Inside American Education (25 page)

Incentives to push paranoia are inherent in the situation, not only for minority faculty, but also for the growing number of minority affairs administrators and for student activist “leaders,” whose effectiveness depends not only on the number of minority students on campus but also on their attitudes and cohesiveness. How many of these key individuals are cold-bloodedly promoting paranoia in pursuit of their own self-interest, and how many are following the all too human pattern of rationalization, are questions to which no answer is possible.
What is clear is what the built-in incentives promote, however much other considerations may lead particular minority individuals to “play it straight.”

Some campus minority leaders, however, have been quite clear that what they needed were not simply more minority students, but more
disgruntled
minority students. Don’t be “happy campers,” warned the head of the black students’ organization at Carleton College, who also quoted Louis Farrakhan to back up his call for alienation.
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Similar promotions of paranoia have been common elsewhere. One tactic used by minority mini-establishments on a number of campuses has been to gain influence on the recruitment and admission of minority students—and to use that influence to
block
the admission of highly qualified black students
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who are likely to fit in, both academically and socially—and therefore
not
be part of the kind of political constituency desired. At a time when the Harvard Medical School was bending the rules to allow some black medical students to become doctors, the school’s black recruiters were passing over highly qualified blacks who did not fit the social or ideological profile they were seeking.
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Like mismatched minority students, mismatched minority faculty have sought refuge in non-intellectual pursuits, such as community activities and campus political activism, in denunciations of standards they do not meet, and in complaints about the moral shortcomings of colleagues, or of American society in general. Given the stark alternatives of (1) losing one’s self-respect by accepting the prevailing academic standards and values, and (2) protecting one’s self-respect by repudiating those standards and values, it can hardly be surprising that many have chosen the latter.

Clearly, not all minority faculty have followed this pattern However, those who have “played it straight” have been overshadowed by activists—regardless of the numerical proportions between the two kinds of minority faculty—and have been largely treated as expendable by administrators preoccupied with placating those with a potential to cause trouble. It has thus been the activist minority faculty who have played a key role in the racial and ethnic patterns which have emerged on campus. A few examples of these minority activists may make the pattern more concrete.

Perhaps the best known of the minority faculty activists is Professor Derrick Bell of the Harvard Law School. He has urged black students at elite colleges in general toward activism.
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He vocally supported a student sit-in at the Harvard Law School dean’s office, trying to force the hiring of tenured black female faculty. On other issues, he has argued that “direct action” is more effective than law, that “reform requires confrontation” which “can’t be intellectualized.”
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While admitting that “few minority scholars have national reputations or are frequently published in the major law reviews,” Bell attributed this to whites’ “exclusion” of them.
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Blacks with a different outlook are dismissed by Bell as people who merely “look black” but “think white.”
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An episode at the Stanford Law School when Bell was a visiting professor captures the atmosphere of the times. According to the dean of the law school:

Students in Prof. Bell’s class criticized his teaching and complained that they were unable to learn the subject from him. Many began auditing other instructors’ constitutional law classes. These events ultimately led to the idea of a series of public lectures in basic constitutional law to be given by various faculty members. Although these lectures would be open to the student body as a whole, their unstated purpose was to offer Prof. Bell’s students a supplement to his course. The series was called off after members of the Black Law Students Association protested the first lecture on the ground that both the students’ dissatisfaction and the unprecedented lecture series were tainted by racism.
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Bell likewise attributed the students’ complaints to their having “viewed me as a token, visiting presence of questionable competence.” There was “an insult inherent in the lecture series,” it was “a denial of my status as a faculty member and my worth as a person.”
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Hispanic Professor Richard Delgado has argued that the predominance of white males among the writers most often cited by law journals and in court decisions shows an “exclusion” of minority writers.
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However, in promoting this thesis, Professor Delgado did not even attempt to establish specifically which less-cited, minority-written publications were superior
to which often-cited, white-written publications. Instead, he used rhetoric about “imperial scholars”
⁹⁸
with “indifference to minority writings.”
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Finally, he used the “may” tactic as a substitute for argument: Whites “may be ineffective advocates” for minority rights or “may lack information” or “may lack passion” or they “may pull their punches.”
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“May” arguments require not a speck of evidence, so that there is no way to answer them, except by constructing an alternative list of “may” possibilities. Since almost anything is possible, there is no way to resolve conflicts based on “may” statements. However, with Delgado as with others who use the “may” tactic, this tactic serves as an emotional prelude (as distinguished from a logical foundation) to other unsupported assertions—in this case, the assertion that white writers should stop writing about civil rights, so that minority writers can get published and cited more.
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Although Asian students and faculty tend not to be as politicized as those from some other groups, there is a fringe of politically activist Asian academics as well, and their arguments follow along lines very similar to those among black or Hispanic activists. Professor Mari Matsuda, for example, has urged that “the process of eradicating apartheid in legal knowledge” be promoted by buying, reading, citing and teaching “outsiders’ scholarship”—defined as writings “written by white women, women of color and men of color.” Like Professor Delgado and others, she simply
assumed
that minority writers had better insight than other writers who were better known, without even attempting to argue this from specific examples.

