The Demonization of Political Correctness
Gitlin, Todd
If American culture is centrifugal, and things are falling apart, what is the center that is not holding? Presumably, it is some core of principles— individual rights and opportunities— united...
...Hardly any students or faculty, let alone journalists, knew that alumni "legacies," athletic, and special-skill admissions accounted for more exceptions to the "objective standards only" norm than affirmative action, so that in 1989, 24 percent of white students were admitted to Berkeley on criteria other than academic scores—still a much lower percentage than in the case of blacks and Hispanics, but not negligible either...
...six, Descartes, Machiavelli, Aquinas, and Plato...
...13) anti-sexism...
...Conservatives observed that, having taken the White House, they still had not taken back Harvard, Hollywood, the Modem Language Association, or the National Endowment for the Arts...
...But beyond Jeffries, in any event, there was no shortage of material to warrant censure of the censorious American university...
...The Selectivity of Media Obsessions The alarmism of Roger Kimball, Hilton Kramer, and Irving Kristol makes an easy target...
...One reason why the campaign against PC had more legs than a caterpillar is that identity politics and attendant censoriousness were real...
...The urgency of the culture war against the barbarians progressed by fits and starts during the Reagan years...
...It is also both compelling and handy to defend the ideal of objectivity against its degradation by obscurantist professors who clot their FALL • 1995 • 493 Demonizing PC writing with jargon and, with great flourishes, trumpet impenetrable translations of dubious French phrases...
...While maladies like chronic fatigue syndrome and Lyme disease balloon overnight into cover stories, other facts and dangers take years to rise to the threshold of media awareness—AIDS, for example, or breast cancer, or lately, prostate cancer...
...By the same token, America's sturdy individuals need free speech, now under assault from "thought police" in everwidening circles of patrol...
...So did student debt...
...In Illinois, for example, university spending fell from 23.5 percent of state funds in 1968 to 18.3 percent in 1990...
...Respectable experts, as I have mentioned, help certify the legitimacy of a story...
...The charge was that affirmative action was excluding thousands of worthy white and Asian candidates...
...But the brandishing of counterevidence does not necessarily clarify...
...affirmative action was news...
...D'Souza, to bolster his proclamation that universities are "expelling Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, and other 'white males' from their required reading list," quoted the chair of the English department at Penn State University to the effect that "Alice Walker's The Color Purple is taught in more English departments today than all of Shakespeare's plays combined...
...Although the academic curriculum and its jargon are not generally of broad journalistic interest, nor admissions schemes, nor restrictions on student life—sexual conduct codes passed without press attention for de486 • DISSENT Demonizing PC cades—suddenly these were all of burning interest...
...If women, or blacks, or gays had their afflictions, well, then, in a world of interest groups, he felt that he had his, too...
...Ted Turner gave Patrick Buchanan a daily slot on CNN's show, "Crossfire...
...Between 1980 and 1989, spending for higher education at all levels of government plunged by 24.3 percent in constant dollars...
...In 1994, a comic Hollywood version of Wesleyan University, PCU, was released, and in 1994-1995, Politically Correct Bedtime Stories was on the best-seller list...
...Especially at elite institutions, it was frequently arbitrary, fatuous, conformist, and wrong-headed, but rarely punitive...
...He worships at the shrine of history but doesn't know the facts...
...Kimball, whose book was one of the first to lend legitimacy to mainstream journalistic exposés of PC, went on to say that "the takeover of the universities and organizations like the Modern Language Association and the American Council of Learned Societies was only the first step...
...Part of the explanation for the PC obsession is that there was, in conventional journalistic terms, "a good story...
...In the 1970s, the term indicated—according to the user's pleasure—either strict adherence to the political line of one's "tendency" or a certain ironic distance...
...To the degree that the university loses face or devalues the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, their own credentials are devalued...
...The idea that people should ever be rewarded (and others, therefore, punished) according to group characteristics flies in the face of a belief that the market, using objective test scores, already adjudicates merit...
...and by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, feminists who offered in Professing Feminism a devastating and knowledgeable critique of women's studies programs...
...The easiest thing to do is to graft the latest round of facts or claims onto the previous round, and leave it at that...
...The center under bombardment by barbarians is "Western liberal values," "civilization," "culture," "reason...
...An individual story makes most sense when it rhymes with an established story...
...Presumably, it is some core of principles— individual rights and opportunities— united by the affirmation that America, heartland of the West, is their home...
...Nor did D'Souza mention that only about fifty of Stanford's fifteen hundred freshmen were taking the course that inspired his loathing...
...So, to the sound of martial music, have the exaggerations charged onward...
...In 1993, television's Comedy Channel began a weekly series, "Politically Incorrect...
...The lament was reinvigorated during the Nixon years, in a popular reaction against militant student movements, a reaction that this time had large-scale academic support...
...the terms (`p.c.' and `p.c.p.,' or `politically correct person') are not used in utter seriousness:' Yet the stampede was on...
...How could the breakdown of authority in the 1960s fail to generate a counter-movement, a conservative consolidation...
...This article is adapted from The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars, to be published in November by Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt...
