A Special Edition of Bitchgrams: Harvard Salient, Are You SERIOUS?
Posted by Kathleen French on March 24, 2010 at 10:20 pm
First of all allow us to link you to THIS article titled Ethnic ‘Studies’ published by The Harvard Salient with the tag-line, “Harvard foolishly politicizes its curriculum.” Now, we have a few issues with this article. Let’s start with a few choice quotes from this article cleverly published over spring break when no one was going to notice:
- “The ethnic studies movement is motivated by an attempt to direct more attention to a topic that deserves no more attention than it already gets, and probably a good deal less. Other similarly useless departments, like Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality serve similar purposes….”
- “When the University agrees that its curriculum needs to change to address ‘the growing diversity of our campus’ or any other imaginary concern of its students, it opens itself up to politically motivated efforts like ethnic studies.”
- “It need not offer a course on African civilizations if there is none worthy of study. The progressive priorities of Harvard’s curriculum usually do not coincide, however, with the promotion of meaningful areas of study.”
- “Ethnic studies is a good example of an academic subject entirely driven by a leftist political agenda. While it is not absurd to suggest that there are some worthwhile topics that fall under the heading of “ethnic studies,” the area is certainly not important enough to merit a secondary field…Americans of color have undoubtedly done some things of note, but their ‘encounters’ and ‘experiences’ are not of paramount importance to a university education.”
- “The necessary elements of an educated man’s curriculum have not changed much over two thousand years of Western education…It is quite difficult for academia to justify an attempt to free the sciences from a ‘Eurocentric’ perspective, given that, with rare exceptions like the Abbasid Caliphate, little scientific and mathematical thought of consequence has occurred outside the Western world.”
The principal thesis of the article is that academia ought to remain in its conservative, westernized form as it has for “centuries.” The article applauds Harvard’s Classics department as an exception to this rule of the deviation from a “Eurocentric” education–funny that the author is a Classics major!
We happen to think that studies of women, gender, sexuality, race, and developing nations are important for understanding a changing world. Granted, academia may have been in stasis for centuries but stasis is absolutely no reason to legitimize a practice–for example, we don’t know, slavery? Women not being able to vote? Ruthless imperialism? Though we’re the first to admit Shakespeare’s brilliance and other writers of antiquity, that is not to say that learning about literature and classics is mutually exclusive from understanding the world around us.
To make the absolutely baseless claim that “little scientific and mathematical thought of consequence has occurred outside the Western world,” is quite frankly, outrageous. Even if to play the devil’s advocate for a moment and grant that this is true, that absolutely does not mean that areas outside of the west are not “worthy” of studying. In fact, the argument would be quite the opposite–it is incredibly interesting to see why some discoveries come from some developing areas versus others–this leads to something we call progress. Studying civil rights movements for women, homosexuals, and minorities is not, and we quote “useless,” it is extremely important to a university education. It has been a long time since we have read such a misogynistic and myopic diatribe as this, and find it shameful that it came from a Harvard publication.
The article ends by arguing that “Curricula should be essentially conservative and permanent.” If this is the case then why on earth go to university at all? If generation after generation studies the exact same thing without branching out into other fields of study–trying to understand the facets of society that have long been ignored as a result of patriarchy, oppression, and the like, then how is one to prevent atrocities from occurring in the future. This philosophy is not towards an education it’s towards an intolerance. Perhaps one of the most infuriating aspects of the article is that it places much of the blame on the students in demanding such areas of studies arguing that “paying attention to the desires and putative needs of twenty-year-olds is of course a dangerous game, and unlikely to produce a rigorous or useful curriculum,” and the moving away from a conservative education is a “consequence of listening to students…[that] Harvard students…should be thankful that the administration is as detached and ponderous as it is; otherwise, we’d be going to a more competitive version of Brown.” Not only is this a completely unfair stab at Brown (baseless), but absolutely contradictory.
A student wrote this article “Ethnic ‘Studies’” no? Then how can he have the audacity to claim that the conservative form of education that he advocates ought to be adopted wholesale throughout the university? The article ends on the senseless note of, “Those calling for studies in ethnicity are right to claim that the issues of America and the world are more complicated than ever before, but that is all the more reason to ensure that Harvard properly educates its students.” So let us get this last point straight: the world is complicated but let’s not deal with it or try to understand it because then we don’t have to do anything to help.
Wow, that is a very salient point isn’t it?
xoxo
BITCHGRAMS
amen sister.
Good bitchgram. That article was one of the most ignorant, rhetorically immature pieces I have ever read. Funny: the author wants “rhetoric,” one of the traditional pieces of education, to remain an elementary component of modern education–yet he writes an article that makes no sense. Go figure.
One of the things that made my head almost fall off and MELT:
“…the Trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the scientific Quadrivium of geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy should still be the basic foundations of education.”
