On the other hand

What's interesting about these 'Canon wars' is that the warriors assume a situation that was in fact a huge exception in the history of American colleges, a five-minute period, give or take, at the University of Chicago. The debate is, when you get down to it, over what curriculum to provide for a group of students composed of many women and minorities. That the student body itself is neither all-white nor all-male is assumed, which is bizarre, since in the Golden Age of Great Books, this was not the case. 'Preserving the canon' is not necessarily the conservative choice; the status quo could just as easily mean reading lists that reflect the demographics of the student body, i.e. Toni Morrison. On the other hand...

The problem with a curriculum that's sensitive to, say, blacks, gays, women, Jews, Asians, and Latinos, is that it establishes a canon of its own, a catch-all list of identities worth defending. It attempts to define, once and for all, who gets to count as the underdog. This approach attributes an implied privileged status to all who fall outside these specific bounds. The socially awkward, the freakishly hairy, the snootily brilliant, and the shockingly tall are not especially worth sticking up for, if they happen to be straight, Christian men with Mayflower ancestry. This is not just about oppression of groups vs. of individuals; the same goes for Armenians, former-Yugoslavians, and other groups whose tragedies could not be explained within the 'race' boxes of an application form. With multiculturalism, in a reverse of the Dead White Male-ism/Orientalism that preceded it, there is a homogenization of groups that are incredibly diverse: a Swiss banker and a Romanian orphan are both 'white,' as were Spinoza and Aristotle.

What's appealing about the Great Books is not that they reveal to us our civilization, but that they are often irrelevant to contemporary Americans' experience of the world in all but their universal qualities. The advantage of a Western Canon is that at this point in America, almost no one will find his own ethnic group's concerns addressed. This, incidentally, sheds some light on why Americans tend not to be as horrified when we learn in school that 'we' are descended from the Pilgrims as our French counterparts are when they learn about 'our ancestors, the Gauls'; the French educational fiction is far more likely to be true for many given classroom.