revised for class 4/27/98
 
I. THE ACADEMIC LEFT
 
*brief survey based on B. Ollman and Vernoff, eds. The Left Academy, John P. Diggins, Rise and Decline of the American Left , ch. . 7, and introd to Paul Berman,ed. Debating PC

a. a Marxist term first used to characterize Party demands for orthodoxy, before being popularized as a form of playful self-deprecation among left-wing students.
b. Archbishop O'Connor of New York recently defended the controversial exclusion of gays from the St. Patrick's Day parade, noting that "political correctness" was not "worth one comma in the Apostle's creed."
 
4. Definition. difficult to distill, but two points can be made
 
a."multiculturalism" neither a coherent doctrine nor an organized movement, but rather a polemical label. Like other such -isms in modern history ("Methodism," "Abolitionism," "Transcendentalism"), it owes its origins largely to its opponents (indeed, one might argue that "multiculturalism" and especially "PC" are essentially inventions of the right. By the same token, denying that PC exists, as Roger Kimball has noted, is the hallmark of PC) But like these earlier labels, it has also been accepted by a variety of activists, although many talk more about "multi" than "culture." So viewed, multiculturalism is a strategy to forge an alliance of groups whose interests can appear at odds when viewed through the separate lenses of "race/class/gender", the centerpiece of "identity politics."
 
b. the goal is to demonstrate that these different groups have the integrity traditionally ascribed to "cultures" in the anthropological sense first developed by Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead in the early decades of this century. From the early 19th to the early 20th century, the concept of "culture" evolved from "self-culture," to a hierarchical "high culture," and finally to the anthropological conception of "all the material and non-material products of group life that are transmitted from one generation to another.
 
*question: how much a departure:a. multiculturalism vs. liberal pluralism
moderates argue that the difference between "pluralism" and "multiculturalism" is not one of "good" and "bad" but a natural evolution that began with increased numerical representation of minorities in the 1960s. [e.g. Arthur Levine, "The Meaning of Diversity," Change September/October 1991, pp. 4-5 distinguishes four stages in the development of the current concept of "diversity" from numerical representation of minorities in the 1960s; to support for new groups through compensatory education, counseling, and ethnic studies in the 1970s; to integration, as reaction to mounting separatist incidents of the 1980s; and finally, to "multiculturalism" in the 1990s, defined as "creating a shared community that maintains the integrity of the different groups composing it..." Others, however see attempts to conflate "pluralism" and "multiculturalism" as an insidious plot to deflect the latter's revolutionary implications.

B. Multiculturalism in Historical Perspective
 
1. Not new
 
a. Earlier attempts to interpret/define "American" character
 
Hector St. John De Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782)
Ralph Waldo Emerson "American Scholar" (1837)
Frederick Jackson Turner's "The Frontier in American History" (1893)
Randolph Bourne, "Transnational America" (1916)
Gunnar Myrdal's "American Creed" in American Dilemma
 
b. The "Canon Debate" is also a perennial
 
Emerson, "American Scholar""Each age. . . must write its own books....The books of an older period will not fit this."[Thoreau, Melville, Dickinson and Whitman.result. Although finally "canonized" only after 1920,
James Russell Lowell at MLA 1890: defended the replacement of Greek and Roman classics for such suspect moderns as Dante, Machievelli, or Shakespeare.
William Dean Howells, "Pernicious Fiction" Harper's 74 (1887), 824-26: cultural spokesman for literary progressivism
Harvard Classics: :included and excluded titles capriciously on a basis of length, salability, and similarly mundane reasons.
Van Wyck Brooks, America's Coming of Age (1915):an American literary tradition going back to Emerson and Whitman,distressing older scholars who considered the study of American literature to be "no more than intellectual slumming.
John Crowe Ransom to Cleanth Brooks (bn. 1906) and Robert Penn Warren (bn. 1905), Understanding Poetry (1941).
 
*ref. Nina Baym, "Melodrama's of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Literature Exclude Women Writers," Am. Quarterly 33 (summer 1981)
Paul Lauter, "Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon," Feminist Studies 9 (1983), 435-64
 
c. Ironiclly, in the attempt to define "America" all drew on non-U.S./ (typically European ) sources. For Crevecoeur it was Voltaire, Montesquieu and other giants of the French Enlightenment. For Emerson it was the Romantics Swedenberg, Coleridge, and Carlyle (the latter, although himself one of the European muses, among the first to congratulate him on the talk); for Bourne, Nietzche, Freud, and other progenitors of European modernism. In different ways, the same was true of Howells realism, and Myrdal's "American Creed."
 
