In Pursuit of a Politically Correct Campus
The words you are about to read have no inherent meaning. Or perhaps they have meaning, but that meaning derives solely from the race, gender and class of the writer. Or perhaps they acquire meaning only in interaction with you, the reader, who is also full of biases.
Such are some of the critical perspectives au courant on many university campuses. Such self-consciously radical perspectives have always been hot stuff there. But the esoterica of academia usually remain confined to faculty clubs and university coffeehouses.
In the past few years, however, worried conservatives have pushed new scholarship trends--from deconstructionism to socialist feminism--out of the ivory tower.
Mainstream magazines quickly picked up the debates. They pondered, for example, whether some sort of post-structuralist curriculum emphasizing minority and Third World thought should replace the traditional liberal education that focuses on a “classical” canon.
Magazines have also latched onto the even hotter topic of “political correctness” on campus, scrutinizing the ways in which open debate is sometimes stifled by concern about offending women, minorities and others who do not consider themselves part of the dominant culture.
In the March Atlantic Monthly, Dinesh D’Souza, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argues that both controversies are linked to a major push for minority hiring on campus. Together, these changes, he believes, will cause repercussions far from the university campus for years to come.
What’s happening in academia, D’Souza says, is a “victim’s revolution” that stands to overturn the concept of academic standards as well as “the nature of learning and the meaning of knowledge.”
D’Souza begins his argument with a familiar catalogue of the excesses of those who take the “virtuous position.” He cites, for example, the chant called out by the champions of a non-traditional curriculum at Stanford: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go.”
Then there is the manual distributed by the American Sociological Assn., in which an instructor states her radical feminist teaching presuppositions: “ . . . It is not open to debate whether a white student is racist or a male student is sexist. He/she simply is.”
D’Souza’s long argument picks up steam as he focuses on Duke University, where a coterie of “superstar” professors, led by English chair Stanley Fish, are challenging the basic traditional approaches to scholarship, including the notion that there is some sort of transcendent “truth” that scholars should aspire to comprehend.
Finally, D’Souza contends that, contrary to first appearances, all of the upheaval--even that caused by such seemingly neutral techniques for literary criticism as “the deconstructionist fad”--can be traced to an underlying ideology that sees Western culture as irrevocably oppressive.
Putting aside notions of deconstructing D’Souza, many readers will find an unsettling shrillness in his anxious analysis.
At the same time, there is cause for concern about the growing repressiveness of some in the increasingly powerful clique of academics who see themselves as saviors of the oppressed and voiceless masses.
Instead of a liberal education, D’Souza writes, “what many American students are getting is its diametrical opposite: an education in closed-mindedness and intolerance--which is to say, illiberal education.” And surely there is some truth (let readers decide whether to capitalize the T) in his conclusion that this sort of education defeats even its own purported purposes.
“Instead of treating them as individuals, colleges typically consider minority members in terms of their group, important only insofar as their collective numbers satisfy the formulas of ‘diversity.’ . . . Even more than others, minority students arrive on campus searching for principles of personal identity and social justice, thus they are particularly disillusioned when they leave empty-handed.”
REQUIRED READING
In July, 1989, three adult strangers handcuffed a 16-year-old girl and pushed past concerned bystanders, dragging her kicking and screaming into a waiting van. Because the abduction had been ordered by the girl’s mother, the police refused to intervene, nor could anyone free the girl from the psychiatric hospital to which she was admitted against her will.
Between 1980 and 1986, teen admissions to private psychiatric hospitals increased 250%. The March California magazine looks at the disturbing trend. By focusing on the case of one teen-age girl, it illustrates the complexities of this difficult legal and moral issue.
Madonna’s videos reveal “the eroticism and sadomasochism, the pagan ritualism and idolatry in Roman Catholicism.” But she needs Camille Paglia to tell her so. At least that’s what Paglia thinks.
Meanwhile Paglia, a professor of humanities at the Philadelphia College of the Arts, needs Neil Postman to tell her that as a culture, “we can destroy ourselves by exhausting the available icons.” At least that’s what Postman thinks. In its March issue, Harper’s brings Postman, the author of “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” and Paglia together over dinner.
Their conversation on the relative merits and dangers of Postman’s cherished written word versus the “fragmented, imagistic world of TV” that Paglia relishes is lots of fun. And besides reporting verbal parries, the magazine provides a running commentary on the meal: “shrimp and basil beignets . . . bass in coriander nage . . . roast monkfish on savory cabbage. . . .”
