Ward Connerly, the Sacramento crusader against affirmative action, has turned his sights on a new target: Ethnic studies.
And that’s not all. He’s also suspicious of women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies, “Black Welcome Week,” Latino orientation day, separate graduation ceremonies, ethnic “theme houses” in some of the dorms and everything else he sees as “Balkanizing” life on the campuses of California’s state universities.
He admitted to me in a telephone interview that he doesn’t know much about gay, ethnic or women’s studies, to name just three issues. He also insisted for the record that he does not, “repeat, not,” plan to crusade against them as a University of California regent the way he led the successful Proposition 209 campaign.
But he does plan to visit classes and talk to faculty over the next couple of months to conduct his own “private” investigation. He may come away convinced, he says, although he admits “I do have my biases.”
Connerly, who is African-American, raised eyebrows when he told an Associated Press reporter last week that he suspects Hispanic, African-American, Asian-American, Native American and other ethnic studies programs are promoting “self-imposed segregation” at the state’s colleges. If so, he said, he wants to put a stop to it.
It was the rise of a recent student movement to form a gay and lesbian studies department at the University of California at Davis campus that was the last straw, Connerly told me. He questioned whether the purpose of the classes was truly academic or whether they were exercises in racial, ethnic and gender cheerleading.
He questioned whether ethnic studies was “something people can learn from their parents, at home, without the taxpayers paying for it.”
When I pointed out that many students have enrolled in studies about groups to which they do not personally belong–white and Latino students in black studies, for example, and men in women’s studies–he said he was impressed, but added, “that has not been my experience” during campus visits.
Too bad. But Connerly’s idea intrigues me. What if he’s right? If we get rid of those divisive ethnic studies, which hardly existed before the late 1960s, can we can get back to the togetherness we had before?
Ah, yes, whatever happened to those halcyon days of old, those days of unity, those days before those Balkanizing ethnic studies came along?
Whatever happened to those jolly days of housing covenants, legal job discrimination, segregated lunch counters and other aspects of American togetherness?
How united we were when the only people who really counted in history and literature classes were white and, for that matter, male. How light-hearted our students could be, unburdened by any obligation to learn about anybody else.
But, why, I wondered, stop with studies about women, gays and ethnics?
As long as we’re going after academic special interests, how about European studies?
After all, if studies of the history and culture of one particular group are Balkanizing, why exempt the part of the world that gave “Balkanize” its name?
Do we really need all those classes in Socrates, Milton, Shakespeare, Mozart and Chopin? Are they going to get you a job in today’s global economy?
Or are they merely exercises in ethnic cheerleading? Are they “something people can learn from their parents, at home, without the taxpayers paying for it.”
Hey, didn’t your mom always keep a copy of Plato’s “The Republic” within easy reach, right next to Dr. Spock and Betty Crocker?
You want unity? Take my word for it: Announce to America’s college students that they no longer will have to learn European history and you’re going to see a lot of students from every race, creed and color dancing in the streets.
Closer to home, how about Civil War studies?
Talk about Balkanizing. The farther you go south of, say, Ohio, the more you run into people who don’t question who won the Civil War or, as they may prefer to call it, the “War Between the States” or, my personal favorite, “The War of Northern Aggression.”
And what about all those foreign language studies classes? What can be more divisive and self-segregating than to have a bunch of people on campus practicing how to talk to each other in languages only a few other students can understand?
I’m not saying this is what we should do. I’m only raising questions, just like Connerly is.
Let’s not think small. Why not pull everyone together by eliminating courses that don’t teach everybody the same basic stuff?
That’s a good way to make everybody the same, together and equal.
Equally ignorant.