(i) typically transformed ("Americanized") the originals. ("We like ideas," the critic Paul Berman comments, of Americans"--but we water them down). "Multiculturalism" derives many of its themes from European thought, in particular, the ideas of the French left of the late 1960s (Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault. Whereas the American New Left of the late 1960s was action-oriented, and largely insulated from French thought by the dominating presence of Herbert Marcuse and the emigrés of the Frankfort school, the "academic the "academic left" of the 1980s created its own variant of the French 1960s philosophy by wedding it to an "identity politics" wherein race/gender/ethnicity become the single most important variables in understanding society--joined by "class," as Paul Berman further remarks, "only for the purpose of conjuring a slight aura of Marxism."
 
 
(ii) paradox: never are the detractors of "western thought" more thoroughly "western" than when extolling the virtues of non-western cultures in contrast to their own,. See Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind.
 
(iii) Multiculturalists that is owe more to the "culture" they oppose (and in the case of academics, to the "disciplines" they often denigrate) than their blanket dismissals would suggest. When a brilliant and distinguished critic like Barbara Ehrenreich writes in Time magazine, for example, that "our educations, whether at Yale or State U, were narrow and parochial and left us ill prepared to navigate a society that truly is multicultural," I wonder where she acquired the skills that have been her so adept at "navigating" intellectually in the world of late 20th century America.
 
d. Perennial dissent from (or within) the "liberal tradition" [?]
 
*e.g. Crevecoeur, Emerson, Bourne (anti-Dewey)
 
i. at best opposed its commercialism, atomistic individualism etc. in favor of community, antimaterialism etc
 
ii. at worst: contempt for necessary compromises (see Emerson and Thoreau), and in current case, threatens free speech.
 
a.. the more moderate condemn "campus codes" that restrict free speech, but argue that separatist organizations (Black Cultural Centers, Women's Centers) are merely temporary and partial devices not unlike the fraternities and sororities, religious organizations, and other clubs that have long been a feature of American campus life.
b. . But others insist that since education requires "civility," there is a need for some restraint in word as well as deed ("There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and its a Good Thing Too," writes Duke professor Stanley Fish)

2. But critics argued that multiculturalism is a departure :
 
"The multiculturalist is a universalist without universalism. . .; a monster child of Western culture; a baleful, unwitting tribute to the tradition he hungers to depose." (Edward Rothstein, New Republic)
 
e.g. . A. Schlesinger Jr. , The Disuniting of America
 
**illustrate by reviewing Bourne, "Transnational America" (and at parallel attempts to redefine the canon). (E unum pluribus? the "tribalism" issue)
 
1. denounced attacks on "hyphenates (German-Americans, Irish Americans etc.), countered the charge that "new immigrants" came over for less exalted motives than "old," and repudiated the narrow definitions of nationality by contemporary "Americanizers." Wartime support of England, he wrote, exposed the fact that the older ideal of American culture was nothing more than a snobbish reverence of things English. The time had come "to assert a higher idea than the 'melting pot'." "The foreign cultures have not been melted down or run together, made into some homogeneous Americanism, but have remained distinct but cooperating to the greater glory and benefit, not only of themselves but of all 'Americanism' around them." By drawing on these diverse cultures, a "transnational" or "cosmopolitan" America could resume its word mission.
 
2. not p.c. by current standards: There are not "inferior races," "inferior civilizations" (p. 110) a statement sure to offend today's sensibilities. His discussion of immigrant groups not only bristled with an "us-them" overtones, but was informed by a keen sense of the stereotypical behavior he disliked (the Jew who has "become a mere elementary, grasping animal", the Bohemian "who has made money and got into ward politics"). The saving remnant to whom he addressed his call was not finally the immigrants themselves, but the "younger intelligensia" would would interpret their message.
 
3. but the result was "cosmopolitanism: Bourne's cosmopolitan ideal, as the historian David Hollinger has shown, was especially attractive to a coalition of old-family WASPS and recently arrived Jewish intellectuals, the latter being one reason why multiculturalism todays occasions such heated debate among Jewish intellectuals. [stress significance]
 
Ref. D. Hollinger, "Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism, and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligensia," Am. Q. (1975)

C.Causes
 
1. Immigration: the context
 
*historically has been the context for most reassessment of "America"
a. Crevecouur [do his background here] Emerson
b. Bourne Massive immigration since 1890 the excesses of "Americanization" programs' cultural nationalism of the New Republic (Croly et al). Both fearful of the new immigration and disliked Americanizers.
 
a. Today:during 1970s and early 1980s, a "third" wave of immigration comparable in its impact to a first in the two decades before the Civil War (1840s-1850s), and a second from Southern and Eastern Europe between 1890-and 1920s. Just as the 1890 census inspired Frederick Jackson Turner's fears that the frontier was closing, so the 1989 census sustains predictions that the U.S., like its old movies, is being "colorized."
 
