It seems strange that a cash-strapped public university would turn down a generous offer from a private foundation to fund an academic program, but that is exactly what the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is considering. The College of Arts and Sciences approached the John William Pope Foundation of Raleigh about funding a Western Cultures program. The resulting outcry has been so shrill that the entire program (and its funding) is now in question.
Opponents of the program are eager to cast the debate in dramatic terms. Jon Sanders, over at FrontPage Magazine, reveals that the campus listserv recently asked, “ Should UNC –CH Accept 12 million Dollars from Racist, Sexist, Classist, and Homophobic Donors?” The university’s internal Graduate and Professional Student Federation declared (without a trace of irony) that the Pope Center was ‘working to create a hostile climate for academic freedom for instructors.’ Presumably, the Federation was referring to the Pope Center’s association with David Horowitz and his Academic Bill of Rights. The faculty senate at the nearby NC State University condemned the Academic Bill of Rights, and Chapel Hill Women’s Studies professor, Karen Booth, asks why the university has not joined in opposing Horowitz’s actions. “We’re behind the curve on that issue.” she stated.
Sanders reports that the UNC-CH student congress voted for a resolution opposing the Western Culture program, lest the Pope Foundation gain undue influence over the program. The UNC-CH student congress apparently ignored the fact that the Pope Center already supports a number of programs at both UNC-CH and NC State, among many other universities, and that these programs have somehow remained free of the dark, right-wing lunatic conspiracy that threatens to undermine academic freedom and even liberty itself.
While it’s true that the Pope Center is a conservative foundation, the more likely reason for rejecting the proposal is the program itself. Under UNC’s new curriculum, according to Sanders, students will not be required to take any courses in Western Civilization (they used to be required to take at least one course in Western History pre-1700). That’s in keeping with the larger trend. According to a study by the National Association of Scholars, only one third of the UNC system require courses in Western Civilization. Two thirds, however, do require multicultural or cultural diversity courses.
Sanders reports that some faculty members have been forthright in their objections. "Where are the students, where are the faculty, that are dying to have this?" asked political science Prof. Pamela Conover asked in a meeting over the proposal.
"Students don't want it," Student Body President Matt Calabria declared for everyone at the same meeting.
A posting on the UNC-CH leftist listserv dismissed the idea of a Western civilization program as "history dealing solely with the disenfranchised plight of rich, white, Protestant men."
The conviction that Western culture – more specifically the Humanist ideal – is the culture of ‘rich, white men’ likely gets to the heart of the student and faculty objections at UNC-CH. The Academy has long harbored the anti-humanists, those that regard the West as oppressive rather than emancipatory, those that regard rationality and reason as logocentric and culturally fashioned. The Humanities departments are full of those distrustful of market capitalism, preferring Marxism and its variants or even more radical forms of politics.
In his excellent book, The Reckless Mind, Mark Lilla argues that intellectuals, far from supplementing the Humanist/Enlightenment project, often find themselves aligned with tyrants, oligarchs, and other strange bedfellows against the distinctive ideals of the West. Writing on Derrida, Lilla explains:
Using the rhetorical gifts he learned from Rousseau, he evoked the beauty, dignity, and irreducible strangeness of third world cultures that were simply trying to preserve their difference. And though Levi-Strauss may not have intended it, his writings would soon feed the suspicion among the New Left that grew up in the sixties that all universal ideas to which Europe claimed allegiance – reason, science, progress, liberal democracy – were culturally specific weapons fashioned to rob the non-European Other of his difference.
The brouhaha over funding at Chapel Hill reveals a similar mindset. The faculty and student opponents can make the ‘poison fruit’ argument all they’d like. Their real concern stems from a fear that the proposed program may distinguish Western culture in some way, that the program may enunciate essential differences between the Enlightenment project of Europe, the liberal democracies of the West, and the oppressive tyranny of the ‘Other’. But to shrink from such a frank discussion seems hardly in the interest of ‘academic freedom’ at all.
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