Will zealots spell the doom of great literature?

The specter of political correctness, disguised as multiculturalism, is threatening America. Its proponents continue to advance their agenda. Recently, Change: The Magazine of Higher Education devoted an entire issue to the college curriculum and multiculturalism, reaching the conclusion that "Multiculturalism today touches, in varying degrees, a majority of the nation's colleges." Thus, the PC/MC virus is on its way to devouring American higher education.

There are some outposts of resistance, organizations such as the National Association of Scholars, whose president contends that the PC battalions have politicized the college curriculum and that their leaders absolutely are opposed to the values contained in the classic texts of Western civilization.

College students should be exposed to--as the 19th-century poet and critic Matthew Arnold said--the best that has been known and thought. The Great Books of Western Civilization fill this need. The best defense is a vigorous offense, which, in my case, as an entrenched professor of English, consists of teaching William Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Miguel de Cervantes, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, and T.S. Eliot, and rejecting as ideological twaddle the book lists generated by the PC propagandists.

Author F. Scott Fitzgerald said that life consists of beating against the current in order to survive. The current today is the PC tidal wave, and it must be resisted by establishing the Great Books as the centerpiece of higher education.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning