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Campus Wars: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference, edited by John Arthur and Amy Shapiro. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. 279 pp. $17.95, paper.
Reviewed by Cynthia Lopez Elwell, Center for Educational Studies, The Claremont Graduate School.
The unfolding evolution of America's colleges and universities is an important and controversial process, and it is taking place before our very eyes. Depending on one's attachment to the academy in its current stage of mutation, the inevitability of this change is seen as an affront or an exciting challenge. Having assembled on the ideological battlefield an army of essayists who add their own volleys to the skirmishes surrounding this evolution, Arthur and Shapiro's Campus Wars: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference evokes the sense of an impending Armageddon.
In their introduction, the editors do a competent job of articulating the aims of their book and defining the issues they have chosen to address as particularly relevant to campus life. As they indicate, the five topics selected are drawn from the many complex issues confront university faculty, administrators, and students. The first of these, "Multiculturalism and the College Curriculum," is discussed in the lead section, which presents essays by Allan Bloom, Barry Sarchett, John Searle, Stanley Fish, and Amy Gutman, who examine the issues surrounding the expansion of the traditional university curriculum, specifically the Western literary canon. As might be expected, Bloom and Searle view the changing curriculum as an attack on and rejection of the truths they view as the cornerstone of Western rationalistic tradition. Fish and Sarchett counter with personal accounts of the inevitable and positive aspects represented by the evolving curriculum.
Though these four essays are related because they speak to the nature of change, they do not...