Note: This paper was presented at the Second Annual Conference on Intellectual Freedom, April 1996, Montana State University-Northern
This nation's culture wars--specifically, the "political correctness" debate raging in the American university--have been dominated by extremists trumpeting strident pro- and anti-P.C. positions that are both simplistic and polarizing. Most of those condemning P.C. claim that a horde of aging hippies, their would-be revolution thwarted in the streets, have infiltrated the humanities, transforming traditional liberal education into mere left-wing indoctrination that brainwashes students into believing that all of Western culture is a cesspool of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia, crafted over the centuries by an omnipotent cabal of Dead White European Males (1). Pro-P.C. apologists, in contrast, generally maintain that charges of a P.C. plague sweeping the Humanities are mere "myths," manufactured by right-wing rabble-rousers in an attempt to squelch any trace of dissent in American culture, and that, if anything, the liberal arts have been not imperiled but enhanced by recent changes in the discipline (2). Since neither side acknowledges problematic ambiguities and complexities, the best arguments lie between these opposed stances--in a nuanced, qualified, speculative middle ground unglamorously resistant to fiery slogans and screeds. Recently, this middle ground has begun to be explored from a range of perspectives in the work of a small but growing number of distinguished intellectuals (3).
The pro- and anti-P.C. extremes were strikingly evident at a pair of academic conferences I attended in 1995: "The Liberal Art of Learning: Traditional Education in the Post-Modern Society," sponsored by the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), and "Transforming the Curriculum: Incorporating Multiple Voices," put on by the liberal University of Washington. Thus, in quick succession, I had a chance to be surrounded by bright professors and students occupying opposite ends of academe's political spectrum.
ISI invited me to take part in their Honors Fellows Colloquium, which assigns a select group of college undergraduates to individual academic mentors, who guide them through their college years, providing both practical and intellectual tutelage. I was asked to join the program after its director had read several of my book reviews in The Montana Professor (and was most pleased, I suspect, by my favorable critique of Daphne Patai's and Noretta Koertge's Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales From the Strange World of Women's Studies). I wrote back that while I did deplore some P.C. trends in the humanities, I couldn't, in good conscience, call myself conservative, so I'd take no offense if the organization deemed me an unsuitable mentor for one of its Honors students. The director wrote again, welcoming me aboard.
The purpose of ISI's conference was twofold: to introduce mentors to students while explaining the details of the program, and to hold sessions where faculty and students engaged in group discussions (usually inspired by a particular assigned reading) on often quite esoteric topics related somehow to liberal arts education. From the moment I arrived, I sensed a warm, tolerant spirit infusing the conference, and it was mostly for this reason, I imagine, that I felt emboldened to speak my mind, which invariably put me at odds with almost everything everyone else was saying. While, unsurprisingly, few of my fellow conferees agreed with me, I was always treated with respect, and my views were, so far as I could tell, thoughtfully considered. Several ISI members went further, thanking me personally for providing an alternate perspective, which they felt had forced them to express their ideas more rigorously. I, too, benefited greatly, leaving the conference with a far deeper understanding than I'd had before of conservative intellectual thought.
Several individual sessions in particular enhanced this awareness. One focused on a position paper co-authored by Benjamin A. Rogge and Pierre F. Goodrich: "Education in a Free Society." It argued for the privatization of all America's public universities (and, in passing, pre-college education as well), because the authors' staunch free market ideology led them to reject "any possibility that the [American educational] ideal could involve state participation," and to argue instead that "the ideal arrangements must be found within the jurisdiction of the private educational marketplace" (4).
Admittedly, my disagreement with Rogge and Goodrich's thesis may be somewhat biased, since I'm currently employed at a public college. Nonetheless, I think a solid counter argument exists--one based, ironically enough, in conservative principles. With considerable validity, the right regularly attacks "multiculturalism" and "identity politics" for leading, in practice, to national fragmentation: a constant danger in a society like ours, composed almost entirely of immigrants lacking a common ethnicity. But Rogge and Goodrich forget that American public education, especially on the lower levels, has always performed a vital assimilative function in American culture. The study of civics and American history, the melding of an ethnically and religiously diverse student body: these and other aspects of public schools aid in countering the threat of cultural "balkanization," helping the United States avoid the kind of tribal strife now raging in the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union. At the session, few of those in attendance agreed with my views, but several conferees amiably discussed with me, then and later, the issues I'd raised.
Not surprisingly, the relationship between religion and liberal arts education also came up at the conference, particularly during a session on the introduction to Mark R. Schwehn's Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America. Schwehn argues for reviving a once standard conception of the American university as a community led by teachers whose firm but benign shaping of their students' moral characters had a distinctly theological aspect. As Schwehn makes clear in the introduction, his primary aim is to explore what he sees as the academic vocation's vital--though now largely ignored--"religious dimensions" (5).
