“He’s still European,” said the young man.
I fell silent for a moment—stunned.
The situation was this: I was at Providence College, where I had taught for 27 years, most of them happy. But the college had allowed its signature program, what had been a four semester, 20-credit course in the development of Western Civilization once required of all freshmen and sophomores, to be severely curtailed—shrunk in time and in the subjects we could cover. But that was not enough for professors who hated that there was such a course. One of them, who to my knowledge never sat in on a single class, likened it to “cultural genocide.”
So I wrote in a Catholic magazine to defend the course, and called out its critics for their incoherence. When you are teaching material spanning 4,000 years, four or five disciplines, and several continents, coming from about 20 different cultures, with literature written originally in Babylonian, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Italian, English, French, Spanish, German, and any of a number of other languages for modern works, it is a little galling to hear that you are culturally “narrow,” and from people who teach only works written in English about what happened in New Jersey last week. About a hundred students responded with an angry public protest against me, spurred on by a couple of politically minded colleagues. The young man had taken part in it.
I sought him out to talk to him and to ask him to remain in our section of the course. I had no ill will against him. He was from Colombia, and was a native speaker of Spanish. Learning other languages is one of my happiest pastimes, and whenever I have a student from a part of the world where I’ve never been, I like to ask about what it is like to live there: the kinds of trees and grasses, the birds and wild animals, the plains and the mountains, the weather, the roads, the customs of the people. I have always been this way, and I take for granted that most people are the same, though maybe not with the passion for languages. So I told the student that we would be reading some of the literature of Spain’s golden age—Life is a Dream, by her greatest playwright, Pedro Calderon.
“He’s still European,” the student replied.
I could have shot back, “Listen, young man, Spanish is your native tongue, not mine, and if you’re not interested in the Shakespeare of your own language, so much the worse for you.” I didn’t, because I felt sorry for him. He was in chains.
[Read It All]
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(2) I Shouldn’t Be Forced Into Politics To Play College Sports
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(5) Largest teachers union says critical race theory is ‘reasonable and appropriate’ for kids
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