It’s hard to read this glowing profile of American Studies prof Roosevelt Montas without being convinced that the school’s new point-man on Core reform is literally the future of American higher education. Montas has his work cut out for him, but if successful there’s a good chance he’ll go down as the man who saved the Core Curriculum in an age of hunger strikes and rampant cultural relativism:
The university announced it would spend $50 million on a project to enhance the core curriculum’s multicultural offerings last fall, shortly after students conducted a week-long hunger strike to protest the weakness of the classes. Now Columbia is assigning a young professor of Western civilization, Roosevelt Montas, 34, to direct the effort.
And later:
What will change is the offerings on the list of major cultures classes that can count toward Core credits. Mr. Montas’s job will be to work with faculty and administrators to create a set of more rigorous, seminar-style classes for that requirement, he said.
No sense here of what will really “change,” especially since expanding the Major Cultures lists is too superficial to even count as “reform.” Although we don’t get a sense of Montas’s more ambitious, long-term plans, the article reaches a troubling conclusion as to what saving the Core Curriculum actually means–indeed, more cynical readers of this article will note that Montas-style intellectual pluralism is being equated with indoctrination into white-bred western modes of though.
Now I’m sure that’s notwhat Mantas has in mind. From the looks of it, he’s all abou confrontation: smashing the universality of the western cannon straight into the socio-cultural complexities of the multi-cultural modern world, following a tack that denies Plato cliched ”dead white man” status without resorting to mindless worship of “the cannon.” Or mindless worship of Foucault or Gayatri Spivak, for that matter.
Montas’s job is to translate that into a curriculum that will satisfy pro-Core partisans without totally alienating their umm, more self-depriving classmates. Let’s see what he can do.