>"The difficulty of imagining one's own end forces many white
>liberal educators who want to invoke the end of oppression to
>embrace a progressive methodology but not the leading ideas
>that may make their own end a concrete reality. For this
>reason, many white educators who deal with "at risk"
>populations willfully adopt a benevolent methodology but often
>refuse to engage the theories that inform it."
>

which extends beyond the study of race. What gives the middle class professor authority to theorise on the proletariat, the male professor authority to comment on feminism, the English professor a license to critically discuss foreign cultures?

There is a privilege in our universities of 'objectivity' (that is peculiar both to the arts and the sciences) but I believe this notion to be somewhat fallacious. All critical writing is subject to/mediated by the musings of its author.

So what's the solution? Should the criteria by which we judge the validity of opinion be based in part (or even full) on a thinker's background?


>He goes on the write about "colonists" (or the descendents of
>colonists) and liberal educators who "shield themselves from
>self-critical reflection that could interrogate, among other
>things, how the maintenance of their privilege invariably
>makes them complicit with the dominant ideology" that
>maintains the status quo.
>
>I once had the opportunity to discuss a similar topic with the
>dean of the art history department at my alma mater. Black
>history existed in the margins of the "canon" or principles
>generally established as valid and fundamental in the history
>curriculum. One-on-one he was willing to admit that this was
>wrong but that, in his position, he felt compelled to support
>the "fundamentals" that did not include a equal focus on Black
>history and culture....


With respect, I'm not sure if what's written above automatically qualifies what's written below. Notwithstanding an apparent agenda, of which I am aware, surely all syllabi have a limited scope for 'teaching' by virtue of time contraints..?


this means the experts really aren't
>experts and the teachers really aren't teachers.