In Roger Geiger's letter (Collegian, March 26) arguing against the mandatory nature of diversity courses, he makes a valiant plea for keeping the curriculum "tilt-free" by not allowing "politically inspired" viewpoints into the curriculum.

Geiger talks about his own initiation into the evils of "biased" scholarship after he realized that the Western Civilization courses of years past were meant to inculcate students with Western democratic/liberal ideology.

Fortunately, scholarship on European history eventually infiltrated the Western Civilization-bias and corrected it, providing us with the objective view of history we receive in our classes today.

Geiger's argument is neither original, nor (as is usually the case) taken to its logical conclusion -- a conclusion which would have to support the mandatory diversity courses. For just as those who taught the Western Civilization courses may have been blind to the biases they perpetuated, so too are those who teach the new-and-improved European history courses.

Geiger's point that the diversity requirements are politically inspired ignores the larger reality that all scholarship is politically inspired. Academics, like the rest of the public, are products of their culture and its belief systems.

Yes, some academics claim "objectivity," but it is exactly those working in these diversity studies who have painstakingly proven these claims to objectivity as false (see Harding, 1983 and Gilligan, 1979).

Geiger also patronizingly infers a lack of debate and challenge in these disciplines yet, ironically, I had just finished reading a women's studies assignment which critiqued feminism when I read his column.

I've found that these disciplines which challenge the norm also tend to challenge themselves (not wanting to repeat the mistakes of European history reformers).

Unfortunately, it is only those who have taken the time to study women's history and black history, etc., who have the working knowledge of just how biased the "regular" curriculum is. We sit, frustrated, in our "objective" courses and marvel at the inconsistencies and even falsehoods of the canon.

We attempt discussions of power with professors who ask us to define the term "patriarchy" and who don't know the difference between the terms "sex" and "gender."

I have sat in a women's history course and watched films of women (black and white) running through tear gas, fighting police and breaking windows to save striking autoworkers from death, and listened to these now gray-haired women recollect their frustration at being told to return to the kitchen and to stay out of the unions they had fought to gain. Moments later, I walked into an "unbiased" philosophy class to hear a professor casually remark, "In the 1930s, when your grandfathers were fighting for the unions . . .

I've heard professors talk about primitive man who "hunted and fished" to keep women alive and bearing children, knowing that "at no time in prehistory did women, with or without children, rely on their hunting males for food," (Miles, 1988). Anthropologists estimate that gathering (women's work) provided approximately 80 to 90 percent of the food of nomadic tribes.

Do I sound resentful? Well, that's one point on which Mr. Geiger and I agree. I do think these courses will cause a certain amount of resentment. Anyone who learns that their history has been perverted and denied to them would become resentful toward those who would still teach the exclusionary canon.

Perhaps this is what all the fuss is about. I keep asking myself, "Why all this resistance to THREE credits of courses that can also count to fulfill GER requirements?"

It can't be the cost, because most agree that the curriculum needs to be revised -- if we're that committed, why not spend some money doing it? Then it must be the mandatory nature of the courses.

I appreciate Geiger's and others' concern for the "student psychology" after we're "forced" to take these courses (note that no one ever talks about being "forced" to take natural sciences, humanities, or languages).

Isn't the real issue here that we're afraid to challenge students? Afraid to present them with ideas that question their beliefs? Ideas that might anger or (heaven forbid) "politicize" them?

I'll admit that I'm not concerned about the undergraduates' psychology. I've been one myself, and I think they can take it.

I believe it's the academics' psychology that will take a beating as more students ask questions about the canon which make professors uncomfortable (and I've witnessed that discomfort too often).

But isn't it by challenging the canon that we improve it? Those who oppose these courses, ask yourselves, what are you afraid of?