Inside American Education (31 page)

While examples of ideological double standards in punishing—or judging—misbehavior can be found from coast to coast, some of the most egregious examples have occurred at Dartmouth College. For example, in 1982 a black professor whose course was criticized in the
Dartmouth Review
(which has also panned numerous white professors’ courses) went to the dormitory where the student-writer lived and—at 8:30
A.M.
—shouted obscenities outside her door, returning at 10:30 to attempt to force the door open. It so happened that the student who wrote the criticisms was not there, but her roommate was—and was in tears. The professor received only an official reprimand from the Dean of Faculty, who said: “I don’t know what it’s like to be a black man. He’s obviously under emotional stress.”
⁵⁹

Three years earlier, Dartmouth reacted far more strongly to an episode which many would consider relatively innocuous. At the end of half-time in a hockey game, three white students, dressed in American Indian regalia, skated out onto the ice—to the cheers of the Dartmouth crowd, which rose to sing the Alma Mater. As soon as these students’ identities became known, they were abruptly suspended from the college. Their crime was ideological. Their actions implicitly challenged the “politically correct” view that Dartmouth’s long tradition of calling its athletic teams “Indians” was wrong and racist. Although the team name had been changed, the hockey crowd’s emotional response to the old traditional symbol of the school provoked an angry reaction in the Dartmouth administration and among the politically activist elements on campus. All
classes were cancelled, being replaced by campus speeches and declarations against “racism” and other related and unrelated topics of an ideological nature.

Although efforts by the campus police to discover the identity of the “Indian” skaters had failed, the students voluntarily came forward to identify themselves, and at least one apologized for any offense. Nevertheless they were suspended, with just one week left in the term—which meant that they received no credit for all their academic work that term and received no refund of their tuition.
⁶⁰
Only after outcries from alumni, some of whom began raising money to finance a lawsuit against the college, did the administration relent. The new punishment, according to one of the students, was: “I have been ordered to conduct public seminars, whenever I can get students to listen, about the evil of the Indian symbol. In addition, I’ve been commanded to take an Indian to lunch once a week for a year.”
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(Incidentally, no one considers it racist that Notre Dame’s athletic teams are called “the fighting Irish” or that Hope College’s teams are called “Dutchmen.”)

Many of Dartmouth’s double-standard episodes have involved students on the staff of the
Dartmouth Review
, a conservative publication located off campus and often referred to by its critics as “racist” and “sexist,” though it has been run in various years by a black editor, a female editor, and editors from India—and its editorial policy has been consistently pro-Israel and critical when anti-Semitic speakers have been invited on campus. “Politically correct” epithets are intended to perform the political task of discrediting, rather than the cognitive task of achieving accuracy. Yet even
Rolling Stone
magazine, hardly a conservative publication, reported on the cameraderie among the multi-racial, multi-national staff of the
Dartmouth Review
, “co-existing in the kind of casual harmony liberals yearn for.”
⁶²

Before the first issue of the
Dartmouth Review
was published, its editors were threatened with a lawsuit by the college’s attorney if they used the word “Dartmouth” in their title.
⁶³
The administration tried in various ways to prevent alumni from donating money to the publication.
⁶⁴
A black administrator who physically assaulted a Dartmouth student who was distributing the
Dartmouth Review
on campus received only a short suspension—with pay—and the faculty voted 113
to 5 to censure the student, rather than the administrator, even though it was the latter who was fined in a court of law.
⁶⁵

A
Dartmouth Review
editor who published information marked “cleared for release” by the College News Service was nevertheless disciplined because the release proved embarrassing to the medical school.
⁶⁶
A
Dartmouth Review
reporter was suspended from the college on a charge of plagiarism in 1990, on the unsupported suspicions of a left-wing professor, with no citation of any writing from which his essay was supposed to have been plagiarized. The professor herself said: “I just have a general feeling that the writing was beyond his ability … I don’t have sufficient evidence to prove or disprove my accusation.”
⁶⁷
While his essay was generally well written and well reasoned, it was nothing beyond the range of a bright undergraduate,
⁶⁸
and was certainly not beyond the range of the particular student who wrote it—a young man who achieved a perfect score on his advanced placement English examination.
⁶⁹
Yet, on the basis of unsupported speculation, he was not only suspended but given a record that will follow him for life, as a violator of the honor code—a cheat.

When word of this episode received national media attention, the waters became muddied, as the Dartmouth administration pulled back somewhat and offered a compromise to the suspended student, who was anxious to resume his education. Their proviso was that he agree not to sue. The original claim of plagiarism was changed to the more nebulous charge of failing to cite sources properly, and the two-term suspension was reduced to a one-term suspension in a negotiated settlement.
⁷⁰
That a freshman at Dartmouth, in his first semester of college, may have failed to cite sources is hardly plagiarism. That he should have been punished more severely—and more indelibly—than others who committed disruptions and even violence is precisely what is meant by the ideological double standards known as political correctness.

An even more severe permanent punishment was inflicted on a Stanford graduate student named Steven Mosher, who was not even on campus when he committed his violation of political correctness. Like many graduate students who have completed their course work, Mosher was no longer in residence but was pursuing other activities elsewhere, pending the writing of his doctoral dissertation in anthropology. Elsewhere
in this case was China, which had only recently agreed to allow some American scholars into the country.

