Political Correctness & Partisan Review
Wrong, Dennis
The Fall 1993 issue of Partisan Review was entirely filled by a symposium on "The Politics of Political Correctness" to which twenty-seven people, most of them professors, contributed....
...Toward the end of a fitting memorial tribute to Irving Howe in the Summer 1993 PR, he criticized Howe and Dissent for, implicitly at least, supporting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua...
...Lilla summarizes European views of the debate that perceive political correctness as no more than the latest evidence of anti-intellectualism reflecting an enduring "profound tension," previously described by Richard Hofstadter, between "American democratic culture . . . [and] the life of the mind...
...SPRING • 1994 • 277...
...This includes PR itself, which two years ago devoted a whole issue to the proceedings of a conference it had organized on "The Changing Culture of the University" in which twelve of the current symposiasts participated, advancing arguments not notably different from theirs in the present issue...
...The assault, moreover, is continuous with earlier attacks on left conformism in the universities that were given wide currency by conservatives during the Reagan and Bush administrations...
...In one of the two or three outstanding— though reprinted— symposium pieces, John Searle points out that poststructuralist relativism and residual Marxism are concentrated in literature departments and poorly represented in departments of philosophy and the social sciences (not at all, of course, in the physical sciences...
...Another editor, Mark Lilla, enjoins, "Let this be the last symposium on the culture wars...
...The distance from the fashionable French thinkers favored by poststructuralist literary theorists to such downmarket experiences of political correctness is considerable, although no doubt there has been a certain trickle effect...
...He ignores the fact that Howe and many writers for Dissent, for example, my New York University colleague Juan Corradi, whom Dissent actually sent to Managua, clearly opposed both the Sandinistas and the Reagan administration's illegal sponsorship of the contra rebellion against them...
...The target has been damaged to the point where those identified with political correctness have themselves repudiated the label and been forced into a defensive posture...
...His article, eventually published in a neoconservative journal, read like a justification (before the facts became public) of the covert and illegal Reagan administration policies in Iran and Central America...
...The latter theme has become a staple of the funny papers (including the liberal "Doonesbury" strip), usually involving the concoction of ingeniously ludicrous equivalents for other groups of euphemisms comparable to "vertically challenged" for short people...
...A newspaper columnist making humorous predictions for the New Year wrote that "every article about political correctness on campus will include the phrase 'a Hebrew colloquialism literally translated as "water buffalo".' " One in four of the PR symposiasts lives up to this prediction by alluding to the farcical incident at the University of Pennsylvania to which it refers...
...Eugene Goodheart also identifies conservative equivalents of PC and adds Ravitch, Nat Hentoff, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cornel West to the list of new voices transcending the frozen terms of a 276 • DISSENT Magazines debate that has been going on for over a decade...
...Seven years ago, PR was publicly embarrassed when it cancelled a symposium on American foreign policy centered on an article by Michael Ledeen after he had been revealed as an important figure in the Iran-contra scandal...
...In the light of PR's illustrious past, it is sad to have to doubt whether this role really meets any urgent intellectual or political need...
...In the years since, the journal has increasingly resembled a quarterly supplement to the New Criterion and Commentary, combining features of both...
...He proceeds to fault Bromwich, Hughes, and Gates for rejecting the right-wing counterparts of PC...
...Three years have passed since the "politically correct" (PC) label came into general use to describe efforts on college campuses to promote or impose approved speech codes for referring to groups victimized by past discrimination and, more broadly, to describe the mechanically applied egalitarian principles justifying these efforts...
...But, then, Mirsky thinks that his friend Elizabeth Holtzman, of all people, was a victim of PC...
...The professor at the University of New Hampshire suspended because of a thoroughly questionable charge of sexual harassment (subsequently defended in The Village Voice and The New York Review of Books) was accused by several barely literate students in a class on "technical writing" in a two-year applied life sciences program...
...The senior editor, William Phillips, and Ronald Radosh, a frequent recent writer in PR on political subjects, both make a point of criticizing anti-PC liberals...
...No one publicly defends the condemners of the "water buffalo" epithet, the list of approved euphemisms circulated at Smith College (which no one has been punished for ignoring), Leonard Jeffries's diatribes at the City University of New York or those of his fellow Afrocentrist at Wellesley College—all invoked yet again by many of the PR symposiasts...
...Do we really need to hear yet again from Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball, who fulminate every month against political correctness and its cognates in Kramer's the New Criterion...
...Nor is there any novelty in the universally critical attitude toward their subject of the symposiasts, none of whom defends political correctness even as a well-intentioned enterprise gone wrong...
