But now, it's over!
Over, do you hear?
Of course, at the moment
You're still stronger than I am.
But I don't give a damn for your power
or for your dogs or your police or your inventions!
And do you know why?
It's because I know I'll get you!…
And you lied to me so much,
about the world, about yourself,
that you ended up by imposing on me
an image of myself:
underdeveloped, in your words, incompetent,
that's how you made me see myself!
And I loath that image…and it's false!…
And I know that one day my bare fist, just that, will be enough to crush your world. The old world is falling apart!
And by the way…you have a chance to get it over with: you can fuck off.
You can go back to Europe. But in a pig's eye you will!
I'm sure you won't leave. You make me laugh with your “mission”!
Your “vocation”!
Your vocation is to give me shit.
And that's why you'll stay…just like those guys who founded the colonies
and who now can't live anywhere else.
You're just an old colonial addict, that's what you are!26
Cesaire's tempestuous diatribe has many targets, not the least of which is Shakespeare himself. According to Cesaire (and CIV more generally), Shakespeare portrayed the relations between Europe and the New World from a distorted “white, male, European” perspective that did not sufficiently consider the deprivations of New World peoples—hence Shakespeare's mistaken portrayal of Caliban as a “monster” and of Prospero as a benevolent protagonist. With a gnosis that Shakespeare lacked, Cesaire is able to correct the distortion and offer a true account of the relation between “colonizer” and “colonized.” In Cesaire's inverted drama, Caliban becomes the revolutionary hero, while Prospero is the vile oppressor. In the process of this refutation, Cesaire simultaneously seeks to diminish Shakespeare's status as a great writer: The Tempest is reduced from a universal text, addressing questions that are of relevance in all places and times, to a case study of 16th-century British provincialism. Aime Cesaire is killing two birds with one book—Western ethnocentrism and transcultural universalism.
Whatever one may think of the literary merits of Cesaire's work or the revolutionary politics advocated therein, as a Shakespearean critic he leaves something to be desired. The crux of his problem is the same as that of Stanford's CIV advocates: Committed as they are to a framework of historicist relativism, they cannot even imagine that Shakespeare might be dealing with issues that transcend the boundaries of Elizabethan England. And so they read The Tempest as a (biased) reflection on the narrow political questions of that distant era. But this interpretation is almost certainly not the way Shakespeare conceived of his endeavor, and any serious criticism of Shakespeare's work should begin with a more careful study of the universal book Shakespeare thought he had written.
In particular, even though The Tempest draws upon reports of the New World discovered by European explorers, it is meant to be more than a meditation upon the enlightenment of not-so noble savages. Even if one concedes (to Cesaire and the CIV instructors) that questions concerning the liberation of Caliban are of central importance, then one should begin by looking at the problems with such a liberation, as described by Shakespeare. Consider the words of Caliban (in Shakespeare's original) as he chants his desire to be free:
No more dams I'll make for fish,
Nor fetch in firing
At requiring,
Nor scrape trenchering, nor wash dish.
‘Ban, ‘Ban, Ca-Caliban
Has a new master, get a new man.
Freedom, high-day! high-day, freedom! freedom,
high-day, freedom!
The words summarize the problem with any “liberation,” naively conceived: How can one be certain that liberation from one particular form of oppression (like collecting wood and washing dishes) will not give way to another, more grotesque and hideous than the first? Caliban's words hint at the relation: He can become “a new man” only by finding “a new master.” In the play, this new master turns out to be Stephano, a drunken butler. Caliban's adulation of this fraudulent savior merely renders his resulting position all the more slavish:
I'll swear upon that bottle [of wine] to be thy true subject,
for the liquor is not earthly….
Hast thou not dropp'd from heaven?…
I'll show thee every fertile inch o’ th’ island;
And I will kiss thy foot. I prithee be my god.
Only Trinculo, the Shakespearean fool, sees through Caliban's delusion:
A most ridiculous monster, to make a wonder of a poor drunkard!
