The Inflated Role of Narratives in Liberal Arts Education

My talk will focus on the role that humanities-centered narratives play in the educational system at BrooklynCollege. There is a continued privileging of the humanities in our Core, in the running of the Scholars Program, and the freshman reading. As a result, quantitative evidence through a social science lens is minimized,often reducing public policy discourse to a struggle between competing narratives not an analysis of statistical evidence.[1]

This year’s freshman year selection is Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I’m Dying. Listed on the Amazon.com website, the Bookmarks Magazine review ends:

The most poignant section focuses on Joseph's tragic trip to the United States at age 81, but Danticat also tells a wider story about family and exile, the Haitian diaspora, the Duvalier regime, and post-9/11 immigration policy. Emotionally resonant and exceptionally clear-eyed, Brother, I'm Dying offers insight into a talented writer, her family history, and the injustices of the modern world.

This summary illustrates perfectly the lament voiced four decades ago by Herb Gans, a preeminent sociologist with impeccable progressive credentials. In his 1973 book, Popular and High Culture, Gans wrote:

High culture's nonfiction is basically literary; relied on novelists for its analyses of social reality. Today, the culture reliesmore on essayists for its nonfiction.[As a result] high culture is often hostile to the social sciences, partly because they refuse to accept literary observations and autobiographical impressions as evidence.

In some ways, the only significant change in these forty yearsseems to be that dead white men have been replaced by multicultural voices anchored by identity politics.

A downside of these narratives, particularly when they are authentic and compelling, is that they can too often be used to demonize dissenters. By providing the foundation for labeling the opposition as racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, nativist, or xenophobic these narrativesnarrow debate on public policy issues.

To concretize this thesis, let us look at recent articles in the New York Times. In early April, the King hearings on the threat from radical Islam occurred. At the same time, UN workers in Afghanistan were killed as retribution for the burning of the Koran by a Florida preacher who represented 30 Americans. In response,New York Times columnist Roger Cohen (“Religion Does Its Worst,” Apr 4) attempted to shift the discourse from radical Islam to allegedly Islamophobic America. To support his position, he offered a factoid used three days earlier in an editorial lambasting the King hearings. The editorial (“The Truth about Muslim Americans,” Apr 1) read in part,

At the Justice Department, it’s called the post-Sept. 11 backlash — the steady stream of more than 800 cases of violence and discrimination suffered by American Muslims at the hands of know-nothing abusers. These continuing hate crimes were laid bare at a valuable but barely noticed Senate hearing last week that provided welcome contrast to Representative Peter King’s airing of his xenophobic allegation that the Muslim-American community has been radicalized.

Offering federal data rather than mythic scapegoating of an easy political target, the Senate hearing focused on the fact that while Muslims make up 1 percent of the population, they are victims in 14 percent of religious discrimination cases. (emphasis added)

This comparison borders ondishonesty. Since there are virtually no religious hate crimes against Christians, of course, Muslims (and Jews) would disproportionately be victimized by religious hate crimes.[2] Indeed, as the actual hate crime statistics indicate, while Jews are less than two percent of the population, they are victims of 80 percent of religious cases: I guess we live in a rabidly anti-Semitic country!

By contrast,per capita hate crime statistics show that it remains that black Americans, and even more so male homosexuals, are by far the major victims of hate crimes, with Latino and Muslim Americans far behind, and even behind Jewish Americans.[3] This is the ordering even if we restrict our observations to a subcategory of hate crimes: assaults.[4]

There certainly have been many narratives that highlightthe brutalization of Latino immigrants, particularly those who are undocumented. And increasingly we are presented with narratives of the hardworking, deserving Latino youth who if given the chance by the DREAM Act, would become worthy Americans. These narratives often highlight the nativist behavior of opponents of expansive immigration of less educated individuals and their extended families. Once again, these compelling narratives are used to silence critics. In particular, the campaign by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that urged journalists not to seek information from allegedly racist immigration groups was discussed in a recent New York Times Magazine article by Jason DeParle (“The Anti-Immigration Crusader,” Apr 17).

After the defeat of the 1997 comprehensive immigration bill, the SPLC labeled some of the opponents “hate groups” and was part of an organized effort demanding that Congress not meet with these groups. Quoting one of its leaders, Frank Sharry, DeParle wrote:

Mr. Sharry acknowledges that he used to warn colleagues that charges of racism would backfire. But he said the 2007 debate convinced him of his opponents’ ill will. “I’ve gone from saying they’re part of the process to seeing them as extremists who want to expel millions of people,” he said. While they started with a liberal gloss, “their juice became culturally conservative Republicans who don’t like brown people.”

