Multiculturalism has Balkanized our campuses, producing mutually antagonistic ghettoes of blacks, Hispanics, and other groups. Having chosen segregation from their fellow students, these groups contribute to the common culture only an angry sense of alienation and wounded hostility—an attitude that precludes not just friendship but even day-to-day fellowship with others, despite what you may have been told to the contrary. Thus, “minorities” admitted to the university on the basis of separate standards go through separate orientations, live in separate dorms, eat in separate areas of the cafeteria, enroll in separate courses, join separate social clubs, attend separate graduation ceremonies, and go their separate ways afterward. Thus, the Office of Student Life instructs blacks, Hispanics, females, and Native Americans about their special rights and warns white males of their special duties. Thus, feminists and blacks make anonymous complaints to the Office for Sexual and Racial Harassment regarding the “insensitivity” of their white male professors, who, being deemed insufficiently sympathetic to their way of thinking, are compelled to attend Chinese communist–style reeducation camps euphemistically described as workshops. Thus, homosexuals have gay-day parades not as pleas for tolerance or expressions of amity but as aggressive gestures of disdain for more conventional sexual behavior and for those who prefer it. And so on. Demonstrations on behalf of peace are common on today’s campuses, but they occur in an atmosphere of tension and conflict. Civility has become a thing of the past.
(Max Hocutt, "Black Teachers for Black Studies? A Philosophical Critique of Multiculturalist Pedagogy," The Independent Review 9 [summer 2004]: 127-135, at 127-8)
