4 OPINION Page 4 Wednesday, April 12, 1989 The Michigan Daily Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan Boycott elitist English class 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Vol. IC, No. 132 Unsigned editorials represent a majority of the Daily's Editorial Board. All other cartoons, signed articles, and letters do not necessarily represent the opinion of the Daily. U.S. policy in Indochina: Return of the Khmer Rouge THE UNITED STATES has opened the door for the Khmer Rouge's return to power. Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge originally took over Kampuchea (Cambodia) as a re- sult of the destruction of Kampuchean so- ciety during Nixon's bombing campaign there in the early 1970s. Now Pol Pot may once again return to massacre the Kampuchean people, if the United States does not participate in a political solution that takes into account the present-situa- tion there. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge ousted the U.S.-backed Lon Nol regime in Kam- puchea. Pol Pot then murdered approxi- mately one million Kampucheans. Over- thrown in a Vietnamese invasion in 1979, the Khmer Rouge could now take power once again. U.S. policy toward Vietnam contributes to the possibility that the Khmer Rouge will return to power. Vietnam invaded Kampuchea after a series of brutal Khmer Rouge attacks against Vietnamese villages along their common border. The Khmer Rouge now operate as a guerilla force in the Kampuchean countryside and in refugee camps inside Thailand, where they routinely enslave and "disappear" people. Using the Vietnamese occupation of Kampuchea as an excuse for continuing a trade embargo against Vietnam, the United States has coerced Vietnam into a hasty withdrawal from Kampuchea, whose pre- sent government may not yet be strong enough to resist the Khmer Rouge gueril- las. By strengthening the Khmer Rouge and placing an economic stranglehold on Vietnam, the United States can undermine peace, and economic development throughout the region. Making an exam- ple of Vietnam, the United States seeks to dissuade other Third-World countries from resisting U.S. domination. The United States and its allies have also voted for the Khmer Rouge, rather than the present Hun Sen government, to be seated as Kampuchea's representative to the U.N. As a result, all forms of U.N. aid Duderstadt' PRESIDENT JAMES Duderstadt's three- page letter to all students last week is a re- hash of similar pieces he's written re- cently, but it's worth examining, if only because he has now decided to command the attention of the entire student body. In measured tones, we are instructed to strive harder for "reason, balance, and re- spect," to try to build "mutual understand- ing, tolerance, and respect" for each other, and to promote a climate of "reason, tolerance, and civility" as members of an academic community. These are moderate and apparently rea- sonable requests, but they do little to il- luminate what the President is trying to say. To help sort out the less obvious messages, we offer the following transla- tions: Duderstadt says: "There are many ways to discuss and tolerate differences and to learn from one another without recourse to irrational accusations, recriminations, and litigation." He does not explain whether he considers only certain accusations or recriminations to be irrational, or what criteria he uses to determine the legitimacy of a given charge. Regardless, this is a re- statement of his previous plea for an end to "character assassinations," which - looking at recent University history - must be perceived as referring to attacks on the administration, himself included. This ties in very closely to the next key point. Duderstadt says: "While I understand the pressures we all feel from time to time, I strongly believe we will achieve our goals only if we keep our eyes firmly focused on the prize ahead and resist calls for an im- mediate reactive stance on every issue that 0 100 Vientiane =--= Miles 1 North Udorn VIET LAOS NAM THAILlAND KAMPUCHEA south c PH NOM PENH NAM es Saigon Gutf China of Siam Seat; The following is an open letter to the University community regarding John Aldridge 's course description for English 539, "The Classic Contemporary Novel," Fall 1989. Given the current debates about what determines the canon of "great" literature, many of us were disturbed to read of a contemporary fiction class with a syllabus composed entirely of white male authors. But our distress is nothing compared to the anger we feel at the caveat used to jus- tify this reactionary exclusion: .these particular writers have been chosen not on the basis of their sex (all of them happen to be male partly [?] because strong female and ethnic talent did not surface in this country until the Seventies and Eighties), their race, or their religion but be- cause they are generally considered by critics and scholars to be the most important writers of the period. Even if we could ignore the chronologi- cal gerrymandering that removes all the fiction written in the last 19 years from a definition of what is contemporary, we must still protest this attempt to deny the talent of such writers as Ralph Ellison, Doris Lessing, Paule Marshall, and the numerous other women and people of color writing within Aldridge's prescribed time frames. Aldridge's