Cultural Property and Student Identity in the Multicultural Classroom

Early in my stint as chair of the English department at my current school, I initiated the process of getting approval for a new general education literature course on the Inklings, the group of Anglo-Catholic British writers dominated by the two towers of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Given the popularity of these two writers with our overwhelmingly Christian student body, the au courant nature of the course given Peter Jackson's blockbuster film trilogy, and the strong desire of one of our faculty to teach such a course, it seemed to me to be a worthwhile addition to the range of courses undergraduates could take to fulfill their literature requirements in the general education curriculum. Messiah College, where I chair, is a relatively small (3000 students) college of "the liberal and applied arts and sciences," which identifies itself as a Christian institution of higher education. Despite these particularities, the school has participated in many of the changes that have been affecting academe across the country: a gradually diversifying student body; competition between the traditional liberal arts and a more "applied" or practical curriculum; and systematic development of policy and procedure, fundraising, and administrative layering that has given colleges everywhere an increasingly corporate character. (1) Rationales for the curriculum here, as elsewhere, strike one as a mixture of old-style idealism and business-like pragmatism. At Messiah, courses in literature have to comply with several parameters in order to be considered a part of the general education curriculum, parameters that alternately seem to speak to practical pedagogical issues or offer somewhat generic blandishments about the nature of educating a well-rounded individual: they cannot require prerequisites, they must expose students to the work of "significant writers," etc. At that time, one parameter also called for classes through which students could develop a greater understanding of "their culture." In developing the rationale for adding the course, I found this last parameter vexing. Our institution has undergone some significant demographic change over the past seven years, and, while our cultural diversity quite literally pales in comparison to most state colleges or elite private colleges in the country, the nearly eleven percent of our student body who come from non-white ethnic groups or from overseas represent a sea change from the two or three per cent of a decade ago. In this respect, while still overwhelmingly white, we are more diverse in terms of race and ethnicity than the vast majority of private colleges that claim a specifically Christian identity, and we are more diverse than most other private colleges of any type in our geographical location in Central Pennsylvania. Students of color have strengthened their own voices, and, with some encouragement from the administration, there have been new calls for celebration and affirmation of multicultural diversity. New policy and procedure documents and college-wide identity statements declare our commitment to antiracist and multicultural education, and a five-year plan states specific plans for establishing this identity. Moreover, Messiah College as a whole springs from a tradition rooted deeply in the Dutch and German peace churches (Brethren in Christ, Mennonite, and so forth), churches with an emphasis on peace and social justice, and, incidentally, with a fairly strong residual sense of ethnic identity. The administration and faculty of the college often defines the college as at odds with, and has struggled to avoid being swallowed up by, what is seen as a dominant American religious, cultural, and political ethos associated with conservative white evangelicalism, what pundits euphemistically call the "Religious Right." Nevertheless, our student body is drawn primarily from precisely that form of conservative white Christianity. Finally, figuring out what "their culture" could really be referring to concerned me in that I am a scholar and teacher of multiethnic literature and co-chairperson of the campus committee dedicated to promoting an antiracist and multicultural identity in the classroom and in the culture of the college as a whole. …