Editorial/PC People
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL PC PEOPLE by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. O ur universities are in crisis. Something must be done! And at The American Spectator we have decided that something will be done. This is not to...
...PC is supposed to encourage "diversity," but one finds more diversity at the University of Moscow than on the average American campus...
...That is why the editors of this magazine, along with various other friends of freedom across the Republic, are establishing a human rights monitoring network, Amnesty in Academia, to protest human-rights violations committed against students by "enrichment-liaison persons...
...In lesser fields the oxen interrupt their harvest tramp...
...All hands head for the house and all ears turn to the wireless, as the flower of the state's manhood strap on armor and gulp down one last restorative of steroids for the afternoon's carnage on the gridiron...
...Little can be done about mediocre and indolent teachers, but perhaps something can be done to protect liberty, particularly now that liberals seem to be catching on that we all have a stake in campuses graced by intellectual diversity, academic freedom, and the Bill of Rights—and, of course, strong athletic programs...
...Legal counsel will be available where the courts still function...
...There is more sophistication at the gaming tables of Monte Carlo than in the faculty club of Stanford University—and infinitely more charm...
...My favorite is lookism ("construction of a standard for beauty/attractiveness...
...In its faddishness, it is inimical to intellect...
...Business schools turn out aspiring Rockefellers and Milkens...
...American students seeking a sound grounding in their civilization would be better advised to head out for the University of Tokyo, where the profs speak better English and probably are even superior to the average American prof in Nintendo...
...University thought patrols (at 'Mane, the thought patroller is called an "enrichment-liaison person," with one posted in each department) harass profs and students with their codes, many of which are being adjudged unconstitutional in the courts...
...Many have been taught to read...
...It is also the program of a generation of campus radicals who grew up in the 1960s and are now achieving positions of academic influence...
...More than 130 universities have issued codes barring free discussion of dozens of topics, most of them quite idiotic, although many universities have made them burning issues on campus...
...Even a student's criminal record is unlikely to preclude participation in a university athletic program nowadays, so long as the student is not actually still in jail or on death row...
...As a class, they are pampered provincials from the 'burbs, and now they are returning American universities to the status of second-rate cow colleges whose attain-ments in the humanities and in various of the social sciences are the laughingstock of the world...
...They have given us no generation of writers, no Angry Young Men, no Bloomsbury, not even a Beat Generation...
...N oting the irony that PC is proliferating in America even as tolerance and free inquiry proliferate in Soviet universities, Charles Bremner of the Times of London defines PC as "a cluster of broadly left-wing attitudes designed to foster tolerance towards race, gender and class but which seem, in Orwellian fashion, to do the opposite " And Newsweek identifies PC as "a set of beliefs and expressions which students from places as diverse as Sarah Lawrence and San Francisco State recognize instantly as . . . politically correct," an agenda . . . broadly shared by most organizations of minority students, feminists and gays...
...It also constitutes a fraud...
...The present low estate of academia is not particularly surprising...
...The American radicals were oppressed only by their megalomania and swinishness...
...Some of these reports indeed disclose insensitivity by students, but the 1960s radicals who spit on Vietnam veterans and burned their flag are unlikely champions of sensitivity...
...We shall establish an 800 number that students can call to notify Amnesty's caseworkers of the imminent arrest of a Shakespearean scholar or the brutal interrogation of a student caught whistling the National Anthem on campus (see box, p. 8...
...Lecturers ridicule not just the United States but also the civilization that launched it, and they do so by taking unfair advantage of standards of freedom and individualism that, as a matter of fact, are unique to the West...
...And this fall we shall publish a special back-to-school issue, detailing the services of Amnesty in Academia, advising students on how to survive in societies hostile to human liberty and to learning...
...Reports of students being singled out for exercising free speech now number in the hundreds...
...Most optimistically, the great purpose of American higher education has not been obnubilated...
...I am told that, even in the Ivy League, a prison term of less than five years has no effect on athletic eligibility, so long as the incarcerated athlete remains fit and reasonably "drug-free...
...In place of the works of such men as Socrates, Milton, and Dante, students are forced to read ephemeral trash written (or perhaps scratched on bark) by Third World farceurs...
