I taught for forty years in a college every bit as PC as Harvard. While I supported PC's guard of liberation for women, blacks, gays, etc., I was bothered by the constant tendency of PC to get ever more "refined" and obsessive about hunting out micro-aggressions, as well as by the attempts of "victim" groups to constantly try to outrank …
I taught for forty years in a college every bit as PC as Harvard. While I supported PC's guard of liberation for women, blacks, gays, etc., I was bothered by the constant tendency of PC to get ever more "refined" and obsessive about hunting out micro-aggressions, as well as by the attempts of "victim" groups to constantly try to outrank each other in the oppression sweepstakes: e.g., black feminists over white feminists, then black lesbian feminists over black straight feminists, etc., etc. I'll never forget a 1980 MLA session in which Gayatri Spivak, a tall, superior Indian expert on Derrida, imperiously looked down on the entire room of professors anxious to hear words from the guru because she held so many aces in an academic world in which feminism, post colonialism, and deconstruction all in one package simply could not be beat. Socratic education, the opposite of PC indoctrination, should obviously involve making ALL students question their deepest beliefs, with the local Socrates doing his best to shatter them in dialogue. (That would, of course, apply to the pro-israel beliefs of a Bari Weiss as much as to the pro-Hamas beliefs of someone else.) Bertrand Russell nailed it when he said the goal of a liberal education is to move the student from a state of inarticulate certainty to one of articulate doubt. (My problem with Bari is that I have yet to hear her doubt. She seems as cocksure as any DEI fanatic in everything she writes and says.) I taught great literature myself, and literature's greatness is always a matter of its brilliant, profound ambiguity, leaving all certainties (and "moral clarities" of the Bari Weiss or DEI type--both are equally morally certain, just with opposite moral values) shattered in their wake. Typical of great literary art is the script of Jean Renoir's masterpiece, The Rules of the Game, a film exposing the decadence (and antisemitism) of the French upper class on the eve of WWII. Renoir's great line is this: "There is one terrible thing about human life. Everyone has his reasons." That's my kind of humbling liberal education wisdom, a realization of the muddled moral complexities of the human condition. Sure, by all means fight Nazis and Donald Trump passionately. But after you've incinerated the people of Dresden in the process, feel proper guilt, too. "With God on Our Side" by America's latest Nobel for literature sums up the evils of being self-righteously cocksure, whether you're Gayatri Spivak or Bari Weiss. Whether you're Bibi Netanyahu or the leader of Hamas, BOTH of whom totally have "God" on their side. The Palestinians have a moral case to make about oppression, just as the Jews have a moral case of their own. As Fitzgerald noted, "The test of a first-rate mind is to be able to hold two opposite ideas in your head and still function."
That was point one. Point two is that Bari Weiss is living in a dream world if she thinks she or "we" (including wealthy Jewish donors) can wipe out DEI in our best colleges, and keep it from trickling down into even our mediocre ones. We need to recall, of course, that DEI started in the 60s in various liberation movements which were either spearheaded by Jews (feminism and gay rights) or in which Jews played the most prominent role of any white people (Civil Rights Movement). After the 60s, large numbers of Jews became professors leading the DEI charge. The students of those professors, themselves often Jewish, are leading the charge today. There is no way liberal education can be transformed into oppression studies and have a carve-out for Israel. There is no way that the influence of Edward Said and the massive prominence of postcolonial studies cannot have a huge effect on the perception of Israel and the Palestinians in our best colleges, as they obviously have. DEI is totally tenured, coast-to-coast. Good luck in trying to replace it any time soon with a curriculum friendly to Israel. The more wealthy Jewish donors try to impose their ideas of how a college's curriculum should ge favorable to Bibi's Israel, the stronger the resistance will become.
Finally, ambitious Jewish parents still have nowhere else to send their smart kids but our best colleges, if the kids can get in. Where else can Jews get the credentials and the connections they will need to end up at Goldman or Microsoft? I know: Auburn was all Tim Cook needed. But how many Jewish families are really going to send their kid with 1600 SATs to Auburn, fine as it may be? Does Goldman really recruit at Auburn? Besides, the main problem for ambitious Jewish families these days is that their kids can't get in to Harvard or Columbia in the first place. Jews were 28% of Harvard students at their high-water mark in 1992 Now they are 9%, about the same as in 1900! And it wasn't affirmative action that kept Jews out; it was more academically talented Asians. Asians will be quite happy for Jews angry over DEI to boycott Harvard. Why shouldn't Harvard have 50% Asians? Jews are at the all-time apex of their achievement, wealth, and power in America right now because of their massive presence at Harvard and the rest thirty years ago. Thirty years from now, Jewish power will be as reduced as the Jewish presence sat Harvard. is today. Asians will have replace Jews at the top of the American pecking order, for the very reasons Bari applauds: hard work and sheer intellectual excellence.
I would love to see American colleges return to what they were before the explosion of DEI from the 60s on. I would love to see Shakespeare taught for the beauty of his language and his capacity to produce the same articulate doubt and confusion in the face of ambiguity Russell thought the hallmark of the liberally educated mind. Instead of teaching Shakespeare to attack him for his DEI lapses into "racism," "sexism," or whatever other "insensitivities" we can pin on him. If I were the educational czar, I would want the goal of our colleges to produce people as wise, complex, contradictory, profound, learned in the ancients, and humble as Montaigne, who lived of course in an age of fanaticism on all sides every bit as bad as our own. But I'm not sure Bari would include herself in Montaigne's greatest generalization about the human race, when he notes that it is a good thing to realize that you've done a foolish thing. But it's a much better thing to realize that you [and everyone else who ever lived] are nothing but a fool. That's the idea I would want all my students to leave college with. It would destroy DEI, of course, but it would also destroy the one-sided views of Israel shared by Bari and many like her. Maybe, as Conrad would surely say, Jerusalem too has been "one of the dark places of the earth," along, of course, with Teheran.
