Philosophy

Traditionally, one of the aims of humanistic education was to get the student to overcome the accidents of his or her background. You are invited to redefine yourself as an individual in light of a universal human civilization and cultural tradition.” And then you go on to say, “Emphasis was on the individual within the universal. Now you derive your identity not from individual efforts at self-definition, but rather from the group to which you belong.
We have abandoned the idea that the university invites the student to become part of a universal community of scholars, part of a universal community of human civilization, where you achieve individual self-definition through participating in a universal human civilization. Now what we tell you is, what’s your ethnicity? What’s your race? What’s your gender? That’s who you are. You don’t define yourself. You are defined by race, gender, class, ethnicity, and cultural background. And that isn’t just stupid, that’s evil. I’m fighting against that, but I think a lot of people now accept that. They think that’s perfectly legitimate. And one way to put it is to say that traditionally in America, such things at that were regarded as accidental. It’s like you’re blue-eyed or you’re left-handed. You don’t build your life around being left-handed, and you don’t build your life around your ethnicity or your race. These are just stupid accidents of your birth. The serious professional intellectual regards it as an accidental fact that he or she was born of a particular race or a particular gender. You create yourself as an individual intellect and that’s what counts, and we will invite you into membership into a universal human community of advanced culture. And within that community you can create yourself as a serious individual. But now we’re telling otherwise innocent children, “Look, you came from this background, that’s who you really are.” And I think to say that is to abandon one of the fundamental advantages of the university education, namely, before we told you, yes, okay, you came from this background, you can be proud of this background, we’ll offer you something better. We’ll let you redefine yourself, giving you the resources of the whole of human history to redefine yourself. Now we’ve even got this stupid Ethnic Studies requirement where we make people study American cultures where the idea is you’re supposed to celebrate various forms of really quite ordinary phenomena. There’s nothing intellectually special about having been born a certain race or a certain gender.