How Multiculturalism Transformed My College

[Geee]

Front Page Magazine:

The historian Polybius famously observed that empires deteriorate either internally or from without. In some cases, however, they fall apart in both ways. This latter situation applies to American higher education, which has succumbed to numerous corrupting influences all at the same time.

 

 

To make my point, I’ll discuss the transformation that befell the college where I was employed between 1989 and 2011. Elizabethtown College, located in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was for most of its history a sleepy Anabaptist college, affiliated with the Church of the Brethren. When the college offered me a position as a full professor, I accepted, welcoming the opportunity to live in a charming setting and to teach at a socially traditional college.

 

I also imagined that I would be able to converse with a scholarly community, but my teaching experience at Elizabethtown, with a few notable exceptions, was far from stimulating. Most of the students didn’t seem eager to learn and when given the chance, were happy to disparage me and other equally demanding professors on the compulsory “evals.” Worse than the hostility of the disengaged students was the reaction of antiwar faculty colleagues who disliked my philosophy, despite my own reservations about a militantly interventionist foreign policy. Attempts at civil debate with them proved futile.