Objectively, Caliban is worse off than before—the degree of subservience is greater, and Stephano is far less worthy than Prospero. But subjectively, Caliban feels like he has achieved a great liberation—for the time being he is rid of Prospero, and that is all about which he cares to reflect. Indeed, as the action unfolds, Caliban even becomes willing to risk his life, gladly following Stephano into battle against Prospero. Only at the very end, when the revolt has failed utterly, does Caliban obtain a measure of insight into the ridiculous nature of his actions:
I'll be wise hereafter,
And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass
Was I to take this drunkard for a god,
And worship this dull fool!
There is no guarantee that Caliban has learned his lesson and will not follow a different “dull fool” should another come along. But for the moment at least, Caliban has recognized that there is no easy formula or chant that will ensure the liberation of the oppressed peoples of the world.
Far from being uniquely primitive, Caliban's last words may represent a degree of enlightenment many critics of the West have yet to reach. Indeed, if one reads Cesaire's text in light of Shakespeare (rather than vice versa), one is left with the impression that Cesaire's interpretation of Shakespeare involves a mistake anticipated and refuted, some 350 years in advance, by Shakespeare himself. If Shakespeare did not enable Caliban's revolt to succeed and a happy ending to follow, then perhaps it was because the Bard believed that revolutionary politics would ultimately prove rather unconvincing. Such an ending might be fitting for a fairy tale or a myth, but it would serve only to fool the credulous.
Instead of being exhausted or rendered irrelevant by the passage of time, The Tempest actually suggests a timely critique of the Stanford crowd that declared, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture's got to go!” Like Caliban with his chant about “freedom,” Stanford's rebels succeeded only in creating another pantheon, filled with a host of new demigods—with names like Rigoberta Menchu and Aime Cesaire—to replace the old. In pursuit of “liberation,” they simply enthroned a new mythology (albeit one of demystification)—but, like Stephano, one much less worthy of adulation. There exists a crucial difference between Caliban's primitivism and Stanford's neoprimitivism, however: Caliban's actions, in a sense, are relatively innocent. Being a savage monster, he really does not know better; he does not have great books (such as The Tempest) available for his edification and would, in any case, be incapable of reading any such books. The same cannot be said for Stanford's humanities faculty.
Rhetoric and Reality
The fallowing of Shakespeare and the cultivation of political chaff were not the result of a mysterious process. This harvest was reaped from seed sown years before, during the long and truculent drive to eliminate the Western Culture program. From the outset, the drive to overhaul the canon and to staff the new classes was politically motivated. The “Hey hey, ho ho” chant was only the best publicized example. Even before that January 1987 march, at a forum in May 1986, history professor Kennell Jackson described the Western Culture protestors as “a kind of underground movement” that was “just beginning t
o explode.”27 Noting that the forum had the characteristics of a “revival meeting,” lecturer Jonathan Reider exulted that “two of my students are up there yelling and screaming.”28
“There have been faculty concerned about this issue from the beginning,” noted anthropology professor James Gibbs, a former dean of undergraduate education. “The process of marshaling support for curricular change is both intellectual and political—and properly so.”29 In the fall of 1987, another series of political protests targeted the Committee on Undergraduate Studies (CUS), a group of key faculty charged with drafting possible legislation for a new freshman requirement. At one such rally, freshman Naomi Martin declared that “we are here to send a message to the CUS that racism in our education will not be tolerated.”30 Chanting “Down with racism, down with Western Culture, up with diversity,” students disrupted the meeting.31 Bill King, president of the Black Student Union, described the purpose of the protest: “[The CUS] was getting a bit timid and we wanted them to be well aware of the dedication to changing the Western Culture program.”32
