New York Times book editor Richard Bernstein said in a speech last night that undergraduates are not old enough to dictate to administrators what types of courses they should take and what materials those courses should include.
"The pendulum has swung too far into the power of youth and the wisdom of age has been de-legitimized," Bernstein said in a speech titled "Should Dartmouth Have a Gay and Lesbian Studies Course? How Multiculturalism Threatens Western Intellectual Life."
"A liberal education is not a therapeutic matter -- it is not a feel-good process," he said to about 100 people in Dartmouth Hall.
Bernstein said the danger in courses such as the proposed Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Studies course to be offered at the College Winter term is that they tend to over-emphasize the positive aspects of the subject matter.
"No aspect of the human experience is not a legitimate realm of scholarship and study," Bernstein said. "But will [the course] be, as many of these courses are, a kind of exercise in political solidarity?"
Bernstein used several examples to illustrate what he considers to be the "sham" of multiculturlaism, and how it can detract from education.
He discussed the Hans Christian Andersen School for Many Voices, an elementary school in Minneapolis, Minn. where he said a curriculum of "multicultural, gender-fair, disability-aware pedagogy" is practiced.
According to Bernstein, who interviewed teachers and students at the school, many of the students did not know who George Washington was and were taught that Eli Whitney was the man "who stole the cotton gin from the woman who invented it but failed to patent it."
"The goal [of the school] is to eliminate as many white men from the curriculum as possible," Bernstein said.
Bernstein said students at the school were forced to classify themselves according to their cultural backgrounds. "The stress on difference masks the common American culture most of us share," he said.
Bernstein also pointed to a recent controversy at Stanford University where the school dropped its year-long Western civilization course requirement in favor of " 'Culture, Ideas and Values,' focusing on women, minorities and people of color."
Bernstein said it is valuable to study foreign cultures but students should have a "firm grounding in the basics" before undertaking these types of courses.
Bernstein also said he suspects these courses are politically motivated. "I think these are courses designed by faculty 99 percent of which vote Democratic ... and make choices that comfort their political view of the world," he said.
He responded to the marching theme of the Stanford students who supported the multicultural requirement, "Hey hey ho ho, Western civilization has got to go."
"I have never heard of a political movement whose basic premise is to trash your own culture," he said. "The serious study of other cultures is essentially a Western creation."
According to Bernstein, every other country tries to create its own national culture.
"I think the Western liberal idea has triumphed," he said. "Everybody else in the world has adopted it -- why shouldn't we?"
Bernstein, who studied Chinese culture at Harvard University and spent three years as the Times bureau chief in Beijing, said he does not consider himself a conservative.
The speech was sponsored by the Ernest Martin Hopkins Institute and the Dartmouth Speakers Union.
