10
PARTISAN REVIEW
those who want to help themselves; they could show the way and moti–
vate their fellow blacks to turn over a new leaf. But they need support
in order to combat entrenched interests.
As long as we allow terms like multiculturalism and diversity and
questions of discussions about textbooks to blur the fact that American
students are being shortchanged, as long as we allow the reputations of
those who don't get onto the bandwagon to be besmirched, we will
replace one type of dichotomous thinking for another, one way of
miseducating our young for another. In the academy, our American left
has been successful in cornering the political discourse, in part by insisting
that "the personal is the political," in part by holding on to its role as
victim long after it has won the ideological war. If, however, its
ideology were to be replaced by its good intentions, we might be well
on our way to better educating our students without giving up our
research, yet another unnecessary and unrealistic dichotomy: we do have
the necessary structures and professors in our colleges and universities for
both. All we have to do is
to
recognize that even though we need
political discourse, education itself must be put above politics.
Unfortunately, this is not about to happen. The most talked about
public debate on television, hosted by Fred Friendly, focussed not on the
subtle intimidation of colleagues by the politically correct, but on what
has come to be called the regulation of hate speech, mostly by students.
Such a focus appears to take separatism by racial and ethnic groups (often
fueled by a member of the faculty) for granted, and ignores that the Civil
Rights Act of 1954 set out to eliminate all segregation. (The reestablish–
ment of special schools for young black males , some of whom are
deemed uneducable, is yet another step into the ghetto-oriented past we
want to undo.) Richard Delgado, a lawyer, argued in an article in
The
Chronicle oj Higher Edllcatioll
(9/18/91), that "regulation of hate speech
may be necessary to guarantee equal protection to all citizens," by
extrapolating from the Fourteenth Amendment. Others, he explained,
maintain that such regulations may interfere with the rights granted under
the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech. Unfortunately, all
the debaters on television also end up deferring to the lawyers and
thereby are confirming that what used to be questions of civility and
social conscience - qualities we are expected to develop in families and
to strengthen in schools - must be transformed into legal ones. Wasn't
the Constitution as valid when, as a new emigrant and student at City
College, I was subjected to racial slurs - either kiddingly or in anger?
Did we ignore them or take them in stride - name-calling felt as bad
then as it does now - because our society was not yet as over- legalized as
it has become? We no longer seem to have "the good sense and the
practical judgment ... to elude the numberless difficulties resulting from