While DeParle does note in passing that there are legitimate liberal arguments against expansive immigration, he gives limited voice to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), one of the groups that has been stained by the SPLC’s campaign of suppression. The pro-expansive migration forces wish to suppress the reach of CIS because they believe it provides evidence that gives cover to nativist, racist, xenophobes. That is, CIS’ estimates of the more than 200,000 annual births to women on temporary visas fuelsgroups which rail against “anchor babies;” the evidence that over two-thirds of legal immigrants are for family unification fuels groups which rail against “chain migration;” and its studies that show a link between immigration and the collapse of teen employment and employment of less-educated black workers fuels groups which otherwise are insensitive to the plight of African Americans.

For example, in a recent publication, CIS noted that Latino immigrants disproportionately use federal welfare programs, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and have a disproportionately large share of families that have no federal tax liabilities.[5] There are similar state studies that document large local tax burdens, especially in states like California that have generous safety-net programs and large immigrant populations.

Elsewhere I evaluate this evidence and recommend legal immigrationmirror the educational distribution of native-born adults and constrain the set of relatives that qualify for family unification.[6] Here, however, I am using this data presented by CIS to illustrate why a more constructive and productive discourse on immigration reform must center on evaluation of statistical evidence notpersonal narratives. (This discussion is separate from what should be done about the more than 10 million illegal immigrants currently in the United States.)

What Can Be Done

Once more, in the name of multiculturalism, the freshman reader presents a compelling ethnic narrative that is politically and socially charged. Does this mean that the selection process goes through a checklist of ethnic groups: Jewish, Italian, Polish, etc. Moreover, when these types of narratives are chosen, they should be complemented by social science and historical research that would enable students to judge how representative the experiences presented are and how accurate the political and social claims made. Having presentations by the authors doesn’t exactly promote the critical thinking that colleges should enhance.

More important, this essay has raised the issue of our Core; a set of requirements, in my opinion, that overly emphasizes the humanities and minimizes the social sciences. It is hard to justify a Core that excludes economics, psychology, and health science; disciplines that provide importance foundational knowledge crucial for developing an informed citizenry. Among other things, these are disciplines in which gaining an understanding of quantitative reasoning would be provided.

The central CUNY administration is pressing for changes that will eliminate our Core requirements. Rather than defend this outmoded emphasis on the humanities, we should undertake a discussion of a distributional set of requirements that will help prepare students for the personal and social problems faced in the twenty-first century with the knowledge and skills to evaluate competiting policies and behavior to solve them.

Robert Cherry

Department of Economics

BrooklynCollege

May, 2011

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[1] Competing narratives are plentiful, particularly those that present a cultural-of-poverty framework. For Latinos, see Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family; for Muslims, see Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel; and for blacks, see Sapphire, Push and Jason DeParle, American Dream.

[2] This is the second use of this religious comparison by the New York Times. In 2010, when reporting claims of discriminatory employment actions made to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, New York Times reporter, Steven Greenhouse (“Muslim Report Rising Discrimination at Work,” Sept 23) stated: “Although Muslims make up less than 2 percent of the United States population, they accounted for about one-quarter of the 3,386 religious discrimination claims filed with the E.E.O.C. last year.” Not only are these allegations not EEOC determinations but the article failed to report that they represented less than one percent of all discrimination complaints received by the EEOC in 2009.

[3] For a recent study that lowers the gay population estimate substantially, thus raising the incidence of gay hate crimes, see Lisa Leff, “Demographer: U.S. Has 4 Million Adults Who Identify as Gays,” Associated Press(Apr 7)

[4] Note that in 2010, the New York Times estimated Muslims as less than two percent of the U.S. population but in 2011 estimated them at one percent. This reflected the New York Times’ decision to no longer use the estimates supplied by the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). For almost a decade, the New York Times has used CAIR’s inflated estimates as it was the designated “moderate” group that was relied upon. Recently, Justice Department lawyers recommended that a leader of CAIR and is founder be indicted as a co-conspirator on charges of funneling funds to the terrorist organization Hamas. While political officials in the Justice Department have rejected this recommendation, undoubtedly the New York Times is beginning to distance itself from the organization.

[5]Steven A. Camarota, “Welfare Use by Immigrant Households with Children,” Center for Immigration Studies (April 2011)

[6]Robert Cherry with Robert Lerman, Moving Working Families Forward: Third Way Policies that Can Work (NYU Press, Oct 2011).