I agree with Schwehn when he attacks Harvard's ex-president Derek Bok's narrowly specialized conception of the academic profession as comprised of professors "'trained to transmit knowledge and skills within their chosen discipline, not to help students become more mature, morally perceptive human beings,'" a conception Schwehn finds sadly dominant in most large American universities today. I agree, too, with Schwehn's contrary insistence that "the academic vocation...finally does shape character" (6). But when Schwehn maintains that this shaping of student character is somehow a religious endeavor, he's arguing in favor of an institution that's inherently exclusionary (as the old American university undoubtedly was), by definition barring from true membership in the college community all teachers and students who are atheists, and, since Schwehn's conception is clearly rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, probably barring, too, all students who are Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. Of course, overtly religious schools (e.g., Notre Dame or Liberty University) should be free to pursue their theological missions. But for America's public universities to fulfill their democratic mandate to provide instruction to all citizens, they must remain secular institutions, where religion is studied (how could a full exploration of Western culture exclude it?) but never preached.
Regarding religion, my biggest criticism of the ISI conferees (and, indeed, almost all conservative intellectuals), is that, while endlessly condemning the repressiveness of academic P.C., they said not a word about the equally vile, and far more powerful, repressiveness of the religious right. Though several in attendance were evangelical Christians, no one publicly voiced support for (or condemnation of) any specific positions espoused by the Christian Coalition and related groups, many of which concern public education: e.g., mandating school prayer, requiring the teaching of creationism in science classes, prohibiting teachers from portraying gays positively, etc. Nor, publicly or to me privately, did anyone mention the crazed conspiracy theory outlined, in numbing detail, in Pat Robertson's The New World Order (a bestseller among fundamentalists), which basically reduces all of human history to a Byzantine satanic plot fronted by a confederacy of Free Masons and "international bankers" (which, as both Michael Lind and the Jewish Anti-defamation League have documented, is clearly a coded reference to Jews). Nor did anyone refer to the oft-stated belief of Jerry Falwell (and other right-wing preachers) that AIDS signifies the wrath of God against deviant "sodomites." Indeed, to my knowledge, no one said anything at all about the Christian Coalition, either good or bad; theological debate remained solely on the abstracted, intellectualized plane found in the Schwehn selection.
No doubt some ISI members were sympathetic to Christian fundamentalism. But if, as an organization, ISI shares this movement's core beliefs, obviously the tenor and substance of the conference's theological discussion would have been vastly different. Why, then, didn't anyone say so? I suspect the answer is twofold. First, just as Republican politicians are terrified of incurring the religious right's ire (witness presidential candidate Bob Dole's posturing as a government-bashing, Hollywood-hating homophobe in a desperate bid for Christian Coalition support), so conservative academic organizations, most funded by right-wing foundations and corporations sympathetic to fundamentalism, may have similar fears about displeasing such a powerful group. Second, while many conservative thinkers may privately consider the Christian Right relatively insane, at least fundamentalists are on the right, so perhaps there's an unspoken consensus against ever attacking one's own side, a shared belief that to do so would weaken the right's case against political correctness.
While, from a tactical standpoint, such reticence may be understandable, I think the right's case is weakened more by the hypocrisy entailed in bashing the left while remaining silent about the programmatic bigotry of the religious right (7). Moreover, which group really poses a greater threat to most Americans' personal freedoms? The religious right, perhaps the most powerful grass-roots organization in America, a major player in the Republican Party? Or P.C. academics, who may think they're "transforming" America through their arcane "radical pedagogy," but in truth (as a professor, I admit this with a heavy heart) belong to traditionally one of the most irrelevant institutions in American life? After all, though presumably P.C. profs have been in power for years now, does the average undergrad seem inflamed with revolutionary ardor (8)?
While conservative thinkers have failed to confront the religious right, right-wing intellectuals are not (as I learned, to my surprise, at the ISI conference) ideologically monolithic. For example, mainstream conservatism encompasses two ideologies that are profoundly at odds: "libertarianism" and "social conservatism." Libertarians believe in the absolute virtue of the free market, and the absolute evil of big government, which impedes the market's natural benevolence, stifling economic growth and shackling the entrepreneurial spirit. Social conservatives, in contrast, think the state has a vital role to play in shaping Americans' moral character, which, in practice, usually means enacting the religious right's theocratic agenda.
