Demonizing in the Academy

Sanford Pinsker
Shadek Professor of Humanities
Editor of Academic Questions, a quarterly publication of the National Association of Scholars

The marketplace of ideas has never been a refuge for the intellectually timid nor a safe haven for those who imagine that what the academy vigorously debates has no consequences beyond its ivy-covered walls. Yet one would be hard pressed to think of a time before now when the professoriate has been more divided, its squabbles more contentious, or its injury reports so widely covered in the popular press. What I'm describing are the "culture wars"--an umbrella term meant to cover the conflicts over not only who should be admitted to higher education's most prestigious institutions and what they should study when they get there, but also whether standards of excellence can coexist with efforts at social engineering. Add the destabilizing effects of postmodernist theory and the result is a litany of fighting words: "evidence," "rigor," and "logic" from one end of the faculty spectrum; "multiculturalism," "identity politics," and "the social construction of reality" from the other. Even those professors who would prefer nothing more than to tend the narrow garden of their own disciplines have found themselves on edge, fearful that uttering an unpopular opinion might turn them into front-page campus news or, worse, end in official disciplinary procedures.

During the 1980s, a steely, pinchfaced curtain of what came to be known as "political correctness" began to descend on campuses from Brown to Berkeley. Identified with the academic Left, political correctness was an effort to seize the moral and intellectual high ground by insisting that only narrowly defined attitudes about race; class, and gender were "correct," and thus worthy of serious consideration. Other opinions need not apply; and indeed, those who so much as whisper a note of dissent are often treated to volleys of angry contempt. They become, in a word, demonized; and as the list of non-debatable topics widened to include nonnegotiable pronouncements about homosexuals, animal rights, and the handicapped. the process of demonization picked up speed.

For some (one thinks of Allan Bloom, Richard Bernstein, Dinesh D'Souza, and George Will), recounting the loopy antics of the local Thought Police became a cottage industry. Did such critics sometimes exaggerate the conditions that, taken together, traveled under the heading of "political correctness"? Possibly. On the other hand, were they onto something? Absolutely, for the missionary zeal of some on the far Left often matched the pundits' cartoon version with eerie precision. Nor did it take long before PC came to stand for bullying and intolerance rather than for a "personal computer." In this regard, the strained insistences of the Language Police (for "manhole cover" read "personhole cover," for "short" read "vertically challenged") were an exercise in language-as-power that largely backfired. And when humorists such as Jackie Mason or Bill Maher got into the act, the academic Left--more noteworthy for self-righteousness than for a sense of humor--found itself with a sizable public relations problem.

Nothing good, I suspect, can come from those with a fondness for words that end in -ize; and it is with something of a heavy heart that I must report that some of the worst offenders make their academic home in departments of English. In much the same way that a word such as "super-star" will no longer do in the pages of Entertainment Weekly or TV Guide (one must, I am told, be a mega-star or people will no longer pony up hard cash for an outdoor concert), it is no longer enough to brand one as "politically incorrect." Now, they must be demonized in the bargain, which means that they are branded as monsters who live beyond the pale of social as well as intellectual acceptability.

The "Other" (or as the with-it prefer, "otherizing the Other") seems at first glance to be demonizing's second cousin, but in fact the term usually implies quite the opposite--namely, that these folks are the victims of a majority culture's irrational fears and deep-seated prejudices. We are thus enjoined to sympathize--yea, empathize--with the capital-O Other, just as we are admonished to join in the demonization of those who hold probably reprehensible opinions about gays and lesbians, the disabled, any citizen of a Third World country (with the exception of those who lack the proper revolutionary fervor), and of course, persons of color.

Where does all this leave life inside the academy? Hardly in the best of shape, for incivility comes at considerable human cost. Even more alarming, efforts to demonize one's antagonists raise serious questions about the very nature of scholarly inquiry, because if a university is not the place where the unthinkable can be thought and the unimaginable imagined, then all claims to the privilege of academic freedom (originally constituted so that the pursuit of Truth wherever it might lead might be preserved) are rendered moot.