...Certain obsessions begin with half- or quarter-truths and inflate them—the "missing children" campaign of the mid-1980s, which in full hysteria, down to its milk-carton portraits and President Reagan's claim that there were "well over a million children who disappear every year," neglected to note that, according to FBI statistics, of the thirty thousand American children missing in mid-1985, the grand total abducted by strangers was exactly sixty-seven, while about fifteen hundred had been snatched by a parent in a custody dispute, and the remainder, the vast majority, were runaways in flight from domestic abuse...
...It conveyed historical certitude...
...The campus climate of the time was, of course, not nearly as suffocating as it was made to sound...
...One explanation for the chorus of condemnation is that many would-be thought police officers were at work (though usually without the power to crack heads...
...The elderly were increasingly willing to dispense with public funds for schools that they thought inessential or worse...
...Of course, editors based in the northeast will say that their audience will be more interested in Columbia than in Texas A&M, and they are probably right...
...For decades after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite, in 1957, and the Eisenhower administration sounded the alarm and began pouring government money into education, scholarship had been justified as a contribution to national defense...
...q FALL • 1995 • 497...
...That was stage one," Kimball added, and as if that were not bad enough, "stage two, the penetration of political correctness into public policy, is now under way...
...If the world was divided up by identity cards, he, too, would learn to define his discomfort as a stigma, identify with it, wear it with pride...
...Pause a moment on these words: more or less total capitulation...
...five, Euripides, Dante, Luther, Montaigne, and Homer...
...Because Republicans and Democrats shared the trough and the blame, the scandal lacked the drama of partisan confrontation...
...One of D' Souza's points was that many blacks and Hispanics were being admitted to Berkeley with grade-point averages lower than whites and Asians—many of whom were being turned away with 4.0 averages...
...It happens, for example, that Newsweek's editor-in-chief, Maynard Parker, the man responsible for putting the 1990 "Thought Police" story on the magazine's cover, became a member of the Board of Directors of Stanford's Alumni Association the following year...
...to the reasonable person's hatred of self-righteousness...
...Destructive," "misinformed," "slanted," "antiestablishment," determined to "tear...
...Per contra, to be stamped incorrect was to be consigned to outer darkness...
...Shakespeare's dominance became even more visibly one-sided when I totaled the number of students in these courses...
...Graff cited national surveys of university literature syllabi to the same effect...
...It might be noted that Jeffries did not attract many students—his black studies program attracted all of "about half a dozen" majors on a campus of 12,000 undergraduates...
...News and World Report and Time, and, not least, cover stories in Newsweek ("Thought Police"), New York ("Are You Politically Correct...
...Nor did D'Souza remind his readers that canons are not engraved in granite...
...Melodramatic, continuous conflict helps make the story...
...Struggle language like Simon's anticipated the rightward shift in the media—and nudged it on...
...A popular phrase was born...
...Right-wing foundations helped launch ideological autos-da-fe like The McLaughlin Group onto the airwaves...
...Partly as a result of the prestige bought by canny investment, the intellectual atmosphere changed...
...Professor Leonard Jeffries of the City College of New York plugged a lot of holes all by himself...
...The term presumed that an entire self-consistent rational system of thought was at stake...
...Then too, once they have found their scandals, journalists like them simple...
...PC was a propaganda slogan from the beginning, a compound of facts and distortions meant to strangle curiosity...
...But have the barbarians actually seized the ramparts...
...It was not multiculturalism but the shopping mall university, full of electives, ushered in at Harvard in the late nineteenth century, that demoted an earlier generation of classics...
...After years of anti-PC blasts and countermobilizations, crusaders might be expected to take some satisfaction that the worst had been averted...
...nor that it took a bitter struggle before the above-mentioned "classics" replaced the Greeks and Latins a century ago...
...He was caught between his individualism, which wanted to be colorblind, and his social liberalism, which acknowledged a history of racial oppression...
...Thanks to this country, Americans have the opportunity to realize their powers according to their merits...
...D' Souza's flying tour of campus atrocities was especially breathless...
...The sense of extremity rivaled that of left-wing absolutists invoking the class struggle in the final battle against exploitation...
...The details were many and hard to grasp...
...On principle and on professional grounds, the press is prone to stand up against violations of freedom of speech—thus, campus speech codes made a compelling target for exposés...
...Thundering that "the only thing that can save the Republican party . . . is a counterintelligensia," Simon was no lone crusader...
...Kimball concluded by invoking the choice between appeasement and military preparedness, citing Churchill's statement in 1938 "that the British people had before them the choice of shame or war...
...In 1978, Simon and Kristol founded the Institute for Educational Affairs (in 1990 renamed the Madison Center for Educational Affairs), which proceeded to fund some sixty right-wing and sometimes scurrilous campus papers, one of them theDartmouth Review, where Dinesh D' Souza cut his journalistic eyeteeth...
...His polemical method was to gather incendiary quotes and baste them together...
...Ideologues drew the line and demanded to know of wafflers, Which side are you on...
...D'Souza declared arbitrarily that this, one of more than forty assigned texts in the course, was "perhaps the text which best reveals the premises underlying the new Stanford curriculum," and devoted two pages to trashing it What he devoted no pages to mentioning was that all eight courses assigned the Old and New Testaments, Freud, Marx, Shakespeare, and Aristotle...