Vice Provost William Chace was one of the few to express alarm at the politicization of the university: “It's a version of academic populism, and populism is always dangerous for a university.”33 But Mr. King had correctly gauged the faculty's bearing as “timid,” though perhaps not in the sense he had intended.34 The more common reaction to the protestors was one of appeasement, as characterized by CUS chairman Craig Heller, who heralded the same rally as “an enthusiastic expression of interest.”35 The faculty's plaudits belied the fact that the sort of “enthusiasm” expressed by student activists discouraged careful deliberation over the merits and faults of the existing Western Culture program. One professor went so far as to compare the atmosphere on campus to that of Vichy France.36 At the very least, the charges of racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism—often explicit, always implicit, and constantly repeated in protests, classroom discussions, dormitory programs, and the Stanford Daily—discouraged supporters of the existing program from voicing their views.37
By the end of the fall of 1987, the CUS had considered four sets of proposals, each more radical than the one that had come before.38 The final proposal mandated the study of one “non-Western” culture and eviscerated the core reading list of great Western works.39 History professor Paul Seaver euphemistically explained that because of the uproar that had followed the first draft, additional drafts were written that yielded a more “positive” response.40 He was hopeful that the final draft would pass, because he “didn't get the sense of hostility” that had greeted the CUS's earlier work.41 Professor Seaver's optimism was premature: A last-minute protest by the BSU almost derailed the CUS report,42 until the CUS also agreed to hire additional minority and female professors to teach the new classes.43
By the time Vice Provost Chace launched a last-ditch effort in early 1988 to keep part of the core reading list, he was too late to turn the tide of the debate.44 Denouncing the Chace proposal, feminist studies professor Diane Middlebrook wrote that “a vote in favor of retaining a core list is a vote against the spirit of criticism in which the whole review of Western Culture was undertaken.”45 There could be no better summary of the “whole review of Western Culture” that had taken place: Driven by protest, its “spirit” was entirely reluctant to accept even a partial list of the West's great books. By the time the matter came to a vote in Stanford's Faculty Senate in March 1988, Chace's compromise was compromised further: Western Culture would be replaced with a new requirement called “Cultures, Ideas, and Values,” but the new CIV classes would retain six token books from the original core during a “transition year.”46
As the Faculty Senate deliberated, protesters waited outside, ready to disrupt should Stanford's faculty vote the “wrong” way.47 Based on his experiences over the previous year, Professor Seaver voiced apprehension: “If the Senate shoots [the proposal] down, it would be terribly disillusioning. As a University, we would be in trouble.”48 Presumably, the “disillusionment” would be on the part of those activists who had fought for so long and so hard, and the “trouble” would arise because no one knew who they might go after next. The Western Culture debate involved a vital issue, Mr. King had ominously warned, and would “set the tone for the next couple of years in terms of minority relations to the University.”49 But the agitators had little cause for concern. The Faculty Senate approved the so-called “CIV compromise” by an overwhelming margin of 39 to 4.50 Most members of the Faculty Senate did not want to be labelled “racist” or “sexist.” Stanford had received some bad press because of the protests,51 and the administration desired a speedy end to the debate and the public relations problem it posed.
The administration's expedient response to the crisis recalled the late 1960s, when Stanford's faculty caved in to radicals demanding the elimination of the then-required “Western Civilization” course, a precursor of and the model for the Western Culture program established in 1980. As in the 1960s, Stanford's capitulation to protestors would only spark new rebellions, encourage more far-reaching demands, and pave the way for even more abject institutional acquiescence. Both the process and the substance of these demands would significantly alter the nature and climate of the university. The most noticeable of these changes was the disappearing distinction between a political attack and an intellectual attack. To the emerging vanguard of activists, the two were the same. They saw curricular debates as simply another setting in which groups struggled for political advantage. In the years to come, academic reform would be driven less by compelling arguments than by coercive protests.
