Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post–Civil Rights Era

5. The Late 1980s and Early 1990s: Culture Wars and the Politics of Identity

117 5 The Late 1980s and Early 1990s CULTURE WARS AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY Predominantly white mainstream four-year colleges and universities in the United States found themselves grappling with yet another host of important issues related to racial and cultural diversity during the late 1980s and early 1990s. These institutions were encountering widespread demands that they prepare students more effectively for the challenges presented by an increasingly diverse and global populace—a future in which “ethnic minority persons will numerically dominate in U.S. society and U.S. higher education” (Cheatham 17) and in which “the workforce and workplace, whether office, factory, or school, will be more diverse” (LaBelle and Ward 59). They were also encountering “a frightening rash of racial incidents on college and university campuses” (Walker 129), including a controversy occurring between reporters and editors at the Dartmouth Review and an African American professor of music over the professor’s purported lack of standards and desire to give “‘affirmative action’ kids . . . a course they can handle” (qtd. in McMahon 194–95); an incident at Brown University when a white undergraduate student was expelled after drunkenly screaming a series of racial slurs and threats under Brown’s first attempt to enforce its “Standards 118 The Late 1980s and Early 1990s of Student Conduct” for hate speech (Hower 156); and a host of other related incidents occurring on campuses including Wisconsin, Michigan, Purdue, Stanford, and Smith (Walker 129). The racial issues and tensions of the late 1980s and early 1990s served as the backdrop for what would become known as the “culture wars,” fought on many mainstream campuses and in the mainstream media over the nature of “multicultural” curriculum and other related efforts that were said to “make students aware of Western civilization in a context that includes exploration of other sources of thought, culture, history, political and social organization, music and art . . . to develop thinking and communication skills that extend beyond a single perspective, point of view, or manner of discourse . . . and [to recognize] the distinctive contributions and backgrounds , as well as the shared characteristics, of students and faculty from different cultural groups” (Schoem et al. 2). The context of the culture wars would find many conservative-learning critics achieving fame, even bestseller status, for scathing critiques of multiculturalism and of the 1960s-era programmatic initiatives that gave birth to them. However, this context would find many progressive critics calling for radical reconfiguration of 1960s-era multiculturalism and its manifestations as well. One especially well-known example of a conservative-leaning culture wars argument of this time was Allan Bloom’s best-selling 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom lambasted what he called the “new curriculum ” of multiculturalism, insisting that it had created a kind of present-day educational chaos whereby, “when a student arrives at the university, he finds a bewildering variety of departments and a bewildering variety of courses. And there is no official guidance, no university-wide agreement, about what he should study” (338). The only guiding principle that this student was sure to encounter, Bloom claimed, was the admonition that “we should not be ethnocentric. . . . We should not think that our way is better than others” (30). Bloom was adamant that this problematic manifestation of pluralism was actually the product of 1960s-era programs, particularly those related to minority recruitment and retention—that is, EOP, “black studies,” and “Black English” (95). These efforts, he argued, had always been firmly rooted in the erroneous notion that “integrationism was just an ideology for whites and Uncle Toms. Who says that what universities teach is the truth rather than just the myths necessary to support the system of domination? Black 119 The Late 1980s and Early 1990s students are second-class not because they are academically poor but because they are being forced to imitate white culture” (94). Bloom finally concluded that both contemporary multiculturalism and its problematic 1960s-era foundations should be rejected and replaced with the “good old Great Books approach” to education (344), one demanding the reading of “generally recognized classic texts, just reading them, letting them dictate what the questions are and the method of approaching them—not forcing them into categories we make up, not treating them as historical products, but trying to read them as their authors wished them to be read” (344). At the heart of...