Inside American Education (28 page)

Professor Troy Duster of Berkeley echoed a widespread view among academics when he blamed racial strife on “the society that generated the students who come here.”
¹⁶⁵
This ignores the observations of others who have said that the racial strife on campus is more severe than that normally encountered in the larger society,
¹⁶⁶
as well as more severe than in the past.
¹⁶⁷
A professor at San Jose State University noted among his painful experiences hearing a black woman who “said she’d never been called a nigger till she got to this campus.”
¹⁶⁸
An Hispanic student at Cornell likewise said that she “had never experienced racism in my face before I came to Ithaca.”
¹⁶⁹
When 70 percent of the graduating seniors at Stanford say that racial tensions have
increased
during their time on campus,
¹⁷⁰
that
does not suggest a “vestige,” if only because a growing “vestige” is a contradiction in terms.

On most campuses, however, the very possibility that institutional policies are themselves adding to racism is not even mentioned. Instead, it is dogmatically assumed that the racism on campus must have originated off campus. When Dr. Ira M. Heyman, then chancellor at Berkeley, blamed racial hostilities on that campus on “the larger framework of the general mood in the U.S.,”
¹⁷¹
he ignored Berkeley’s own racial quota policies under his administration—policies which turned away more than 2,000 white and Asian students with straight A averages in one year,
¹⁷²
in order to admit black students who overwhelmingly failed to graduate.

Professor Duster, while likewise blaming campus racial problems on “the mood in the country” more explicitly blamed a “conservative era,” in which “Reagan has made racism a more legitimate thing.”
¹⁷³
Similar views have been echoed by many others, including Professor Philip G. Altbach of the State University of New York at Buffalo, who said that “the racial crisis on campus is very much a part of the legacy of Reaganism.”
¹⁷⁴
But Massachusetts has never been Reagan country and the problems plaguing liberal or radical institutions like Berkeley or the University of Massachusetts have seldom erupted on more conservative campuses.

Very conservative Pepperdine University, for example, has a higher percentage of non-white students than the more liberal or radical University of Massachusetts
¹⁷⁵
—and yet it is U. Mass which has had headline-making racial violence. The conservative University of Oklahoma, with a predominantly white undergraduate student body, elected a black woman president of the student body by a majority vote—which is to say, a larger vote than that received by the three other candidates combined.
¹⁷⁶
At a time when black students at many liberal Northern campuses express alienation and dissatisfaction, and engage in self-segregation, a college admissions counselor visiting conservative Rhodes College in Memphis found the black students on that Southern campus expressing feelings of being part of the campus community.
¹⁷⁷
While this evidence is suggestive rather than decisive, the larger point is that the very concept of evidence is not applied by those who repeat the
academic dogma that racial polarization is caused by conservatism, wholly ignoring the possibility that this polarization may be a backlash against double standards promoted by liberals and radicals.

The argument is often made that what really angers white students is the loss of coveted places in elite colleges to black and other minorities, and their consequent loss of numerical predominance or “cultural hegemony”
¹⁷⁸
on various campuses, as the numbers of minority students has increased. But, although this theory is often asserted, it is almost never tested empirically. For example, on many elite campuses, Asian students often substantially outnumber black students and are a significant percentage of the total student body, without provoking nearly as much hostility or violence as that directed against blacks, Hispanics, and others who are admitted under double standards—and who are permitted double standards of behavior.

Asian students outnumber blacks at seven of the eight Ivy League colleges and on all nine campuses of the University of California, as well as at Stanford, Case Western Reserve, Union College, Haverford, Davidson College, Franklin & Marshall, the Illinois Insitute of Technology, Lehigh University, and Whitman College, among other places. They outnumber black, Hispanic, and American Indian students—put together—at Cal Tech, the University of Chicago, Harvey Mudd College, Renssealaer Polytechnic, Cooper Union, the Rose-Hulman Institute, and Worcester Polytechnic. Asians are more than 20 percent of the student body at more than a dozen institutions.
¹⁷⁹

Why does this large-scale taking of places from whites not provoke the same reactions against Asians as against other nonwhites? As an old song said: “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.” Asians have done it by outperforming whites. A white student at San Jose State University expressed the different reactions to the two kinds of minority admissions:

Just because 150 years ago some people were treated poorly doesn’t mean I have to repay their descendents. Simply because I’m white, should somebody who’s not white get my slot?

I think it stinks. The Asian with a better grade point average—that person should have that slot.
¹⁸⁰

Neither Asians nor Jews have been wholly immune to all forms of student resentment and Asians have been adversely affected to some extent, like the Jews, in the racial backlash and polarization which has struck many campuses. It has been a common pattern in a number of countries, and in various periods of history, that heightened group hostility between groups
A
and
B
also adversely affects attitudes toward groups
C
,
D
, and
E
—who have nothing to do with the strife between
A
and
B
. Increased group chauvinism is a threat to everyone. Nevertheless, Asians have seldom been targets of outright violence, even on campuses where they are a large presence. If whites’ real resentments were over a loss of slots or a loss of “cultural hegemony,” the Asians would be their prime targets on elite campuses across the country.

On any of these issues revolving around the “new racism,” people might differ and argue—but they almost never do in academia. Views contrary to the prevailing ideology are simply not mentioned, much less debated. That is the essence of the dogmatism which makes any solution, or even improvement, in the campus racial scene unlikely for many years to come.

