In his essay "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Fredric Jameson usefully defines the shift from the modern to the "postmodern" as one in which "the alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject." In terms of literary narrative, the distinction plays out roughly as follows: the modernist attempts to assemble a unified, psychically integrated identity from the fragments an increasingly chaotic and incoherent social universe; while the postmodernist accepts such fragmentation as given, and constructs identity accordingly. In contrast to the modernist, then, the postmodern personality has no nostalgia for a "center" that can no longer hold; he or she is not disturbed by the sense of existing as a multiplicity of selves, a repertoire of faces behind which there is no single "truer" one.

Using this distinction, I'd like to suggest that St. Thomas is at a point of transition between "modern" and a "postmodern" sense of itself as an institution. The Mall of America campus and other offshore projects are only the physical signs of a reality that has been with us in other ways for some time now. Consider the realities already extant in the institutional life of St. Thomas: the pressures of meeting the needs of--not to mention recruiting--more varied and specialized "clienteles"; increased emphasis on research in one's own field; fragmentation of faculty governance and teaching between graduate and undergraduate programs; and ongoing conflicts between secular, civic principles and religious and doctrinal ones.

Seen in this context, all our debates about the "core curriculum" have only returned us to what seems an increasingly untenable notion--namely, that our undergraduate programs, and in particular the general education component of those programs, somehow represent the center or "core" of the University's being. Counting in terms of people (as opposed to credit units), it's numerically demonstrable that such a "center" no longer exists except in the mentalist sense.

Consider, for example, the figures for Fall 1992 compiled by our own Institutional Research office:

As of Fall 1992 we had many more students in graduate programs than students enrolled in core courses; and, even allowing for third- and fourth-year transfer students and students delaying some core courses until after their sophomore years, it seems likely that the MBA program alone has a population comparable that of the general education curriculum at a given time. Given these numbers, which of these groups--if either--more fully represents the "center" of the University's institutional identity, and which the margins? Or does it any longer make sense to distinguish between the two?

My point here is not to say that this situation is good or bad, but simply that it is, and that it has implications for how we think about our activity as an institution. The metaphor of the "core" or "center," implying the existence of some essential grounding principles to which others must be subservient, seems clearly at odds with the material, numerical, and curricular realities which now define us. Because our activities are now so diverse, our interests and clientele so fragmented, any attempt to construct or define a "center" will necessarily result in a sense of "marginalization" by a significant number of those--students, faculty, staff, administration--who participate in the activities of the University.

This may help explain why lately our institutional conversations have been marked by a fragmentation of voices--one that, surely, is projected when we speak to others outside the campus as well. No matter what frequency one tunes in to--whether it's the voices of people from graduate business programs, theology, English, foreign languages, or sciences--the buzz is that people feel marginalized, misunderstood, and underappreciated, always with respect to some opposing "center" against which they feel themselves defined. We shouldn't understand this as a symptom of what George Will has sneeringly called the "culture of victimization"; rather, we should suspect what the postmodern model allows us to see--namely, that this center is not simply mystified, but actually mythic, part of a nostalgic self-description expressed on paper which no longer reflects reality. In the postmodern campus as in the postmodern universe, we are all marginal by definition because there is no center.

Imagine, for instance, the model of identity--or of education--that will allow easy movement between the ethoi of Justice and Peace 450, "Active Nonviolence," and Aerospace 211, "The Development of Air Power"; or one that will absorb the interdisciplinary whipsaw students experience as they march across the quad from Theology to General Accounting. The existence of such diverse lines of inquiry under the umbrella of a single University "Mission Statement" creates some dissonances in whose face our students cannot help but be cynical (another attitude necessary for survival in the postmodern universe); but the real dissonance is that between our actual practice and our attempts to persuade those students, through a rhetorical device called the "core curriculum," that the self and the world can be integrated, that you can (to paraphrase a car commercial) have your pinstripes and your Jesus, too, without experiencing any disturbance of the "whole" person we posit as the end of a St. Thomas education.

All this sounds, I suppose, very despairing, nihilistic, even heretical. But institutions don't collapse because there is no center, nor does consciousness or selfhood cease. There is simply a new kind of institutional identity, a new consciousness of the self. Life goes on, and so will St. Thomas. But we need to learn how to think about ourselves in a postmodern universe. And the question is, who will teach us?

