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PAR.TISAN REVIEW
shouting down speakers, shutting down universities. At the University of
Pennsylvania, for example, a group of black students expropriated an en–
tire run of a student newspaper to protest a "racist" article, while at the
University of California, Berkeley, Chicano students went on a hunger
strike until officials granted their demand for a department of Chicano
studies.
Some of these new departments have proved extremely useful addi–
tions, opening up whole new areas of research. Others have been created
less to increase knowledge than to increase power and presence. This ex–
poses the most serious consequence of PC in the university, which is the
growing politicization of academic life, usually at the cost of scholarship
and learning. On the pretext that everything is political and always was,
courses are created for no other purpose than to redress past injustice and
validate minority claims.
It
is not surprising that hitherto ignored people
should desire more information about their history and culture, not only
in order to inform themselves but to educate others. Yet the need to in–
crease self-esteem has developed malignant side effects, leading, for exam–
ple, to conditions of self-segregation where hard-won advances in civil
rights have been vitiated by separate classrooms, exclusive dormitories,
and sequestered dining facilities.
In
this politicized atmosphere, some members of the PC professoriate
will not hesitate to use fabricated or skewed research in order to consol–
idate feelings of racial or gender superiority (the "sun people-ice people"
theory and the current myths about the intellectual influence of "black"
Egypt on Periclean Athens are only two examples). Just as historical fact
is manipulated for racial purposes, so the issue of free speech becomes se–
lective. PC professors and students can protest such speakers as Colin
Powell for his position on gays in the military and, in the same breath,
cite the privileges of free expression to defend the presence of notorious
anti-Semites like Leonard Jeffries. (Some fellow- traveling acadenucs - no–
tably Stanley Fish of Duke University - have even begun questioning the
First Amendment when it doesn't promote social equality or conform
to PC thinking.)
As demoralizing as the insults to truth, history, and civil liberties are
PC restrictions in the field of knowledge. The multiplication of special
studies and special departments has made it possible for minority students
not just to be better informed about their culture but to go through
college without learning about anything else. What Christopher Lasch
called "the culture of narcissism" has now found its politically-approved
form. Students learn by looking in a mirror and studying themselves. And
what they see have got to be "positive images" - no example of non–
Caucasian brutality, or instance of female misbehavior, is allowed to up–
set the historical melodrama of minority victims and white male oppres-
