TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040191/0401631.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 15.0 KB | 301 lines

                                                                                IDEAS, Page 66

Upside Down in the Groves of Academe


In U.S. classrooms, battles are flaring over values that are
almost a reverse image of the American mainstream. As a result,
a new intolerance is on the rise.

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III -- Reported by Anne Hopkins and Daniel
S. Levy/New York, with other bureaus


    Imagine places where it is considered racist to speak of the
rights of the individual when they conflict with the
community's prevailing opinion. Where it is taboo to debate the
moral fitness of homosexuals as parents, and sexist to order
a Domino's pizza because the chain's chairman donates money to
an antiabortion group. Imagine institutions that insist they
absolutely defend free speech but punish the airing of
distasteful views by labeling them unacceptable "behavior"
instead of words -- and then expel the perpetrators.

    Imagine a literature class that equates Shakespeare and the
novelist Alice Walker, not as artists but as fragments of
sociology. Shakespeare is deemed to represent the outlook of
a racist, sexist and classist 16th century England, while
Walker allegedly embodies a better but still oppressive 20th
century America. Finally, imagine a society in which some of
the teachers reject the very ideas of rationality, logic and
dialogue as the cornerstone assumptions of learning -- even
when discussing science.

    Where is this upside-down world? According to an increasing
number of concerned academics, administrators and students, it
is to be found on many U.S. college campuses. And it is
expanding into elementary and secondary school classrooms.

    For most of American history, the educational system has
reflected and reinforced bedrock beliefs of the larger society.
Now a troubling number of teachers at all levels regard the
bulk of American history and heritage as racist, sexist and
classist and believe their purpose is to bring about social
change -- or, on many campuses, to enforce social changes
already achieved.

    This new thinking is not found everywhere, to be sure, but
in many places professors contend it is becoming dominant.
While American universities and colleges have always been
centers for the critical examination of Western assumptions and
beliefs, the examination has taken a harsh and strident turn.
At times it amounts to a mirror-image reversal of basic
assumptions held by the nation's majority.

    To the dismay of many civil libertarians, the new turns of
thought are fostering a decline in tolerance and a rise in
intellectual intimidation. Says Leon Botstein, president of New
York's liberal Bard College: "Nobody wants to listen to the
other side. On many campuses, you really have a culture of
forbidden questions."

    Obfuscatory course titles and eccentric reading lists
frequently are wedded to a combative political agenda or
outlandish views of the nation's culture and values. At Duke
University in North Carolina, an English-department course uses
plays and films to pursue the theme that organized crime "is
a metaphor for American business as usual." Another Duke
offering condemns a heterosexual bias in traditional Western
literature; its professor has written about such topics as
"Jane Austen and the masturbating girl."

    A University of Texas professor of American studies has
constructed a course on 19th century writers to alternate
between famous white men one week and obscure women the next,
in part to illuminate "the prison house of gender." A woman who
has been visiting professor at both the University of Hawaii
and the University of Texas describes traditional liberal arts
as prone to "a fetishized respect for culture as a stagnant
secular religion." Mary Louise Pratt, a Stanford professor of
comparative literature, has objected to "the West's relentless
imperial expansion" and its "monumentalist cultural hierarchy
that is historically as well as morally distortive."

    Although most students at most colleges continue to take
courses bearing at least some resemblance to what their
predecessors studied, even the traditional curriculum is often
read in new ways. Valerie Babb, an assistant professor of
English at Georgetown, is teaching a course this semester
called White Male Writers. Among them: Hawthorne, Melville and
Faulkner. The title reflects one of the course's chief
assertions: that just as women or black writers are studied as
a class that shares a particular sensibility, so too should
these white male artists be. However great their works might
be, they speak merely as "one element of the large and
diversified body of literature."

    The flowering of new and at times exotic theory is in
keeping with the great tradition of liberal-arts education. But
many of the new critics have a hostile view of traditional
scholarship and seem to judge ideas by their "political
correctness" (abbreviated as P.C.) -- that is, on the basis of
whom they might offend.