self-conscious and defensive posture forces us to question his motives, and the intellectual honesty of ducking responsibility for these sexist and racist exclusions by deferring to invisible and thus unanswerable "critics and schol- ars." By what criteria are these "classic" writ- ers "...generally considered...to be the most important...?" What "critics and scholars" are responsible for this secret canonization process -- presumably not those who awarded the Pulitzer Prize to Toni Morrison or the National Book Award to Maxine Hong Kingston. The language of Aldridge's course description pre-empts any debate or discussion: "...as classics, their work is particularly illustrative of some of the most important developments in the novel form..." (translation of this tautology: they're great because they're great because they're great.) His clinging to undefined categories such as "classic" are more unfortunate given the English Department's "New Traditions" requirement and President Duderstadt's recent proclamations concerning the Women's Agenda and the Michigan Mandate for diversity. We do not advocate censoring course content or forcing instructors to teach from a prescribed list of texts; we, how- ever, need not consent to his vision of lit- erary history. Therefore, we encourage students to boycott English 539, "The Classic Contemporary Novel." Graduate Students from the departments of English, American Culture, and Comparative Literature: Chris Bass, Peter Blickle, Christine Blouch, Brian Burt, Yoshi Campbell, Chris Cernich, Tim Chin, Camille Colatosti, Nancy Cho, Michael Delahoyde Susan De- spenich, Corey Dolgon, David Edwards, Mike Fischer, Annee Fisher, Karen Fisk, Thomas Fujita, Karin Fuog, Simon Glick- man, David Halsted, Susanmarie Harring- ton, Christine Haydinger, Sharon Holland, Robin Ikegami, Helen Kim, Cynthia Koch, Haromi Anne Kuno, Jill LeRoy-Frazier, Elisa Lichtenbaum, Susan Marren, Matthew Marrin, Shawn Maurer, Tracy Mishkin, David Mitchell, Sherri Moses, Wendy Motooka, Duane Niatum, Catharine O'Connell, Tina Parke-Sutherland, Jeanne Paul, Lisa Poneck, Lisa Rado, Ranu Samantrai, Matthew Schultz, Christina Shea, Sharon Snyder, Donald Ungar, An- gela Winano, Susan Whitlock. And the English Minority Student Coali- tion, the U-M Asian Student Coalition, and the United Coalition Against Racism. 4 to Kampuchea have been cut off, with the exception of food delivered to Khmer Rouge-controlled refugee camps along the Thai-Kampuchean border. This has kept Kampuchea poor, underdeveloped, and vulnerable to a Khmer Rouge takeover. Even more disturbing, the United States has undertaken a policy of malicious neg- ligence on its allies' military assistance to the Khmer Rouge. The United States has permitted Thailand, a country friendly and subservient to U.S. interests, to serve as a weapons conduit for Chinese-supplied arms to the Khmer Rouge. The United States has raised no objections to Chinese military aid to Pol Pot either. As a result of this military aid, the Khmer Rouge now ravish the Kampuchean countryside, where it continues to brutalize the peas- antry. The people of Kampuchea, as well as Vietnam, have suffered terribly as a consequence of U.S. policy toward In- dochina. Out of the most elementary prin- ciples of decency and humanity, the United States should reverse its policy and take whatever political action is necessary to ensure that the Khmer Rouge do not bring terror to Kampuchea again. How great is Great Books ? By Rebecca Novick and Marcia Ochoa This is an excerpt from a letter written to Professor Cameron by two students in his Great Books class fall term. All Honors students must take Great Books. We are both first-year students in your Great Books class. We have been deeply disturbed by the emphasis of your lectures. You must certainly be aware that the whole concept of "Great Books" is a con- troversial one. While we appreciate the undeniable value of Greek literature, we cannot ignore the ethnocentricity of an English requirement including only books by white men in a Western culture. Nor can we as women help but feel profoundly marginalized by this university's curricu- lum. We believe that women's perspec- tives and the workings of the female char- acters must be examined to a much greater degree in Great Books. As the professor of a class that by definition perpetuates ex- clusionary methods of thinking you have the choice either to continue what Toni Morrison called the conscious process of erasure, or to stop it - to consciously bring women back into literary analyses. What is required from you is a compen- satory effort to counterbalance the one- sidedness of the curriculum. In one of your first lectures you said, "If you're looking for feminist issues, don't read Greek literature." This is clearly false. The Lysistrata is about women's struggle for power, and we fail to understand how you could adequately discuss it when ap- -proaching it with the belief that it con- tains no feminist issues. It is becoming frighteningly clear that you should have said, "If you're looking for feminist is- sues, don't take my class." Furthermore, we resent your equation of "feminist" with "woman." We are not particularly con- cerned with the fact that Greek women couldn't vote; women's issues go beyond Rebecca Novick and Marcia Ochoa are Opinion Page staff members. the