734
PAl?..TISAN REVLEW
ulty. The traditionalist faculty tend
to
shun committee work as a waste
of time, but many of those pushing for radical changes in the university
actually like to fill their days with meetings. (Of course they never admit
this, telling everyone in sight that they would rather be in the laboratory
or the library.) Beneath the bombast, the president discovers, there is a
bureaucrat trying to escape. Political militancy is a form of institutional
conservatism; to see their new programs through to completion, the re–
formers must preserve the structure that will house them.
Finally, demands for inclusion are usually accompanied by demands
for money: higher salaries for the faculty, financial aid for targeted stu–
dents, and administrative underwriting of new programs and institutes. At
a time of financial retrenchment, college presidents can hardly be ex–
pected to look favorably upon expensive new initiatives. Such initiatives,
however, may not be that expensive after all. Faculty in the humanities
and social sciences, particularly those attracted to academia as a political
cause, tend to make very little money in the first place; it is far cheaper
to support a Marxist economics department than a neoclassical one.
Moreover, even though there are academic superstars making reportedly
large sums of money, they are cheap compared to scientists; whatever the
costs of building the Duke University English Department, the recogni–
tion came cheaply compared to what it costs to build a physics depart–
ment. The money needed to be spent to respond to demands for inclu–
sion is, from the new-class point of view, money well spent.
Besides the relative conservatism of the race-class-gender agenda,
there is a second reason why university administrators tend to be recep–
tive to it. The clash between multiculturalists and their opponents is not
necessarily a clash over ideas. [t is also a battle between those who claim
that the university should be about ideas versus those who believe that
the university should be about suffering and redemption. As Henry Louis
Gates,
Jr.
has pointed out, some of the more exotic forms of
Afrocentrism resemble twelve-step recovery programs. They do not so
much search for new ideas about race and ethnicity as they affirm the
pain of racism and the exhilaration involved in recognizing that pain.
The demands of those who want the university to acknowledge the
contributions of once-excluded groups take on the character of psy–
chodramas; it is not what you say but how you "really feel" that mat–
ters. The period when political correctness achieved its high point was a
period of emotion, not one of reason.
If this psychological propensity is true of issues of curriculum, it is far
more the case when universities deal with policies involving racial and
sexual harassment. Here again one notes an odd reversal; 1960s radicals
sought to abolish
in loco parentis;
1990s radicals, often the same people,
