From: orwell@erich.triumf.ca (BALDEN, RON)
Newsgroups: alt.activism.d
Subject: The Fraudulent Concern over ``Political Correctness"
Date: 4 Jan 1993 17:49 PST
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I regard the current concern over the issue of ``political correctness"
as entirely fraudulent, raised as it is in the name of a
disinterested defence of intellectual values by defenders of the status
quo, who seem threatened by the barest indication that various groups
that have traditionally had no political or institutional power might
even be thinking of trying to acquire some. 
These critics (Dinish D'Souza's recent book "Illiberal Education" is a choice
example) apply a derivative filter to the actual facts to arrive at
their conclusions --- i.e. where before they had a 10 to 1 advantage,
now they only have a 9 to 1 advantage, so the sky is falling! 
(Sometimes its more like going from a 20 to 1  advantage to  19 to 1.)


Russell Jacoby, in {\em The Last Intellectuals}\footnote{From Chapter 7, 
``After the Last Intellectuals".  Basic Books, 1987;
paperback edition The Noonday Press (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 1989.}
comments on the disingenuous character of this criticism as
applied to the American university as follows (my ellipsis -- indicated
by \ldots [LaTeX codes in following]):


\begin{quotation}

Conservatives, however, cherish a more benign view of professionals
tending their own fields.  Yet even this is not a consistent principle. 
Their man of letters is not to be found above or outside the fray,
cleaving to arts and letters, but on its right flank; they do not allow
that an independent intellectual can also be a critic of society.  For
most conservatives this is a contradiction, proof of corruption, loyalty
to alien powers, and un-American activity.  In the conservative lexicon
``politics" itself is a dirty word, which somehow the left introduced
into the university; at least politics is the special province of
politicians, who never mess with art and scholarship.  Once upon a time
culture and scholarship stood apart from politics.  The left drove them
together. 

This skewed notion of politics drowns their own defense of standards and
values.  \ldots Not only do [conservatives] imagine that at some point
culture was uncontaminated by politics; but for them politics can only
mean left-wing politics.  {\em Their own politics is not politics.} {\tt
[My emphasis]} \ldots 

\ldots  When conservatives see leftists in the university, they cry
``politics."  However, they are silent about the much more numerous
conservatives.  Why?  Are they outside politics?  One radical law
professor in a conservative department; two Marxist economists in a
Keynesian or monetarist discipline --- these isolated, and sometimes
not-so-isolated individuals cause conservatives to announce the decline
of the university and civilization. Politics has taken over. 

Yet it is not difficult to demonstrate that the active and committed
conservatives far outnumber the miscellaneous radicals and leftists. 
The emergence of left-wing literary theorists regularly occasions
attacks in the conservative journals.  But why not attack the far more
significant institutes of Russian studies or international affairs, even
schools of business and management?  With a few exceptions,
conservatives not only man these outfits but play much more important
political and cultural roles than the usual beleaguered left professors.
 Is the Harvard Business School or the UCLA School of Management
nonpolitical? Departments of political science and economics house
untold numbers of scholars who advise the United States Government.
This, too, is ``politicized" scholarship.  Why the fiction that the
universities have been politicized by some left scholars? 

\ldots We are to presume that conservative ideas have difficulty getting
a hearing --- as if the entire structure of government, from the
American president to most college presidents, does not emphatically
lean to the right. 

For conservatives a critical vision is itself evidence of personal
failings or foreign ideas.  For instance, Lewis Mumford might seem a
conservative hero, an authentic man of letters, who has stayed clear of
big government, big universities, and big grants.  The problem is that
Mumford has mounted a withering critique of American society.  How can
Edward Shils, a conservative, explain that?  Easy.  While Shils
acknowledges Mumford's independence and intelligence, he concludes that
he has not ``been strong enough to withstand the force of misleading
traditions."  \ldots 

The distaste, even contempt, for critical thinking --- it is not only
wrong, it is foreign --- becomes even less innocent when coupled with
the conservative penchant to undermine freedom of speech.  They object
to academic freedom not because it is too feeble or narrow but because
it is too strong and wide. William Buckley's book\footnote{{\em God and
Man at Yale} by William F. Buckley, Jr., 1951.}  on Yale, which
inaugurated his career, is subtitled {\em The Superstitions of
``Academic Freedom."}  Like many conservatives, Buckley believed the
threat to academic freedom was academic freedom itself. 

``It is therefore an appalling yet indisputable fact that because of the
restraints of ``academic freedom" \ldots scores of influential
professors \ldots are allowed -- in fact encouraged --- to teach just as
they will, to traffic within loose limits, in whatever values they
choose," wrote Buckley.  {\tt [Ellipsis in quotation from Buckley is in
original.]} His roster of trafficking professors, who should have been
cashiered, was quite long; it included not only socialists, Keynesians,
and ``collectivists" but one Yale professor who at an American Social
Hygiene Association conference attacked as ``unrealistic" and ``outworn"
the ethical and religious sanctions against premarital sexual
intercourse.  ``As a professor, Mr. Murdock has wide influence," Buckley
noted darkly, ``and it cannot be expected that his remarks and attitudes
will have no influence on his students." 

\ldots  The conservatives' critique of big universities and big bucks is
also more than a bit compromised by their embrace of big universities
and big bucks.  Few have resigned like Russell Kirk.  They attack the
noxious impact of the dollar from cool corporate offices.  If left-wing
academics appear sweaty, clamoring for positions and appointments,
perhaps it is because they have traditionally been blacklisted, locked
out in the street.  It looks rather unseemly --- from the top floors
where the conservatives lament the decline of scholarship.  No academic
left can tap funds of the magnitude available to conservative
intellectuals.  \ldots 

\end{quotation}
[Russell Jacoby, ``The Last Intellectuals"]

The unstated premise that ``Their politics is not politics" is rather clearly 
illustrated by failed U.S. Supreme Court Nominee Robert
Bork in his memoir {\em The Tempting of America}.  Bork paints a picture of
a high-minded dedication to the law defeated by the dangerous intrusion
of ``politics" into the judicial selection process.  But an actual examination
of Bork's record of judicial opinions show a clear and consistent
preference for the expansion of institutional power -- whether
governmental or corporate --- over the rights of individual
citizens.\footnote{Recall that Bork was Solicitor-General in the Nixon
Administration in 1973, and was the man who, following Nixon's orders,
actually fired Special Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox after both the
Attorney-General (Elliott Richardson) and the Assistant Attorney-General
 resigned rather than do so.} 

Ron Balden
Newsgroups: alt.activism.d