FRED SIEGEL
725
Civil Rights explained in 1972, "We have a whale of a lot of power
[over academia], and we're prepared to use it" to rectify what was then
described as the "underutilization of minorities." "When representatives
of HEW were told that there were no women or minority students in
the department of religious studies at one university, in part, because, a
reading of Greek and Hebrew was required, representatives of HEW ad–
vised orally that such requirements had to be revised so that, in the name
of relevance, there could be more minority participation." HEW's affir–
mative-action oversight produced a tremendous demand for paperwork
like racial identification surveys which in turn produced the need for
more administrators, and so on.
The growth of affirmative action administrators would over time be
an important element for yet more affirmative action. But their original
source of power was the threat
to
federal funding of EEO lawsuits.
Writing his memoirs in 1990 an anonymous dean described the advice
given by his university's attorney: "I think we should give them whatever
they ask for. ... We certainly don't want the
EEO
people to think we
are not cooperative."
Business responded to the new wave of regulation with a counter–
offensive that in part produced Reaganism, which in turn eased the regu–
latory burden. By contrast, academia - and here I generalize broadly -
internalized the new regulatory regime.
It
responded to Reaganism with
new forms of regulation designed to make the universities over, the sci–
ences partly excepted, into kinder and gentler and even therapeutic con–
gregations.
But I'm jumping ahead of myself. To go back, the late 1970s saw
two related developments of considerable importance, the decline of so–
cial science and the rise of what Ernest Gellner has described as
"epistemological hypochondria."
For three centuries, beginning with Newton's rise to control of the
Royal Academy of Science, rational inquiry had progressively triumphed
over all other forms of explanation. Science and freedom had become, it
seemed, permanently linked. Walter Lippman in
Drift and Mastery
ex–
pressed the general understanding. "Democracy in politics," he wrote, "is
the twin-brother of scientific thinking.... As absolutism falls, science
arises. It is self-government." "The discipline of democracy, the escape
from drift," he concluded, is "the outlook of a free man."
Social science, starting even before the 1944 publication of Gunnar
Myrdal's
All Alllericall Dilemma,
had been given the task of extending a
full measure of freedom to racial minorities. Writing about the 1950s,
Robert Nisbet noted that "except for the footnotes there really wasn't
much difference ... between the meeting of a social science association