...As Richard Bernstein (but not his headline writer) noted in the New York Times article that touched off the 1990-1991 media frenzy, "the term 'politically correct,' with its suggestion of Stalinist orthodoxy, is spoken more with irony than with reverence...
...If he had started out with a tolerant disposition, he was dismayed to find that integration had become the goal that dared not speak its outdated name (except, curiously, in parts of the Deep South...
...This is one reason why Stanford proved enthralling to media in 1988, when the Western civilization curriculum was revamped into a multicultural substitute, and not ten years earlier, when Western Civ was instated in the first place...
...Universities made journalistic targets partly because they were already losing public respect...
...Neoconservatives supplied the theory, identifying the media and the universities as nests of a knowledge class that had no stake in business (or national) success and whose naysaying was subsidized outside the market...
...PC did not, in fact, haul miscreants up before congressional committees, fire or flunk nonconformists, pillory them in the press, or take their passports away...
...Indeed, they may have a more intimate stake...
...He was ready to have conservatives name his malaise: victim of PC...
...For that matter, no symposium of left-wing academics, especially in literature, history, or cultural studies, lacked its counterattacks on reactionaries who, we were told, cloaked their own orthodoxy (even racism or sexism) by pretending that the textbooks and universities that once excluded people of color and women had, in that more bucolic time, been protected pastures of freedom— at least until barbarians of the 1960s aimed their mortars and bazookas at the ivy-covered ivory tower...
...But in no apparent relation to the actual strength of the wounded bete noire, much of the right continued to emit a high pitch of horror and fervor...
...Sometimes truth is difficult to establish, in particular when government propaganda goes to work...
...Let the young take care of themselves...
...In the early 1990s, about half of enrolled students held jobs while attending classes...
...Properly speaking, the phrase "politically correct" was recycled: the term had been around since the 193 Os...
...There were the delights of combat and exposé, with public values at stake...
...Even the anti-PC National Association of Scholars was divided, with some convinced that the left-PC-feminist-multiculturalist "monolith" (Kramer's word) had swept all reason and culture before it, others that the worst dogmatism associated with "political correctness" had been fought to a stand-off...
...In the case of the antiPC panic, journalistic fascination got a boost from the well-heeled right wing...
...Richard Bernstein of the New York Times, a far better reporter than D'Souza, compiled many serious cases in his 1994 book Dictatorship of Virtue—cases that in their prosecutorial absurdity indeed deserved to become canonical: among others, the University of Pennsylvania bringing charges of racism against a student for yelling "water buffalo," a translation of a Hebrew swearword, at some noisy black students...
...D' Souza's account of Stanford University's curriculum reform, for example, was woefully wrongheaded...
...Other top Newsweek editors, though not all, agreed that "Thought Police" would make a smashing cover for newsstand sales, which, although only a small percentage of total circulation, impress advertisers, and mark how well the magazine is doing against the competition...
...It was in 1993 that Kimball published these words, three years after his own book and Dinesh D' Souza's best-seller had sounded their alarms against the PC onslaught...
...down our system": these are among the terms hurled at the media, intellectuals, and universities by prominent executives of multinational corporations during 1974 -1975...
...Conservatives apparently cared more for his freedom than liberals who, in the name of diversity, counseled discretion that he could easily mistake for self-censorship...
...Over this four-year period I located two courses in which The Color Purple was taught, while I found eight courses that required at least six plays by Shakespeare and eight that required at least two...
...Hardly any understood that in a most Californian euphemism, high school students got bonus grade-point credit for doing well in college preparatory courses, so that a 4.0 average did not mean that a student had gotten straight A's...
...Bernstein's rhetoric was extravagant: he took his title from the French Revolution, opened with an epigraph from Robespierre, and peppered his text with references to Stalinism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution...
...George Will became ubiquitous in magazines, newspapers, and television...
...Comparisons end up in sidebars, if anywhere, but not in the headlines or the lead in the evening news...
...17) openness to the possibility that certain popular right-wing dogmas just might be erroneous...
...The genius of the attack on "political correctness" in the nineties has been to fuse the three, polarize opinion against them, and thereby seize the initiative...
...The instructor, a Jesuit, graded it D and warned the student that any more of this sort of thing would get him in serious trouble...
...Gaybashing is not a crime that catches much attention in a nation that ostensibly quivers with the fear of crime...
...The media panic was encouraged by another background factor—the weakening of the universities...
...By the late 1980s, indeed, the term was used mainly tongue in cheek...
...3. Finally, business money must flow away from the media which serve as megaphones for anticapitalist opinion and to media which are either profreedom or, if not necessarily "pro-business," at least professionally capable of a fair and accurate treatment of procapitalist ideas, values and arguments...
...If he was not conflicted, he got the idea that everyone else got to speak bitterness but himself...
...How shall we understand this inconsolable fervor, and its success in setting the terms of the debate...
...Like an Afrocentrist who claims that Plato was black but still doesn't get around to thinking about him, D'Souza claims to be on Plato's side but shows himself innocent of the Socratic method...
...Beyond personal connections and the pleasures of reporting properly located combat, journalists leaped into the PC story because, like it or not, they are engage—though not usually in the deliberate ideological way charged by many media critics...
