“Ways of thinking,” or, the curriculum without content

Abstract

9. favorite, The Destruction of Black Civilization (1974), in explaining why he wrote that book as fitting in this tradition. But the problem with this view is its insistence that the white university is merely a reflection of the society in which it operates. This sort of two-bit Marxism does great disservice to understanding the complex roles of both validating a society's values-which are always in flux, and thus always a bit difficult to pin down-and criticizing them that a university or virtually any other institution is performing. The dilemma of the black scholar can be summed up in this way: in writing about when he went to Fisk University from the integrated environment of his hometown of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, DuBois wrote: '% new loyalty and allegiance replaced my Americanism: hence-forward I was a Negro. But when he went to Europe, and freely mixed with whites, DuBois wrote: this unhampered social intermingling with Europeans of education and manners, 1 emerged from the extremes of my racial provincialism. I became more human. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Campus Life: Uncle~graduate Cultures From the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: I~aopf, 1987), 82-97 et passim. Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America. A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (New York: Sagamore Press, 1957), 1-6.