Iwas involved in a good many campus and culture wars for almost a decade, in the late Eighties and early Nineties when I was at Stanford. I started a conservative student newspaper, The Stanford Review, back in 1987. Four years is an eternity in a college context, but we managed to keep the paper going for all that and more—it’s still intact, thirty-five years old or so at this point. Of course there was ample craziness and silliness and stupidity and wickedness on the college campus for us to report on.
Some of that craziness, however, had a much greater and more cosmic resonance. One of the very big debates at Stanford in the late Eighties was about the “Western Culture” course. This was a sort of formational program, a year-long course all Stanford freshmen were required to take. Jesse Jackson led a protest at Stanford with the famous chant, Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture’s got to go. This was a commentary on the course and the particular books studied, but then also on the entire civilization covered by the course—somehow a very local and a very universal thing at the same time.
I thought I might start with a reading from the book that David O. Sacks and I wrote a few years after this, The Diversity Myth (1995). The first chapter talks about the abandonment of the great books at Stanford and describes one of the titles chosen to replace them in the wake of the protests. It is a play by Aimé Césaire called A Tempest, a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in which Caliban becomes a kind of revolutionary hero. The magician Prospero is portrayed as an evil imperialist. The book culminates in a tirade by Caliban, and I’d like to read a few lines because I think it captures the temper of those times, which seem at once like a long, long time ago and not even yesterday: “And I know that one day my bare fist, just that, will be/ enough to crush your world. The old world is falling apart!// And by the way . . . you have a chance to get it over with: you can fuck off.”