The fall academic year has already brought to campus renewed anti-Semitic violence. At the University of Pittsburgh, last Friday, a keffiyeh-clad non-student used a broken bottle to slash two Jewish students wearing yarmulkes and what might be termed “walking while Jewish.” The two were able to subdue their attacker until police arrived and arrested him. Such attacks are of a piece with the anti-Zionism of academia and its obsession with identity politics and alleged oppression. As students return to classes at Pitt, history courses will include such choices as Museums as Sites of Contestation, and the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies offerings will include Queering Home: How Trans and African American Spaces Reframe Capitalism.
But a balance to such courses can be seen in the decor of Pitt classrooms—ironically located in the landmark building outside of which the attack on the Jewish students took place. In the school’s towering, Gothic-style Cathedral of Learning, classes will be held in the Nationality Rooms, which include exhibits dating to 1938 that celebrate the cultures of 31 immigrant groups who built the Steel City: Hungarians, Scots, Czechoslovaks, Turks, Lebanese, Norwegians, Germans, English, and more. A student group has provided tours since 1944. The Nationality Rooms provide, per their official description, the “opportunity to engage in learning in a unique setting that helps [students] explore the historic diversity of the Pittsburgh region.”
This is a different kind of diversity than that which we hear so much about today, the tendentious sort that emphasizes ongoing difference and inequality, that asserts that “inclusivity” has fundamentally eluded America. The message of the Nationality Rooms recalls the time when E pluribus unum emphasized the distinct but complementary backgrounds of immigrants and minorities. “In their diversity,” wrote one-time university chancellor Wesley Posvar of the Nationality Rooms, in a guidebook still on sale, “they preserve and honor our ethnic identities. Collectively, they symbolize our national unity.”
Our national culture, in other words, is greater than the sum of its parts—but it is worth celebrating the contributions of those parts. The columns of the Greek room remind us of where democracy first flourished; the carved woodwork and stained glass of the German room celebrate the birthplace of university education, and a coat of arms commends the University of Buda in the Hungarian Room. The Renaissance is recalled in the Italian Room’s red-tile floor replica of Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. Additions have been made to the rooms honoring Eastern European groups to include Africans, Koreans, Japanese, and Israelis.
“One thing seemed clear in regard to entertaining immigrants,” settlement house pioneer Jane Addams, who led the early twentieth-century movement to assimilate immigrants by teaching them English and preparing them for citizenship, wrote in 1910. “To preserve and keep whatever of value their past life contained and to bring them in contact with a better type of Americans.” The history told in the Nationality Rooms is not one of oppression.
That the Nationalities Rooms are also classrooms stands as a kind of rebuke to current academic fashion. If students knew only the cultural, political, and scientific history on display in these rooms, they would already have learned more than they could from the selective and polemical arguments more commonly given today. One hopes that students absorb a great deal simply through the osmosis that comes with observation.
Indeed, young people were notable among those lining up for tours when I visited on a sweltering day this summer, to see non-air-conditioned rooms on the first floor of the 42-story Cathedral of Learning, still the tallest academic building in the United States.
More rooms have been added over the years; the English room was not added until 1952. Some adjustments would seem to be in order today, however. Israel should, of course, be credited for the Old Testament (represented by a replica of the Dead Sea Scrolls) but the contributions of immigrant Jewish-Americans should not be overlooked. Africa is represented by the courtyard of an Asante temple rather than by the contributions of black Americans, themselves notable in Pittsburgh; consider the plays of August Wilson, many set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, or the career of slugging Josh Gibson of the Negro League’s Pittsburgh Crawfords.
The most important aspects of the Nationalities Room are not the specifics but, rather, the values they embody. They bring to mind the small book my grandmother, a proud Jewish assimilationist, once gave me, entitled Americans All, which informed me that Haym Salomon was the “financier of the Revolution.” The book’s unifying message isn’t heard as often today, but any visitor to the Nationality Rooms would have ample reason to agree with it.
Photo: daveynin from United States - Information Kiosk - Nationality Rooms, CC BY 2.0, Link