Modern Age - Summer 2016 - 60

MODERN AGE

SUMMER 2016

A

nd how do things stand now? In the fall of 2015, a group of
students took over the president's office and met him with
a long list of demands. Some of the demands were expensive,
others utterly at odds with academic freedom-requiring, for
example, that all departments submit their prospective hires to
evaluation by a "diversity" committee. What concerns me here is
that, no surprise, they went after the DWC program. We experience these periodic attacks rather as people afflicted with malaria
do. It never really goes away, but sometimes you feel almost
normal, and sometimes you break into fever and chills and the
sweats. The students want diversity. That is the watchword, just as
relevance was at Brown.
There is a Manichean mania about such political movements. If
not relevance, oppression! If not diversity, institutional racism, as
one of my colleagues in politics put it, or genocidal racism, according to a sociology professor who arrived at Providence College
when I did, who immediately began to attack the DWC program,
and who has learned nothing about it ever since.
It isn't easy to out-yell the true believers at a political rally. Nor
does it serve any purpose. I learned that way back in 1992, during
one of our waves of political malaria. In an article I wrote for the
student newspaper, I made an offer to students who said they
were eager to learn about civilizations other than the Western
ones. They and I would read, together, the medieval mystical and
devotional tract The Cloud of Unknowing along with the Tao Te
Ching of Lao-Tzu. That offer fell into the bottomless pit of irrelevance. For my pains I was ridiculed by a couple of scurrilous (and
anonymous) letters to the editor.
This time around I wrote an article for Crisis, taking note of the
wild array of cultures to which we introduce our students. For this
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Modern Age - Summer 2016

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Contents
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Modern Age - Summer 2016 - Contents
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