Even at the time, the expediency of the Stanford administration only created a new public relations crisis because its shameful capitulation was easily recognized for what it was. As the heat from the media spotlight grew more intense, the administration tried to cover its tracks. The administration was not eager for alumni and parents, whose contributions finance the university, to identify the political motivations behind the change from Western Culture to CIV. As the national media spotlighted the curricular battle, Official Stanford launched an aggressive public relations campaign aimed at convincing parents and alumni that the changes were benign, modest, and academically motivated. A signed two-page letter in the fall of 1988 from Dean Junkerman and Thomas Wasow, Dean of Undergraduate Studies, exemplified this effort. “Dear Stanford Parent,” they began the letter:
We hope that a concise insiders’ summary of what happened will serve to allay any misapprehension you may feel from accounts you may have read of what is, in fact, a fairly modest (although imaginative) curricular reform…. The discussion was carried on at an impressively high intellectual level, clearly putting questions of pedagogical principle above any political considerations.52
(emphasis added)
Meanwhile, activists on campus received precisely the opposite message. In a “Statement by the Dean of Undergraduate Studies,” circulated only on campus in the spring of 1988 (just shortly before the letter to parents), Thomas Wasow wrote:
As has been widely reported in the press, Stanford's Faculty Senate voted on March 31, 1988 to make substantial changes in its Western Culture Program; those changes will take effect in the autumn of 1989.53 (emphasis added)
Now, “modest” and “substantial” are relative terms, and it is certainly possible that the same curricular change could be viewed as modest by one observer and substantial by another. But in this case, the same observer described the same change in diametrically opposed ways! Dean Wasow could have believed only one of the statements he wrote. The statement circulated on campus was more likely to be the accurate one, because campus activists (unlike parents scattered across the country) were in a better position to ascertain its veracity. If they believed the changes were merely incremental, protests would have quickly resumed. Needless to say, they did not.
Dean Wasow's double-talk echoed the equivocation of Stanford's president. Throughout the year of protest and intimidation
, Donald Kennedy maintained a strange silence. Earlier, in May 1986, he had voiced his support for change: “I think it should be changed,” he said on campus radio, “and changed in significant ways.”54 He appreciated the “powerful critique” of the Western Culture program, based on “a really impressively sustained effort on the part of a number of students, faculty, and others—over a period I measure at not less than two and a half years, and maybe longer than that—to express serious dissatisfaction, to present alternatives, and to be heard on the matter.”55 President Kennedy did not distinguish between a political attack and an intellectual critique; for him, as for many others, that difference seemed to have collapsed. But by early 1988, he declared that it was not his place to dictate the content of the curriculum, and that such decisions should be left to the faculty. He had “reached no a priori conclusion about what the outcome should be,” and would await the votes of others.56 While washing his hands of the impending decision, President Kennedy said little about the misuse of political force at these academic discussions. Having failed to make the distinction between politics and academics earlier, he was in no position to do so then. Once the change was enacted, however, the president again vigorously defended the new program before the public: “The decision-makers really operated in a very free and a very rational and very constructive environment.”57
On campus, the administration endorsed the efforts of the protestors, if not explicitly, then by tacit approval of inappropriate conduct. Off campus, in order to facilitate fundraising efforts among parents and alumni who supported the popular Western Culture survey, it carefully maintained the image of diligent educational patricians. In the wake of the Western Culture debate, Official Stanford sent Professor Rosaldo to alumni meetings across the country, directing the same eloquence which had galvanized student protestors at reassuring disgruntled donors. Even Vice Provost Chace, stalwart of the core list and critic of academic populism, closed ranks with the new regime, defending substance and process in The Washington Post: “There is a widespread conviction here that a very good course, now modified in reasonable ways, will continue to be taught effectively.”58 In its own diplomatic fashion, the administration was as politically minded as the young protestors. The rejection of academic standards in favor of political goals—raising money, garnering favorable publicity—went to the highest levels of the administration. The resulting loss of intellectual integrity was university wide. The fall of Stanford had begun.
The Diversity Myth Page 5