Campus Wars

Campus Wars: Multi-culturalism and the Politics of Difference, ed. John Arthur and Amy Shapiro (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, c. 1995), gives us a set of reports--a collection of articles by noted scholars--from the trenches of academia. In Part One, "Multiculturalism and the College Curriculum," the editors include articles by two traditionalists, Allan Bloom and John R. Searle, who insist a true college education focuses on classics of Western Civilization because of their commitment to such ideals as truth, objectivity, rationality. Searle, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, explains: the "Western Rationalistic Tradition" adheres to a realism which believes we can, with words and logic, rightly represent truth regarding reality. "In a word, true statements are made, but the truth of statements is not made, it is discovered" (p. 45). This tradition, underlying the grandeur of academia, is now endangered--assaulted, Searle and Bloom say, by leftist political agitators who follow Nietzsche's dictum that "There are not facts, but only interpretations." Intent on orchestrating social change--often of a feminist or homosexual or environmental sort--"postmodernists" pose a revolutionary threat to the integrity of the university. Illustrating such postmodern forces, Barry Sarchett, who teaches English at Colorado College, asserts that TV and rock music may be as thought-provoking and thus worthy of study as Plato or Shakespeare. Discounting the claims that words and ideas correspond to the real world, Sarchett supports Derrida and Saussure in realativizing knowledge and value: what we imagine to be "true" or "good" merely represents our inner desires or cul¬tural influences and can be altered at will. Campus Wars includes essays on campus sexuality by Catherine A. MacKinnon, who argues that all sex is rape, and Camille Paglia, who says it's not. There are essays on free speech, or its absence, illustrating the irony of "liberal" institutions instituting byzantine speech codes to protect the feelings of various groups from "hate speech." Questions concerning affirmative action elicit extensive discussion. While often denying the fact, masking it under the rubric of "diversity," many schools clearly mandate quotas, giving preferential treatment to some racial groups. Approximately one-fourth of the articles in this collection espouse a traditional, conservative view, while the rest improvise on the postmodernist theme. There is, clearly, a "generation gap" between the traditionalists and the insurgents. This collection helps one discover what's happening in today's universities.