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PAR.
TISAN REVIEW
democratic sentiments" and our "passion for equality." He was so right.
How, it was asked, given the horrors of Vietnam abroad and racism
at home, could reactionaries be allowed to speak? It's easy enough to
view these matters dispassionately now. But at the time it was a close call
for even the level-headed of my generation . Leave the matter of power
aside; it didn't seem too much to ask that we sacrifice some of our free–
doms on behalf of the oppressed.
The beginning of the end of debate on the campuses came with the
fight over the 1965 Moynihan report on the condition of the black
family. Initially it had been well-received by Martin Luther King, but it
soon became an exercise in line- drawing. To even discuss a degree of
black accountability was, in the words of William Ryan, to "blame the
victim."
By 1972 when Vietnam was deescalating and the rioting had for the
most part calmed down, James
Q.
Wilson wrote that "the list of subjects
that cannot be publicly discussed ... in a free and open forum has
grown steadily, and now includes the war in Vietnam, public policy
to–
wards urban ghettos, the relationship between intelligence and heredity,
and the role of corporations in certain overseas regimes ."
In
effect the
substantive commitments
to
supporting the "victims" overwhelmed the
form of university life organized around debate.
Shortly thereafter William Ryan, of "blaming the victim" fame and
one of the "founding fathers" of PC issued an ideological call to arms.
He asked for an army of intellectuals to join ranks
to
"get back into
uniform" as "ideological shock troops" in order
to
fight off the emerg–
ing array of critics skeptical of what was described as "the equality revo–
lution." But if the attitudes associated with PC were already firmly in
place, the institutional enforcement mechanisms were not. The primaty
problem with PC, after all, is not the opinions held by those with plu–
perfectly-raised consciousness per se, but their power at some schools
to
make their dogmas into the equivalent of a religious test for institutional
membership.
The early to mid-1970s were the heydays of Naderism and an almost
revolutionary expansion of federal regulatory powers. From the era of
Progressive reform through the New Dea l and up until 1964 "only one
regulatory agency (the Food and Drug Administration) had been estab–
lished at the Federal level whose primary responsibility was
to
protect
either consumers, employees, or the public from institutional malfea–
sance ." But, writes David Vogel, "between 1964 and 1977 ten regula–
tory agencies were created with this as their mandate."
As the federal government sprayed itself into every nook and cranny
of American life, the once largely autonomous universities were caught
up in the new regulatory web .
J.
Stanley Pottinger of HEW's Office for