After his stay in China, Mosher shocked much of the world by revealing that country’s widespread compulsory birth control program, including compulsory abortions, imposed on Chinese women by the Communist government. His book,
Broken Earth
, became a best-seller and helped shatter the rosy picture of Maoist China being promoted by many Western intellectuals on the left, including academics on American college campuses. In addition to rubbing Stanford’s left-wing anthropology department the wrong way ideologically, Mosher’s book also jeopardized the newly available access of American research scholars to China. Chinese government officials wrote to Stanford, denouncing Mosher’s activities in China.

Steven Mosher was terminated as a graduate student from Stanford, prevented from earning the Ph.D. which plays such a crucial role in an academic career. As with so many other punishments inflicted on those who have violated political correctness, the basis for Mosher’s expulsion was left vague and inconsistent. Not one stated requirement for the doctorate in anthropology was even claimed to have been violated, nor the facts in his book challenged. Instead, criteria of personal behavior were created
ex post
as a reason why the department “could not certify you as an anthropologist,” even if the remaining academic requirements of a doctoral dissertation were met.
⁷¹

These new personal behavior criteria included “responsibility for the welfare of those he is studying” and a “professional imperative for sensitivity to others.” Moreover, these nebulous personal behavior standards were repeatedly and insistently depicted by Stanford University’s President Donald Kennedy as
professional
criteria in anthropology, rather than university rules about personal conduct
⁷²
—for the latter have due process protections which Mosher was never accorded. Instead, Mosher was given one hour in which to make his case and denied the presence of his attorney, on grounds that “presence of counsel would make for an adversarial confrontation rather than informative colloquy”
⁷³
—even though this “informative colloquy” could ruin his whole professional career.

To complete the Alice-in-Wonderland reasoning, Mosher was repeatedly denounced by Kennedy for “lack of candor”
⁷⁴
because Mosher’s letters to his professors did not reveal many aspects of his personal life in China, nor his misadventures with the Communist authorities there, as he sought out information that they did not want him to have. Yet there were neither university rules nor departmental Ph.D. requirements that he write to his professors at all, much less that he detail his relations with the opposite sex,
⁷⁵
his legal difficulties with the Communist authorities,
⁷⁶
the informal favors he did to gain access to the information he wanted,
⁷⁷
or his payment to a local Chinese man to drive him into areas which both knew to be off-limits.
⁷⁸
Yet failure to adequately disclose these things were among the key reasons given for expelling him from Stanford’s Ph.D. program.

President Donald Kennedy waxed indignant that “Mosher was not candid about the very relevant fact that he and the ‘translator’ are now married,”
⁷⁹
that he “failed to mention” his arrest in China “until directly asked,”
⁸⁰
and cited Mosher’s “possible dissimulation to the Chinese officials,” as part of a picture of “manipulativeness and lack of candor.”
⁸¹
Even if every charge
and
every interpretation in the thousands of words in Kennedy’s official decision were 100 percent correct, there would still not be a single violation of the existing rules for receiving a Ph.D. in anthropology at Stanford.

Of all the many campus injustices across the country, what happened to Steven Mosher was the academic Dreyfus case of our time. But there was no Emile Zola to write “J’Accuse.” A man who attacked both Communism and birth control was obviously not “politically correct” and so could expect few defenders.

While some individuals receive favorable treatment on college and university campuses because of their race or sex, it is not simply the biological category to which one belongs but the ideological category that is crucial. An Asian American woman at the University of Connecticut, for example, was severely punished for violating an ideological taboo. A sign on the door to her dormitory room listed “people who are shot on sight,” including “preppies,” “bimbos,” and “homos.” After gay rights activists complained, she was ordered to move out of the dormitory and off campus, and was forbidden to set foot in any dormitory or college cafeteria—in other words, she was sentenced to virtually total social isolation. Only under threat
of a federal lawsuit did the university later allow her to move back on campus.
⁸²

Even matters involving the physical safety of students and faculty can be determined by ideological double standards. Dartmouth College has hired forensic experts to try to trace anonymous, abusive letters to feminists and blacks, but it took no action when one of its professors received death threats because he co-sponsored a speaker (on the sinking of the
Titanic
) with the
Dartmouth Review
. Nor was the Dartmouth administration interested when a black writer on that newspaper was threatened, even though he had faculty witnesses and named the other black students from the Afro-American Society who had threatened him. There was a similar disinterest when members of the same society threatened another black student, even though he is handicapped and in a wheelchair.
⁸³

It is hard to know how much of the ideological double standards found on college campuses reflects the ideologies of the administrators themselves and how much is a pragmatic caving in to vocal ideologues among the students and faculty, or a pre-emptive surrender to their presumed desires. The swiftness with which administrators have sometimes reversed themselves when counter-pressure was applied suggests that they still have that “versatility of convictions”
⁸⁴
with which Thorstein Veblen credited them long ago.

During the Persian Gulf war of 1991, for example, officials of the University of Maryland made students take down displays of the American flag and other signs of support for the U.S. war effort in the Middle East. “We have a big population to be sensitive to,” one administrator explained, while another said, “what may be innocent to one person may be insulting to another.” Yet when the story made front page headlines in the student newspaper and also appeared in the
Washington Post
, the administration quickly reversed itself and declared that it “strongly supports” such displays “as expressions of freedom of speech.”
⁸⁵
A very similar episode occurred at Cornell University, where students were threatened with expulsion if they did not remove their American flags and yellow ribbons from their windows during the Gulf War. Again, the administration backed down only after the story reached the media.
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