Bookbagging traditionalism and multiculturalism

As the countdowns to LDOC and Old Duke begin and the semester wraps up, bookbagging and the question of Fall semester’s classes come knocking for all but our seniors. Whether your choices have the freedom of a budgeted free semester or the constraints of an engineering major, all of us have to eventually pick electives that take us into humanities or social science departments like English or political science. Today, we look to help students be cognizant about their course choices through the tension between traditional disciplinary canons and the innovative perspectives of the “multicultural” academic camp.

In many ways, class selections is a process of choosing what knowledge is most worthy of our time and effort. In an article he wrote while still Dean of Yale College, President Richard Brodhead addresses a particular clash of paradigms in the humanities, attempting to reconcile traditionalism and multiculturalism. He characterizes the traditional canon as the consensus of universally excellent works and the multicultural counter as the incorporation of fresh and underrepresented voices to more accurately reflect human experience and the human fabric of society. Brodhead concludes with the limitations of both curricular paradigms and an emphasis on careful thinking about how bodies of knowledge are created for students.

For traditionalist courses, we harbor concerns of the discouragement of spaces for the stories that were often marginalized or silenced. For example, not until the late twentieth century did the importance of female and minority writers like Toni Morrison and Richard Rodriguez start to be seen as approaching the contributions of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. The traditional curriculum intentionally or incidentally dwarfed any shreds of multiculturalism in the name of meritocracy and the status quo. Offering a fix, multiculturalism emphasizes the way these writers from the outside can “substantially change and enrich the terms” by which we understand and interpret the traditional canon.

On the other hand, overemphasis on multiculturalism risks diminishing or censoring traditional works that really have earned their place in the pantheon of a discipline. A scholar with dazzling knowledge of a relatively obscure author like Nella Larsen brings something to academia but is incomplete without an understanding of William Faulkner as Larsen’s estimable contemporary. The takeaway is to blend the traditional and the multicultural. Treating the two as competing is the wrong approach, and we should take classes that emphasize co-emphasis and, for example, see the work of the classical canon in the light of and in terms of innovative multicultural work that can be a lead-in to a future “traditional” paradigm.

As curriculum changes are discussed by faculty, we would point out the lack of student discourse on what Brodhead brings in his article and call for more guidance on understanding canons of knowledge and the foundations of traditionalism and multiculturalism. As we pick classes, we are crafting the way we orient ourselves in the world and should aim for an education that recognizes a diversity of voices. Perhaps the biggest lesson here is that the more we learn, the more we realize how much there is still out there to learn.