| Summary: | November 20,1992 Opinion 5 Underlying elitism evident at Concordia Guest Column Gordon "Yes, (as a Christian) I would give the Devil the full protection of the law, but for my own safety's sake". -- Sir Thomas More Perhaps it should not be too much of a surprise of the negative reaction to the profile on Ms. Rothman's practice and advocacy of witchcraft as belief and form • of knowledge. Indeed, it could have been much more censurable and invective. The surprising thing was illustrated by the smug intellectualism by that "Gang of Nine," as I choose to call them, those professors and others who took it upon themselves to censor the open access of information by taking on the mantle of rationality and objectivism for The Concordians decision to run the piece about witchcraft a couple of weeks ago. While the misgivings they may have may be heartfelt and sincere, it is yet another subtle reminder of everything that is wrong about this campus. And a careful glance at some of the other articles -- the editorial about the disparity between theoretical "diversity" vs. real action, the reaction to the witchcraft article, the reaction to the reaction by Rob Kimm and even the innocent piece about the first Native American Faculty Scholar -- should alert the sensitive reader that they are in a strangely ironic sense, interconnected and, surfacing as signifierand the signified, highlight certain immutable facts about the underlying sense of frustration of the student population and the obsession for elitism at Concordia. In the modern consciousness, the fear of witchcraft stems from, in my opinion, an entirely different kind of fear; from its very first appearance witchcraft was associated by the leaders of the Inquisition, whether or not they actually practice the black arts, with people who very often were either politically agitating or just socially deviating from the norm such as the mentally handicapped or persons suffering from neurosis or psychosis. Just as in the early relations between Native American/Anglo-American contact, it represented a mystery and so was a socio-political threat to the class distinctions of the dominant culture that economically enabled it to build its imperialism and nationalistic concerns around just such distinctions. Today, the first inkling that one should have that a similar cultural imperialism and racism is being advocated is when buzzwords like "objectivity" are thrown around; it is the foundational concept of the Western liberal tradition of which rationalist narratives of the knowing subject, full of benevolence, welcomes only those who accept the Western interpretation of fact in experience in order that they too may be "liberated" and begin to inhabit a technologically superior world controlled and ordered, of course, by an elitist'class of the "best and brightest" of social engineers; from Plato to our own time this has always been the dream of Western philosophy. Therefore truth, in the Western tradition is constructed as a matter of a validating structure, and is thus more a case of psychic need than intellectual understanding and thereby works more as a politicizing structure, not intellectual one, as the way is tread through a Cartesian journey that would force God to fill in all of the epistemologicai gaps in the ambiguity of experience by dichotomizing the world into atomistic bits and pieces. This in turn creates a great deal of confusion and misinterpretation when non- Western cultures attempt to deal with Anglo society whether on a cognitive or personal level as ancient peoples rarely conceptualized their thought or language to reflect the same highly abstractualized other-worldly sense of an All-Eternal. Experience, of course, reveals this other side of the individual not as collectivity which leads to macrological solutions, but the real individual predicated by its subjective states caught within the textuality of historical or ideological forces. This, the fear of the loss of control, it seems to me, is what moves cultural imperialism and what moves certain of our faculty, however innocently or unconsciously, to preserve only those forms of knowing and knowledge preset in literature and philosophy which are able to lay claim to being canonical through the objectivist standard of the Western critique. In other words, those forms that are empiricist, rational, Anglo-Celtic and male-dominated. Scientific rationality, the unification of knowledge, and the emancipation of humanity are all the domain of a phallocentric mode of cognition of a use-value critique of society which actively works to deny, in its Eurocentric cultural agenda of elitism, any de-conslructive attempt of finding metaphysical truth in the marginality of the peripheral, the subject where you find the 'really real' as Kant termed it, because it states it in terms of a non-collective subjectivity that is at best only wimpishly theoretical, i.e. feminine, and at worst does not climax its thought to a rousing crescendo. It is also why in discussions of post-modern philosophies like feminist theory or structuralism/post-slructuralism one gets in the Student Lecture series, for example, one can detect a certain amount of patriarchialization in the argument and presentation of the interpretative sciences of literature, philosophy and the arts, so that it too may have the solid and/or political import. This mode of consciousness even infiltrates something as innocent as the profile of Concordia's first Native American Faculty Scholar; see now that the positive message that Native Americans have the ability to weave through the many obstacles white society places on everyone has to be balanced against the more ominous influence of patriarchialization that when persons of color do succeed in the white world it is only because of the adopting of the "correct and rational" Library committee proposal remains unacknowledged posture to the world, while the others are failures because they have not. That is ominous because it is so comforting to the dominant culture: it says that there really isn't anything wrong with the American institutions at all; it is the message to non-whites that "if you can weave and swerve your way through all the obstacles that the white sea of higher education or other corporate structures can put before you, then you too are worthy, are a real