One ISI event seemed to typify the conference's spirit: an evening hayride, followed by an outdoor barbecue and campfire. Issued straw hats and brightly colored bandannas, we piled into horse-drawn covered wagons and were driven into the verdant mountains of Snoqualmie Pass (just outside Seattle). At the barbecue, as we warmed ourselves by the fire to offset the chill caused by the region's seemingly endless drizzle, a scruffy young man in a Stetson and cowboy boots told a dreadful rustic "local color" story--in which, as I recall, a rural schoolteacher slips on a human turd left in the hall by one of her less sterling pupils. I sat there, looking around at all those straw-hatted, bandannaed academics listening to the tale with near-heroic geniality, and I thought: Boy, I really can't picture liberal professors doing this!
But the event did fit ISI. After all, conservative academics aren't estranged from traditional American culture. Unlike leftwing intellectuals, the right's historical antagonism isn't toward American society and its bourgeois, middle-class values, but, instead, toward P.C. in academe. That evening hayride seemed to symbolize the conservative celebration of traditional American life. Frankly, I found the evening, in its unapologetic hokiness, rather charming, especially since I've always hated the knee-jerk condemnation of American culture so rife among far-left academics, most of whom have benefited greatly from the very society they profess to despise. However, the event's symbolism also brought to mind some basic fallacies in the right's conception of America--flaws relevant to their anti-P.C. campaign.
After all, the event alluded to all the trappings of not so much an America long gone, as one that never really existed in the first place. The quaint hayride, the brand-new straw hats and bandannas, the lovably rustic storyteller: these were icons of Americana, not America, the stuff of B-level Hollywood Westerns, in no way resembling the true history of the Old West. Of course, the right's mythologizing of history has less to do with an interest in America's past than with a desire to control America's present and future. By invoking some lost American utopia suffused with "family values," conservatives can wield this nostalgic ideal like a club to bash those allegedly '60s spawned aspects of modem America which the right loathes: feminism, divorce, secular humanism, gay rights, legal abortion, the welfare state, pacifism, drugs, etc. Moreover, this rewriting of history conveniently lets conservatives conceal all manner of historical facts far more sinister than those evoked by hayrides and campfires--shameful realities we should be proud, not aggrieved, to have left behind.
American higher education today, ISI believes, is in ruins, with the standard core curriculum replaced by a "cafeteria-style" arrangement, whereby students can earn credits by choosing from among a vast hodgepodge of commonly shallow, trendily P.C. courses. In the past, they argue, the liberal arts taught students the classic academic disciplines (literature, history, philosophy, mathematics, the sciences, theology), giving them "Great Books" filled with truths comprising the essence of Western culture, with the ultimate aim of transforming students into moral human beings, productive citizens and informed inheritors of their tradition. But today P.C. profs are hell-bent on "deconstructing" the West, thus inflaming in their charges an ultimately suicidal hatred of their own culture.
Clearly, this position has merit. It's hard to argue with the belief that today most American college students graduate woefully uneducated and that a dumbed-down, attenuated, vapidly "relevant" curriculum must at least share in the blame. But the problem with the right's defense of traditional liberal arts education against the alleged P.C. threat is that it rests on several highly debatable premises: first, that the earlier curriculum was static; second, that it was ideal; and third, that the developments rocking the humanities of late are wholly catastrophic.
Anyone believing that the humanities core curriculum remained unchanged until the 1960s should read Gerald Graff's Professing Literature: An Institutional History, a history of literary study in higher education from colonial times to the present. Graff finds the teaching of literature has changed often and dramatically in response to a myriad of social and cultural forces, changes which invariably sparked rancorous debate. The post-war era, in which New Critical analysis widened the canon to encompass Modernist literature, is the phase the right misrepresents as the Eden in which literary studies dwelt immutably before those nasty deconstructionists came along. Moreover, Graff finds that much of today's P.C. controversy echoes disputes from earlier eras between "specialists" and "generalists." Now, the debate is waged between those espousing various arcane critical theories, on the one hand, and "public intellectuals" committed to providing general literary education, on the other. Contrary to conservative claims, in essence the P.C. debate is nothing new.
Once one realizes that humanistic study has changed drastically over time, the conservative idealization of "traditional liberal arts education" grows increasingly tenuous. Surely, our past educational system had flaws, especially in practice: e.g., a tendency to stress rote memorization over critical thinking, conformity over individualism, a xenophobic ballyhooing of the West over a thorough, warts-and-all dissection of our culture. If feminist, Afrocentric, gay, deconstructive, Marxist, New Historicist theories, et al., have enabled students to take a less blinkered look at their own society, is that really such a disaster? Other related changes in the humanities also have value: e.g., the inclusion of more female and minority writers in the canon, the increased study of non-Western cultures, the uncloseting of homosexuality as a fit topic for intellectual discourse, the analysis of popular as well as high culture, etc. The distinction the right consistently ignores is between moderate and extreme versions of these reformist trends. While I think most of these new perspectives have value when presented in a sensible, inclusive fashion, and only become detrimental when instructors are fanatically intolerant of conflicting views, too often conservatives sweepingly brand all divergence from tradition as uniformly bad.
