In Academic strife: the American University in the slough of despond, Norman Levitt confronts “cultural competence”:
Like its predecessors ‘affirmative action,’ ‘diversity,’ and ‘multiculturalism’, it attempts to cloak problematical and even disturbing policy initiatives in linguistic vestments that suggest that no right-minded person could possibly demur. A ‘culturally competent’ academic, one might naively surmise, would be one who has absorbed and is able to propound some of the deep values — ethical, aesthetic or epistemological — that embody the stellar achievements of Western culture, one who could explain, for instance, why Dante or Kant or Ingres is present, at least subtly, in the assumptions under which we all live. Or something like that.This, alas, would be a comical error.
“Here is an illustrative if fragmentary list,” as Levitt says, “of transgressions that would likely strip an academic of any chance of being designated culturally competent”:
- Suggesting that affirmative action might conflict with other standards of justice and equity, or that opponents of affirmative action are not ipso facto Klansmen waiting for their white sheets to come back from the laundry;
- Taking issue with the claim that Malcolm X was a paragon of humanitarianism and political genius;
- Disputing the wisdom of feminist theory as regards the social constructedness of gender;
- Asserting that the early demographic history of the Americas is more accurately revealed by scientific anthropology than by the Native American folklore and myth celebrated by tribal militants;
- Expressing doubts that ‘queer theory’ should be made the epicenter of literary studies.