political. We are interested in women's thoughts and in their unique perspectives. There are certainly women's issues in Greek literature, you are just ignoring them. For example, your treatment of Clytaemenestra's character has been un- sympathetic. You devoted a great deal of time to justifying Agamemnon's murder of Iphigeneia and to establishing Orestes' right to vengeance, but you did not exam- ine Clytaemenestra's motives. Rather you characterized her actions variously as pas- sionate, irrational, unwomanly, and those of a jealous woman. You are perpetuating the stereotypes surrounding empowered women. Even when you do include women in The blame for this is not all yours. The association of seas (birth-waters) with dyes (women's work) with death, is Aeschylus' misogyny, not yours. However it is no longer adequate to say: well, Aeschylus was sexist, Shakespeare was anti-Semitic, but we and they exist in a cultural vacuum in which we are meant to just "appreciate" their work. We need to make clear that while we do appreciate the greatness of these works we must not accept all their values unchallenged. You need to explain Aeschylus' imagery and then point out its misogyny, to point out Aeschylus' vindi- cation of Orestes and then explain what this means about Greek ideals of justice. We recognize that the complexity of the internal structure of a work of literature 'In one of your first lectures you said, "If you're looking for feminist issues, don't read Greek literature." ....It is becoming frighteningly clear that you should have said, "If you're look- ing for feminist issues, don't take my class."' S message 4 take an active and public position on the important issues which face the University now. Should the University "keep [our] eyes firmly focused on the prize ahead" while a highly-qualified Black woman so- ciologist is turned away with no explana- tion? Should the president remain silent while a requirement for the study of race, ethnicity and racism is rejected and racist incidents flourish on campus? How better can we "learn from one another" than in the classroom itself? Duderstadt is, in ef- fect, asking students to read the Michigan Mandate and shut up. Duderstadt's calls for a more moderate debate are not surprising. Public demon- strations and expressions of outrage have consistently been required to force the ad- ministration to accept change. The recent failure of the administration and faculty to support a race, ethnicity and racism gradu- ation requirement illustrates the impor- tance of student activism to achieve the progress Duderstadt only talks about. If the president were seriously concerned with maintaining as "civil" an environ- ment as he claims he could work to diminish the presence of military death- and-destruction research on campus. If the president really wanted to stop the flow of racist hate materials distributed on cam- pus, he could offer to waive tuition for a semester for any student whose informa- tion leads to a conviction of these crimi- nals. If the president really wanted to achieve the goals he is so quick to pro- claim he could stop dishing out patroniz- ing advice to the University community and start accepting his own responsibility. Instead, Duderstadt offers only a word of quiet to the vocal discontent of activist your lectures, your language is degrading. In describing Achilles withdrawing from the battlefield you said he watched the battle, "Like a little girl playing with her dolls." This is a very sexist image. When you analyzed Nausicaa's character you dismissed her careful planning as schem- ing for a husband and then called her a shy maiden, once more trivializing women's motivations. Throughout the Odyssey, you described the women as temptresses and seductresses and showed Odysseus ac- quiescing helplessly and a little gleefully. You then called this a "male fantasy." It may very well be, but forced seduction is not one of our fantasies. The concept per- petuates societal attitudes linked to rape and to men's perceptions of what consti- tutes rape. sometimes precludes placing it in its cul- tural context. We are not trying to deny you this prerogative, nor to imply that Greek writings are irretrievably weighted down by the prejudices of their authors. However, when we are told that a body of literature represents the ultimate distilla- tion of what it means to be a human being - the epitome of human reasoning - when on the first day of class you tell us that the study of Classics will ennoble our thought, the fact that this literature and the analysis of this literature completely ex- cludes women threatens our perceptions of ourselves as human beings. The Greek Golden Age is tarnished; we are asking for a recognition of this, for an end to the de- ification of a system of thought stained by sexism and ethnocentricity. Wasserman yov CAMAE To TW5 C~iuI.CRFoQ SAN~CTUARY ? SI IN LVAWO 'I.I WNELL, vWE'D LKETfo " aYou MR. AT VO% -I So WE'RE "I-ImtAN&YoO OV TO JNl. C C 4 J c Letters to the editor Misleading article cussion on, "Myth of Terror: the Turkish-Armenian Ques- tion" (Michigan Daily, Mon- dav. Anri lOR89_n_) fate which the Armenians suf- fered at the hands of the Ot- toman Turks. AsfanArme~nian. I can mcuire the U of M Armenian Club, I can assure you that no member of this club, nor any of the A rmcnin hitnr-,n nnt ~