...All the better when a party to the conflict or a victim of the crime carries prestige— Stanford or the Ivy League universities are newsworthy, just as the notorious rape of the Central Park jogger, a white investment banker, in 1989 received hundreds of times more attention than all the other brutal rapes committed around New York City that year put together...
...For all their genuflections toward reason, humanism, and liberality in a disinterested search for truth, Roger Kimball, Dinesh D 'Souza, and many of their journalistic derivatives were, at the very least, sloppy and amateurish...
...He was right...
...Scarcely any students, or faculty, for that matter, understood the administration's actual policy...
...The counteroffensive against the redoubts of the academic left began in the fall and winter of 1990-1991...
...7) kindness...
...matched human achievement...
...The dominant tone was anxiety...
...Any assessment of the PC panic must start with two general observations...
...Its ship had come in...
...to support affirmative action in student admissions but disapprove it for faculties or the Supreme Court...
...This climate, where it existed, was well worth criticizing, as at all times when students, professors, or anyone else conforms...
...By 1994, independent-minded opponents of the trendily "correct" were acknowledging that the alarm had been excessive...
...To be correct was to be stamped with the prestige of that system and assured of victory...
...One could write a book as long as D'Souza's composed entirely of refutations and qualifications...
...Individuals are already free to attain what they were meant to attain, and the heavy hand of the State should not interfere...
...in Colorado, from 23.5 percent in 1982 to 19.2 percent in 1992...
...Disproportionately, they are alumni of these schools...
...Then subsequent incidents are ripe to be recognized as part of a pattern...
...Only then could Political Correctness become a usable demonology in the eyes of politicians and the press...
...It was during these late months of the Reagan administration that the National Association of Scholars was founded to fight leftwing academics, and a turgid, quirky, demanding, obscure and frequently obscurantist book by a political theorist named Allan Bloom soared onto the bestseller list with a blanket assault on student activism, relativism, German philosophy, and rock 'n' roll...
...The center is a bedrock America, which is a "way of life," a "dream," an avatar of morality...
...Here was a tenured professor who had never produced any relevant scholarship, but in 1989 was considered a significant enough figure to be appointed as a consultant to an official task force by the New York State Superintendent of Education, where he delivered himself of the view that the dominance of "the EuropeanAmerican monocultural perspective" explained why "large numbers of children of non-European descent are not doing as well as expected...
...Reagan had the charm and ideological wherewithal to widen his political base beyond "movement conservatives," while his 51 percent of the vote looked like a landslide against Jimmy Carter's 41 percent...
...The exposés were of uneven merit, but they acquired instant canonical standing...
...Lewis essay arguing that pain is an instrument of God's will...
...Correct transcended right...
...Reagan's cuts in university funding, in fact, predated the end of the cold war...
...The savings and loan banking scandal, replete with bad guys and consequences amounting to more than $150 billion, took years to get into the spotlight...
...Some crusades start with almost no truth—for example, the "Africanized killer bees" periodically making their way northward over the Texas border to plunge America into a public health crisis...
...12) anti-fascism...
...The belief that a true picture of the world is possible is their occupational raison d' etre...
...In the twilight of political certitudes and all-encompassing political visions, the term was ready-made for mockery, even selfmockery, as by the Polish émigré ex- and anticommunist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, who once entitled an essay "My Correct Views about Everything...
...Harvard had only one required course, in composition, when I went there in the early 1960s...
...But the enrages among the conservatives kept maintaining that everything of value remained at risk, that the war was total, the stakes absolute...
...There were scandals—misappropriations of government funds and episodes of sexual harassment—and although there might have been just as many academic scandals left unexposed during the preceding decades, journalists were now primed for the hunt...
...Here was the chair of City College's department of black studies holding his position490 • DISSENT Demonizing PC a position normally held at the pleasure of the administration—for twenty years in a row while teaching that whites are "ice people" and blacks "sun people," and specializing in anti-Semitic smirks...
...In the polarized view, the center stands for truth long ago arrived at and agreed upon by reasonable men...
...most American universities and cultural organizations...
...The question is what to make of them...
...He grew less likely to care about racist, sexist, or homophobic harassment, and cared more about being the victim of stereotyp496 • DISSENT Demonizing PC ing himself...
...Media panics frequently start with, or get a boost from, the preoccupations of powerful groups who talk up certain social problems so vociferously, in the right journals, at the right resorts and the right dinner parties, as to land them on the journalistic agenda...
...The claim had to be made that reason and civilization were being overwhelmed by superannuated tenured radicals and their administrative puppets...
...The distinguished English professor Wayne Booth wrote in a February 14, 1994 letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune: May I suggest that you reprogram your computers...
...It did not hurt their cause that many in the media were receptive to certain complaints from the right...
...Inside the academy, scarcity inflamed faculty turf fights and fueled the intensity of PC and anti-PC crusades...
...With affirmative action, the number actually turned away was about 2,800...
...5) tact, courtesy, concern about hurting people's feelings unnecessarily...
