---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 22:48:22 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Has Multiculturalism Failed?
Has Multiculturalism Failed?
By MARGARET TALBOT
NY Times Magazine
November 18, 2001
Has Multiculturalism Failed?
I 've been wondering lately what multiculturalism was. I remember, of course,
that it was a cause clbre of the 80's and 90's, a big deal on campus, a hot
ticket at the Modern Language Association. I remember all the talk about
overthrowing the ''dead white males'' of the old canon and opening it up to
the ''subaltern'' and the ''displaced'' and the ''other.'' And I figure that
along the way it got some good writers included on reading lists, where they
should have been in the first place, and some good writers dropped too. What
it apparently did not do was promote the study of other languages, or indeed
of other cultures.
During the very years when the multicultural movement was extending its
influence, the study of foreign languages was falling into a general malaise.
Enrollments were dropping, the ranks of competent language instructors
thinning out and foreign-language requirements quietly disappearing. For
example, according to the American Council on Education, 34 percent of all
four-year American colleges and universities made foreign-language study a
graduation requirement in 1965, while only 20 percent do now. Since the 60's,
the percentage of college students enrolled in language classes has shrunk by
half. And for all the multiculti buzz about respecting and exploring other
cultures, the number of students who studied abroad remained tiny, the length
of their stays got shorter and the list of countries they preferred --
Germany, England, France -- scarcely diversified. (How many parents, footing
the bill, want to send their junior to, say, Uzbekistan? How many college
students, laser-focused on landing a job on Wall Street or a slot in law
school, want to put their G.P.A.'s at risk by studying, say, Urdu?)
Meanwhile, disciplines that might once have sponsored in-depth study of other
cultures -- political science, for example -- were taken over by scholars who
eschewed fieldwork in favor of computer models and game theory.
There are plenty of reasons that Americans don't flock to language study,
from geographic isolation to our traditional assimilationist credo to the
widespread use of English. We don't have to! But if multiculturalism is not
precisely to blame, it is odd that a movement so flamboyantly dedicated to
the celebration of cultural diversity did so little to check our tendencies
to cultural isolationism. In fact, it may have reinforced them, by lulling us
into the sense that we were getting a resoundingly global education when all
we were really getting was a little Arundhati Roy here, a little Toni
Morrison there. (In multiculturalism, somehow, black American culture was
cast as other, even alien, when in fact it is as inextricably and
influentially American as a culture can be.) Multiculturalism was easy,
whereas deep knowledge of another place, predicated as it usually is on
linguistic competence, is hard. Besides, the impulse behind multiculturalism
was politicized inclusion. You were meant to reach out to groups with
historical grievances against the white male population of the United States
and to celebrate their accomplishments. It was the upbeat ethnic-festival
approach, which is nice, but which also allows you to leave out a lot of
groups, like those that speak difficult languages or live in rough
neighborhoods of the world or don't seem to treat women particularly well.
Of course, none of this would seem all that urgent if it weren't for Sept.
11. But now, suddenly, the fact that the colleges and universities in the
United States graduated a total of nine Arabic majors last year seems to
matter a great deal. So does the fact that the F.B.I. had to issue those
slightly pathetic pleas for Arabic and Pashto translators in the days after
the attacks. And so, most disturbingly, do reports that there were warning
signs in F.B.I. intercepts about the first World Trade Center bombing in
1993, warnings that went unheeded because the agency didn't translate them
until later. Now Arabic-language classes at some colleges are filling up, and
scholarly books on Islam are re-emerging as best sellers.
In truth, this is an old pattern. It was the cold war, and Sputnik in
particular, that spurred the growth of language and area studies in the
United States and the Vietnam War that encouraged serious scholarship on East
Asia. It would be pleasant to think that ideas and research agendas are
independent of national-security concerns or war. But in the United States
the latter have been much more important, especially in language studies,
than high-minded commitment to the ''other'' ever was. Probably the best
place in the country to study hard languages is the U.S. military training
institute in Monterey, Calif. And the National Security Education Program,
which began in the early 1990's under the supervision of the Department of
Defense, has been one of the most lucrative sources of scholarship money for
undergraduate and graduate students pursuing ''strategic'' languages like
Farsi, Arabic and Mandarin -- with special emphasis on historically black
colleges and un-elite two-year institutions. Partly it's a matter of
financing -- national-security needs free up money in a way that celebration
of difference just doesn't. And partly it's a matter of motivation. Americans
don't like to learn difficult languages, and to take them on, we seem to need
a motivation more urgent than the vague feeling that we ought to expand our
horizons -- something like a wartime imperative or even the religious calling
that makes those clean-cut, white-bread Mormon missionaries some of the most
dedicated students of foreign languages around. Either way, there's an
irresistible twist in the fact that the conservative establishment may have
done more to advance our understanding of what the other is saying --
literally, anyway -- than the P.C. academy ever did. Multiculturalism may not
have prodded us to study cultures fundamentally different from our own; the
war on terrorism will have to.
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Margaret Talbot is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a
contributing writer for the magazine.
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