    The University of Delaware barred Linda Gottfredson from
accepting money for her educational research from the
controversial Pioneer Fund because it had financed unrelated
studies into possible hereditary differences in intelligence
among the races. The review committee judged that by
underwriting such studies, Pioneer had exhibited "a pattern of
activities incompatible with the university's mission." The
University of Michigan student newspaper condemned sociologist
Reynolds Farley for, as he phrases it, "lack of ideological
perspective, for not directly attacking gender and racial
differences in wages." A male philosophy professor at Pomona
College in California has been fighting a lonely and losing
battle to get a course critical of feminist theory listed among
women's studies. Several schools have punished students for
expressing religious objections to homosexuality or, as at the
University of Washington, questioning a professor's assertion
that lesbians make the best mothers.

    Taboos on fields of inquiry are increasingly accompanied by
bans on language. According to a growing number of academic
theorists, the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech
can be legitimately laid aside for worthy reasons. Chief among
them is if it interferes with what is billed as a new and
nonconstitutional right: the right to avoid having one's
feelings hurt, or what Botstein calls a "subjective
interpretation of harm." Thus dozens of universities have
introduced tough new codes prohibiting speech that leads to,
among other things, a "demeaning atmosphere," and some of them
have suspended students for using epithets toward blacks,
homosexuals or other minorities, not only in classrooms but
also in dormitories, in intramural sports and even off campus
altogether.

    "Freedom of expression is no more sacred than freedom from
intolerance or bigotry," says John Jeffries, a black who is
associate dean of the graduate school of management and urban
policy at New York City's New School for Social Research. But
on some campuses, hostility to white males is more or less
condoned. The University of Wisconsin at Parkside suspended one
student for addressing another as "Shaka Zulu"; yet the
university's Madison campus held that the term red-neck was not
discriminatory. At some schools, professors teach that white
males can never be victims of racism, because racism is a form
of repressive political power -- and white males already hold
the power in Western society.

    At Brown University, President Vartan Gregorian redefined
the racist, wee-hours tirade of a drunken student as
unacceptable behavior rather than as protected free speech and,
having thereby finessed First Amendment concerns, expelled the
offender. Although Gregorian insists he was responding to the
whole set of circumstances, his explanation is widely disputed.
Says Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, a First Amendment
activist: "Gregorian is engaged, unwittingly I suppose, in
classic Orwellian speech."

    In an unlikely tactical alliance to ban such activities,
Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois, a conservative
Republican, this month introduced a bill with the backing of
the American Civil Liberties Union. The measure is designed to
discourage private colleges from disciplining students "solely
on the basis of conduct that is speech or other communication."
It is given a good chance of passage.

    In the nation's elementary and secondary schools, the
polarization is not yet so extreme. But increasingly
curriculums are being written to satisfy the political demands
of parents and community activists. In some cases, expediency
counts for more than facts. New York State officials, for
example, have responded to pressure from Native American
leaders by revamping the state high school curriculum to include
the shaky assertion that the U.S. Constitution was based on
the political system of the Iroquois Confederacy. In Berkeley,
chicana activist Martha Acevedo, who is vice chairman of the
school board, has blocked adoption of new textbooks despite
state approval for their multicultural approach. According to
her, the books lack "positive role models." She cites the
depiction of a 19th century Hispanic Robin Hood-style figure
who is shown in one text on a wanted poster.

    Perhaps the most problematic development is the emergence
in dozens of cities of "Afrocentric" curriculums. All of them
legitimately seek to bolster black children's confidence in
their ability to achieve and to debunk the patronizing notion
that black American history and culture began with the
Emancipation Proclamation. When pursued with intellectual
discipline, the Afrocentric idea can be inspirational. Says
Franklyn Jenifer, president of Howard University, in recalling
his own education at that historically black school: "Every
course I took was infused with some sense of our destiny or my
personal destiny and the possibility of my achieving it."

