I agree that you should take off like a deer from troubles that aren't your own. That's why I believe that when someone comes at you, from the left or the right, yelling DIVERSITY, you should run away. Diversity is a modern piety-word, invoked by colleges, corporations, and correctional facilities to affirm the heavenly mix of people at their institutions. The greater the range of types, the greater the blessings, seems to be the doctrine; and beyond questions of distributive justice, it's likely that something of this sort is true. Universities are particularly fervent worshippers of diversity. What's awkward is that amid clamorous and often quite successful campus crusades for diverse student bodies, faculty bodies have remained quietly mired in homogeneity. Jews like me, for instance, are madly overrepresented in many academic departments, and in university administration. If universities were representative of the American population, Joe Lieberman would be president and Jackie Mason would be vice-president. The loudest voices in the current "intellectual diversity" debate (Horowitz, Pipes, Fish) are Jewish. If they cared about religious diversity, these people would hire Ba'hai spokesmen. If I may be permitted to disclose a little bit more about myself -- I represent David Horowitz's worst non-diverse faculty nightmare. Registered Democrat (voted for Gore), environmental nut (belong to many conservation groups and own taunting anti-SUV bumper stickers which are supposed to be affixed to the backsides of Hummers but I'm too wimpy to do it so they sit in a drawer), tres gay-friendly (teach course in Literature of AIDS), secular, indifferent to the naughty adulterous ways of politicians. I live in a town that's a Nuclear Free Zone and that everyone calls The People's Republic. In fact, though, because I'm a "conservative" in the intellectual context that matters - the context of the typical American English department - I do represent intellectual diversity. I'm a lonely anti-Deleuzian voice in the wilderness. I think students should stop reading shit like The Awakening and go back to Paradise Lost. It's tricky - that's all I'm saying. Academia is a rather narrow social subculture and that ain't gonna change. But what we should care about is the integrity of university teachers in the classroom. This is also tricky, as I've tried to suggest in earlier posts, because above all we should wish to protect academic freedom. Demogogues and dunces there will always be, - these are the troubles and dangers that are truly ours. We should always be thinking of ways to neutralize the damage they do. But diversity initiatives and mandates are not the way to go. |