By Max Goldberg
Gargoyle senior editor
Posted Sunday, April 23, 2006, The OG, opinions

Last week I participated the Spring General Meeting of the Parent-Faculty Organization. The topic of the meeting was how we can all coexist in Uni's multicultural and multi-ideological environment. I was one member of a five-member panel that represented different views across the school, from conservative Christianity to advocacy of more Asian literature programs.

I had done very little preparation for my remarks. In fact, all of my notes consisted of pink marker on a ripped paper tablecloth from The Bread Company. My main point was similar to one I stated almost two years ago in a column titled “Ideological Intolerance at Uni.” I called for an end to the intolerance of political beliefs other than the accepted liberal norms of Uni.

I wasn't entirely proud of my performance during the speech. I had trouble looking at the audience because I was so nervous, and I ended up generating a sympathetic response from the audience rather than generating the thought that I had hoped to create about listening to new ideas.

Not only was I upset with my own failure to communicate my message, but I was also worried about the message of the meeting. I saw that many parents were trying to divide the curriculum, especially of English, to cater to more ethnic groups.

I do not think that it would be feasible to include a separate semester-long course for every single different group or culture, and I do not think that parents who were lobbying for specific courses would care at all about the courses that parents representing other groups wanted.

In the end, I felt as if we were more divided and further away from a solution or compromise than ever. I think that instead of looking at how we can separate people into different ethnic or cultural groups through teaching about each group as if it existed in a vacuum, we should look for common ground.

I personally believe that shared interests can be found in the canon of Western literature. In these texts we can find many universal themes that all humans share, rather than breaking up ideas by ethnic lines.

Before I am accused of furthering Eurocentricism and colonialism, I would like to point out that the idea of multiculturalism itself arose from the Western intellectual tradition. In fact, without the Western ideas that arose from Renaissance thought, modern liberalism would not exist as we know it, and it is a distinct possibility that it may never have come to be at all.

Until we can come up with a feasible plan for incorporating multicultural values into our curriculum, we need to evaluate whether or not it is possible to accommodate the interests of so many groups that are all struggling to the top for cultural visibility, and whether we want to place multiculturalism as a priority over human values that we can all understand and to which we can all relate.