About a month later, I found myself at the other end of the academic universe from ISI when I attended the University of Washington's conference (ironically, held in Seattle, next door to Snoqualmie Pass) on "Transforming the Curriculum: Incorporating Multiple Voices." I was asked to speak at a session on sexual orientation by the conference organizer, who'd read my editorial in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing my experience battling, in our conservative community of Butte, a local fundamentalist pastor who tried to force the cancellation of a course I was to teach on gay and lesbian studies--a fight that inspired such a public furor it eventually caught the attention of the national media. My co-presenter at the conference was an English professor and academic dean who'd taught for decades at a small Catholic college in Milwaukee before declaring her lesbianism to the faculty and administration, who'd responded with near-unanimous support.
While my session was quite heartening, I had a dismal experience at another one, on "Academic Freedom and Professional Responsibility." The title piqued my interest, since, during the controversy over my course, I'd defended the class primarily on the grounds of academic freedom: i.e., the ominous precedent that would be set if someone unaffiliated with the college could dictate what went on in our classrooms. However, as the session progressed, I discovered that the conception of the role and scope of academic freedom held by the three presenters (all University of Washington humanities professors) differed vastly from my own. On the contrary, their view seemed to be that when conservative instructors refuse to "transform" their own courses in P.C.-approved fashion, and then defend their refusal by invoking academic freedom, such instructors are guilty of "professional irresponsibility," since the presenters apparently assumed that the sublime virtue of a P.C. curriculum was beyond debate. By implicitly demanding that university codes on academic freedom be junked in order to force conservative faculty to toe the P.C. line, the UW professors were displaying precisely the repressive intolerance the ISI academics were complaining about.
Unlike the lily-white ISI colloquium, the UW conference included many blacks and Hispanics, and minority issues were widely discussed. For example, a community college professor related that, at his institution, a faculty-backed policy statement noting all the groups the school didn't discriminate against--i.e., blacks, women, non-Christians, the handicapped, war veterans, gays and lesbians, etc.--was changed by the college president, who'd removed gays and lesbians from the list. Audience discussion of this issue ended when a black professor from the same school remarked that not only did many on campus support the revised policy statement, but that the president who'd made the change was a "person of color." Since he stated this fact without elaboration, the professor seemed to think it automatically clinched the argument, as if merely the color of the president's skin placed his decision beyond reproach. But why should it? Nonetheless, the professor had correctly gauged the temper of the audience. While I imagine most of the white conferees at this liberal gathering disliked the revised policy statement, apparently they were unwilling to challenge either the faculty member or the college president for fear of being branded racist.
A second session also exemplified the conference's poor handling of minority issues. In the midst of a meandering discussion on multiculturalism, a young woman who taught at another community college informed us that, although she was female, lesbian, and African-American, she defined herself (for reasons she never explained) exclusively as African-American. She was soon reproached by another conferee, who stated that her self-definition combined being female, white, and lesbian, and that the first woman was failing to acknowledge the multiplicity of her own identity. The other woman simply frowned, shaking her head, and the discussion veered off in some new, unrelated direction.
While I fully agreed with the second speaker, my larger sense was that here was a good example of the left's current enthrallment to the dogma of "identity politics." The obsessive need to define oneself by group has led to endless hairsplitting and divisiveness among people who should be working together to achieve shared goals, as well as to a disastrously dumb rejection of the ideals of universalism and individualism that bolster traditional liberal thought. As Todd Gitlin writes in The Twilight of Common Dreams: "To recognize diversity, more than diversity is needed.... To affirm the rights of minorities, majorities must be formed.... Affirming the virtues of the margins, identity politics has left the centers of power uncontested" (9).
While the differences between the ISI and UW conferences were obvious and plentiful, I did note one striking similarity. Both right and left-wing academics at the two conferences claimed to be victimized for their politics by those in power at their respective institutions. Conservative professors at ISI complained about being vilified and denied promotion and tenure, as did liberals at the UW conference--both groups sharing a passionate profusion of personal "horror stories" meant to substantiate their charges.
How can this enigma be explained? What kind of politics must hold sway in American universities if both liberal and conservative academics are being persecuted simultaneously?