...Eventually, a higher order of debate, with clarifying potential, emerged in anthologies edited by Paul Berman, Patricia Aufderheide, and Michael Berube and Cary Nelson and in articles by Barbara Epstein, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and David Hollinger—no fault of theirs that many of their judicious writings appeared in small-circulation academic journals...
...9) antibigotry...
...The tribute to American greatness joins three themes: the embrace of a canonized American (and Western) history and literature, the opposition to group rights, and the affirmation of free speech...
...8) courage in defending the underdog...
...Alum492 • DISSENT Demonizing PC ni preferences were a tradition...
...Students wondered whether, on graduation, they would be able to live in a house half the size of the one they grew up in...
...Consider the controversy over race-based admissions at Berkeley, one of D' Souza's case studies...
...Since arrogant professors and ignorant students are not (and have never been) in short supply, this was not difficult...
...He called for "nothing less than a massive and unprecedented mobilization of the moral, intellectual and financial resources which reside in those . . . who are concerned that our traditional free enterprise system, which offers the greatest scope for the exercise of our freedom, is in dire and perhaps ultimate peril...
...In principle, canon, opportunity, and free speech ought to be mutually detachable...
...The literary scholar Gerald Graff, author of a magisterial account of the history of his profession, decided to count the texts assigned in Northwestern University's English department from the fall of 1986, when Alice Walker's novel was first assigned in a course, to the spring of 1990...
...Their institutions require that they make objectivity claims...
...nor that one of those notorious white men of today's canon, good gay Walt Whitman, had to elbow aside John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell a generation later...
...In British literature, it is Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and Thackeray...
...The editorial pack, ever eager to sniff out trends by sampling each others' noses, went into full panic...
...In the populist mood, all the educated classes are under suspicion together for "elitism...
...But by the time of Reagan's presidency, the shine was off federal spending...
...The Right Turn But how, in particular, did the PC recoil begin...
...15) sympathetic support for the jobless, the homeless, the impoverished, or the abused...
...It is logically possible, for example, to support a common curriculum that is both Western and nonWestern...
...Declining in wealth, universities also declined in prestige...
...Still, he had a lot of goods, and by now, almost no one denies it...
...In 1978, in the view of former Secretary of the Treasury (under Presidents Nixon and Ford) William E. Simon, "What is happening in this country is a fundamental assault on America's culture and its historic identity...
...In PC, journalists and editors, who don't ordinarily scrutinize topics for their deeper significance, found the elements of a juicy continuing story: good guys and bad guys, an aura of menace, a promise of moral melodrama, an ever-replenishable source of follow-up stories...
...When they defend the ideal of objectivity— and yes, "Western Culture"—they defend some Platonic idea of themselves...
...11) anti-anti-Semitism...
...The American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and more specialized right-wing think tanks churned out op-ed pieces and briefing papers, which reporters felt obliged to pore over...
...It suited ideologues of the right to brandish the term relentlessly, collapsing affirmative FALL • 1995 • 487 Demonizing PC action, curriculum revision, and speech regulation codes into a uniform enemy, lumping together nonsensical "Afrocentrism" with serious scholarship, and referring darkly to a "new McCarthyism...
...The mission of cultural institutions is to pass the heritage on, not trade it away for a mess of multicultural pottage...
...Therefore, whatever mixture of superior and inferior feelings they harbor toward universities, journalists have a stake in the legitimacy of the sorts of activities that go on there...
...The elderly were not only growing as a percentage of the population, but made up an even larger proportion of the voters...
...The news comes down with a clang of absolute factuality: THIS HAPPENED...
...His card would say that he believed in color-blindness, individual rights, freedom from responsibility for the sins of his (or anyone else's) ancestors...
...In nineteenthcentury American literature, the canon is still dominated by Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, and Emerson...
...takeover...
...Its history was long ago collectively understood and engraved in granite, where it must remain fixed and available for the reverence of future generations...
...Within a few months, waves of moral alarm were rolling from the New York Times ("The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct: Academia's New Orthodoxy") to U.S...
...Arguably, his attachment to the university was not decisive in Parker's thinking, which was little if any different from that of other editors, but was not irrelevant either, for such a link to university power bespeaks an established view of the world and a special disposition to worry about PC tendencies at elite universities...
...But what they do not say, what perhaps doesn't rise to consciousness, is that they feel the travails of Stanford and Harvard and Duke in a distinctive way...
...and to oppose restrictions on campus speech but encourage students to conduct themselves with decorum...
...At the same time, an aging population of taxpayers was losing sympathy for public schools...
...A paleoconservative free enterpriser, Simon and his cobelievers welded a common front with ex-leftist neoconservatives like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Midge Decter...
...The charge of "political correctness," however, rests on the presumption that there are only two sides...
...And then, of course, Reagan's election certified that the right was not to be considered marginal...
...When Ronald Reagan came to office, he was known to read—or at least consult—the right-wing Human Events and Conservative Digest, and if these were still considered slightly kooky tastes, they were so only by comparison with instantly more respectable journals on the right...
...President George Bush, not normally concerned with campus trends or the fate of free speech, contributed a University of Michigan commencement speech on May 4,1991, deploring "the new intolerance" sweeping the universities and denouncing what he called "the boring politics of division and derision:' The maxim that the power of the media is not necessarily to tell us what to think, but the power to tell us what to think about, was thunderously confirmed...