*but only context. Immigants not taking lead so much as elite WASP students. Why change?
 
2. also internal dynamics of intellectual class. (careerism)
 
a. Crevecouer wanted to be the interpreter of U.S.
b. Emerson's goal to establish career for writer and independent intellectual (mention R. Jackson Wilson, Figures of Speech analysis of "American Scholar")
c. Bourne and "independent intellectuals" (see Bell essay). Universities height of conformity
d. Also today (but speculate).
 
(i) Stanley Fish and the NBA analogy
 
(ii)Another concerns job insecurities within the professions, that arguably give a revolutionary edge to what is quite a normal process of cultural revisionism. For some of its proponents, multiculturalism may also provide elite universities and college a mission to restore some of the lustre lost in the aftermath of the Vietnam debacle.
 
3. Politics and world situation (and showed "city on hill" sense of mission))
 
a. Bourne writing as U.S. becomes World power
 
b. Post-Cold War malaise and talk of "American decline":some observers have suggested that multiculturalism in the United States reflects a world-wide balkanization following the collapse of the Soviet Empire, albeit in the U.S. the effects have been more psychological than political. The collapse of Communism has deprived both ends of the political spectrum of a longstanding "enemy." "Now that the right can no longer blame communists for subverting our national morality," Robert Brustein writes in The New Republic,it has concluded that the body politic is being corrupted by artists and intellectuals; while the left, whose enemy list was previously limited to McCarthyites, bigots, and extremists, has recently been adding those considered 'insensitive' to racism, sexism, ageism, lookism [the sin of privileging physical beauty], homophobia, to discuss discrimination against minorities and the handicapped.
 
4. Generational transition
 
a. Bourne speaks for "younger intelligensia". The generation of the 1880s: Van Wyck Brooks, Walter Lippmann, Ruth Benedict, whose message then developed by the Generation of 1900, which included writers of "lost generation," but also powerful figures now called "G.I.Generation"
 
b. also the case now.the United States as the 1960s Baby Boomers replace the "G.I. generation (born 1901-1924) and their "Silent" successors (1925-42) in positions of political and cultural authority. Although the conflict is to some degree inter-generational (witness Heterodoxy editor David Horowitz (bn. ) and Roger Kimball [1953]), the opposing forces typically face one another across generational lines. Thus, for example, the historian Arthur Schlesinger (bn.1917) and sociologist Nathan Glazer (1923) join E.D. Hirsch (1928) Allen Bloom (1930) on one side, against Joan Scott and a multitude of late fortyish "baby boomers" on the other.
c. Consequence:new authority to many themes of 1960s that inform the call for "multiculturalism": the ideological nature of "objectivity" (a tool of WASP and/or white male culture) ; the celebration of subjectivity and feelings (hence the need for a" non-judgmental" attitude and "sensitivity"); the importance of "role models," "mentoring," and related concepts that in practice translate into hiring from ones own ethnic, racial, or gender group.

c. Also explains why hy so traumatic?
 
i. sheer numbers
 
ii. timing. In the universities, this transition predated that represented by Clinton on the political scene, creating the illusion that the academics opposed an "establishment." Given the normal time required to obtain a doctorate, difficulty obtaining permanent positions during the late 1970s, and a normal seven-year probation period, those who were undergraduates in the late 1960s and the early 1970s characteristically gained tenure (and hence job security) in the mid-1980s.
 
ii. Longevity of older paradigm
 
5. . role of universities different?
 
a. in earlier debates concerning "American" identity, the universities have typically been on the defensive. From Emerson onward, architects of a new American identity typically spoke as outsiders, against establishments that resisted their message. Thus Emerson challenged the Phi Beta Kappa society of Harvard, and Bourne the authorities at his alma mater Columbia who were already lining up behind the "Americanism" he attacked. For both men, their vision of a new "American" identity provided a role for themselves as free-floating intellectuals, as cultural arbiters not based in the universities.
b. now universities are site of "adversarial culture," a process begun by "modernist" assault in 1950s (see Charles Sykes, A Nation of Victims)
Although the current culture wars to some degree among academics within the university, it more typically pits journalists and foundation-based intellectuals against the professorate: Kimball, D'Souza, Sykes, Horowitz et al. against the Catherine Stimpsons, Paul Lauters and others now-prominent within their universities and professional associations.
 
