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.”


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