Campus Counterrevolution

...Yes, it still is fantastically powerful, even at those universities where it has suffered defeats, and it uses its power to do outrageous things...

...The first salvo was fired by the New York Review of Books last May, when Helen Vendlerperhaps America's most influential poetry critic—condemned half a dozen major feminist literary critics and anthologists for their "ideological approval of third-rate work...

...on its cover, and pictures of Maoist Red Guards and book-burning Hitler Youth on the inside...

...But each lot of new CLS hires was less impressive—and more clearly chosen on political grounds—than the last...

...Its special achievements and values, however, are gifts to all humanity . . . " It takes about twenty years for a bright undergraduate to become a full professor...

...Perhaps the worst of these defeats occurred at the Harvard Law School...

...The New York Times and other newspapers have reported that Bell is self-sacrificingly forfeiting his salary...

...In a funny description of last December's Modern Language Association meeting in Chicago, New Criterion managing editor Roger Kimball observed that each politically correct talk began with a hasty disavowal of political correctness...

...The essential position of the law school subdivision of the academic left, which calls itself "Critical Legal Studies," is that the law is "indeterminate": no judicial result is more legally correct than any other, because a clever judge can invent an equally convincing justification for virtually any result he cares to reach...

...The MLA lecturers are slowpokes: more than a year ago, the ultra-chic Edward Said, the PLO apologist who holds a day job teaching literary theory at Columbia, made a point of criticizing the "badgering, hectoring, authoritative tone" of much of contemporary cultural studies...

...Dalton was a popular teacher and a sympathetic, cheerful personality in a school full of cranky egotists...

...The suit has been joined by national civil rights organizations, and is surreptitiously being advised by members of the faculty, including Bell himself...

...What she was not was a scholar of substance...

...the opinions of judges, of the generation before that...

...Schmidt, a former constitutional law professor, is a stickler for campus free speech...

...By 1986, the hard and soft left appeared to be within a vote or two of a 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991 reasonably reliable 33-percent bloc, and thus of a decisive voice in the governance of the school...

...Bok happily accepted it, and picked as Vorenberg's successor Robert Clark—a young (45) corporation law professor, a faculty adviser to the Federalist Society, and one of Harvard Law's three confessed Republicans...

...In December, a Newsweek cover story blasted the "thought police" of the campus left, and asked whether its dogmatism constituted a "new McCarthyism" (while reserving kind words for the dogmas themselves...

...In the early 1980s, the arrival at Harvard of a cadre of charismatic CLS scholars, the most brilliant of them a bearded, blue-jeaned relic of the sixties named Duncan Kennedy, dazzled a faculty bored with plain vanilla Brennan-style liberalism and demoralized by the sudden ascendancy of Reagan Republicanism in Washington, and delighted students with an unstuffy style of teaching and unprecedentedly easy grading...

...The punishment, grave enough to have destroyed the student's hopes of attending law school, violated Yale's own detailed rules on freedom of undergraduate speech...

...There have been marches and demonTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991 13 A year after Harvard's Bok installed Clark at the law school, Yale President Benno Schmidt emulated him by selecting Donald Kagan, an aggressively conservative classics professor, as dean of Yale College...

...Dalton's case provoked two years of bitter faculty wrangling, which turned into a struggle over control of the school, with its meek dean, James Vorenberg, helplessly looking on...

...Just last fall, a popular first-year property-law professor found his classes boycotted and picketed after he confessed in class that he didn't know enough about the law of antebellum slavery to spend more than a single class on the topic...

...She was particularly popular with female law students, many of whom turned to her for personal and professional advice and support...

...be excluded from committees charged with tenure or curriculum decisions, is quietly letting it be known that he is really a very conservative fellow...

...The opinions of lawyers, the great English jurist A. V. Dicey observed a century ago, are the public opinion of a generation ago...

...Just three years later, Bell and the left have been reduced to begging for a quota...

...Then in October, the big guns of the New York Times Arts & Leisure pages began to boom, as culture reporter Richard Bernstein complained of "the rising hegemony of the politically correct...

...If so, this would be enormously encouraging news—it would imply, for one thing, that the university has not become so hermetically sealed an institution that it is beyond saving by the larger society But the truth may well be more encouraging than that...

...Henry Louis Gates, the new chairman of the Afro-American Studies department at Harvard and probably the wiliest academic politician in the country, delivered an address to the American Studies Association in November distancing himself from the extremes of both left and right, and asking that multiculturalism be recognized not as a repudiation of academic traditions, but as a manifestation of "liberal pluralism...

...Yet the left at Harvard Law is unmistakably deflated...

...Kagan, a contributor to Commentary and the Wall Street Journal, maintains that the appointment "astonished" him, but Schmidt's motives are intelligible enough...

...Happily, precisely because the law is indeterminate, the same legal rules and institutions that now protect capitalist society can be used to destroy it...

...It should have been predictable in 1968 that the years from 1985 to 2000 would be among the most troubled in the history of the American university—and it is equally predictable today, when more than 60 percent of the undergraduates at both Harvard and Yale (according to polls by the student newspapers) supported the Gulf War, that the university will begin to settle down over the course of the coming decade...

...Al along the front, the artillery has opened fire at the tempting target of Political Correctness...

...He convened a panel, considered the record from scratch, and . . . turned Dalton down...