...he is pleased to witness the emergence of strong liberal critiques of PC from Searle, Frederick Crews, Irving Howe, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., David Bromwich, Todd Gitlin, C. Vann Woodward, John Highman, and Robert Hughes...
...Fred Siegel cites Hofstadter to the same effect...
...All precincts, in short, have been heard from and for some time now...
...Robert Alter, a professor of English at Berkeley and the author of a book critical of the new ideological modes of theorizing about literature, observes that even in English departments where Toni Morrison is thought to be more important than Shakespeare, the students respond more enthusiastically to the latter...
...Three contributions, including two of the longest, were previously published elsewhere, and quite a few of the contributors have had their say in other easily accessible publications...
...Radosh, to be sure, may have some trouble recognizing such a distinction...
...SPRING • 1994 • 275 Magazines To his credit, one of the editors, Morris Dickstein, begins his contribution with the declaration, "This is rather late in the day for a symposium on political correctness...
...One has the impression that the most extravagant rhetoric denouncing PC as "liberal fascism" (Kramer quoting Paul Johnson) posing a threat to "the traditions of the West" (PR's preamble to the symposium), "the autonomy of the modern university" (Brigitte Berger), "what is best and most lasting in our culture" (Kimball), "nothing less than the intellectual and political achievements of our democratic society" (Kramer), "irony and wit" (David Lehman), "the heritage of Western civilization" (William Phillips), "the integrity of our culture" (Ronald Radosh), comes from journalists and literateurs who, like the most prominent neoconservative publicists, are not very conversant with the structure and routines of the contemporary university...
...Morris Dickstein insists that conservatives have created their own version of PC in demonizing "the Left...
...They fail to note that it is in fields of such dubious intellectual repute as communications, education, journalism, film studies, and, perhaps, as Wolfe suggests, business administration that "sensitivity training," multicultural pieties, and various new forms of groupthink have taken firmest root...
...Just about every major newspaper and magazine in the country has run lead articles criticizing political correctness, denouncing it as "thought control" in violation of the First Amendment, or at the very least ridiculing its silly linguistic puritanism...
...This is even true of sociology, traditionally a field attractive to political activists...
...Alter's reflections are wise and thoroughly knowledgeable about the current condition of the teaching of English, skeptical of the anecdotalism and extreme claims made by both sides in the PC debate, although unambiguously opposed to the ideologues of race, class, and gender...
...One either supports the teaching of Western traditions and values, or dismisses them as the product of dead, white males," writes Phillips...
...Diane Ravitch provides a typically well-informed and intelligent account of antimeritocratic practices at the high school level...
...There is an abysmal failure here to distinguish between the adoption of a middle position between two extreme's and the outright rejection of the terms in which the debate is posed by both sides...
...Most of the symposiasts concentrate on university liberal arts programs, especially on English departments—fully a third of them are professors or former professors of English...
...sociologists have in recent years elected such non- or anti-PC figures to the presidency of their academic association as James Coleman, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Amitai Etzioni...
...Daniel Bell, Leon Wieseltier, Susan Sontag, and I ended our association with Partisan Review as a result of this episode...
...Yet Phillips and Radosh would surely be quick to deny that opposition to both the Stalinism to which Phillips predictably likens PC and the McCarthyism with which Radosh equates it involved splitting the difference between them...
...And not without reason...
...Dumbocracy in America," "The Politics of Separatism," "The Reign of Intolerance," "Self-Censorship," "Soft Totalitarianism," "False Gods," "McCarthyism of the Left," "The War on Standards," "The Crisis in Higher Education," "Anti-Rationalism" —all of these self-explanatory titles heading the individual contributions have become virtual clichés in the crusade against political correctness...
...Yet except for Searle and Ravitch none of these writers is represented in the symposium, while several well-known neoconservative polemicists are included who quickly seize the opportunity to link PC to the Clinton administration...
...Another PR symposiast, Mark Mirsky, grotesquely misconstrues Howe's silence in an informal conversation as tolerance for Leonard Jeffries's anti-Semitism...
...It may be that some liberal PC critics were asked to contribute and declined, perhaps because they did not like the company they thought they would be keeping in PR's pages and did not relish being token voices...
...Alan Wolfe argues that to a considerable extent political correctness has been imposed by university administrators schooled in new managerial techniques...
...As for a middle ground, it simply does not exist...
...The Fall 1993 issue of Partisan Review was entirely filled by a symposium on "The Politics of Political Correctness" to which twenty-seven people, most of them professors, contributed...
...Unlike several famous earlier PR symposia, this one can hardly be said to take up either a timely or a neglected topic...
Vol. 41 • April 1994 • No. 2
