Dictatorship of Virtue
Bernstein, Richard
E very year the undergraduate newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania, the Daily Pennsylvanian, carries a single conservative column. Gregory Pavlik was the writer of that column during the...
...First, the university's Judicial Inquiry Office called to tell Pavlik he would be the subject of an investigation...
...Great, except she misspells "Gandhi...
...Indeed, the only thing fair and honest in this book is Bernstein's reporting...
...Focus connects experience and language...
...7/ DICTATORSHIP OF VIRTUE: MULTICULTURALISM AND THE BATTLE FOR AMERICA'S FUTURE Richard Bernstein Alfred A. Knopf/367 pages / $25 reviewed by M.D...
...You bracket the subject and center on it...
...It may not be pedagogy at the level of Quintilian, but is it enough to destroy the career of a thirty-year veteran with tenure...
...The stories Bernstein relates surely support that sentiment, but in the end he seems unwilling to draw the necessary lessons from them...
...That was not the way campus authorities saw it...
...A small group of parents protests the change, noting that several graduates of the course have gone on to Ph.D.s in history, while more than a dozen others are history teachers in other schools...
...the supposedly "harassed" person never heard a thing...
...member warned it might not be the best thing to punish one of its students for what he wrote in the school paper...
...A professor of English at the University of New Hampshire was found guilty of sexual harassment stemming from a classroom lecture in which he said, "Focus is like sex...
...You seek a target...
...Bernstein's book is a tiny but unmistakable sign, I think, that relatively normal, middle-class Americans of all political bent are growing less tolerant of the foolishness about sensitivity and identity victimization...
...You close in on the subject...
...f you have the inclination to see Gregory Pavlik's story as an isolated case of sensitivity run amok, Richard Bernstein's Dictatorship of Virtue will disabuse you of the notion...
...was an adulterer and a plagiarist...
...He refused...
...One officer was suspended, and a follow-up report by the university recommended that the campus police begin keeping race and sex information on their detainees, "to determine if [arrest policy] has an adverse impact on any groups and if the policy is applied in a consistent, non-discriminatory manner...
...Bernstein, a reporter for the New York Times, has written a report that catalogues so many such abuses that it becomes impossible to consider them exceptions that prove fairness and honesty to be the general rule...
...In protest, a group of black students stole and destroyed a press run of the newspaper...
...The university finally agreed not to prosecute Pavlik, after a faculty M. D. Carnegie is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator...
...They reiterated the racial harassment charge, and defended their own actions as an example of free expression...
...And that, of course, is what conservative thinkers have known for quite some time: if you force "tolerance" down someone's throat, he is sure to grow less tolerant...
...Hardly incendiary material in the normal, free exchange of ideas...
...these tales of idiocy and intolerance read like a reference source for 1984...
...he also recounted the stale old news that Martin Luther King, Jr...
...The story has a final, improbable twist: The only people finally punished for the incident were the police who arrested the students who destroyed the papers...
...A social studies teacher defends the abolition of the course in a strident letter to the local newspaper, listing historical "greats" from other cultures that ought to be studied instead...
...While he may be correct in arguing that our obsession with racial "diversity" and "inclusion" is a direct outgrowth of the civil rights movement, Bernstein does not go so far as to conclude what most conservatives take for granted—that, in the end, a "bias-free environment" is an abstraction that can be neither effected nor managed by institutions such as universities and governments...
...As the incident gathered steam around the school, other students started piling on additional charges...
...The dissenters are lambasted as "vigilantes" and "intellectual imperialists...
...Gregory Pavlik was the writer of that column during the 1992-93 academic year, and drew a lot of attention from his fellow students and the university administration...
...CARNEGIE The American Spectator December 1994 81...
...You and the subject become one...
...Advanced Placement European History, widely regarded as the best and most challenging course at Brookline High School in Massachusetts, is slated to be abolished in favor of a course in "government," in which thestudent takes an internship in a local or state agency...
...You zero in on your subject...
...Pavlik was told the charges against him would be dropped "if he agreed to a meeting with the thirty-one students who had accused him...
...B ernstein allows that he himself is a liberal, one who is sympathetic to multiculturalism's goals—equal opportunity and justice for all—but who feels that the reactionary forces of the left have simply gone too far...
...The teacher was eventually suspended without pay after an alleged remark about a female student was reported by a third party...
...Pavlik opined that affirmative action contradicts the American principle of equal treatment for all...
...You move from side to side...
...The charge: racial harassment, in the form of the opinions he expressed in his columns...
Vol. 27 • December 1994 • No. 12
