Diversity by subtraction By Nicholas J. Kaster
In the latest chapter of the Left’s ongoing culture war against the West, Yale University has announced that it is eliminating its popular introductory art history course because of the “overwhelming” whiteness, maleness, and straightness of the artists who comprise the Western canon.
This spring, “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present,” will be taught for the last time. The final installment of the course, “will seek to question the idea of Western art itself — a marked difference from the course’s focus at its inception.” According to the syllabus, the course will consider art in relation to “questions of gender, class and race” and will discuss its involvement with Western capitalism. Its relationship with climate change will also be a “key theme.”
Commenting on Yale’s decision, Robby Soave, senior editor at Reason, noted that, “Art students who wish to master the Western canon will still find plenty of other courses that satisfy their interests. But the removal of the introductory course makes it difficult for non-majors with a casual interest in the subject to study it.”
That would appear to be the goal.
In his recent book The Assault on American Excellence, Anthony Kronman, the former dean of Yale Law School, wrote about how the obsession with “diversity” on campus is odds at with a university’s mission to strive for excellence and pursue truth:
“The existence on campus of a range of beliefs, values and experiences is essential to the spirit of inquiry and debate that lies at the heart of academic life… But diversity, as it is understood today, means something different. It means diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. Diversity in this sense is not an academic value. Its origin and aspiration are political. The demand for ever-greater diversity in higher education is a political campaign masquerading as an educational ideal… Motivated by politics but forced to disguise itself as an academic value, the demand for diversity has steadily weakened the norms of objectivity and truth and substituted for them a culture of grievance and group loyalty. Rather than bringing faculty and students together on the common ground of reason, it has pushed them farther apart into separate silos of guilt and complaint.”
“It’s good to include more perspectives and to ensure that a liberal arts education is not excessively focused on Europe,” wrote Soave. “But diversity by addition is vastly preferable to diversity by subtraction.”
It’s a sweet thought. But the cultural Marxists who dominate academia are not interested in adding to the Western canon. Eliminating a single art class is merely the means to an end. Their end is multiculturalism and the erasure of Western civilization.
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