https://www.nas.org/articles/shedding_humanity_shredding_the_humanities
An incident from my final year teaching at Providence College, now roiled by what has been called “identity politics,” stands for me as an example of how that new monster of man’s morbid imagination has made real education in the humanities and the very notion of a common good nearly inconceivable.
A young freshman from Colombia was among a group of students who took offense at my suggesting, in an article written online for conservative Roman Catholics, that the cult of diversity, defined by a stark political monotone and divorced from interest in actual human cultures, was self-contradictory. I called out the diversitarians for their frankly expressed desire to transform the somewhat Catholic Providence College into a secular place like pretty much every other, and noted that this desire was especially visible in the college’s apparent longing to join those other secular colleges in that land of sexual indifference over the rainbow.
I am not going to argue about that article here. The student did not want to argue about it, either. He and other students went straight to the president’s office to demand that I be fired. Of course that was not going to happen. I had tenure. Peter Singer, the philosopher of ethics at Princeton, does not get fired for recommending the murder of lebensunwerte Leben, a baby here and a baby there. I was not going to get fired for saying that people ought to learn about other cultures before they call themselves “multicultural,” as fearful as such learning might be.
I found out about the student, who was enrolled in my section of the college’s team-taught program in the development of Western Civilization. I wanted to talk to him about what a culture is, why we study them, and what he might be reading with us in the spring if he stayed with the team. We would be taking a good look at the golden age of Spain, and reading, in a bilingual edition, a work by her greatest playwright, Pedro Calderon de la Barca. But he shook his head and muttered, “It’s still European.” And there you have it. Calderon is an artist of the first rank, working at the end of the most glorious period of dramatic flourishing in the history of the world, but because he was European and not Colombian, or just because he was European and not something or anything else, he meant nothing to this young man. It did not matter that Spanish was the student’s mother tongue and not mine. I was passionately interested in reading La Vida es Sueno in the original early modern Spanish, and he was not. That alone did not of course distinguish him from his fellow students, who are not known to be eager to venture forth into lands and times far distant from theirs. But some of them at least might be capable of catching the fire of the venture, whereas politics had cast a cold frost upon his mind and soul.
