Owing to its left-leaning political atmosphere, the town of Amherst,
Massachusetts, home of the principal campus of the University of
Massachusetts, is often ironically referred to by the local
inhabitants as the People’s Republic of Amherst, and the folks in
charge of UMass—as the state university is called—nowadays seem
more determined than ever to live up to this caricature of radical
political orthodoxy. Their latest political gambit, which has once
again thrown the university into an uproar, has been an attempt to
establish “contributions to multiculturalism” as the basis upon
which faculty members’ merit raises, promotions, and tenure will be based.
Henceforth, professors at UMass will be obliged to file an annual
report on what, if anything, their teaching and their scholarship
has contributed to the university’s multiculturalist agenda. Those
who meet the requisite multiculturalist tests will be advanced;
those who do not, will not.

The enforcement of such tests as a basis for academic advancement is
all the more pernicious in this case because there is no officially
agreed upon definition of multiculturalism at UMass. According to a
recent report in a local newspaper—The Springfield Sunday
Republican—a university task force tried and failed in 1994 to
come to an agreement on the meaning of the term. But this doesn’t mean
that the university community doesn’t understand the de facto
meaning of multiculturalism. For it is also reported that a course
in the religions of China, Egypt, Turkey, et al., which was granted “cultural diversity” status in the 1980s, had that
designation withdrawn when it was discovered that the course
failed to include specific sections on black Americans and women. In
other words, the term “multiculturalism” is little more than a
political euphemism for enforcing the study of politically
preferred, politically correct subjects.

As the experience at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst
suggests, the preferred method of enforcing the multicultural agenda
is as follows: first you impose an affirmative action program that gives
priority to black and female candidates, then you require of all of
the faculty—not just those exclusively concerned with black studies or
women’s studies—that they make a demonstrable contribution to one
field or another, or both, as a condition of advancement. Are we
alone in discerning a whiff of totalitarian coerciveness (not to
mention pedagogical folly) in this procedure? MAT192 Mathematics, Gender, and Culture (Spring)
3 Credit Hours

Survey of the effects of gender and culture on the teaching, learning
and doing mathematics [sic]. Topics include: gender and race
differences in mathematics, factors influencing them and sociological
consequences; eurocentrism in mathematics; ethnomathematics; women
and people of color in the history and development of mathematics;
and gender and multicultural issues in mathematics education.
From the Undergraduate Catalog 1996–1997 for the State University
of New York College at Plattsburgh.