Multiculturalism: Is It the Spell Checker, or Is It Just Me?

Midwest Modern Language Association

Multiculturalism: Is It the Spell Checker, or Is It Just Me?Author(s): George P. CunninghamSource: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 27, No. 1, The Futureof the Profession (Spring, 1994), pp. 70-74Published by: Midwest Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1315060 .

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M ulticulturalism: Is It the Spell Checker,

or Is It Just Me? George P. Cunningham

I've long since taught my spell checker to accept words like interdisciplinarity, oppositionality, post modernism, Africana, my own name, and the names of a variety of scholars with whom I share these terms as part of a common commitment to the intellectual and analytical work that we do. The most recent upgrade of my word processor was shipped with words like feminist, hegemony, and interdisciplinary as acceptable parts of the

public vocabulary. But in this private state of my own refashioned public language, the word multiculturalism always comes back as "unknown" and, of course, potentially "incorrect." Even though I often use the word, I am unsure of the work of this word and not quite sure of the nature of the common project I share with its other users. Nevertheless, like Michelle Wallace (and I suspect many others) "despite my reservations about multiculturalism, I have become a reluctant supporter of it. At the same time it is crucial to its usefulness that we view multiculturalism not as an obdu- rate and unchanging ideological position, but as an opportunity for on-

going critical debate."' I keep letting my spell checker kick the word back as a reminder that the serious debate of investing multiculturalism with meanings is before us.

Interdisciplinarity in its specific expressions - American Studies, Black Studies, Women's Studies, and more recently, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and Cultural Studies - offer terms that are no more clear, but the problem of meaning attached to them is, to my mind, fundamentally different from the ambiguity that is attached to multiculturalism. The ambiguity of

meaning in various interdisciplinary studies is the product of more than two decades of rich internal contestations, debates that have led to vary- ing configurations of people and ideas that shape the still-evolving schools of black studies, women's studies, and interdisciplinary studies in general. As descriptions of cultural and intellectual projects, the names attached to various interdisciplinary studies embody Raymond Williams's assertion that meanings and usages are not purely matters of signification but the result of "important social and historical processes [that] occur within language, in ways which indicate how integral the problems of meanings and of relationships really are."2

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Despite the growing body of work on multiculturalism, the problem of meaning seems less the product of internal contestation than the product of a conflict between those who support it and those who oppose it. Multi- culturalism seems to embrace and include interdisciplinary studies and, further, promises not only a synthesis of the last twenty years of interdisciplinary scholarship, but also a binding of various specific expressions into a common project. However, the search for meaning in multiculturalism neither configures nor sounds like a natural outgrowth of the search for meaning in the various interdisciplinary studies. The discontinuity between the growth of interdisciplinary studies and the emergence of the term multiculturalism is, for me, the locus of a disparity between its future promise and the actual work that term does in the present. My con- cern here is to highlight the quest for meaning in order to examine the difference between multiculturalism's promise and the work that the term does in mediating institutional and structural crises occasioned by the emergence of specific interdisciplinarities in higher education.

Part of that discontinuity between multiculturalism as a term and the specific interdisciplinarities that it promises to embrace lies in the origins of the term itself. I first remember hearing multiculturalism used not in relationship to the curriculum of higher education but in relationship to the possibilities of transforming elementary and secondary education. To be sure, the new knowledge produced in institutions of higher education established the intellectual groundwork for revisions of the elementary and secondary curricula, and all curriculum revisions were simultaneously driven and shaped by the cultural politics of the last three decades. Some of the most active theorists of multiculturalism have come from the field of education in America and England and have focused their attention on the precollege experience. At the heart of that discussion was an emphasis on pedagogy as a way of looking at broad institutional trans- formations, rather than interdisciplinarity as a means of producing new knowledge.

It is not, of course, a bad thing that a term from elementary and secondary pedagogy can migrate into higher education, because such a migration challenges our implicit assumptions that the dissemination of knowledge trickles down from colleges and universities, and from teacher to student. In fact part of the larger force behind the call for multiculturalism centers on slight shift in the intellectual activity of defining the curriculum away from the supply side (teachers and institutions of higher learning) and toward the demand side (students). Not only do our students come to college from far more diverse backgrounds, but they also insist on the integ- rity of their backgrounds. Allan Bloom is not exactly incorrect in arguing that the American students of the 1950s, who were for him, "clean slates

George P. Cunningham 71



unaware of their deeper selves and the world beyond their superficial experience," have been replaced.3 Now many students take for granted the authority of their own experiences. A sense of the politics of identity is already a part of the loss of cultural and intellectual innocence that Bloom laments. At colleges and universities, interdisciplinary studies have most readily answered the call of identity politics, and recently answered that call in a very complex way with ideas of multiple identities, social con- struction, and difference within.

