Teaching and Reforming in the Age of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

I teach at a wonderful liberal arts women’s college in New York City that is dedicated to teaching anti-racism and the ongoing project of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). I specialize in an area that will be under pressure, in which I will likely have a role as we undertake the English major review and reform: Seventeenth-century English literature, the period of John Milton.

People more often think of Milton as the author of “Paradise Lost,” the epic of “the Fall of man,” than as the defender of liberty of conscience, freedom of the press, and the separation of church and state. Milton’s political writings influenced the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and The Declaration of Independence, now criticized (as Milton has been) for the implicit exclusion in its idea that “all men are created equal,” because who counted as all men? Obviously, not women or enslaved black people. The Declaration of Independence - America’s founding document, which was radical at the time - voiced an ideal that has never been realized.

And, in a curriculum review, the questions will come up (they already have in some institutions) whether and why we should continue to teach early modern writers, but also Enlightenment writers and thinkers, the creators of “liberalism.” Personally, I have always taught these writers and their texts critically. But is that enough? What do we do about teaching literature, especially earlier formative texts that have been made to bear responsibility for some of our current problems?

So much has changed since I came to Barnard College almost seventeen years ago. We now have a far more diverse student population, thanks to the college’s efforts, which include need-blind admissions. These are some of my best students, many truly exceptional, intellectually as well as personally. In our entering class for 2021, more than half identify as people of color.

I think back to many years ago when I was an undergraduate who never saw anyone among the faculty like me. No one was Jewish, there were practically no women and certainly no Jewish women. There just wasn’t anyone I could imagine myself being. That’s why I understand students today who want a diverse faculty and a curriculum that includes their voices, even as I think education should be expansive, not simply reinforcing an already-formed identity.

Now as a senior professor, teaching and writing about seventeenth-century English literature and culture, I’m wondering what will happen to my courses when we do reform our curriculum. But is it “my literature” or “my culture” to reform?

That is complicated. With my weird name, difficult to place or pronounce, I was not someone who obviously belonged as an English major, studying the so-called White European canonical tradition. As a Jew and a woman, a first-generation student with an immigrant father, English literature was an alien field; I was an outsider. Yet some of English and American literature spoke to me, deeply and personally, as well as intellectually. A wonderful Professor at Indiana University, the late Owen Thomas (an Americanist, who taught Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne, but also linguistics and Chomsky’s transformational grammar), urged me to go to graduate school, helped me get in to UCLA, the school from which he had earned his Ph.D. But in the middle of my second year, the senior Americanist (a powerful white man with the pedigree of an old Anglo-Saxon name) kept me from specializing in nineteenth-century American literature (a field I had planned on), by failing me on the qualifying exam, though years later I found out he thought I’d plagiarized my essay believing it was too good to be written by me. That professor made it clear there was no place for me. It never occurred to me at the time that he would think this young woman he didn’t know, with a foreign name, could not possibly be an expert in his field. I now know the history of how Jews (and women) were excluded from Ph.D. programs at elite universities. I was devastated at the time, thought I would surely never go on, but the faculty—and then the field—embraced me. That was the beginning of my career in the literature and culture of seventeenth-century England.

It wasn’t “my” literature or culture, except in so far as it had become part of the culture of America. It was Christian literature—actually, Protestant Anglo-Saxon literature. Yet, over the years I made it “mine.” As I gained professional successes and tenure, as well as confidence in my voice, I found a freedom to think and write about it differently, to make Milton mine in a way that allowed me to understand and critique the limitations of his vision, his prejudices (the greatest Hebraic writer,v but not tolerant of Jews, or Catholics), even while celebrating his virtues and expanding his notions of liberty and tolerance.

My long experience and struggles for acceptance make me sympathize deeply, indeed identify, with those students and faculty seeking changes and release from curricula that might seem to have contributed, even indirectly, to the social injustices that we are trying to reform. I chafed under feeling that, as a Jewish woman, it could never be fully my culture. Jewish literature and culture was not what I wanted to study. It was not all of me. I wanted a larger world. I still cling to a belief that each of us can feel both “universal” and “particular” identities. If that is not possible, we are then as human beings… lost.

There is much to be said for a long perspective, for wide and broad reading, for reading things that are not narrowly “ours,” for inclusions and additions, rather than exclusions. I don’t think I could say it better than Cornel West and Jeremy Tate did in their brilliant, impassioned opinion piece in The Washington Post (April 19, 2021) on the announcement that Howard University would be abolishing its Classics department: “The Western canon is, more than anything, a conversation among great thinkers over generations that grows richer the more we add our own voices.”