Frank Kogan

Another email to Josh, also from 2002:

Multiculturalism doesn't mean "all cultures," it means "many cultures," and it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to like everything that you're trying to understand, or that you always have to allow the things that you dislike to go into full effect (human sacrifice, for instance)... For me, the problem isn't so much that, though Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world, there's - tsk tsk tsk - no Indonesian Studies here. It's that a lot of the life that's right under one's nose is forbidden play in the university; hence there are no rednecks, hillbillies, farmers (in the high-school sense not the agricultural sense), greasers, grits, burnouts, skaters, and niggas on the faculty. And so you get a spurious "multiculturalism" while sidestepping the basic issues of class. And the point isn't that "liberal arts" values such as freedom of speech and civil rights shouldn't be enforced in these people's disciplines (whatever those may turn out to be), or even that these people shouldn't be required to master some of the standard liberal arts curriculum - in other words, I'm not saying that we can't demand that people submit somewhat to academic culture - but that academia is ridiculously narrow about what it allows in, what counts as its culture, narrow well beyond the needs of a liberal university to retain itself as liberal (in the liberal arts sense, not [necessarily] the political sense). If we include only the people who know what we know while excluding the people who know what we don't know, what liberal value are we serving? It seems like pure class self-interest and nothing but. (Of course, a lot of my argument may well be moot, given that most burnouts-skaters-niggas etc. won't want in, since letting them in threatens burnoutism etc. as much as it threatens academic elitism.) But the issue isn't only "fairness" (which of course will run us into conflicts and contradictions, since if I had my way I'd allow the words "bitch" and "fag" into the academic discourse too, my assumption being that the liberal arts culture is strong enough to handle it, just as ILx is, and that if you're going to allow the niggas and burnouts and skaters in you've got to allow them to put their culture into at least some effect) but curiosity and knowledge. How can you deal with someone if you're not willing to get to know him?