What Multiculturalism Couldn’t Do, Terrorists Might
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 11.28.01 | 9:20 PM ET
Will the threat of more terrorist attacks on American soil and the subsequent interest in all things Muslim do more for foreign language competency in the U.S. than decades of multicultural studies? It sounds odd, if not terribly sad, but Margaret Talbot posits just that in a recent New York Times Magazine article. Even as multiculturalism was achieving greater prominence in academia in recent decades, sending generations of students to libraries in search of Maxine Hong Kingston novels, Americans were growing increasingly monolingual. In fact, since the 1960s, enrollment in foreign language courses declined by half. So what of the promise that multiculturalism would liberate Americans from their isolationist tendencies? “In fact,” Talbot writes, “it may have reinforced them, lulling us into the sense that we were getting a resoundingly global education when all we were really getting was a little Arundhati Roy here, a little Toni Morrison there.” The September 11 attack has added urgency to the situation. While the U.S. needs Arabic experts, colleges and universities turned out only nine Arabic majors last year. Thanks to the terrorist threat, this may change. Some courses are now filling up, Talbot notes, and scholarly books on Islam are hot sellers. “Multiculturalism may not have prodded us to study cultures fundamentally different from our own,” she writes. “The war on terrorism will have to.”
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