...It is supposed to create a sense of intellectual community, but in its brutal contentiousness—pitting sex against sex, ethnic group against ethnic group, class against class—it could not possibly create community...
...In a dozen sports our universities have enrolled some of the finest professional athletes money can buy...
...The real question is: Will anyone be able to rescue the universities from PC's anti-intellectual radicals of the 1960s...
...We shall publish a yearly review of human rights violations on campus and a list of the worst tyrannies in academia...
...Aside from a little rock music and a few treatises on the public benefits of dope and zoo sex, the 1960s radicals have created nothing of lasting intellectual interest...
...We shall send such trained human rights negotiators as P. J. O'Rourke to campus despotisms where students are being oppressed and, at places like Stanford University, quite possibly tortured...
...At Smith College the code delineates ten kinds of oppression to be avoided, among them ageism ("oppression of the young and old by young adults and the middle-aged") and heterosexism ("oppression of those of sexual orientations other than heterosexual . . . this can take place by not acknowledging their existence...
...No, at the heart of the university all is well...
...Many universities have adopted athletic programs for coeds that are as lucrative as the programs that fire the idealism of male athletes...
...PC constitutes a vast infringement on the human rights of students...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr is editor-in-chief of The American Spectator...
...But in the university's quieter locales, where etiquette matters, where folkways and mores are carefully prescribed by traditions that trace back to the monasticism of the Middle Ages, a blue-nosed orthodoxy called PC, which in the original Chinese characters appears roughly like this is now conjured up when the authorities in Peking sense that college students are getting out of line...
...At the University of Michigan, the code prohibits "any behavior, verbal or physical, that stigmatizes or victimizes an individual on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991 creed, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, handicap or Vietnam-era veteran status...
...Their illuminati have created not one book admired anywhere by anyone but them...
...College athletics have never been more robust...
...It is supposed to encourage toleration of minorities and something envisaged as "multiculturalism," but it is spectacularly intolerant and fundamentally ignorant of all cultures...
...Departments of the sciences still function reasonably well, and knowledge in many scientific fields proliferates annually at an amazing pace...
...Bremner wonders: "How did the PC culture become so powerful in a country dominated by conservative politics...
...they did labor under certain impediments...
...Engineering and medicine flourish...
...The anti-intellectualism of the American academy is an old story, but human rights violations committed in the name of PC are relatively new...
...If they no longer talk of taking to the streets, it is because they now are gaining access to the conventional weapons of campus politics: social pressure, academic perks . . . outright coercion...
...The scientifically inclined are often perfectly capable of matching skills with those of their profs at Nintendo, and even Sega...
...The answer is that it withdrew to those areas of American life where politics is non-democratic and played by manipulating liberal ideals...
...Incidentally, this is a generation of radicals who, despite two decades of braggadocio have made no greater contribution to Western intellect than have the intellectual elites of Bulgaria (and I mean no disrespect to Bulgaria's eggheads...
...Now, however, American liberals are beginning to sense that PC culture is profoundly anti-liberal...
...It was back in the early 1960s, in a book that makes ironic reading today, Anti-Intellectualism in America, that the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that "ours is the only educational system in the world vital segments of which have fallen into the hands of people who joyfully andmilitantly proclaim their hostility to intellect...
...According to its idiotic principles, students are to be denied much of the highest thought of Western civilization on the grounds that much of that thought has issued from Dead White European Males...
...On autumnal Saturdays in Nebraska and Michigan, in Ohio and Oklahoma, and in many fine Southern states, all work ceases...
...The tractors stand idle in the fields...
...The advocates of PC are indeed hostile to intellect, but they are also hostile to human rights...
...What is more, most of the great universities now allow students to participate in sport despite academic records that hitherto would have prohibited such healthful play...
...It is Western civilization that has tolerated diversity, exalted freedom, and remained sufficiently open to other cultures to be able to revitalize its own art...
...This is not to say that all provinces of the great universities are in crisis...
...The University of Connecticut issued a proclamation banning "inappropriately directed laughter...
Vol. 24 • May 1991 • No. 5
