Universities have been ceding ground to anti-Western activists for
decades now (remember Jesse Jackson leading chants of “Hey ho, hey ho, Western
civ has got to go” at Stanford back in the ‘80s?). So it should come as no
surprise that Yale recently announced it would grant yet another concession to
multiculturalist students who demand that diversity of skin color replace the oppressiveness
and irrelevance of Dead White Males: this spring will see the end of one of the
school’s previously most popular classes, a survey course called
“Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present."
According to the Yale
Daily News blog, in its final iteration the course will shift from transmitting to
students a greater appreciation of their cultural heritage, to a more “woke”
focus on subverting the canon of Western art itself. The course’s instructor, art
history department chair Tim Barringer, has stated that the class will still
cover Western art chronologically from 1300 to the present, but he intends to emphasize
that other regions, genres and traditions are as “equally deserving of study”
as Western art, because according it any special reverence is “problematic.”
As we are all reminded daily now in every cultural
arena from academia to Hollywood, anything Western is “problematic” (to put it
politely) because multiculturalist doctrine deems that all cultures must be
revered equally – except for Western culture which, because of its association
with the toxic privilege of “whiteness,” must be denigrated, deconstructed, and
dismantled to heal the nonwhite victims of its oppression and exploitation. Thus,
we must be careful not to elevate the great works of the greatest artists in
world history over other, “equally deserving” genres and traditions.
In a syllabus note to potential students,
Barringer wrote that the emphasis would be on the relationship between European
art and other world traditions. That is a fair topic for study, considering
that Western artists have occasionally been influenced by other traditions:
Picasso and African masks, for example (although such influence now would be
devalued as “cultural appropriation,” another racist concept concocted by the postmodern
and/or Marxist left). But the class also, according to Barringer, will consider
art in relation to – wait for it – “questions of gender, class and ‘race’” and will
discuss its relationship to Western capitalism. In other words, immersing
ourselves in the transcendence and beauty that literally define great art and touch
our common humanity must take a back seat to imposing our earthbound
interpretations of how art divides us. Climate change also will be a “key theme.”
Of course it will, because all intellectual streams now must feed into the river
of today’s acceptable groupthink.
This change in the History of Art Department
follows the Yale English Department’s decision in 2017 to “decolonize” its
degree requirements after students presented a petition demanding that a
survey course called “Major English Poets be abolished, and that the
pre-1800/1900 requirements be refocused to deliberately include literatures
relating to gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and ethnicity.” Yale caved then
as well, making the course introducing English majors to such luminaries as Shakespeare,
Chaucer, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, and Eliot “optional.” Meanwhile students
can choose from such other
options as “Black and Indigenous Ecologies,” “The Politics of Museums,” and
“U.S. Afro-Latinx Literatures.”
Like far too many other universities, Yale quite
simply has given students who have traded any sense of intellectual humility
for belligerent activism too much power to determine the direction of their own
edification. As the Yale Daily News notes, the art
history major has adapted to changes “suggested” by students pushing to
increase minority and female representation. The Director of Undergraduate
Studies Marisa Bass noted, for example, that students have prompted the
creation of art history courses like “Global Decorative Arts” and “The Politics
of Representation.” She didn’t say whether there would be room in one of those
courses for a truly notable “global decorative art” such as the breathtaking genius
of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings (pictured above). Presumably, that
would be “problematic” because Michelangelo is not representative of the
correct skin color and genitalia that some students have declared must be
prioritized.
There is nothing wrong with a history of world
art survey course that examines art from all over the world. But the
de-emphasis of Western art at a major university in a course whose time frame begins
with the European Renaissance, and the administrative kowtowing to a very vocal
minority of politicized students, is an intentional devaluation of our own
civilizational achievements and does a disservice to students who need to be roused
from the anti-Western indoctrination they are subjected to now from
kindergarten onward. Teaching that our own culture has a “problematic” history
while uncritically revering every other tradition is anti-intellectual,
bigoted, and self-loathing. And downgrading our appreciation for and comprehension
of great art to examining it in terms of its racial and class dynamics is
reductionist and divisive.
It's time for our universities to help make
Western civilization great again.
From FrontPage Mag, 1/26/20
