The emerging line of defense in the debate over multiculturalism is the charge of “exaggeration.” Multiculturalists accuse their critics and the press of overstating their impact and distorting their demands. The opposite is the case. Years before multiculturalism became controversial, its advocates were introducing racial quotas into history writing and literary studies. Public awareness has yet to catch up with the extent to which high-school and college education have already been transformed.

More critically, those who mediate between the activists and the public—the press, educators, and administrators—regularly muffle the more radical aspects of the multiculturalist platform in a blanket of normalizing rhetoric. This ill-conceived diplomacy results in a gap between the public face and the reality of multiculturalism. The debate has been presented in terms of how many pages a history textbook should devote to Cree culture and how many to the Bill of Rights, when what hangs in the balance is our culture’s commitment to rationalism and objective standards of knowledge.

A prime example of the repackaging of multicultural extremism as moderate academic reform is the public presentation of the Sobol Committee Report. The Sobol Committee was appointed in 1990 by New York State’s Education Commissioner, Thomas Sobol, to review the state’s history and social-studies curricula. It was widely understood that the impetus behind the review was the demand to make New York’s curriculum more multicultural—the present committee was formed after its predecessor issued a diatribe against Eurocentric education that was too extreme for even the