Tuesday, August 21, 2007

"Why colleges are becoming anti-American"

In Investor's Business Daily, Thomas L. Krannawitter, an assistant professor of political science at conservative Hillsdale College, takes a whack at it:

The keystone of multiculturalism is the hypothesis that what ordinary people believe is "true" is nothing but their own cultural prejudice. The real test of multicultural
education is whether one has freed one's mind from the trappings of one's culture — especially if one's culture happens to be, like American culture, more powerful and prosperous than others.

Celebrating foreign cultures and rejecting America are two sides of the same multicultural coin; it is the way American multiculturalists demonstrate their own multicultural sophistication to each other. From their perspective, the most anti-American Americans are the most educated Americans.

And dings David Horowitz for conceding the multiculturalists' main point:

Some conservatives, David Horowitz most notably, oppose the prevailing multiculturalism of our schools by pushing for an "academic bill of rights" to ensure greater "intellectual diversity" and thereby remove politics from education. But in his emphasis on "diversity," Horowitz concedes the most important ground to the multiculturalists.

Horowitz wants to break up the monopoly liberals have on academics today, and I applaud him for that. But his complaints ring hollow unless he can defend the principles that conservatives want to conserve as true, something he seems reluctant to do. If all political ideologies are equally irrational and therefore equally untrue, then why does it matter if students are exposed to one irrational prejudice or a "diversity" of prejudices?

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