entity and not like the non-person you were before you attempted to follow those archaic nativist values, beliefs and traditions to discern truth and reality." Within any discourse of power the distinction (that is, the dismissal) of - alternate forms of knowledge and narrativity, in Western conceptualizations of truth, does not promote diversity nor, ironically enough, will it ever be able to fulfill the intellectual program of a free-flowing exchange of ideas across cultures and belief systems that rational inquiry is supposed to promote but simply leave a void at the long end of its chain of cause and effect that can only be filled by a racial and/or racist cultural consciousness of truth. All of those four articles point to some disturbing underlying crisis of a feeling of too much responsibility and too little authority that I feel is simmering just under the surface at this school. Fortunately, as a senior, I probably won't be around for the explosion. But the fact that The Concordian profiled someone like Msi Rothman, who was not a Faculty Scholar, not an Honor Student, not a Forensics finalist, not a Lady Cobber Tournament winner or anything else in Concordia's frenzied and obsessed-fillcd race of trophy-lust, but just a person with an interesting tale to tell, points to the desire and demand for a little freedom of self-expression on the part of some of the student population; that needs no objective analysis to justify the lightness of its actions and it would do well if Concordia's largely balding, certainly overfed and white male faculty would step out of their glass bubbles .for a moment to take the time to notice it. On Deck Bob Lundblad This past week, I received a letter in the mail that was sent to the members of the Library Committee, a committee of which I am a member of. Now most of the time I don't get too fired up about a simple letter in the mail, but this one was different. This one concerned a recommendation that the library committee passed last spring. I guess this whole library issue has kind of been a burning issue for me for about a year and a half. Just so you know where I am coming from, I will provide you background behind this whole situation. Last year, 1991-92,1 was appointed to the Library Committee by then president and vice president of Student Association, Paul Knutson and Michael Meek. At first, I wasn't sure what, if anything, I would really do on this committee. But after our first meeting, it was obvious that the big topic was current library hours. The students on this committee and I voiced concern for fellow classmates about how the library closes at midnight during the week, yet studies still continued. It was decided, then, that we would look into this and see if there really was a need for extended library hours or not, as well as talk with the library staff to see if this was even possible. Once the task was defined, the committee decided that the best way to find out the students needs for study space and the use of the library would be to formulate a survey to see if there was a genuine need to reform. The committee then spent a number of meetings discussing this survey, and numerous drafts were presented in front of the committee. It was recognized at the beginning that the library staff vehemently opposed any extension of library hours, but myself and the students on the committee felt that there was enough concern from our classmates about the library hours that we wanted to stick in our voice to see if maybe there was something that should be done. Needless to say, there were many hours spent on the formulation of this survey, as everybody on the committee agreed that if we were going to take on this big task, it only made sense that everything was legitimate so as not to disqualify our work in the end. Along with the advice from a sociology professor, a psychology professor and a political science professor, the survey was deemed legitimate, and in fact the psychology professor even said in a letter to the committee that it probably leaned more to the library staff ideals than the student ideals. Finally, the whole committee, including the library staff, agreed that the survey was legit and it was implemented. A phone survey was done, and over 175 responses were completed. But our work wasn't even close to done. Myself and another student member of the committee then entered all the data from these surveys into a computer, and tabulated the results. Again, this took many hours of volunteer time that we thought was for the benefit of the committee. The results basically indicated that students were very interested in seeing the library open after midnight. Eventually, last spring, the committee voted on and passed a recommendation that went to Dean Lanning and Dean Homann, as well as to the library staff. The recommendation that was passed called for the library to be open until 1:00am, Sunday through Thursday, but only during peak times of the semester that were indicated in the surveys. The peak times were designated as two weeks before mid-sem and four weeks before finals. OK.tum the clock ahead to 1992-93. We already passed the mid-sem break, and I don't remember seeing the library hours extended, do you? What happened, all that work for nothing, or what? Well, reluctant about joining a committee that I had already put so much time into and had seen no results, I did accept another appointment to join the committee again this year. At our first meeting, the topic was food and garbage in the library. That was great. We discussed issues, there is a problem, let's do what we can to solve it. But then the focus turned back to last year. As myself and some of the faculty members that went through this whole ordeal with this committee last year were wondering, what happened to our proposal? Why weren't the hours extended? Since the head librarian was not there, an assistant spoke for him. He said that first of all, the proposal was sent only to the Deans, and never to the head librarian. Well, it seems hard for me to believe that the library staff was unaware of the proposal, for as far as I know, they worked with the committee all of last year and were with us at the end when the recommendation was passed. ( I will mention that the recommendation was not please see library/11
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