Double Standards of Behavior

The passing years have seen an ever-widening double standard of behavior, by race, on many campuses. At the University of California at Berkeley, for example, when some partying fraternity members pinned a confederate flag outside the frat house, the administration imposed “sensitivity” training on the whole fraternity and asked them to seek more minority members, but it took a very different view when the feelings of Jewish students were involved:
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Two female members of the Jewish Student Union were recruiting for the organization when members of the Black Muslim Union spotted them, and began loudly harassing them with anti-Semitic remarks. A small crowd gathered and egged the Muslims on. The women, in tears, fled and reported the incident to the Student Conduct Office, wanting the fighting words code invoked. They were told that they ought to develop “thicker skins” and nothing was done.

On many other college campuses as well, the standards for “racism” themselves vary by race. For example, when a white woman at the University of Pennsylvania expressed her “deep regard for the individual and my desire to protect the freedoms of all members of society,” she was chided by an administrator who said that the word “individual” is “considered by many to be RACIST.”
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The reason is that emphasis on the individual could be construed as “opposition to group entitlements.” At Stanford, an even more strained use of the word “racist” grew out of a conflict that had nothing to do with race. When a fraternity student was punished for insulting a homosexual resident advisor, a few of his fraternity brothers staged a silent, candlelight vigil as a protest, wearing hockey masks to shield their identity and avoid having this protest be seen as a fraternity-sponsored action. Some observer decided that this silent, candlelight vigil was reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan and contacted the Black Students Union, 30 of whose members then appeared on the scene.

Although the fraternity protesters expressed surprise at the racial interpretation put on their vigil, an altercation was only narrowly averted. The fraternity men were condemned as “insensitive” by Stanford President Donald Kennedy for not realizing the racial implications of their actions,
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even though those actions were not directed at any racial or ethnic minorities and involved entirely different issues. But the Stanford administration had no such condemnation when the head of the Black Students Union publicly declared, “I do not like white people.” He said:

Unfortunately, for blacks, we only get our pictures in the paper when we protest or fail and not when we succeed.

My response, and you may quote me, is “kiss my black behind!”
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No one in the Stanford administration called him “insensitive”—or said anything at all publicly. Had a white student made similar remarks concerning blacks, he would be lucky to escape expulsion—not only at Stanford, but at many other colleges and universities across the country. Formal prohibitions on statements that can be construed as racist (or sexist or homophobic) have become common, along with stringent penalties for violations of their broad and vague provisions. What has also become common are double standards in applying these codes. The lattitude permitted members of minority groups (or homosexuals, feminists, and others) has been extremely broad. Moreover, the students themselves know that such double standards exist.

At Vassar College, a black student had a public outburst that included such epithets as “dirty Jew” and “f--king Jew.”
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He was neither suspended nor expelled, as the Vassar administration focused its efforts on keeping the story from being published by the
Vassar Spectator
, a student-run publication, which became a target of intense criticism—and retribution—when it published the story anyway.
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A number of black student organizations on various college campuses have invited as a speaker Louis Farrakhan, noted for his fiery denunciations of Jews. However, Minister Farrakhan is by no means unique in this respect. Other speakers invited to address black student groups on various campuses have made such comments as “the Jew hopes to one day reign forever,” that Jews are a “violent people,”
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that the “best Zionist is a dead Zionist,”
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or have referred to “Columbia Jewniversity in Jew York City.”
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Official condemnations of “racism,” which are freely proclaimed in other situations, are seldom if ever forthcoming when minority students, faculty, or invited speakers attack other racial or ethnic groups.

Double standards extend not only to words but also to actions. When dozens of minority students have invaded classrooms to shout down the professor, intimidate the students, and prevent the lecture from being given, they have done so with impunity at San Francisco State University, at Berkeley, and at the City College in New York.
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On the campus of the State University of New York at Binghamton, a public lecture by a 70-year-old retired professor was invaded and disrupted by dozens of students—mostly minority—carrying sticks. One of
the black students blew his nose on a tissue, which he then deposited in a cup of coffee from which the professor had been drinking—to the cheers of the mob, while an administrator sat silently in the audience, grinning.
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Despite a readiness of university officials to interpret all sorts of words and deeds by whites as racist, even outright physical assaults by blacks against whites are unlikely to be labeled that way. When two white students at Brown University were victims of unprovoked street attacks by blacks, according to the student newspaper the head of campus security “was quick to point out that ‘There is nothing at all that would tend to indicate that this is a racially motivated incident’.”
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After a similar unprovoked street attack on two white students by five blacks at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), the student newspaper there similarly reported that campus police “do not believe the attack was racially motivated, although ‘racial slurs’ were used.” Indeed, when the students asked why they were being attacked, the answer was: “Because we’re black and you’re white.”
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But, officially, it was still not considered a racial attack. At Wesleyan University, where thinly-veiled hints of violence from black student activists both preceded and followed a fire-bombing of the university president’s office,
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the president of Wesleyan likened the arson to an “automobile accident” and called for “healing.”
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