First of all, our students. Habitues of the world of sound bites and pixel reality, where time collapses and changing decades is a matter of switching channels, our students know the postmodern condition, whether or not they can name it. We complain of their indifference to integrating or relating the bits of knowledge they glean from their various courses; but there is something to ponder in Jean-Francois Lyotard's observation (in The Postmodern Condition) that knowledge is in the final analysis local to the discipline which produces it, and is in fact a creation of that discipline's own procedures. Our own reinforcement of the "disciplinary" distribution in the curriculum review process only emblematizes this fact. The message to students is clear: change classes, change channels. They've seen this before.

The postmodern campus and curriculum may be realities, but they need not be lamentable or demoralizing ones. We can learn from other models of identity that have prophetically anticipated and negotiated the postmodern landscape in which we find ourselves awakening. In his book Framing the Margins, Phillip Brian Harper observes that members of marginalized groups (in which I include those marginalized by class, gender, sexual orientation, and geopolitical power structures) are already experts at "postmodern" existence; surviving on the margins--or in the belly--of a dominant culture requires a certain skill at negotiating psychic dissonance, and of making common cause with others whose goals and particular experiences are distinct from one's own.

I think we should draw on this expertise, already possessed by our students and other voices on the margins, and take it on its own terms rather than try to assimilate it into an already-existing paradigm built on the notion of the "center." After all, these others have already learned, via our own unintended example, to disdain such a "center" as a delusion or a power scam. My argument, in other words, is for an active multiculturalism, one that invites us to think of those voices on the margins not as ones to be "drawn into the center," but rather towards which we can move; we need to see in them new repertoires of speaking, hearing, and seeing. In the postmodern world, what was once the center must learn the ways of the margins, and not the other way around; as with our students, in a very real sense we need them more than they need us.

This scenario may seem to some like a cowardly surrender of the dream of a humane institution; but it's a culturally specific practice to assume that "humane" communities require a "center," or to celebrate the fetish of the unitary personality. If we look at a tendency common to many of the marginalized groups I've been alluding to, we find a key alternative strategy for making sense of the world, and of the self. It can be neatly summarized in Anthony Appiah's distinction between identity based on beliefs and that based on values.

Beliefs presume a center, a norm about which subordinate terms cluster and against which contradictory terms must be distinguished; they are hierarchical or exclusive (true/false, right/wrong, doctrinally correct/heretical, good/better/best, bad/worse/worst). Values, on the other hand, are relational; sometimes values can be in tension, even in outright conflict. Conviction can vie with tolerance; charity with honesty; diversity with universality; and so forth. Seen in one way, the recent Margaret Sanger poster controversy was a conflict over such opposing values: the value of belief (whether Sanger's beliefs and activities were themselves doctrinally correct, in terms of the "Catholic" valence of the University's identity) as opposed to other civic and educational "goods," such as free speech, social activism, even "controversy" itself, which are also part of the "mission" of the University.

Adjudicating such conflicts is not a matter of determining on any absolute scale which "value" is superior to another per se, but rather striving for a delicate balance among all the various "goods" which the society or culture puts forward. In Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart, the Igbo of West Africa confront the coming of European missionaries with some anxiety, but do not feel it is necessary to assert their own doctrinal superiority over this new religion. Rather, it is but another element that must be recognized and accorded its place in the universe; as one tribal elder notes, quoting an Igbo proverb, "There is no story which is not true."  Had the missionaries themselves accepted such a de-centering of their own spiritual cosmos, the history of Africa might now read much less tragically. One of the challenges and opportunities of becoming decentered in terms of our own stories is that of finally hearing and internalizing, in their own distinct voices, the stories of others.

Which brings me to my final point. Now that we all dwell on the margins, we need more than ever to learn from each other--not to integrate our voices into one, but to understand better what it means to live, speak, and teach on the margins without reference to a "center" that, in practice, no longer possesses sufficient gravity to hold us together anyway. Despite the loss of such a center we can still have an institutional identity, defined as a sum of orbitally related parts, if the University is willing to support forums in which various departments and programs can build a latticework of connections to one another--not to forge an integrated voice in which all speak as one, but in which the various "margins," disciplinary and otherwise, can dialogically engage one another.

This is where multiculturalism can provide a metaphorical model for multidisciplinarity, and bind us together despite the postmodern campus's lack of a center. By testing the sort of "truths" or knowledge claimed by one discipline against those claimed by another, we can learn to recognize that no discipline is comprehensive of all the others, nor privileged with respect to them. We need to understand the ways in which each marginal node of knowledge--theology, English, sociology, physics, business administration (to name only a few)--poses questions and challenges for every other. In this way, perhaps, we can become more comfortable with the relational rather than the integrated or hierarchized nature of our identity as a "postmodern" campus and university, and move ahead into the new century with confidence rather than fear and loathing.