Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing

http://www.jstor.org/stable/357563

by Maxine Hairston

She thinks it's bad for FYC teachers to teach about politics or diversity. She highlights Marxism in FYC courses and says that English departments shouldn't let literary critics run things. She says we should just teach writing, period, free of democratic ideals.

Race and gender in current American politics: A discourse-analysis perspective.

At least one study combined qualitative rhetorical analysis with quantitative word counts: Suleiman & O’Connell (2008) examined political guests on Larry King’s talk show. They found that the race of guests influenced the amount of non-standard speech they felt comfortable using, with Barack Obama, Condoleeza Rice, Hilary Clinton, and Colin Powell all using fewer non-standard forms than Bill Clinton. I mention this to note that researchers are beginning to take other sociological variables into account when examining discourse; I found this to be rare even in current studies. Suleiman and O’Connell’s quantitative analysis found that “Bill Clinton consistently talks the most, and Hillary Clinton the least” (p. 381). They note that this is consistent with Mehl’s finding that, contrary to the popular myth, women do not speak more than men. By comparing the amount of talk generated by political guests on a talk show to Mehl’s findings, the authors imply that the political interviewees verbal production can be generalized to the larger American population.

Institutionalizing Our Demise: America vs. Multiculturalism

Roger Kimball

Immediately after September 11, the country became very patriotic, but it soon faded.

Kimball argues that multiculturalism will be the demise of America. He believes the WASP ideology is fundamentally American and immigrant culture is not. He applauds immigrants who "melt" and forget their countries of origin.

"Every time you call directory assistance or some large corporation and are told, "Press One for English" and "Para espanol oprime el numero dos" it is another small setback for American identity."

He hates bilingual education, saying that it sets students up to be second-class citizens.

Kimball says America is essentially religious and Western Europe is "godless."

America was "founded on four things: ethnicity, race, ideology, and culture."

He equates multiculturalism with terrorism.