Cultural Property and Student identity in the Multicultural Classroom

Abstract

Early in my stint as chair of English department at my current school, I initiated process of getting approval for a new general education literature course on Inklings, group of Anglo-Catholic British writers dominated by two towers of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Given popularity of these two writers with our overwhelmingly Christian student body, au courant nature of course given Peter Jackson's blockbuster film trilogy, and strong desire of one of our faculty to teach such a course, it seemed to me to be a worthwhile addition to range of courses undergraduates could take to fulfill literature requirements in general education curriculum. Messiah College, where I chair, is a relatively small (3000 students) college of the liberal and arts and sciences, which identifies itself as a Christian institution of higher education. Despite these particularities, school has participated in many of changes that have been affecting academe across country: a gradually diversifying student body; competition between traditional liberal arts and a more applied or practical curriculum; and systematic development of policy and procedure, fundraising, and administrative layering that has given colleges everywhere an increasingly corporate character. (1) Rationales for curriculum here, as elsewhere, strike one as a mixture of old-style idealism and business-like pragmatism. At Messiah, courses in literature have to comply with several parameters in order to be considered a part of general education curriculum, parameters that alternately seem to speak to practical pedagogical issues or offer somewhat generic blandishments about nature of educating a well-rounded individual: they cannot require prerequisites, they must expose students to work of writers, etc. At that time, one parameter also called for classes through which students could develop a greater understanding of their culture. In developing rationale for adding course, I found this last parameter vexing. Our institution has undergone some significant demographic change over past seven years, and, while our cultural diversity quite literally pales in comparison to most state colleges or elite private colleges in country, nearly eleven percent of our student body who come from non-white ethnic groups or from overseas represent a sea change from two or three per cent of a decade ago. In this respect, while still overwhelmingly white, we are more diverse in terms of race and ethnicity than vast majority of private colleges that claim a specifically Christian identity, and we are more diverse than most other private colleges of any type in our geographical location in Central Pennsylvania. Students of color have strengthened own voices, and, with some encouragement from administration, there have been new calls for celebration and affirmation of multicultural diversity. New policy and procedure documents and college-wide identity statements declare our commitment to antiracist and multicultural education, and a five-year plan states specific plans for establishing this identity. Moreover, Messiah College as a whole springs from a tradition rooted deeply in Dutch and German peace churches (Brethren in Christ, Mennonite, and so forth), churches with an emphasis on peace and social justice, and, incidentally, with a fairly strong residual sense of ethnic identity. The administration and faculty of college often defines college as at odds with, and has struggled to avoid being swallowed up by, what is seen as a dominant American religious, cultural, and political ethos associated with conservative white evangelicalism, what pundits euphemistically call Religious Right. Nevertheless, our student body is drawn primarily from precisely that form of conservative white Christianity. Finally, figuring out what their could really be referring to concerned me in that I am a scholar and teacher of multiethnic literature and co-chairperson of campus committee dedicated to promoting an antiracist and multicultural identity in classroom and in culture of college as a whole. …