Roger Kimball brought his attack on multiculturalism last night to a place that has provided a home for many of his enemies-Duke University.
About 35 people gathered in the Breedlove Room of Perkins Library to hear Kimball rail against former Duke professors Stanley Fish and Henry Louis Gates Jr. and current Professor of Literature Fredric Jameson in a speech entitled "Culture or Multiculturalism?"
Kimball, author of the book Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, said the academic trends of multiculturalism and postmodernism have watered down higher education and harmed race relations in the United States.
"For the multiculturalist, what is important is not what binds us but what separates us," said Kimball, managing editor of The New Criterion, a monthly magazine that calls itself a "staunch defender of the values of high culture."
Focusing specifically on the intellectual framework of Afrocentrism, Kimball presented many anecdotes intended to discredit multiculturalists. These academics, Kimball said, "demand that historical truths be sacrificed in the name of diversity."
Kimball said many blatant falsehoods in academia are simply ignored because the "moderate center" of universities has been taken over by radicals. These radicals then try to position themselves as centrists by differentiating themselves from "caricatures" of the right and the left, he continued.
Attempting to combat the notion that his movement is solely a politically conservative one, Kimball gave examples of critiques of multiculturalism from liberal academics.
Any critics, Kimball said, are met with ferocious opposition from multiculturalists. "Tolerance is reserved exclusively for those that subscribe to one's ideology," he said.
Kimball said multiculturalism's "common cause and common vocabulary" provide an umbrella for a wide variety of radical branches of study, from race and gender studies to queer theory.
Multiculturalism's heightened presence in academia has lowered the quality of higher education, Kimball said, because students no longer read the books essential to understanding Western civilization.
"The effect [of multiculturalism] is to impoverish, not enhance, our experience," Kimball said.
He suggested that students pursuing a liberal arts education should read the classics of Western culture and should avoid "deconstructing" these books for political motives.
"One should look to the past, not to the streets, for the substance of a liberal education," he said.
When asked if he believed that multiculturalism would soon fall out of style with academics, he responded, "I think it's going to be a long road.... The power of television, rock music [and] pop culture is impossible to overestimate."
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