One might have thought those protected by the warm blanket of tenure would have risen up in protest, but this has not, alas, been the case. Administrators will go to extraordinary lengths to insure that the rights of protected minorities are, well, "protected"--whether through campus speech codes or no-nonsense disciplinary action brought against offending students and faculty members alike; but free-fire zones are quite another matter, and there is little hesitation about heaping abuse on fundamentalist Christians, policemen of any sort, fat-cat businessmen and their late capitalist cronies, and, of course, political/cultural conservatives. Rather than being protected, these folks are likely to find themselves not only demonized but also out of luck when it comes to any claims they might make for equal treatment under the speech code statutes. After all, who has a smidgen of sympathy for those knee-deep in the hegemony? Virtually every crime against humanity can be toted up to dead-white-European-males and the Western civilization they imposed on unwilling Others. It is a story that has by now become so entrenched that a recent survey by the Higher Education Research Institute reveals that only 28 per cent of 34,000 academics interviewed deemed that Western civilization was "essential" or even "very important." If it is true that America remains the country of choice for thousands upon thousands of immigrants (apparently, freedom and opportunity still mean something in the "real world"), it is also true that Western civilization has been demonized inside the academy's gates and on the individual syllabus. But as much as the drumbeat for diversity may apply to the downtrodden, its principles certainly do not affect the demonized. One searches in vain for a single instance in which a social studies or humanities department came to the conclusion that it was high time that they hired a neoconservative, much less a mainstream Republican, in order to achieve a sense of diversity in places clearly dominated by the Far Left. A conservative professor such as Harvard biologist, E.O. Wilson, regards his position as akin to that of "an atheist in a Benedictine Monastery," and there are surely others (one thinks of Dartmouth professor and National Review editor, Jeffrey Hart) who take a certain relish in being gadflies on the back of Marxist horses; but the bulk--of professors in trouble with the local campus thought police turn out to be classic liberals appalled at the turns that the Far Left are taking. Here, the celebrated case of Allan Gribben, the University of Texas English professor who dared to speak out publicly about the take-over of freshman composition by those with more interest in social engineering than with instruction in clear writing, is instructive. He is indeed demonized (there is really no other word to adequately describe the ugly phenomenon): shunned by most of his colleagues, made to endure late-night anonymous phone calls and even death threats, Gribben ultimately was forced to resign his tenured full professorship or risk serious consequences to his health. Ironically enough, Gribben does not regard himself as a political conservative, but, rather, as somebody who felt that enough was simply enough. Students deserved better, much better, than the political indoctrination that the director of the freshman composition had in mind for them.

Nonetheless, when Gribben's opposition made its way into the national press, he was written off--demonized, if you will--as "worse than a conservative, a right-wing kook," or perhaps more charitably, as "a useful idiot for the far right." Gribben reports that at faculty meetings he used to count the number of empty seats that surrounded him: a minimum of nine on each side, including two rows vertically." Talk about the heavy symbolism of pariahhood. Gribben, of course, had dared to raise serious questions about matters that were, so far as "the other side" was concerned, deserved exactly this response. Sadly, enough those in general agreement with Gribben were unwilling to have him talk with them in places where they might be seen. Hang around with the "demon" over coffee or in the hallway and you, too, will be demonized.

Demonization has a long, sad history--from the late 1800s when the term first began to appear in British newspapers, through Senator Joseph McCarthy's efforts to stigmatize those he felt endangered his idea of a God-fearing, patriotic, and certainly non-Communistic America to the present situation in which it is the Far Left that terrorizes anyone to the right of themselves.

Sometimes this is done with sneer quotes, as is the case when someone is identified as a "conservative," or it is accomplished by a wave of the hand that means to glibly dismiss serious critiques. Here, the opening paragraphs of Lawrence W. Levine's The Opening of the American Mind are instructive, for he lists the titles of a handful of books from Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education to Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals and Richard Bernstein's Dictatorship of Virtue only to conclude that their collective jeremiad against the academy is sour, ill-founded, and completely untrue. Nor does he feel any obligation (this, despite the fact that his own title was consciously chosen to ride on Alan Bloom's coattails) to take their arguments seriously. Instead, it is enough to simply demonize them as people who are either afraid of the new multiculturalism (for ignoble reasons) or woefully ignorant of how the shape of American education has changed over the last two hundred years.

Let me end where I began--but with a difference. There have most assuredly been heated debates as higher education endured various "paradigm shifts," to use an expression made infamous by Thomas Kuhn. But even when, say, the New Critics were battling it out with their literary elders, or when philosophers held forth about the merits or impending disasters of analytic philosophy, there was never a sense that politics per se had so muddled the atmosphere that demonization could be justified. Now, demonization comes with the territory--greater in some universities than others, but never entirely absent even in schools that pride themselves in decorum and civility. Why so? Because the disinterested pursuit of truth has given way to a widespread feeling that "everything is politics" and that each book we assign, each lecture we give, is a nakedly political act, whether acknowledged as such or not. Those on the side of the angels take comfort in the fact that they are helping to bring about a more enlightened society, one that eschews racism, sexism, and homophobia. Put another way, they teach "goodness," as they alone define the term. Often what they do not teach, however, is the discipline, complexity and respect for evidence and logic that had formerly been their main business. And when somebody dares to point out that "politics"--as they are defining the term--happens on the streets and at the ballot box, their response is censure, intimidation, volleys of political correctness and avalanches of what I have been calling "demonization." Language, as they well know, has power. It can bless as well as curse, heal as well as wound. To demonize someone is to eradicate--or at least to try to eradicate--their humanity in a single shot. Small wonder, then, that the same academics who put a new spin on a very old concept have made our universities and colleges such sad, beleaguered places.


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