NO!! … do these people realize how misguided and primitive much of the ideology behind the Trivium and Quadrivium was??? Until fairly recently (a few centuries ago), those two genres of study were Church-sanctioned ideological boxes, and innovative thought was spurned if it didn’t match the teachings of the Church. Should we really go back to learning that the four elements are air, fire, water, and earth, and that the earth is at the center of the universe? Right, because education is supposed to be stagnant, so curricula should never change.
What. the. hell. Conservatives sometimes make me want to cut my face off and burn it. Also, the unnecessary jab at Brown…?
Also, the assertion that most significant mathematical and scientific thought occurred in the West is…WRONG. For math, check out India. Or go way back to Babylon. For science, China has some good examples. Btw, alchemy was practiced for a very long time in the West.
Nonzero intelligence: it’s why I’m not a Republican.
Thank you for putting this out there. Glad to see someone coming out against what I consider frankly a very racist piece. The author views as worthy only those eurocentric notions of patriarchy and dominance which have, as you said, perpetuated injustices like slavery, oppression of women and minorities, etc. His claim that there are “no African civilizations worth studying…” Really??? So from his POV they must not have produced anything of merit? Gee I wonder if their lack of ‘progress’ in his eyes could have anything to do with THE WHITE MAN’S DESTRUCTION OF AFRICAN CIVILIZATION AND CULTURE FOR THE PURSUIT OF PROFIT????? And the continued lack of assistance provided to these struggling countries?
As someone more knowledgeable than I once said, Privilege is invisible to those who have it.
Thanks for taking the time to take down that absurd and embarrassing essay. And well done.
praise
this article is stupid beyond comprehension, but i’m going to take the unpopular stand and defend the Salient. Knowing some of the guys there I truly think they’re intelligent, reasonable, and perfectly respectable people. Granted, they are Republicans, but they’re not all bat shit crazy.
This guy is NOT representative of Salient and harvard republicans as a whole.
Peace out.
Perhaps the author should explain in a follow up piece how it’s possible to present oneself as a principled Conservative while arguing that one of our better universities ignore any (or all) ethnocentric subsets in the humanities.
Or, more plainly, explain how one might champion centuries worth of traditions and customs without first studying how those traditions and customs were formed.
What’s offered here isn’t a critique of Harvard’s new curriculum. It is intellectually soggy nativism spiked with an adolescent strain of xenophobia… as if Michael Oakeshott’s college crib notes were collected and edited by William Luther Pierce.
One assumes Mr. Brennan is piling submissions like these in the hopes of replacing Jonah Goldberg over at National Review. Provided, of course, that his crystal clear distain for anything non-white or non-Western keeps him from the horrors of working beside the likes of Ramesh Ponnuru and Katherine Jean Lopez.
Way to use the author’s own idiolect of biased terms to deconstruct his ridiculous argument. He is a “classic” case of someone who has never ventured far enough of his own insulated mind to realize how absurdly crude, ignorant, and unfounded his opinions are.
Let’s go, Kathleen. Your article is pure invective poetry.
Perhaps, we might step back from the situation for a minute to consider:
What is so bad about tried and true? What principles of curricula built the reputation of our esteemed institution? What exactly is wrong with the educational system that fostered the brilliant minds behind the founding and progress of our nation? (Tricolon Crescens for good measure, in case the rhetorical wit of my post is also subjected to vivisection.)
Yes, I will “come out” and admit it. I too am a Classics concentrator. But that does not mean that I solely constrain myself to translating “Euro-Centric” literature. In fact, Classics encompasses women’s studies, slavery, and ethnic concerns.
Did the article go too far? Maybe. Yet it is certainly valid to question Harvard’s allocation of resources in times of financial instability.
@ Annoyed Harvard Student
“Did the article go too far? Maybe. Yet it is certainly valid to question Harvard’s allocation of resources in times of financial instability.”
I’m guessing you actually mean:
“Studying niggers is all well and good when we’re running a surplus. But right now we need stick to a curricula of white male appreciation ’till the cows come home”
This person calls himself a a Classics Major. Ever heard of BLACK Athena?
Also, “Curricula should be essentially conservative and permanent.”
I’m pretty sure nothing about a university should be conservative (in the traditional sense of the word) or permanent. Otherwise why would you do research?
@CT
Right, let’s just put words in my mouth.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/09/AR2007070900609.html
@Annoyed Harvard Student
Regardless of your views on the existence of a secondary field in Ethnic Studies, I think that it is difficult to argue with the fact that Brennan’s article is poorly written and poorly argued.
This article is ridiculous, but pleeeeeeeease don’t attack Classics just because this one douche (the writer of the salient article) is a concentrator.
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If I were a member of an ethnic minority (which I would be if I were American)I would be offended by the very existence of so-called “ethnic studies”. Why should black authors be confined to such exotic labels instead of becoming an integral part of general literature syllabi?