Word Warrior Engages the ‘Politically Correct’ : Scholars: A professor who advocates using rap to help teach high school English wants to use new role as head of the Modern Language Assn. to open up college curricula.

Go ahead. Ask Houston Baker about the “political correctness” controversy raging across the nation’s college campuses. See how Baker feels about charges of left-wing political orthodoxy in the academy.

As the new president of the Modern Language Assn. (MLA), the professional group for teachers and scholars of English and other modern languages, Baker might be expected to be low-key, scholarly and politic in his response.

But that’s not Houston Baker’s style. After all, this is the man who has advocated that high school teachers learn something about rap music, music videos and contemporary clothing styles to communicate better with their students.

“Never before has literary study had more potential for democracy, and the consideration of differences, than at this moment,” Baker, a professor of African-American literature at the University of Pennsylvania, responds bluntly.

“The proponents of this political correctness offensive tend to use words like threat , bigotry and suppression. To me it sounds very much like a McCarthyite initiative to purge certain thought processes on campus, or to close them down.”

The 48-year old Baker has a number of important issues to deal with during his yearlong presidency of the 30,000-member MLA. But none is more pressing, or more visible, than the battle over “PC.”

Critics claim some literature professors are using interpretations based on race, class and gender to trash the great works of Western literature; that they are dumbing down the literary canon by replacing Aristotle with Alice Walker, and that they are using their classrooms to indoctrinate their students with left-wing ideologies.

“They are attempting to rewrite cultural and intellectual history,” says Ben Wattenberg, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “Whether you like it or not, the intellectual and cultural history of this civilization, in terms of the most important personages, have been what are now called ‘dead white males,’ and to teach it otherwise, and to create myths, be they gender or racial or non-Eurocentric, is bogus.”

Counters Phyllis Franklin, executive director of the 100-year-old MLA, “The fact is, the debate about what students should read has been around almost as long as modern language studies (which replaced the study of Latin and Greek around the turn of the century). But there is now a political edge that has emerged.”

That political playing field may actually be a perfect surface for the glib, savvy and personable Baker, a graduate of Howard University who earned a Ph.D in Victorian English at UCLA.

Baker has made a name for himself as one of the foremost academics working in the field of African-American literature. He has written several well-received books on the subject (with such jargonized academic titles as “Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory”), taught at Yale and the University of Virginia, and now heads the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture at Penn.

He has also been in the forefront of the PC wars and has been attacked by best-selling author Allan Bloom (“The Closing of the American Mind”), who has said that TV and pop culture are turning young people into acultural illiterates.

Baker says his theories about pop culture have been misunderstood--that all he was suggesting was that in the “oral urban culture” of poor black teens, a knowledge of hip-hop helps teachers connect with their charges.

“But,” he says, “what happens is that people come out and say, ‘Houston Baker wants to replace reading and writing with rap music.’ And that’s simple-minded. Here I am, a person who has spent much of my life reading and writing, who is president of the MLA, trying to advance literary studies in the U.S., and that just makes no sense, except in a mean-spirited, distorting frame of reference. And if I could tell you why these people are so mean-spirited, I think I could explain the fall of Adam and Eve.”

Houston Baker hasn’t always been this candidly political. A native of Louisville, Ky., Baker was born into a solidly middle-class family, in which both parents were college graduates--his mother a former French teacher who ran a family-owned general store, his father a hospital administrator.

Baker describes his younger self as a “square who liked solitary things, who couldn’t connect” with others his own age. Bookish and apolitical, he attended segregated schools until the eighth grade, when Louisville’s school system was desegregated. He eventually matriculated at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

Despite Baker’s contention that for years “all I knew was the black world,” he did not have much of what has come to be called a “black consciousness.” Baker’s knowledge of black literature was spotty, and he describes his years at Howard as “a replication of white college life. It was bourgeois; they were pushing me in the same way my parents were pushing me: to be better as a professional.”

His moment of truth--his conversion to the black aesthetic and decision to devote his life to black literature--came in the late 1960s. Baker pinpoints a meeting with black students at Yale who, impressed with a lecture he gave, remarked upon his resemblance to Malcolm X, and told him that the black consciousness movement could use people with his obvious gifts.

But the conversion is more complex than a simple anecdote.

“I think it was that the whole U.S. had changed externally, things were rushing at you, there were poets, artists, films--the battle was enjoined on the streets,” he says. “It was sort of a natural thing--people came up and said, ‘Let’s go, you’re here, it’s time you do it.’ The literary training was there. Someone asked me to work on an anthology of African-American literature, and suddenly there was the objective opening onto the world that hadn’t been there before.”

It was an exhilarating time for black intellectuals. Because black studies were so new, all the scholars felt they were inventing the wheel, that there were simply no boundaries. “I had a sense of mission,” says Baker, “that this had not been done, that the time was now. And everything was to be done, from biographies to critical studies. It made me work four times as hard as I would have worked as a Victorianist.”

Baker emerged from this as something of a literary polymath. These days, sitting in his austere offices on the third floor of a castle-like building on the edge of Penn’s urban campus, he is equally at home discussing George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” as he is recounting the virtues of the pulp novels of Iceberg Slim. A trim man who looks younger than his age, he can also slide easily from the most arcane literary jargon into contemporary black language. He is known on campus as a brilliant lecturer who will slip into a range of voices and accents as he reads from his favorite works.

It is this combination of academic respectability, street smarts and ability to communicate with a wide variety of constituencies that may make Baker the perfect MLA spokesman in the PC wars.

If nothing else, he now has a new weapon to bring to the fight: A recent MLA survey of English professors found that oldies are still goodies when it comes to courses in American and British literature. The most-taught authors in 19th-Century American literature courses remain Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville and Emerson. In courses on the British novel, it’s Dickens, Eliot and Hardy. Even when these teachers added works to their courses, they tended to stick to non-controversial choices like Oscar Wilde or Frederick Douglass.

Despite these results, the survey remains open to political interpretation: Conservatives like AEI’s Wattenberg see it as ultimate proof of the failure of the whole PC movement; Phyllis Franklin of the MLA thinks it shows that those inveighing against PC have raised a red herring--”that the canon is showing enormous stability.”

The MLA seems to be behind the current leadership. Baker says he has received very little negative comment. And at last month’s national convention, a resolution was passed supporting the organization’s stance against Carol Iannone, a conservative scholar who had been nominated for a seat on the National Council of the Humanities. The MLA had opposed her nomination, claiming her scholarly credentials were lacking. Baker sees the move as an endorsement of the more public posture of the MLA--though just how much of an impact the Baker presidency will have still remains to be seen.

Houston Baker believes the process of opening up the academy to once-disenfranchised groups is ongoing, that “anyone who believes this is a fad in American society is probably not being realistic.”

And when asked how far this inclusiveness goes--will literary studies become as balkanized as the former Soviet Union?--he holds to a steady course.

“As we have begun to move toward pluralism, there is a necessity to not decide by fiat that we’ll go this far and no farther,” he says, “because that kind of thinking in the past has decided the limits of legitimacy for certain groups, and has excluded others in this country’s history.

“The fact is, what’s going on right now is democracy, and I think it scares people to death.”