Patrick Brennan: Harvard Doesn't Need "Ethnic Studies," Says Contributions of Blacks of No Importance to College Education

Harvard University's decision to expand "Ethnic Studies" seen as foolish by windbag Patrick T. Brennan, who says contributions by African Americans have no place in a college curriculum.

Harvard University is expanding its curriculum, specifically ethnic studies. Well, Patrick T. Brennan thinks its a foolish move. To paint Africa as insignificant to history is an affront and a disgrace to Harvard and everything it stands for. Here's an excerpt of his highly flawed argument:

When the University agrees that its curriculum needs to change to address “the growing diversity of our campus” or any other imaginary concern of its students, it opens itself up to politically motivated efforts like ethnic studies. Tragically, worthwhile academic subjects like Egyptology have also been subsumed into the larger effort of emphasizing diversity and ascribing significance to the insignificant, as demonstrated by Professor Christopher P. Jones’s comments that “Egypt is a major African civilization,” and that “it is very important that Africa should be a part of what everyone thinks about the modern world.”

Egypt is a worthwhile subject not because it is an African civilization, but because it represents an incredibly sophisticated and important ancient civilization that happens to be African—let alone the fact that the Egyptians pharaohs, with the exception of 75 years of Nubian rule, were about as “African” as Ian Smith. Harvard should have an Egyptology department, or at least devote some of its resources to the study of a civilization which has had such profound influence on the world. It need not offer a course on African civilizations if there is none worthy of study. The progressive priorities of Harvard’s curriculum usually do not coincide, however, with the promotion of meaningful areas of study.

Ethnic studies is a good example of an academic subject entirely driven by a leftist political agenda. While it is not absurd to suggest that there are some worthwhile topics that fall under the heading of “ethnic studies,” the area is certainly not important enough to merit a secondary field. The Undergraduate Council’s original proposal for the field states that it will examine “how people of color in the United States have historically experienced social and political institutions and how, as growing populations, they will continue to encounter life in the United States.”

Americans of color have undoubtedly done some things of note, but their “encounters” and “experiences” are not of paramount importance to a university education. The ethnic studies movement is motivated by an attempt to direct more attention to a topic that deserves no more attention than it already gets, and probably a good deal less. Other similarly useless departments, like Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality serve similar purposes—no one would deny that Macbeth’s wife is an interesting study in the construction of femininity, but such occasional instances of relevance do not justify an entire academic field.

Curricula ought to be naturally conservative rather than progressive. The necessary elements of an educated man’s curriculum have not changed much over two thousand years of Western education—the Trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the scientific Quadrivium of geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy should still be the basic foundations of education. It is quite difficult for academia to justify an attempt to free the sciences from a “Eurocentric” perspective, given that, with rare exceptions like the Abbasid Caliphate, little scientific and mathematical thought of consequence has occurred outside the Western world. Ironically, the first man to delineate officially the seven liberal arts, Martianus Capella, was from Roman Africa; he apparently did not feel his contributions to the world should be more or less important because of his Berber provenance. Source: Harvard Salient

According to Brennan, we should just ignore the contribution of Africa to civilization as we know it. Really? I always thought people of African descent played a role in history and there's absolutely nothing wrong with educating our young people about the contributions of all ethnic backgrounds. He also states that African Americans have made no contributions worth teaching in an institution of higher learning. Wrong on all counts. This piece amounts to ranting by a narrow-minded conservative windbag.