...The business class agreed...
...3) moral or ethical standards;( 4) justice, fairness, equality of opportunity...
...According to the right-wing correctors of left-wing political correctness, it was not bad enough that ill-conceived ideas and an intolerant atmosphere prevailed in certain departments of certain institutions of higher learning or that there was a rash of censorious outbursts on many campuses...
...What were conservatives going to do without barbarians...
...The question is not simply whether the panic was misguided but why it mounted so quickly throughout the media...
...There were actual facts...
...In a milieu where certain texts (the "science" of Marxism-Leninism), a certain nation (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), and above all a certain man (Stalin) or, for dissenters within the tradition, men (Lenin and Trotsky) were held to have cracked the code of history and to have come into possession of knowledge of how the world was to move forward, correct was a certificate...
...For breadth, students chose, as at Stanford, from among a list of approved courses...
...Just after the Gulf War, George Will could write with a straight face that Bennett's successor at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney, "secretary of domestic defense," faced enemies who were more dangerous in the long run than her husband Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney's adversaries abroad...
...Jackie Mason called his one-man Broadway show "Jackie Mason, Politically Incorrect...
...In the meantime, long overdue, a range of neither-nor positions was emerging...
...when it comes with its own pre-affixed label, and can be recognized as a chapter in an ongoing plot...
...FALL • 1995 • 495 Demonizing PC Within his first year in office, the right's intellectual map dissolved...
...6) generosity...
...Considering this notion outlandish, one student wrote a parody...
...PC suddenly stood for something other than Personal Computers...
...He was one of the more forthright and better-placed of the rightwing publicists who through passion, organization, and not least, money, helped undermine the liberal-labor welfare state consensus...
...Between 1981 and 1986 federal funding for higher education plunged by 14 percent in real dollars...
...It affirms that the United States ofAmerica is the incarnation of opportunity, transcending gender and race, a guardian of culture, education, and the arts, resplendent in its un© Copyright 1995 Todd Gitlin...
...The political right, reflecting upon its loss of control in American culture, reasonably enough determined that the universities and the media ought to be singled out for counteraction...
...This tribute affirms that individuals have more than rights...
...The more arrogant the professor and the more ignorant the student, the more typical D'Souza found their quotes...
...Second, some things are true even if Dinesh D' Souza says FALL • 1995 • 491 Demonizing PC them...
...First, media panics are imperfect guides to the truth...
...Hilton Kramer, a trenchant 488 • DISSENT Demonizing PC art critic when he is not enrage-in-chief of the right-wing culture monthly the New Criterion, warned in 1993 that "the political correctness movement" had achieved "a decisive victory...in the realm of education, culture, and the arts...
...Perspective comes trailing afterward, if at all...
...Regardless of justifications, all media alarms share certain elements...
...PC was a good story—but the world is brimming with potential subjects for media frenzy...
...10) anti-racism...
...Instead of supplying the PC expressions when thought fails, program them to ring bells and flash the following whenever any of these expressions is typed in: "PHRASE OUTWORN AND MEANINGLESS...
...This is only rarely because journalists are indifferent to truth...
...Of those works recently added to the American list, the one most frequently assigned was Harriet Beecher Stowe, and she "was listed by only 15 percent of the teachers surveyed...
...Exuding a love of liberty, they were spared the need to be clear, while pooh-poohing any idea to the left of the current center of gravity of the Republican party, and, moreover, appealing (selfrighteously...
...Nor was it a staple of PC exposés that at Harvard, as late as 1988, preferences for children of alumni accounted for more admissions than all the African-American, Mexican-American, Native-American, and Puerto-Rican registrants combined...
...For its part, the administration did a poor job explaining itself—as if it scarcely understood its own policy...
...I was the freshman who parodied Lewis, and the student whose talk in Tulsa had to be moved to a coffee-house off-campus...
...The alarmists offered an interpretation for a widespread feeling, but did not invent the feeling...
...Let one group of Stanford students chant "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture's got to go," and the echo reverberated for years...
...As partisans of identity politics girded their loins for the combat against white men and their works, so did men of flame and brimstone invoke the war against barbarism...
...He feared that they would choose shame—and have war nevertheless...
...2. Business must cease the mindless subsidizing of colleges and universities whose departments of eco494 • DISSENT Demonising PC nomics, government, politics and history are hostile to capitalism and whose faculties will not hire scholars whose views are otherwise...
...In 1994, the range of neither-nors was extended by Russell Jacoby's Dogmatic Wisdom, which chastised the right for a prosecutorial zeal that stopped short of rising in righteous indignation against the dramatic threat to higher education from economic impoverishment...
...The student was barely seventeen, and not inclined to explore just what sort of trouble the man in the collar meant...
...In one of the eight, the reading list included L Rigoberta Menclui, by the Guatemalan Indian woman who was shortly to win the Nobel Peace Prize...
...Explaining why he had assumed the presidency of the John M. Olin Foundation in 1976, Simon declared that business was obliged to put its money where its interests were...
...Correct was a Stalinist relic...