The obviously self-serving nature of the usual administrative responses to racial incidents—free speech restrictions, making ethnic studies courses mandatory, larger quotas for minority students and faculty—provide an impetus to new and ever-escalating rounds of double standards and racial backlash. Where will this self-reinforcing spiral end? In other countries, group preferences and quotas in higher education have led to widespread bloodshed (as in India) or to outright civil war (as in Sri Lanka). The growing evidences of racial hostility and sporadic outbreaks of violence which we in the United States call “the new racism” may be an early warning that we are heading in the same direction as other countries which have promoted preferences and quotas longer and more strongly. But the prevailing dogmatism among academics suggests that the real meaning of these early warnings may not be understood until long after it is too late.

CHAPTER 7
Ideological Double Standards

R
ACIAL DOUBLE STANDARDS
are not the only double standards pervading the elite colleges and much of the academic world. So many decisions have been dominated by ideology rather than principle that the term “politically correct” has arisen to describe these double standards. It has become such a familiar term among academics that it is often abbreviated as “P.C.” A comic strip character named “politically correct person” appears in Brown University’s student newspaper, dressed like Superman but with “P.C.” rather than “S” on his costume.

Students, for example, may go unpunished for major violations of campus rules, including disruptions and violence, if these actions were undertaken to forward some ideological agenda currently in favor among academics. But mere infringements, or even inadvertent actions construed as infringements, may be very severely punished, up to and including suspension or expulsion, when those accused are ideologically out of step. Sometimes it is not the purpose but the group from which the offender comes which is crucial in defining what is “politically correct.” Homosexuals, ethnic minorities, radical feminists, Marxists, and environmentalists are among those likely to be
forgiven their transgressions, or even praised for the “idealism” behind them, but no such leniency can be expected for those whose ideals are conservativism, especially if they fall in the suspect category “white males.”

Many invited speakers have been prevented from speaking at Harvard by disruption and violence, and the university has either done nothing at all or has given only the most nominal punishment—when the disrupters were “politically correct” and the speaker was not. Such conservative figures as Caspar Weinberger, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Contra leaders, and others have been disrupted and assaulted with impunity at Harvard by radical students.
¹
In one episode, the speaker—Contra leader Aldolfo Calero—was ready to resume his talk after having been physically assaulted, but was prevented from doing so by Harvard University authorities. One rationalization for this surrender to the opponents of Calero was that there was now “a solidly conservative audience” remaining in the lecture hall, which would create the impression that the sponsors “were trying to exclude liberals.”
²
The impression that free speech was being excluded was apparently less troubling to those who wanted to be “politically correct,” or to practice the administrative tactic of pre-emptive surrender to those who were.

In the wake of demands that Harvard protect speakers and /or punish disruptors, Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences A. Michael Spence said: “We rely on basic human decency as the ultimate corrective mechanism to insure freedom of speech.”
³
Dean Spence has in fact suggested limiting the number of controversial speakers, in order to reduce security costs.
⁴
Since the only speakers who are “controversial” at Harvard, in the sense of being likely to be disrupted or assaulted, are those who arouse the wrath of the political left, this too was “politically correct.” Such concern for frugality was not apparent, however, when one of the leftist causes—divestment in South Africa—was involved. As the
Harvard Salient
reported:

When divestiture protesters illegally erected shanties in Harvard Yard last spring and refused to dismantle them when the University asked them to do so, the administration spent thousands of dollars every week to give them a twenty-four
hour police guard; the college even ran an electrical line out to the shanties to enable the protesters to use their televisions and lamps while they lived in symbolic poverty.
⁵

Double standards are the essence of political correctness. Harvard has not been unique, but in fact all too typical of elite institutions, in permitting the politically correct to use storm trooper tactics against the politically incorrect. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick has been driven off the stage at Berkeley by disrupters shouting and throwing objects—and has been similarly disrupted at the University of Wisconsin, the University of Washington, and other institutions. Former Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, once welcome on campuses across the country during his radical days, has now turned against the left after living in countries with left-wing dictatorships—and has been prevented from speaking by disrupters at Berkeley, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Other speakers opposed to the prevailing leftism on campus have likewise been shouted down or otherwise disrupted when trying to give talks at Columbia, Northwestern, U.C.L.A., Wisconsin, University of Colorado, and Wellesley, among other places.
⁶

These are not merely the personal vicissitudes of particular speakers. These are systematic patterns of stilling free speech and preventing academic audiences from hearing anything which challenges the prevailing vision of the left currently monopolizing many elite colleges and universities. The problem is not that most professors are politically on the left, but that alternative visions are kept off campus—by force if necessary—and that colleges and universities themselves are selectively permissive toward disrupters, though capable of dealing harshly with those who challenge (or even appear to challenge) the “politically correct” views.

Among professors, those holding “politically correct” views may turn their classrooms into indoctrination centers and staging areas for political activism, but those with different views may be accused of “insensitivity,” “racism,” or “sexism” on the basis of nothing more than a failure to use politically correct language—“Native American” rather than “American Indian”; “he or she,” rather than the generic “he”—or a failure to include “issues of race, class, and gender” in their courses. No
such squeamishness applies in the other ideological direction. As two retired faculty members report: