Ricardo Duchesne’s letter (“Eurocentric University Defended,” Bulletin, December 2006) is at best puzzling and at worst offensive. I don’t know whether to bemoan the ignorance displayed in this letter or to feel angry at the chauvinism.

His thesis, “All the traditional disciplines originated in the West, and so did most of the great philosophers, historians, scientists, composers and painters,” which is supposed to be a defense of the Eurocentric university is nothing but a bald reiteration of the dogmas of Eurocentrism.
     
In a truly multicultural university system Duchesne would have learned of the patent falsehood of this claim. He would have been provided more than ample evidence of the contributions of classical Indian and Chinese civilizations to philosophy, the sciences, law, mathematics and medicine. He also would have learned of Buddhist universities like India’s Nalanda, which far exceeded anything Europe had to offer between the 5th and 12th centuries.
     
He would have been exposed to the subtleties of Indian and Chinese aesthetics and art. The role of Islam in preserving, developing and transmitting Greek philosophy and medicine would have become clear to him. The names of Ibn Arabi, Kautilya and Chu Hsi would have had something other than mere exotic value.
     
Duchesne’s second claim, “European higher culture must always remain at the center of higher learning because there is no higher culture,” is the type of baseless claim a multicultural university would subject to relentless scrutiny and certainly expose as false. The political danger inherent in this claim, if accepted as true, is that it implies for non-European Canadians in the universities, a second-class and less than “higher” status and it would be a demand for ideological and cultural assimilation.
     
The study of other cultures is not a luxury and nor should it be some fatuous celebration of diversity or just an anthropological curiosity. It is an essential component of education. As is coming to terms with the fact it was within the ambit of European high culture that we saw the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, the Atlantic slave trade, Colonialism and Auschwitz.

Rohit Dalvi
Philosophy, Brock University