...The prominent expert partisans who certified that PC was a menace— Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and Dinesh D' Souza in particular—were supported by the John M. Olin Foundation...
...for every reading of Walker there were approximately eighty-three readings of Shakespeare...
...This history transcends perspectives, particularities, self-interested passions...
...Bush began his regime in an ideological disarray brought about by a collapse of enemies...
...With dialectical elegance, a new radicalism aroused a new conservatism...
...If he had friends of color in high school, he resented their receiving fellowships to which he was not entitled...
...By flinging about the scarlet letters, the accusers arranged for a melodramatic confrontation: freedom against slavery...
...It helps when experts stand at the ready for consultation...
...For a brief moment around 1990," wrote Roger Kimball, managing editor of this same manual of cultural resistance and author of Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, "the 'long march through the institutions' for which sixties radicals agitated seemed to be complete with the more or less total capitulation of most American universities and cultural organizations to the forces of political correctness...
...The sense that the university was vulnerable was driven by the dominant ideology of the Reagan years and accelerated during the waning of the cold war...
...But hardly any protesters understood that there were so many California high school graduates with 4.0 grade point averages (more than 5,800 out of the 21,300 who applied to Berkeley) that, even were there no affirmative action at all, in 1989, 2,300 4.0s would have had to be turned away...
...16) preservation of the environment in which human life might survive...
...Conformism there was—unpleasant, stifling, inimical to the high ideal of the free pursuit of knowledge...
...the New Republic, and theAtlantic, which featured a long excerpt from Dinesh D' Souza's book Illiberal Education...
...The change in political climate from Reagan's years to Bush's helps account for the timing of the PC panic...
...Leaders of major corporations thought that only ideological bias could explain the disrepute in which business was held...
...This "crusade" would mobilize "those who see a successful United States as the real 'last best hope of mankind.'" Simon concluded with three points: 1. Funds generated by business...must rush by multimillions to the aid of liberty...
...The same horror stories circulated, unexamined and unrevised, from one right-wing pundit to another...
...Though many on the left were reluctant to admit it in public, many true stories could be compiled to plug the holes in D' Souza's sloppy research...
...Even the victorious long march of the right through the institutions of politics had failed to roll back the feminist, gay, and multicultural movements that had indeed acquired niches in the institutions of image and word...
...Tenured radicals are trying to turn campuses into authoritarian ministates," read the pull quote in a George Will Newsweek column...
...This receptivity predictably belonged to the recoil against the movements of the 1960s...
...Stanford's hoary Western Civ program, begun in the late 1930s, had been dropped in the late 1960s, only to be reinstated (renamed Western Culture) in the late 1970s...
...One need not be a conspiracy buff to conclude that media institutions are selective...
...Recall Roger Kimball, quoted in Richard Bernstein's original PC story in the Times...
...This campaign came during the damp, declining presidency of George Bush, when the right wing, distrustful of Bush, feeling that (whatever his protestations) he was not quite their man, were in need of a focus of evil to concentrate their minds and their resources...
...State budget cuts, worsened by recession, were disproportionately leveled at higher education...
...If he was aggressive or self-pitying enough, he would complain anyway...
...Where Bloom was ornery and idiosyncratic, lesser conservative intellects set out to break down his assault into a set of distinct issues in higher education, and then to clump those issues into an indivisible amalgam called Political Correctness...
...William Bennett banged bully pulpits in Washington at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Education...
...Fellowships that the federal government would never have dreamed of justifying in the name of knowledge were now justified by their contribution to National Defense—thus the enactment in 1958 of the National Defense Education Act, one of the major sources of stipends for a generation of graduate students...
...Stage two was inaugurated by the Clinton administration, whose nominations of former University of Wisconsin chancellor Donna Shalala (as Secretary of Health and Human Services) and former University of Pennsylvania president Sheldon Hackney (as director of the National Endowment for the Humanities) apparently outweighed its not-very-PC nominations of the corporate lawyer Zoe Baird for attorney general or loophole sustainer Lloyd Bentsen for Secretary of the Treasury...
...One might well want to argue in favor of core curricula—this author would—yet only the tenFALL • 1995 • 489 Demonizing PC dentious critic would fail to note that these are relatively rare and recent creations in America...
...For many a white male (and not only him), the most attractive receptacle was the conservative counterforce...
...Commentary was now read widely in Washington, as was the Sun Myung Moon-sponsored Washington Times and its magazine supplement, Insight...
...In 1960, to take a tiny example, a freshman composition instructor at Harvard assigned his students to write an assessment of a C.S...
...It was Bennett who, in 1988, converted the revamping of the freshman year humanities requirement at Stanford University into a national cause celebre, declaring that "for a moment, a great university was brought low by the very forces which modern universities came into being to oppose—ignorance, irrationality and intimidation...
...2) legality...
...Correct and incorrect came back into vogue for the New Left of the late 1960s: a sign that smug rigidity, a priori dismissiveness, and metaphysical fantasy had entered a movement that had begun in an exploratory temper, eager to find new language for new circumstances...
...The prolific critic Robert Alter, himself an adversary of fashionable literary theory, wrote that although illiberalism does "constitute a real threat to the variety and freedom and complex pleasures of intellectual life on the campuses, . . . my guess is that its scope and gravity have been exaggerated by most conservative reactions and in the popular media...
