








d critically. 1 what we mean by liberal education not that a ti plumps for certain political programs, but th teaching is done in a  liberal  (open, undog style.
I do not doubt that there are conservative an cal teachers who teach in this  liberal  spirit. V was a student at City College in the late 1930s, ied philosophy with a man who was either a m of the Communist Party or was  cheating it dues.  Far from being the propagandist of th< line, which Sidney Hook kept insisting was the sary role of Communist teachers, this man was c humane, and tolerant. Freedom of thought pn in his classroom. He had, you might say, a  li character, and perhaps his commitment to teacl a vocation was stronger than his loyalty to the Were such things not to happen now and then, sides would be intolerable.
If, then, a university proposes a few required < so that ill-read students may at least glance a they do not know, that isn t (necessarily)  elitis ferent teachers will approach the agreed-upon 1 different ways, and that is as it should be. If 2 student gets  stuck  with a conservative teache conservative student with a leftist teacher, that s what education should be. The university is sa its incoming students:  Here are some sources dom and beauty that have survived the centui time you may choose to abandon them, but fin something about them. 
Your list of classics includes only dead, white m tied in to notions and values of Western hegemony, this narrow excessively the horizons of education?
All depends on how far forward you go to c( your list of classics. If you do not come closer present than the mid-eighteenth century, t! course there will not be many, or even any, wo your roster. If you go past the mid-eighteen tury to reach the present, it s not at all tn only  dead, white males  are to be included, ample and this must hold for hundreds o. teachers also I have taught and written abo Austen, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, El Gaskell, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Edith ton, Katherine Anne Porter, Doris Lessing, an nery O Connor. I could easily add a compan of black writers. Did this, in itself, make me   teacher? I doubt it. Did it make me a better
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51. Value of the Canoi
We still lack modes of evaluation subtle enough to say for sure.
The absence of women from the literature of earlier centuries is a result of historical inequities that have only partly been remedied in recent years. Virginia Woolf, in a brilliant passage in A Room of One s Own, approaches this problem by imagining Judith, Shakespeare s sister, perhaps equally gifted but prevented by the circumstances of her time from developing her gifts:
Any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. . . . A highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwai ted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity. . ..
The history that Virginia Woolf describes cannot be revoked. If we look at the great works of literature and thought through the centuries until about the mideighteenth century', we have to recognize that indeed they have been overwhelmingly the achievements of men. The circumstances in which these achievements occurred mav be excoriated. The achievements remain precious.
To isolate a group of texts as the canon is to establish a hierarchy of bias, in behalf of which there can be no certainty of judgment.
There is mischief or confusion in the frequent use o the term  hierarchy  by the academic insurgents, a conflation of social and intellectual uses. A social hierarchy may entail a (maldistribution of income and power, open to the usual criticisms; a literary  hierarchy  signifies a judgment, often based on historical experience, that some works are of supreme or abiding value, while others are of lesser value, and still o ers Quite without value. To prefer Elizabeth Bishop dith Krantz is not of the same order as sanctioning e inequality of wealth in the United States. To pre er Shakespeare to Sidney Sheldon is not of the same order as approving the hierarchy of the nomenklatura in Communist dictatorships.	_	. ,
As for the claim that there is no certainty o ju g ment, all tastes being historically molded or in ivi dally subjective, I simply do not believe that t e pe   pie who make it live by it. This is an egalitananisrn  f valuation that people of even moderate dera y know to be false and unworkable the making judgments, even if provisional and historically mo luted, is inescapable in the life of culture. 1 cannot make judgments or demonstrate t e grou for our preferences, then we have no business fog literature we might just as well be teac mg tising and there is no reason to have departme literature.	.	/
The claim that there can be value-free teaching is a deception or self-deception; so too the claim t at ^.,1^ texts untouched by social and political bias. Po dies is everywhere, and it s the better part of honesty to
If you look hard (or foolishly) enough, you can fm< political and social traces everywhere. But to see pol tics or ideology in all texts is to scrutinize the riches c literature through a single lens. If you choose, you cai read all or almost all literary works through the singl lens of religion. But what a sad impoverishment of th-imagination, and what a violation of our sense of real: ty, this represents. Politics may be  in  everything, bu not everything is politics. A good social critic will knot which texts are inviting to a given approach and whicl it would be wise to leave to others.
To see politics everywhere is to diminish the weigh of politics. A serious politics recognizes the limits of it reach; it deals with public affairs while leaving alon large spheres of existence; it seeks not to  totalize  it range of interest. Some serious thinkers believe tha the ultimate aim of politics should be to render itsel superfluous. That may seem an unrealizable goa meanwhile, a good part of the struggle for freedom ii recent decades has been to draw a line beyond whic politics must not tread. The same holds, more or les: for literary' study and the teaching of literature.
Wittingly or not, the traditional literary and intellects canon was based on received elitist ideologies, the values^ Western imperialism, racism, sexism, etc-  nA*e^ the humanities was marked by corresponding biases-It is no necessary to enlarge the canon so that voices from Africa Asu for minority students so that they may learn about their ongi and thereby gain in self-esteem.
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9. UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL PLURALISM
range of opinion among teachers, and if anything, the American academy has tilted more to the left than most other segments of our society. There were of course right-wing professors too; I remember an economics teacher we called  Steamboat  Fulton, the object of amiable ridicule among the students who nonetheless learned something from him.
Proposals to enlarge the curriculum to include nonWestern writings if made in good faith and not in behalf of an ideological campaign are in principle to be respected. A course in ancient thought might well include a selection from Confucius; a course in the modern novel might well include a work by Tanizaki or Garcia Marquez.
There are practical difficulties. Due to the erosion of requirements in many universities, those courses that survive are usually no more than a year or a semester in duration, so that there is danger of a diffusion to the point of incoherence. Such courses, if they are to have any value, must focus primarily on the intellectual and cultural traditions of Western society. That, like it or not, is where we come from and that is where we are. All of us who live in America are, to some extent, Western: it gets to us in our deepest and also our most trivial habits of thought and speech, in our sense of right and wrong, in our idealism and our cynicism.
As for the argument that minority students will gain in self-esteem through being exposed to writings by Africans and black Americans, it is hard to know. Might not entering minority students, some of them ill-prepared, gain a stronger sense of self-esteem by mastering the arts of writing and reading than by being told, as some are these days, that Plato and Aristotle plagiarized from an African source? Might not some black students feel as strong a sense of self-esteem by reading, say, Dostoyevsky and Malraux (which Ralph Ellison speaks of having done at a susceptible age) as by being confined to black writers? Is there not something grossly patronizing in the notion that while diverse literary studies are appropriate for middle-class white students, something else, racially determined, is required for the minorities? Richard Wright found sustenance in Dreiser, Ralph Ellison in Hemingway, Chinua Achebe in Eliot, Leopold Senghor in the whole of French poetry. Are there not unknown young Wrights and Ellisons, Achebes and Senghors in our universities who might also want to find their way to an individually achieved sense of culture?
In any case, is the main function of the humanities directly to inculcate self-esteem? Do we really know how this can be done? And if done by bounding the curriculum according to racial criteria, may that not perpetuate the very grounds for a lack of self-esteem? I do not know the answers to these questions, but do the advocates of multiculturalism?
One serious objection to  multicultural studies  re
mains: that it tends to segregate students into cate; fixed by birth, upbringing, and obvious environ Had my teachers tried to lead me toward certain v because they were Jewish, I would have balked I w to find my own way to Proust, Kafka, and Pirandelk ers who didn t need any racial credentials. Pt things are different with students today we oug to be dogmatic about these matters. But are the shared norms of pride and independence among people, 
