FRED
SIEGEL
729
Say what you will about
R..
D. Laing, before his death he acknowl–
edged the biochemical basis of schizophrenia, effectively repudiating the
writing that made him famous. The same can't be said of other '68-ers,
many of whom cling to their outmoded glory days like ex-jocks hanging
on to their high school championship jackets. The ideas of '68 have for
them been replaced by newer variations but never repudiated. For those
struck blind by "the singular evil of America," political correctness was
and is to campus politics what water is to fish.
ALAN WOLFE
The New Class Comes Home
The
emergence of political correctness in the late 1980s reveals a univer–
sity bearing little resemblance to an earlier image of academic life. Far
from cloistered, this university is politically engaged. Its humanities pro–
fessors Jre more preoccupied with Madonna than Milton. Rather than
academic freedom and skepticism, the emerging university pursues cer–
tainty (in the name of radical doubt), while contemplating restrictions
on free speech. Its scholars, anything but absent-minded, are vigorously
professional and career-minded. What was once a milieu of gentlemanly
conservatism has become the home of assertive women and minorities.
For an institution that, because of tenure and tradition, is supposed to
change slowly when it changes at all, the academy in the course of
twenty years turned upside down.
One change in particular has been noticed by many of the commen–
tators on political correctness, but its significance has not been fully ap–
preciated. I refer to the role played in these transformations by academic
leaders: presidents, provosts, and deans.
If
the political correctness move–
ment of the late 1980s is the outcome of the politics of the late 1960s,
then one of the more puzzling of its aspects is how those who once
tried to lock college presidents out of their offices came
to
depend on
presidents to support their demands. Just as today's activists campaign to
let homosexuals into the same military from which yesterday's radicals
were trying
to
escape, academic leftists cannot obtain their objectives
without the support of the college leadership they once denounced.
Some of the more notorious of the stories recounted in the political
correctness debates have invo lved academic administrators more than
