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PARTISAN REVIEW
taken to a movie. Teachers regularly take their students, sometimes to
good movies like
Glory,
to films that depict or are based on an incident
in reality. I don't know what they then do when they return to the
classroom. That's another question.
Abigail Thernstrorn:
Yes, it would be very easy to get alarmed. But
the fact is we're not about to elect some left-wing kook as President of
the United States.
Ronald Radosh:
There's always been a division between the culture
and the political drift of the country. There's almost no relation. [ want
to address something that Roger and Fred said. Roger just mentioned
Teachers for a Democratic Culture. The very name implies that those of
us who've been concerned with these questions and have criticized
"political correctness" are not for democracy or for a democratic cul–
ture. That was a clever name to have chosen. In her letter inviting us to
this meeting, Edith addressed the relation of this whole debate to politi–
cal issues. A few weeks ago, as Roger mentioned in his earlier remarks,
Paul Lauter, at a conference in California, discussed the kinds of argu–
ments Arthur Schlesinger has made in his book. And he made some gen–
eral points about these educational, political and cultural issues. Lauter
was extremely frightening and very revealing. He had clipped out an ad
that many of you have seen in
The
NWJ
York Times Book Review
for some
obscure right-wing book that none of us have ever heard of. And he
implied that the ad and this book had something to do with us and the
things we are saying. Of course, the audience laughed, and he went on
to
say that this is pure 1950s, that this book belongs in the garbage pail;
and he ripped it up and threw it in the garbage pail. He then held up
the recent issue of
Americall Edllcator,
the AFT magazine, which reprinted
a lengthy excerpt from Arthur's book on multiculturalism. And Lauter
then went on to equate this erudite and intelligent book
to
the garbage
of that ad and as belonging in the garbage pail too.
Lauter is an intelligent man, a distinguished professor who has writ–
ten and published widely. His audience was eating this up. He went on
to say there is no such thing as political correctness, that it's been devised
by the right wing to protest the fact that he and his friends, ostensibly
the left wing, have opened up the universities to blacks, to women, to
gays. I tried to counter it by saying that, in fact, all historians make use
of much of the recent feminist history, women's history; that tremendous
contributions have been made in the last twenty years in the
reinterpretation of slavery. But the left wing is trying
to
suggest that it
alone is concerned with the fate of blacks and women and civil rights.
