Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

occur because of the nature of a “liberal arts education”? Does
such an “evolution” just happen because of the simple presence
and proximity of diversity? Although Perry had attested to the
almost “cause and effect” nature of those relationships, he had
not claimed that their outcome, that “relativism” of his, was
something easy to bring about. In the very same way, then, was
that potential and promise of “writing with uncertainty” for
which I had sung the praises like a devout missionary out to
save the world and for which Perry’s findings had become useful
explanation and evidence so very easy to realize as well? No.
It simply was not. And something I would come to understand, in
time, was that, while it was very difficult to fulfill them, it
was actually very easy, all too easy, to hinder and even betray
them.
Those questions confronted me with more frequency and with
more insistence while I was working towards my Ph.D. at Stony
Brook. They were born out of experiences in the writing
classroom that laid bare to me something altogether different
happening beneath all that talk of Uncertainty. Zealous efforts
to promote that questioning, Uncertainty-raising philosophy of
not simply writing but even of life turned into an unknowing
dissemination of a certain and, to some degree, authoritative
perspective of reality and “truth.” Discourse that offered
disparate and contrary perspectives stifled, ironically, out of
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