I taught for forty years in a college every bit as PC as Harvard. While I supported PC's guard of liberation for women, blacks, gays, etc., I was bothered by the constant tendency of PC to get ever more "refined" and obsessive about hunting out micro-aggressions, as well as by the attempts of "victim" groups to constantly try to outrank each other in the oppression sweepstakes: e.g., black feminists over white feminists, then black lesbian feminists over black straight feminists, etc., etc. I'll never forget a 1980 MLA session in which Gayatri Spivak, a tall, superior Indian expert on Derrida, imperiously looked down on the entire room of professors anxious to hear words from the guru because she held so many aces in an academic world in which feminism, post colonialism, and deconstruction all in one package simply could not be beat. Socratic education, the opposite of PC indoctrination, should obviously involve making ALL students question their deepest beliefs, with the local Socrates doing his best to shatter them in dialogue. (That would, of course, apply to the pro-israel beliefs of a Bari Weiss as much as to the pro-Hamas beliefs of someone else.) Bertrand Russell nailed it when he said the goal of a liberal education is to move the student from a state of inarticulate certainty to one of articulate doubt. (My problem with Bari is that I have yet to hear her doubt. She seems as cocksure as any DEI fanatic in everything she writes and says.) I taught great literature myself, and literature's greatness is always a matter of its brilliant, profound ambiguity, leaving all certainties (and "moral clarities" of the Bari Weiss or DEI type--both are equally morally certain, just with opposite moral values) shattered in their wake. Typical of great literary art is the script of Jean Renoir's masterpiece, The Rules of the Game, a film exposing the decadence (and antisemitism) of the French upper class on the eve of WWII. Renoir's great line is this: "There is one terrible thing about human life. Everyone has his reasons." That's my kind of humbling liberal education wisdom, a realization of the muddled moral complexities of the human condition. Sure, by all means fight Nazis and Donald Trump passionately. But after you've incinerated the people of Dresden in the process, feel proper guilt, too. "With God on Our Side" by America's latest Nobel for literature sums up the evils of being self-righteously cocksure, whether you're Gayatri Spivak or Bari Weiss. Whether you're Bibi Netanyahu or the leader of Hamas, BOTH of whom totally have "God" on their side. The Palestinians have a moral case to make about oppression, just as the Jews have a moral case of their own. As Fitzgerald noted, "The test of a first-rate mind is to be able to hold two opposite ideas in your head and still function."
That was point one. Point two is that Bari Weiss is living in a dream world if she thinks she or "we" (including wealthy Jewish donors) can wipe out DEI in our best colleges, and keep it from trickling down into even our mediocre ones. We need to recall, of course, that DEI started in the 60s in various liberation movements which were either spearheaded by Jews (feminism and gay rights) or in which Jews played the most prominent role of any white people (Civil Rights Movement). After the 60s, large numbers of Jews became professors leading the DEI charge. The students of those professors, themselves often Jewish, are leading the charge today. There is no way liberal education can be transformed into oppression studies and have a carve-out for Israel. There is no way that the influence of Edward Said and the massive prominence of postcolonial studies cannot have a huge effect on the perception of Israel and the Palestinians in our best colleges, as they obviously have. DEI is totally tenured, coast-to-coast. Good luck in trying to replace it any time soon with a curriculum friendly to Israel. The more wealthy Jewish donors try to impose their ideas of how a college's curriculum should ge favorable to Bibi's Israel, the stronger the resistance will become.
Finally, ambitious Jewish parents still have nowhere else to send their smart kids but our best colleges, if the kids can get in. Where else can Jews get the credentials and the connections they will need to end up at Goldman or Microsoft? I know: Auburn was all Tim Cook needed. But how many Jewish families are really going to send their kid with 1600 SATs to Auburn, fine as it may be? Does Goldman really recruit at Auburn? Besides, the main problem for ambitious Jewish families these days is that their kids can't get in to Harvard or Columbia in the first place. Jews were 28% of Harvard students at their high-water mark in 1992 Now they are 9%, about the same as in 1900! And it wasn't affirmative action that kept Jews out; it was more academically talented Asians. Asians will be quite happy for Jews angry over DEI to boycott Harvard. Why shouldn't Harvard have 50% Asians? Jews are at the all-time apex of their achievement, wealth, and power in America right now because of their massive presence at Harvard and the rest thirty years ago. Thirty years from now, Jewish power will be as reduced as the Jewish presence sat Harvard. is today. Asians will have replace Jews at the top of the American pecking order, for the very reasons Bari applauds: hard work and sheer intellectual excellence.
I would love to see American colleges return to what they were before the explosion of DEI from the 60s on. I would love to see Shakespeare taught for the beauty of his language and his capacity to produce the same articulate doubt and confusion in the face of ambiguity Russell thought the hallmark of the liberally educated mind. Instead of teaching Shakespeare to attack him for his DEI lapses into "racism," "sexism," or whatever other "insensitivities" we can pin on him. If I were the educational czar, I would want the goal of our colleges to produce people as wise, complex, contradictory, profound, learned in the ancients, and humble as Montaigne, who lived of course in an age of fanaticism on all sides every bit as bad as our own. But I'm not sure Bari would include herself in Montaigne's greatest generalization about the human race, when he notes that it is a good thing to realize that you've done a foolish thing. But it's a much better thing to realize that you [and everyone else who ever lived] are nothing but a fool. That's the idea I would want all my students to leave college with. It would destroy DEI, of course, but it would also destroy the one-sided views of Israel shared by Bari and many like her. Maybe, as Conrad would surely say, Jerusalem too has been "one of the dark places of the earth," along, of course, with Teheran.