Christina: Back in the 1990s, when we were winning the argument, and we had the support
of the media, there were all these great writers, that took our side, pro free speech, and it
was taken for granted, and people would make fun of the courses. They would look at the
MLA and there would be these silly courses on, I don't know...cross-dressing and medieval
Valencia or autoeroticism in the early Jane Austen. It was fun, and then the media got
a little tired of it, and thought it had gone away. It didn't go away. It got much worse.
And if you look at the curriculum now and the courses that kids take...on Twitter there's
a Twitter called Peer Review and all he does is report abstracts, show abstracts in journals.
It's so shocking, and it never ends, and you'd think they've reached the ultimate of madness.
Just to give an example and this isn't the worst, Feminist Glaciology. It's a feminist
study of glaciers. It draws on feminist post Colonialism, and feminist political ecology.
What are these fields? There's a field, Feminist Political Ecology. What do they read? It must
just be slogans, and mixed with a little propaganda, a little paranoia thrown in. One course after
the other, so are they taking History of Western Civilization? Are they learning about art?
Do they know major historical figures? No, but they could talk about these arcane, little
propaganda, stick topics. Camille: Yes, the core curriculum was abandoned as these new
micro-fields came in. Women's studies, African-American studies and so on, and identity politics,
they changed the curriculum in the 1970s, and then all of a sudden the whole history
of Western art, well, that's classist, it's racist, so we have to abandon that. And so
what you have now is a whole generation, in fact two generations probably of graduate
students who are incapable, actually of ever teaching in a broad, narrative way, the old,
wonderful survey courses. Christina: Right. Camille: Now what I'm calling for is an attack
on upon the curriculum, a reduction by 60% of these elected, these silly electives to
be thrown out, and a compulsory return to teaching within these core ideas that are
oriented toward ancient to modern. Because another thing that, in addition to what you
just mentioned, the fragmentation, is that too many courses now are dated in the present,
the present from after the Enlightenment or even after the 19th century. So you have an
imbalance in the curriculum, so that young people have no sense of the ancient civilizations,
and the way they rose and fell over time. They have no idea of the world. They think
that all the evils of the world are isolated in Western culture. They have no idea about
the atrocities, and the oppressions of empires all over the world. So what we need to do
I discovered in my students coming from a broad range of preparations, now and then
there'll be private schools, but mostly they come from good suburban schools or from bad
inner city schools and they know absolutely nothing about the chronology of human life.
Hence, they look around them, and they see things that are flaws in our current system,
and they believe that these flaws can be fixed, and that all other cultures in the history
of the world were somehow a paradise on earth, and we're enjoying the most liberties, ever
as women. Christina: These cultures and all these students who are so hostile to the United
States because it's a capitalist, hetero, patriarchal, oppressive, imperialist system,
these sorts of terms are taken seriously. Well, compared to what? What other country?
We're far from perfect, but we're a struggling democracy that's done more to address racism,
and classism, and sexism than any country I'm aware of. But it's almost as if they don't
know that. Camille: I know it. Christina: They don't know that we have experimented
with systems that don't have free markets and they didn't work out very well. These
students don't seem to know that. They don't know the history of Communism. Camille: Oh,
they have no sense of economics or much less, political theory. Christina: Economic illiteracy.
And so they're very confidently and they've been taught in their classes, and what astonishes
me is someone who as a professor of many years, I always thought it was a sacred commandment,
"Thou shalt teach both sides of the argument." So in any philosophy class, I would make sure
whatever we were studying, I'd try to bring the best that was thought and said on both
sides. Well, in these classrooms, in many classrooms and especially anthropology, sociology,
not philosophy...philosophy is so far immune to this, although it has other problems...
Camille: Literature, throughout the humanities. Christina: ...literature, and then of course,
gender studies, all the ethnic studies classes it's largely one point of view. They have
their doctrinal feuds, but it's the gamut from A to B, they leave out all other perspectives.
Conservatives aren't there, heaven forbid, libertarian perspectives, not there. Commonsense
has no place, and so the students have this sense that they've been exposed to what they
take to be settled knowledge. It's not settled.