6. Consumerism: culture as "life style"
 
i. Bourne suspicion of consumerism: sees ways t has corrupted Old World cultures.
 
ii. multiculturalism as embodying consumer ethic in several respects:
 
a. most simply is media-fueled.
 
b. more basically, translation of culture into "life style," of traditions into personal "values," smacks of the "culture of consumption" that has been reshaping American society most of this century. Consumerism, as radical historians themselves have argued, robs participants of identity by alienating them from the products of their work, then restores a manufactured equivalent through the consumption of "name brands." While actually fostering conformity (since differences between brands are inconsequential) consumerism encourages the illusion that every individual desire can and must be gratified.
 
c. Multiculturalism, at least as seen by its critics, echoes the themes noted above: apparent need for identity through an exclusionary, tribal identification combined with absolute insistence on the integrity and validity of ones personal "feelings;" an insistence on uniformity in word and speech in the alleged-cause of diversity.
 
(cf. Sykes: the "victim" psychology ultimately the demand of "ego."
 
d. Go further and question appropriation of "culture" concept, part of "social scientizing "of American life." One problem with this strategy, as a recent critic has noted, is that it overlooks the fact that culture in its traditional meaning is essentially conservative. To achieve their aims, mainstream multiculturalists make cultural identity a matter of "life style," and deepseated spiritual injunctions into more or less subjective "values." Thus , as in the ongoing battle over New York City's "Rainbow Coalition," multiculturalists find themselves opposed by Blacks and Hispanics who resent the equation of "gay" culture with Latino or African American traditions; or, as the case with a recent cover of the New Yorker magazine (showing a Hasidic man kissing a black woman) by Orthodox Jews who proscribe public displays of affection even between husband and wives.(see Kay S. Hymowitz, "Multiculturalism is Anti-Culture," New York Times, March 25, 1993, p. A 23.
 
7. Race.
 
1 earlier ignored from Crevecoeur through Bourne. Only "cultural pluralism" of 1940s began to address.
 
2. can be explained only by seeing how serves particular needs of both sides in the post-Civil Rights era.
 
a. conservatives. For conservatives, the assault on multiculturalism presents the attack on "affirmative action" in less racially-explicit terms. Not coincidentally, the Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer, known for his book Affirmative Discrimination (1976), now argues that race is really the issue. D'Souza's Illiberal Education, as reviewers noted, is primarily concerned with African-Americans in the universities. Arthur Schlesinger's recent best-seller The Disuniting of America (1991), began as a minority report regarding racially charged school battles in New York.
 
b. radicals (including Black academics):also comes at a convenient time for champions of Black rights. With "affirmative action" and "quotas" under attack, "diversity" became a convenient substitute. For some Black academics, the promise of an multicultural "rainbow coalition" emerged at a time of relative success, but also frustrations as they found themselves and their programs ghettoized in separate departments within their institutions. Dissension within the Black community--whether as dramatized during the Anita Hill hearings, or as represented by such conservative Black academics as Orlando Patterson of Harvard and Steven Carter of Yale--puts an edge on the argument.In the academy and beyond a reinvigorated coalition of "persons of color" holds hope of a new direction as its defenders reveal a sense that "affirmative action" no longer has its old appeal.
 
3. Conflation of race and other issues skews the argument on both sides.
 
a. Conservatives's examples of "tribalism" almost inevitably come down to some form of "Afrocentrism," whether represented by Leonard ("ice people") Jeffries of City College or, only slightly more credibly by Martin Bernal's Black Athena.
 
b. Multiculturalists, in turn, take the undeniable facts and lamentable history of white treatment of African-Americans as proof of the inability of American society to incorporate Hispanic and Asian cultures without "destroying" them, and, further, as a framework for interpreting what otherwise might be viewed as rather normal tensions among groups. Like the common cold, the label "multiculturalism" the unfortunate result of combining quite different ailments under a single label, often with the consequences alluded to above in the example of Blacks and Hispanics resisting inclusion in a "cultural" coalition with gays or feminists.
 
8. Training new international elites in an age of globalization? Was/is this a new emphasis in the 1990s?