...In a memo released last January, Schmidt warned, "I believe that crisis is not an occasion to divert this institution from its important mission of teaching and research...

...But there is reason to hope that a better result is on its way, evidence that accumulates with every passing year and with every fresh wrinkle on the foreheads of the generation of '68...

...in fact, it is being quietly made up by Bill Cosby...

...In January, New York magazine, which normally finds it hard to get angry about anything more topical than the insufficient fluffiness of a scallop mousse, let loose its howitzers by putting the satiric question "Are You Politically Correct...

...One of his first acts on becoming president in 1986 was to overturn the punishment of a sophomore who had been charged with sexual harassment and sentenced to two years probation for putting up posters satirizing Yale's annual "Gay and Lesbian Awareness Days...

...If she'd been a man or a conservative woman she would have been unceremoniously dinged...

...The left still exercises huge power at Harvard Law...

...Do not let anyone convince you that you are 'selling out' in whatever career you choose...

...Universities are almost as backward-looking—and the seeds of hope accordingly take a long time to germinate...

...And then an amazing thing happened...

...What today's professors think is what bright undergraduates thought twenty years ago and more...

...The media challenge and the academic response make it look as if, under tremendous criticism from the press, the academic left is beginning to retreat...

...The faculty roster quickly filled with CLS professors...

...In February, the New Republic devoted an entire issue to shelling left-wing illiberalism on campus...

...Vorenberg, tired of it all, submitted his resignation...

...And in an address last September, Kagan insisted that the study of Western civilization and its achievements will remain at the core of Yale's humanities programs, not just because America "developed within the context of Western civilization," but because the roots of the modern world's technology andfreedom "are to be found uniquely in the experiences and ideas of the West...

...He added, "Most of the sins and errors of Western civilization are those of the human race...

...By the end of the affair it was clear that a victory for her would neatly box and giftwrap the premier law school in America, and present it to CLS...

...Dalton brought a sex discrimination suit, which has since petered out...

...He must have realized that, however paid up their memberships in the ACLU may have been, his liberal colleagues were not up to the job...

...For this winter's journalistic onslaught against the academic left is only one in a series of defeats that holds out the hope that the university may in the end even be capable of saving itself...

...Schmidt and Kagan have made it clear that the left will not be permitted to shut up its opponents—or close down their classes...

...Even now, one of the school's weirder characters, Professor Derrick Bell, has taken a year's leave of absence to protest the absence of black women from the school's tenured faculty...

...Under pressure from an increasingly radicalized administrative apparatus, Schmidt needed a dean capable of protecting academic free speech...

...No, the academic left is not beaten, nor does it show any signs of losing soon...

...At that point, the faculty was called on to vote on a tenure offer to Clare Dalton, a young female professor associated with CLS...

...Leftists on the faculty squawked and hollered at this intrusion into its prerogatives...

...So is helping the wheels of commerce turn and helping business produce the goods and services needed by society...

...The New York Review of Books resumed its cannonade that same month with a huge attack on the campus left by the noted Berkeley philosopher John Searle for the "immoral" practice of "using the classroom to impose a specific ideology on students," and for "politicizing the whole curriculum...

...When Duncan Kennedy and the CLS professors were pressing for tenure for Dalton, they claimed that CLS was the most important movement in contemporary law, and few of their colleagues disagreed—at any rate, out loud...

...For only the second time in his twenty years in office, Harvard President Derek Bok intervened in a law school tenure decision...

...Scandalized, law school students mounted protests, petitions, and sit-ins...

...Those who were not dazzled or delighted were easily ignored or intimidated...

...David Frum is an assistant features editor at the Wall Street Journal...

...And, with each lot, CLS professors and their allies came closer to numbering 33 percent of the tenured faculty, the proportion needed to veto future tenure offers...

...Even Stanley Fish, the Duke University English department chairman who became notorious for urging that members of the local chapter of the National Association of Scholars (chaired by that old New Deal liberal James David Barber...

...It was all rather as if the 101st Airborne had parachuted into Prague in February 1948.strations, and a group of students has brought an antidiscrimination lawsuit against Harvard, demanding the appointment of a black woman professor...

...Kagan, who teaches the history of the Peloponnesian War in a Brooklyn accent and from under a Korean War-style crewcut, was his man...

...Five years ago, Harvard Law seemed on the verge of becoming the academic left's biggest conquest...

...Harvard had refused to offer tenure to a capable, but non-left, woman scholar just three years before...

...T here are limits, of course, to what I any one dean can do...

...In his fall 1989 address to the incoming class, Dean Clark brokewith the rigid custom that requires law school deans to urge their students to go to work for Ralph Nader after graduation, and said instead, "No part of the profession has a monopoly on 'doing good.' Helping people to solve their problems—to cope with government agencies and neighbors and spouses—is essential work of lawyers...

...And, just possibly, it may be able to circumvent the demographic trends, excluding today's young non-leftist scholars from promotion, and, like the mainline Protestant denominations, isolating itself from the conservatism of the young in order to enjoy its plush endowments in splendid irrelevance...

...You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows...

...And last month, the Atlantic joined the barrage with a long excerpt from ex-Dartmouth Review editor Dinesh D'Souza's new book II-liberal Education (see review, p. 53), while New York magazine lionized Camille Pavia, a weird but aggressively Incorrect feminist...