ALAN WOLFE
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seek to reimpose it. This is not necessarily an inconsistency, however.
Those who wanted colleges and universities to stop regulating sex were
basing their positions on a tradition of thought; students are au–
tonomous individuals conducting their own lives, the reasoning ran, and
if they were treated paternalistically, how could we expect them to learn
to think for themselves? By contrast, the arguments in favor of sexual
regulation are psychological more than they are intellectual. Although
there is a good deal of talk about power - we need to regulate sexual
harassment because women have so little power - what is really at issue is
a question of recognition and identity. The passage of a sexual harass–
ment policy is a sign that the institution is willing to listen
to
the de–
mands of its female members. At the University of Virginia, all sides agree
that a proposed policy banning sex between students and teachers would
have been ineffective, but many supported it nonetheless because its pas–
sage would have constituted a step toward female self-assertion.
Cries for recognition would have been impossible for academic ad–
ministrators of the old school to heed; both corporate autocrats and
veterans of the Stalinist wars are equally ill at ease with terms like
"empowerment." But the college presidents picked under the new rules
find demands for redemption more comfortable than demands to take
ideas seriously. The management style they understand best is one that
speaks in psychological jargon. The position of university president is no
longer, in Max Weber's sense of the term, a calling demanding the sacri–
fice of self-interest for some higher purpose.
It
does not require character
and rectitude, but the ability to get along with diverse groups and find
compromise formulae that make everyone feel wanted. When they call
for sensitivity workshops, new class college presidents are applying the
principles of Management 101. They are trying to create an environment
responsive to personal growth and institutional cooperation. Their job is
not to make distinctions between good ideas and bad ones, let alone
right ideas and wrong ones. To pass judgement is
to
condemn, while
leadership is about acceptance. Those pressing for a more intellectual
curriculum tend
to
be abrasive types who hurt the feelings of others.
If
they, in their zeal for argument, sometimes step on the toes of others,
the least the president can do is make everyone feel welcome.
A third factor also enters into the elective affinity between new class
university administrators and the demands for more inclusion. Both stand
in opposition to those who entered academic life during a brief mo–
ment: the period after universities curtailed the practices which retained
the privileges of white Anglo-Saxons but before they opened themselves
up to those whose position in the university would be justified by the
sufferings imposed on them by the larger society.
The cultural war in the universities is a generational war. The
