Capitol Ideas/Tulane and the Big Government Campus
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS TULANE AND THE BIG GOVERNMENT CAMPUS New Orleans Like other professors who have re- sisted the importation of "politically correct" thought into the university, Tulane's Paul Lewis...
...Reed fans should know that many of his columns have been reprinted in Whistling Dixie, published by the University of Missouri Press, with a foreword by Eugene Genovese...
...It was, of course, at the elite private institution across the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991 11...
...Professor Mack had earlier circulated a memo among his colleagues, denouncing the "enrichment" document as itself "profoundly racist and sexist," for the following reason: "It fully embraces one of the key anti-liberal principles found at the core of all racist movements...
...Titlane I knew quite well, mostly as a visitor and user of its library...
...This thesis appears within the document in the claim that at present the university represents only a narrow and parochial perspective on the world because its membership is drawn largely from 'one small sector of our society,' viz the `Caucasian' and the 'male.' " If it's true, Mack continued, that peoples way of thinking is determined bytheir biological category, then "the pursuit of rational and humane intergroup communication is absurd...
...In the Bay Area there's a close analogy...
...Finally, he responded by drafting a resolution calling the document an attack on academic freedom and a "direct insult to the integrity of this faculty," which was encouraged to "reject all procedures proposed" by the initiative...
...It was a low-key, decorous event, given the divisiveness of the topic...
...This claim was neither documented nor could it be contradicted, Gwyn pointed out, since the alleged sentiments of racism and sexism were said to be held "unconsciously...
...He told me that he had received quite a bit of support for the stand he has taken—some of it from people he had never heard of before, some of it anonymous...
...People of color" and women were to be lured with reduced teaching loads, higher salaries, and special stipends...
...They can therefore find out what's going on at the university by reading the local newspaper...
...In a further echo of totalitarianism, faculty and students would also be encouraged to report on each other...
...Eamon Kelly, the president of Tulane, replied with a letter of his own, rather lamely pointing out that by Tom Bethell these were mere proposals, not yet in final form...
...Entitled "Making the Campus Safe for Bureaucracy," his article describes a 1990 Carnegie Foundation report (Campus Life...
...So one does begin to form the impression of an administrative class of Higher Educators, well armored with advanced degrees but "not true academicians," as Lewis remarked, floating about from one foundation to another —Ford to Carnegie to Rockefeller—with intermediate administrative stops at educational establishments, spending gilt-edged trust funds on guilt-edged causes...
...The "initiative" opened with the casual assertion that "racism and sexism are perTom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent and a fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...It was the best university in the New Orleans area, no doubt in thestate, and of course reliably liberal and very much representative of the views and opinions of the American academy in general...
...Evidently there are people on campus who didn't like what was going on but are afraid to say so publicly...
...If implemented, the TuJ 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991 lane initiative will shift a lot of power from the faculty to the university administration, considering the "enrichment liaison" types it would have to hire...
...As a result of the publicity, Lewis thought, supporters of the initiative were "hunkering down in their foxholes for a while" but wouldn't give up, because they were "true believers...
...So one whistle-blower can cause the administration a big headache...
...Changing the academic level of the university is not something that can be easily achieved in so short a time—if it can be done at all...
...In any event, the Tulane administration was immediately thrown on the defensive by Lewis's letter...
...As a well-known New Orleans lawyer pointed out, Tulane has a local board of administrators...
...In the last twenty years, Lewis pointed out, the number of full-time students at Tulane has increased by 72 percent, while the number of administrators has increased by 300 percent (and the number of faculty by 25 percent...
...Strange now to think of it as harboring whole departments of racists and sexists, I thought, as though perhaps the Plaquemines Parish followers of Leander Perez (excommunicated by the Archbishop in the 1960s for his segregationist views) had somehow managed to gain appointment and tenure at the university...
...Paul Lewis mentioned that the "advocacy of interdisciplinary programs" is one of the more effective tools used by administrators who in general want to "pulverize faculty resistance to centralization...
...Paul Lewis pointed out that three of the key figures in the administration pushing for the initiative—Eamon Kelly, Ron Mason, and Paul Firstenberg, chancellor for Resource Planning and Development—were alumni of the Ford Foundation...
...But even at Stanford, I gather, students of late have been tactfully resisting the feminist mind patrol and the multicultural brainwashing...
...Bay that students were first heard shouting "Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture's got to go...
...And every department would have its own KGB officer, called an "enrichment liaison person," who would inform the administration about progress in meeting "enrichment goals...
...Given that the academy has long been the main citadel of liberalism, what we have been seeing in recent years can be considered an oblique attack on liberalism itself from an unexpected direction...
...It was published prominently on the editorial page, and made an impact...
...He had always considered campus politics a great time-waster...
...Furthermore, on the day before the initiative was promulgated, the Ford Foundation awarded a grant of $100,000 to Tulane—to be spent on "race and gender understanding...
...Lewis's first inclination was not to get involved...
...The Wall Street Journal then mentioned the Tulane developments in one of its editorials on the declining academy, prompting another reply from Eamon Kelly...
