Composing a Life

many of my colleagues liked to think of as inferior; opening up the exclusive club of the faculty to other groups; opening up the curriculum to include a broader spectrum of the human experience. The structural and psychological issues of including different groups that have traditionally been excluded are nearly identical. On the one hand, excluded groups need to find ways of affirming their own value, from the search for self-esteem of women in consciousness-raising sessions to the expressions of gay pride, slogans like “black is beautiful,” and the struggle to escape from a colonial mentality. On the other hand, the values and potentials of excluded groups need to be made visible and accessible to stimulate the imaginations of those who have always assumed that their way—often the way that benefits them most—is the best.
    It was a moment of achievement when the Amherst romance-language department hired, for the first time, not only a native speaker of Spanish but a New-World Hispanic; a moment of achievement when a member of that department undertook to teach French literature originating outside of France. A small college can only teach a limited number of languages, but it can become more inclusive by noticing that French and Spanish, like English, are no longer limited to the Western tradition. The college’s temporary soft-money commitment to Japanese was transformed into a permanent department of Asian languages, and we had begun to support a cooperative commitment to Arabic.
    Taken together, these were suspect moves, and they made nominal liberals uneasy. My colleagues grumbled about the “camel’s nose under the tent,” so I bought a small toy camel to stand on my desk, next to the roll of authentic red tape and a wind-up robot labeled FTE (for “full-time equivalent”: better than money, FTEs are the ultimate measure of value in terms of budgeted faculty positions). The nose of the camel under the tent is a matter of openness, of lifting up the canvas and making an institution that is preoccupied with the basis of its own privilege open to other kinds of people and other cultural traditions.
Terras irradient
, the Amherst College motto, has tended to be a one-way street.
    Because all forms of elitism and exclusion are congruent, the issue of women kept coming up. Sexual, racial, and cultural chauvinism all rest on the same traditional assumptions of dominance based on difference. To be an advocate for the young and insecure could be construed as being an advocate for women. So could any effort away from secrecy and special exceptions toward regular and explicit processes of hiring and promotion, for the old secretive ways supported old patterns of power and privilege. Even a concern for interdisciplinary programs must have seemed like an effort to subvert the god-given disciplinary departments, which provide the traditional power bases of the academy even as they constrict the imagination.
    It has been pointed out that all of the world’s Universalistic religions originated at the margins of powerful high civilizations. It also seems probable that the most creative thinking occurs at the meeting places of disciplines. At the center of any tradition, it is easy to become blind to alternatives. At the edges, where lines are blurred, it is easier to imagine that the world might be different. Vision sometimes arises from confusion. Women at Amherst were not only outsiders; they also tended to focus their intellectual interest on subjects that were treated as peripheral. Julian Gibbs, who was president when I arrived, defended the need to teach courses on non-Western culture in public. Privately, he confided his conviction that the peoples of Western Europe and the United States must be superior because of their role in the modern development of science.
    In 1980, the Amherst political-science department included one woman, an expert on modern China, who was also the only member of the department concerned with nonindustrialized societies. The history department had one woman also, teaching on India, the only untenured member of the department. After she was denied tenure, the department wanted to fill her position with an additional Americanist, but they did agree to seek someone who would teach American women’s history, labor history, or minority history. Later, when I queried their selection of a man who was an expert on white male immigrant labor, Julian dismissed the entire original