...Identity politics was one way to crystallize this anxiety and shape it into a worldview...
...Apparently all opposition was in vain, for according to Kimball, "over the last couple of years political correctness has evolved from a sporadic expression of left-leaning selfrighteousness into a dogma of orthodoxy that is widely accepted, and widely enforced, by America's cultural elite...
...Moreover, during the Reagan and Bush years, the federal government shifted the burden for public programs to the states...
...Feeling chilled in the 1990s, he was not interested in being reminded that he was warm compared, say, to his parents...
...The independent left critic Morris Dickstein spoke of "a resurgence of liberal thought, rejecting both intimidation of the left and the hysteria of traditionalists," and ticked off, as exponents, John Searle, Frederick Crews, Irving Howe, C. Vann Woodward, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., David Bromwich, Robert Hughes, John Higham, and this writer...
...He no longer had the cold war as a magnetic force to line up supporters into a solid front...
...that seven assigned Augustine, Virginia Woolf, and Rousseau...
...In 19871988 the faculty had considered replacing the required freshman Western Culture course, a proposal declared by Secretary of Education William Bennett to be "a proposal to 'drop the West...
...and] funnel desperately needed funds to scholars, social scientists, writers and journalists who understand the relationship between political and economic liberty...[and whose work would] dissent from a dominant socialist-statist-collectivist orthodoxy which prevails in much of the media, in most of our large universities, among many of our politicians and, tragically, among not a few of our top business executives...
...It did not force economics departments to hire, or retain, Marxists, nor require of business majors that they study labor history...
...Nothing seemed to shake the canonical standing of their claims...
...To begin with, the potential for a protracted crusade against the wrong ideas has always been latent in America.'The locus classicus of right-wing laments about the subversive university was the 1951 book that put William F. Buckley, Jr., on the national map, God and Man at Yale...
...Newspapers did not fill with denunciations of the tyrannical atmosphere of the universities...
...It did not slow the exponents of cultural war when Jon Wiener, Louis Menand, Gerald Graff, Russell Jacoby and others exposed and refuted many of the wilder excesses of the anti-PC corpus...
...Later on in the I960s, students were thrown out of universities for refusing to attend chapel or to enroll in compulsory ROTC...
...Among the periodicals in the NEXIS database, the term "politically correct" and its variants appeared seven times in 1988, 15 times in 1989, 66 times in 1990, 1,553 times in 1991, 2,672 times in 1992, and 4,643 times in 1993...
...They read their alma mater's in-house magazines and keep in touch with gossip...
...There is, in the end, no more coherence in the defense of the center than in the assertion of essential difference, but there is a common rhetoric...
...Furthermore, to break out, a story has to catch the fancy of editors, which is most likely to happen where national media have flung their news net—at Columbia or Stanford, not San Diego State or Texas A & M. Of course, once the story is certified at a high journalistic level—a New York Times story being the most important certificate of significance— the momentum can grow...
...PLACE YOUR CURSOR ON THE NUMBER OF THE VIRTUE YOU ARE OPPOSED TO, PRESS THE 'ENTER' KEY AND THEN GIVE YOUR REASONS OR START OVER...
...Like the old requirement, the new one, Culture, Institutions, Values, or CIV, offered students eight alternative choices...
...If the key to the art of demagogy is oversimplification, the crusade against PC was a master exhibit...
...Student fees increased dramatically...
...Conformism, small-mindedness, abuses of power—these are, indeed, common features of American university life...
...One might also argue vociferously—as again this author has—against the instant elevation of popular fiction to classic status or against the propensity to downgrade literature in favor of "cultural studies" of ephemera...
...So does the standard multiculturalist defense...
...CANNOT CONTINUE UNTIL YOU CHOOSE FROM THE FOLLOWING SYNONYM CLOSEST TO THE VIRTUE YOU WANT TO MOCK: (1) decency...
...If he came from the working or middle classes, he resented the imputation that his life was a breeze and that he was not deserving...
...Corporate funding from AT&T legitimized public television's MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, featuring policy talk that rarely departed from the assumptions of Washington think tanks...
...But truth is neither necessary nor sufficient for a media crusade...
...They looked homeward, and found new barbarians among the superannuated old barbarians, for it was not lost on them that what they labeled the PC forces had roots in the 1960s left the very amalgam of minorities that had triggered the "silent majority" reaction in the first place, helping resurrect the Republicans and converting them into a majority party under Richard Nixon...
...A "report" from a think-tank, or a quotable figure with a book to his or her credit, probably doesn't send a reporter running to write a story, but does help recommend it to an editor or a producer, does move the story along...
...The journalists get to defend the ideal of transparent prose coupled to the ideal of objective standards...
...14) refusal to kneel to mammon...
...In 1965, the president of the University of Tulsa refused permission to a speaker from Students for a Democratic Society to lecture on campus property against the war...
...Not surprisingly, journalists, too, were frequently content to remain ignorant...
...One need not be a radical relativist to note that, like all social groups, journalists have a social position to defend...
...Journalists like conflict for the same reason dramatists and sports fans do...
Vol. 42 • September 1995 • No. 4
