TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040191/0401630.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 4.0 KB | 82 lines

                                                                                IDEAS, Page 68

Academics in Opposition


    The chairman of Tulane University's political science
department is no academic bomb thrower. But when Paul Lewis
looked closely at the "initiatives for the race and gender
enrichment" of the university proposed by a faculty committee
-- well, he says, "I raised a stink." The plan implied a quota
system for hiring more black and female teachers and the
appointment within all departments of "race and gender liaison
persons," whom Lewis likens to political commissars. Thanks
largely to the challenge he organized, Lewis is a controversial
figure at Tulane, but the initiatives are now being revised.
"I never even heard the term politically correct until last
September," says Lewis. "Boy, have I had an education since."

    As a result of the fracas, Lewis is following the lead of
other aroused academics and organizing a Louisiana affiliate
of the 1,750-member National Association of Scholars. With
headquarters in Princeton, N.J., the N.A.S. has emerged as the
cutting edge of faculty opposition to the excesses of
multiculturalism and the replacement of traditional curriculums
with courses about race and gender issues. One well-known
N.A.S. critic, Stanley Fish, chairman of the Duke University
English department, has declared that the association is widely
known to be "racist, sexist and homophobic" and argued that its
members should be barred from committees dealing with tenure
or curriculum. But N.A.S. president and co-founder Stephen H.
Balch, 47, insists that the N.A.S. seeks only to maintain the
standards of excellence that have made U.S. universities the
world's envy.

    N.A.S. members are manning the intellectual barricades
almost everywhere these days. At the University of Texas at
Austin, chapter adherents successfully challenged a proposal
to focus English 306, a required freshman writing course, on
problems of race and gender. They argued that the change would
turn the class into a political-indoctrination course. At the
University of Wisconsin in Madison, the N.A.S. chapter has
criticized a plan to hire more minority professors, contending
that it would set up the academic equivalent of a patronage
system. Christina Hoff Sommers, an associate professor of
philosophy at Clark University, refused to sign a
course-proposal form that would have required her to explain
how she had incorporated "pluralistic views" into her teaching.
Other faculty members, including several avowed leftists,
shared her outrage that academic freedom could be infringed on
by this kind of monitoring. The proposal has been dropped.

    To Stephen Balch, all these incidents show that individuals
can make a difference if they are prepared to speak out -- and
take the heat for doing so. An associate professor of political
science at Manhattan's John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
Balch began meeting with a small group of like-minded academics
in the New York City area in 1982 to discuss academic problems.
By 1987 they had evolved "from a community to an organization"
and opened an office. The N.A.S. is funded in part by four
conservative foundations, but Balch insists, "We follow our own
lights." The association publishes the quarterly Academic
Questions, sponsors regular conferences and has affiliates in
20 states; membership has almost doubled in the past year and
is growing at the rate of 25 applications a week. Among the
roster of luminaries: Duke political scientist James David
Barber, Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson and Jeane
Kirkpatrick, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. The reason for
such interest, says Clark's Sommers, is that liberals as well
as conservatives now worry about an "environment of
intimidation" that has forced some professors to tape their
lectures as a safeguard against bias charges. "It's the
opposite," she says, "of what a university should be."


By John Elson.