...Today he is chairman of the political science department at Tulane University, the author of a recently published book, The Crisis of Argentine Capitalism, and the most visible opponent of a "politically correct" assault on 'Mane...
...The chairman of the university's affirmative action committee said at the law school debate that the problems identified by Lewis would be addressed...
...In a recent issue of Academic Ques- tions, a publication of the National Association of Scholars ("the cutting edge of faculty opposition to the excesses of multiculturalism," according to Time), Thomas Short of Kenyon College makes much the same point...
...Lewis wrote a letter to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, pointing out all these things...
...Facultymembers would be expected to attend "racism and sexism awareness" seminars to "sensitize" them (i.e., re-educate them...
...Then again, the alumni of such institutions notoriously don't have much idea what is going on beyond the performance of the football and basketball teams...
...This is the thesis that how THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991 9 people think, feel, and act is determined by their racial/biological category...
...Paul Lewis turned out to be a well-organized, intelligent person who had been keeping careful files and obviously had spent a good deal of time in recent months thinking about the politicization of the academy and the rise of a new form of McCarthyism...
...Five years later he voted for Eugene McCarthy for President...
...John Shelton Reed, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, mentioned to me the other day that the problem in the universities may not be as widespread as some fear...
...On the other side were Ronald Mason, general counsel and senior vice president of the university, and a law school professor...
...The Tulane document proposed the following: Every department would be required to hire qualified "people of color" and/or women until the university's affirmative action goal was met...
...The effect might be to encourage liberals to ask themselves what, if anything, they do believe in, beyond "freedom of expression...
...But it isn't easy to do so...
...Ilived in New Orleans for years and it was a pleasure to be back recently, in that blessed interlude—call it "Lent" —between the crowds of Mardi Gras and the heat of summer...
...vasive in America, and are fundamentally present in all American institutions," by implication including Tillane...
...One would thinkthat the dependence of such private institutions as Duke and Stanford on the generosity of their alumni would make them less political and more accountable than they seem to have been...
...On the other hand, bureaucratic empire-building does have its possibilities...
...Few stay for much more than a decade at whatever institution they preside over, and in that time they naturally want to make an impact...
...By this time, the "MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour" and Time magazine had also contacted Paul Lewis...
...We're all locked into our biological boxes (except for the "miraculously enlightened few" who propose to set us straight), making respectful discourse between the separate groups impossible...
...The provost would "aggressively use his authority" to "overrule the hiring recommendation of a department" if incorrect faculty members were hired...
...Now, with all the publicity, perhaps they are beginning to find out...
...Kelly worked there for ten years before coming to Tulane...
...seeking, as the 'Mane proposal (in a nice outburst of utopian candor) says, "to change over time the nature of our University, and bring it to the next level of social and human progress...
...He and Firstenberg "go back a long way together," Lewis said...
...Reed has spent this academic year at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and I find that I turn first to his very readable column, "From the Lower Right," in the monthly journal Chronicles...
...Tulane was in fact one of nineteen universities to be so favored by the foundation, which apparently is giving away millions in support of this cause...
...Lewis had some interesting things to say about the dilemma of the university president in general...
...Everyone seemed to be conscious of the news media's potential interest in the story...
...This in turn leaves room "only for coercion and indoctrination," which the document duly supports, "with great internal consistency...
...Departments would be pressured to "integrate materials on women and people of color in their course curriculum...
...In fact, the siege of political correctness could well have salutary effects...
...Last year, after the university administration circulated a draft document entitled "Initiatives for the Race and Gender Enrichment of Tulane," Bill Gwyn of the political science department drew Lewis's attention to the document, calling it "the most dangerous proposal I've seen in 25 years...
...A revised version of the proposal will be circulated sometime in April...
...How very implausible the whole thing seemed...
...He received his doctorate from the University of North Carolina in 1965, and in a book entitled North Carolina and the Negro is depicted in Chapel Hill in 1963, singing "We Shall Overcome" with a group of civil-rights activists...
...But senior vice president Ron Mason, who is black, said in the debate that the revised proposal will be "tougher than ever...
...In mid-March there was a debate at Tulane's law school, with Lewis and Eric Mack, a libertarian member of the philosophy department, arguing against the proposed initiative...
...And I don't have an answer to that," Paul Lewis said, when I mentioned this apparently greater susceptibility of private institutions to politicization and ideological takeover...
...At universities with national boards, however—Stanford, Harvard, and Duke are examples—the president has greater power, because the board will tend to know only what he tells them...
...As Reed pointed out, the problem at Duke is worse than at Chapel Hill...
...If they had been quashed, the university itself "would have been gravely guilty of suppressing intellectual freedom...
...In Search of Community) that is replete with woolly-headed nonsense about caring and celebrative communities, multi-cultural pluralism, and cross-cultural diversity...
...CAPITOL IDEAS TULANE AND THE BIG GOVERNMENT CAMPUS New Orleans Like other professors who have re- sisted the importation of "politically correct" thought into the university, Tulane's Paul Lewis has good liberal credentials...
...I'm told that the University of California at Berkeley is far from being a radical hotbed these days...
Vol. 24 • May 1991 • No. 5