    But through zealotry or inadequate research, too many of
these courses have expanded their claims far beyond the
generally accepted list of black attainments. Among the most
controversial assertions: that ancient Greece derived -- no,
stole -- its culture from black Africa; that black Africans
invented science and mathematics; that the Egypt of the
pharaohs was a black culture; and that a racist white
Establishment has systematically hidden these and other black
achievements. The hazard of such courses is that they may
instill less pride than resentment.

    Ethnic material increasingly is taught to children of all
races; conventional history increasingly is not. In
education-minded Brookline, Mass., where 79% of high school
graduates go on to college, parents have had to fight to
restore a European-history course that was canceled as
Eurocentric and elitist. Meanwhile, students have been enticed
into fringe electives with such sales pitches as "Have you
ever wondered what goes on in the mind of a voodoo doctor?"

    Why are Western cultural and social values so out of favor
in the classroom when so much of the rest of the world has
moved, during the past couple of years, to embrace them? Roger
Kimball, conservative author of Tenured Radicals, a book
harshly critical of the trend, blames the coming of age of the
academic generation shaped by the struggles of the '60s. Its
members, he says, vowed back then to transform campuses into
engines of ongoing social change; now they are in a position
to impose their will. A much less conspiratorial interpretation
is that American schools and colleges are dealing with a
demographic change that will take another couple of decades to
grip society as a whole -- the shift, because of higher birth
and immigration rates among nonwhite and Hispanic people, from
a majority-white to a truly multiracial society. These nonwhite
and Hispanic students want a curriculum that gives them more
dignity. So do women and gays -- and faculty from all those
groups. Says the Rev. Clarence Glover Jr., who teaches a course
about the sins of "the European-American male" at Southern
Methodist University in Dallas: "People of color have always
been a majority in the world and are now becoming a majority in
America. The issue becomes, How do we begin to share power?"

    Courses that explore these questions are increasingly
popular among students in general, but the primary audience for
minority-oriented curriculums is usually the minorities
themselves. Typically, they seek courses that reassure as much
as instruct them. At San Francisco State College and also in
that city's two-year City College, students can minor in gay
and lesbian studies, with such offerings as Gay Male
Relationships and Sexual Well-Being. The City College department
was founded in 1989, says chairman Jack Collins, because "it
will raise the self-esteem of lesbian and gay students who will
realize that they are complete people, that we do have
recognizable and describable cultures."

    The chief risk in any ideologically based curriculum is that
it can promote tribalism and downplay the value of discovering
common cultural ground. The very idea of the melting pot, of
assimilation, indeed of a common American identity, is under
fire in some academic circles. Warns Diane Ravitch, adjunct
professor of history and education at Columbia: "If we teach
kids to connect themselves to one group defined by race or
language or religion, then we have no basis for public
education. We need to retain a sense of the common venture."

    Colleges are as subject to fad and fashion as the rest of
society -- perhaps more, for the client base of students turns
over quickly. But few scholars believe the current intellectual
battles will end soon -- particularly as the confrontation
permeates other levels of education. In the process, the
American tradition of tolerance in diversity, an uneven
tradition at best, may be strained as rarely before.


____________________________________________________________
BULLETINS FROM THE P.C. FRONT


    SANTA CRUZ, CALIF. A University of California administrator
has sought to ban such phrases as "a chink in his armor," "a
nip in the air" and "call a spade a spade" because they contain
words that in other contexts have been used to express
prejudice.

    SAN FRANCISCO. Students who signed up for a fall-semester
course in Black Politics at San Francisco State picketed it
instead, and most eventually dropped out. Their complaint: it
was listed in the catalog under Political Science rather than
Black Studies.

    AMHERST, MASS. A "straight pride" demonstration by
conservative students at the University of Massachusetts in
March was broken up by gay protesters. (Last year the event was
billed provocatively as the "Burn a Fag in Effigy" rally.)

    SANTA MONICA, CALIF. Last week the social-science department
at Santa Monica College censured economics professor Eugene
Buchholz for arguing ethnic- and gender-based studies
"sidetrack students who could otherwise gain useful disciplines
or skills."