ABSTRACT
The Advisory Board's consequent influence on curricula promoting racial awareness—that is, promoting students' ability to "whang out" the race—added public and institutional force to the goals of The Future of Minority Studies research program. Thus although one competency is waning and the other is prominent, in each case—whether prosody or identity—the college classroom proves to be a crucial location for imparting the competencies involved in assigning meter to a line of Milton and race to the body of a person. If racial ontology is, to this extent, an intradisciplinary extension of the ontology of meter, then it would seem to make just as little sense to doubt the existence of races as it would to doubt the existence of meters. The realism of FMS's theory of identity—particularly racial identity—recapitulates, then, the realism of a New Critical theory of poetry—particularly metrical poetry.