First, though I'm suspicious of both groups' claims, I think conservative allegations have at least somewhat more validity (10). Still, even if the right's claim to being academic pariahs is stronger than the left's, the constant conservative comparison of P.C. persecution to the 1950s McCarthyite purges against academics is problematic. On the one hand, as Neil Hamilton argues in Zealotry and Academic Freedom: A Legal and Historical Perspective, in one sense P.C. persecution is worse than McCarthyism, since, in contrast to that earlier era, current attacks against non-conforming faculty come from inside, rather than outside, the academy. On the other hand, as Russell Jacoby claims with equal cogency in Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Culture Wars Divert Education and Distract America, unlike the past, the present witch hunt isn't orchestrated at the highest levels of government, nor, in contrast to the '50s, have any instructors paid for their politics by being fired, much less blacklisted (11).
In his great book, Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America, Robert Hughes offers another explanation for why allegations of victimization seem to span the political spectrum: "The all-pervasive claim to victimhood tops off America's long-cherished culture of therapeutics. Complaint gives you power--even when it's only the power of emotional bribery, of creating previously unnoticed levels of social guilt.... The shifts this has produced may be seen everywhere, and their curious tendency is to make the 'right' and 'left' converge" (12). The true motive, then, for both right- and left-wing professors who flaunt their "wounds" may be a covert bid for power through "emotional blackmail," a tactic ideal in our "culture of therapeutics" for prompting professorial advancement: e.g., by muzzling would-be opponents at conferences, browbeating spineless administrators, silencing recalcitrant students, etc.
A second possible explanation (which doesn't negate the first) is that the American university today is, in fact, neither the P.C. bastion alleged by the fight, nor the reactionary bulwark claimed by the left, but, instead, like most American institutions, essentially centrist, pragmatic in nature, and thus willing to make gestures of appeasement to both the campus left and right, so long as such gestures never go beyond tokenism and endanger the financial bottom line. Of course, this is guaranteed to enrage academics of any ideological stripe.
Admittedly, the middle-way I advocate between pro- and anti-P.C. extremes is difficult to sum up neatly, since by definition it rejects the clear-cut dogmatism that abounds on both extremes. Broadly speaking, this moderate approach is characterized less by a particular reading list or set of pedagogical prescriptions, than by an intellectual habit of mind--a general mode of thought and behavior. Perhaps it's best expressed by Cardinal Newman's description of liberal education in his classic Idea of a University: "University training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end. It aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind.... It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to...go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is Sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant" (13).
Put in my own more pedestrian prose, college students should seek to accomplish the following: to maintain an open mind untainted by blind faith; to study fully and objectively all sides of an issue, including, even perhaps especially, views with which one intensely disagrees; to reach tentative conclusions based on the evidence available; to subject those conclusions to the informed scrutiny of one's teachers and fellow students; and to be ready always to revise any idea should more persuasive counter evidence appear. Above all, one must cling fiercely to one's intellectual independence. At the end of George Orwell's great essay on Dickens, he calls the novelist (in words even more applicable to Orwell himself) "a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls" (14). Today, our intellectual orthodoxies are just as foul as those that polluted Orwell's era, and, as in his day, their stench wafts from both ends of the political spectrum.
As we enter the next century, will the American university demonstrate a commitment to developing "free intelligences"? Ultimately, the answer may hinge less on anything to do with academic P.C., than it will on the future direction of larger social forces over which academia has little, if any, control. For example, though members of either group rarely admit it, I suspect many academics on both sides of the debate know the real problem in colleges today isn't that students are reading non-canonical books instead of canonical ones, or vice-versa, but rather that, outside class, students aren't reading at all--that in our mass media culture, books are in danger of becoming obsolete.
Along with the decline of literacy, other large societal trends also gravely threaten the future of humanistic education: e.g., the shifted focus in college curricula from the liberal arts to vocational education; the explosive growth of two-year community colleges, which have neither the time nor sufficiently trained faculty to give any but fleeting attention to the humanities; the increasing inability--in this era of rising tuition and declining financial aid--for poor and middle-class families to afford to send their children to first-rate schools; the penchant for financially-strapped colleges to turn to such "cost-saving" measures as hiring ill-qualified adjunct professors, cutting degree requirements, etc. In the face of such dire academic realities, the P.C. debate looks almost irrelevant.
Nonetheless, it doesn't seem absurdly quixotic to imagine that conditions in higher education may improve some day. If they do, I dearly hope the American university seizes that opportunity by rejecting both hyper-vocationalism and "smelly orthodoxies" of either the left or the right, adhering, instead, to the classical mission of the liberal arts to nurture "free intelligences."