The last twenty years of American academic life has been shaped by far more than a generational shift in scholarship. The new knowledges produced by interdisciplinary studies have strained the coherent relationship between the production of knowledge and the institutional organization of knowledge. The traditionally demarcated departments grouped within the grand divisions of the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences no longer automatically correspond to the sites of intellectual production. Black Studies and Women's Studies joined American Studies in a variety of strategic border crossings in order to constitute new objects of knowledge and, more importantly, new subjects of knowledge. While the national media may joke and at times even sneer at the panels and papers at scholarly conventions and the variety of courses that are being added to the curriculum, for those inside the academy, whether or not they agree with interdisciplinarity, it is difficult to question the sophistication of the interdisciplinary body of work shaped by both traditional theoretical and post-modern modes of inquiry. If one understands that the rapid emergence of Gay and Lesbian Studies and Cultural Studies in the last decade built upon already existing interdisciplinary and theoretical methods, one sees that interdisciplinary inquiry has reached what economists used to call the "take-off point," the point at which an economy had attained suffi- cient infrastructural sophistication and depth to make its growth and "mod- ernization" self-sustaining and inevitable.

Intellectually, interdisciplinary studies are no longer merely fiddling at the margins of the traditional disciplines, but its intellectual sophistication is matched by a corresponding infrastructural marginalization. What does it mean that a significant portion of the most necessary and influential scholarly work of the last three decades has been produced at the margins of the traditional disciplines? What does it mean that the basic organiza- tional governing units of American colleges and universities no longer coherently correspond to the business of producing knowledge? What does it mean to students and faculty members that the knowledge that is often the most meaningful to them is produced in self-conscious and methodologically articulated opposition to the structural organization of the institution? At least a part of the answers to these questions is an insti-

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tutional crisis of legitimacy. Another part of the answers to these questions is a structural crisis in higher education.

Multiculturalism represents and mediates this crisis. But I would argue that in representing it, the term multiculturalism simultaneously holds forth the promise of resolution while serving to forestall that resolution. Indeed, the term multiculturalism offers everybody involved the pleasure of repetition. The very newness of the term invites us to go back to the glory days of the struggle. Both those who favor multiculturalism and those who oppose it can relive the struggle that characterized the early days of Black Studies and Feminist Studies. The pleasure of oppositionality can substitute for the more complex and fragmenting experience of mov- ing into "government," of normalizing and institutionalizing interdisciplinary studies. As in national politics, it is easiest to run against Washington, so too in academia, it is more comfortable to celebrate the marginal. At the same time, for those who oppose multiculturalism, the newness of the term is an invitation to once again raise the question of legitimacy about areas that have already made significant and probably irreversible mark- ings on the symbolic order, to ask if we should do what has already been done. This repetition, which is subjectively attractive to both sides, fore- stalls the important question of how interdisciplinarity is going to be institutionalized in American colleges and universities.

The deployment of the term multiculturalism in the current discussions also allows institutions and their administrators to slice their budlget pie at the same old angles. The types of knowledge that are produced through interdisciplinary inquiry is absolutely essential not only to the day-to-day curriculum but also to the public face of the college. The sign "multiculturalism" attached to a research center, integrated into a mission statement, highlighted in an institutional development plan signals the institution's responsiveness to the demands of a fragmented society and reassures all that higher education can still offer a model for the harmonious recon- struction of civil discourses. But because of the disparity between the symbolic and infrastructural place of interdisciplinarity, the academy does not have to allocate the same type of resources to interdisciplinary inquiry as it does to the disciplinary inquiry.

Programs, institutes, research centers, faculty discussion groups, and ad hoc committees that provide the basic site of origins for interdisciplinary inquiry in most cases exist without the bargaining power or other perqui- sites of departments and divisions. They are most often funded through discretionary funds and soft monies rather than being considered funda- mental line-budget items. In some cases, outside funding becomes one of the main means of support for sustaining the structures of interdisciplinarity.

George P. Cunningham 73



It would be unfair to argue that the extra input of labor and love that has characterized interdisciplinary endeavor is totally unwarranted. The extra investment of time and energy that faculty members devote to creating alternative ways of looking at things will always be an important part of the continuing revitalization of the institutional life of higher education. But at some point experiments succeed or fail in their promise. I am arguing that interdisciplinary studies, in their specific expressions, are at the point where they can be judged, where institutions should be making decisions about the place of these sites of intellectual production in the overall governance and budgets of the institutions, and that interdisciplinary structures need to be institutionalized with a regularized voice in appointments, promotions, tenure, release time, etc. Not to make those kinds of decisions, I argue, turns the commitment of a large number of individual faculty members into the equivalent of surplus labor that is appropriated by the institution to meet its basic needs. Institutionalization need not necessarily mean departmentalization, although in some cases it clearly should. Rather, institutionalization means a questioning of departmentalization that looks toward a structurally "normalized" sharing in the resources and decision-making powers of the institution. As we are work- ing to find a meaning for multiculturalism, both the intellectual and the institutional questions must be asked. The term holds the promise of mov- ing forward the processes of recreating higher education for the twenty- first century, but it is important that we think about multiculturalism not as a new project but as an the opportunity to pose questions about institutionalizing the last twenty years of growth in interdisciplinary studies. How do we bring in line institutional divisions of the production of knowledge with the actual forums in which a significant part of knowledge is being produced?

Brooklyn College (CUNY)

Notes

1. Michelle Wallace, "Multiculturalism and Oppositionality," Between Borders: Peda- gogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies, eds., Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren (New York: Routledge, 1994) 182.

2. Raymond Williams, Key Words: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (rev. ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1983) 22. 3. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Touchstone Books, 1987) 47.

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Multiculturalism: Is It the Spell Checker, or Is It Just Me?