566
PARTISAN REVIEW
tion of the marvelously named Sheldon Hackney, sometime president of
the University of Pennsylvania, to be the head of the National
Endowment for the Humanities. As I write, Mr. Hackney's appointment
is all but official: he was unanimously approved by the Senate Labor and
Human Relations Committee and now awaits only confirmation by the
full Senate. Barring divine intervention, that is sure to be forthcoming.'
Mr. Hackney has been much in the news of late. As president of the
University of Pennsylvania, he presided over some of the most noxious
examples of politically correct intolerance to capture the public's atten–
tion in years. There was, for example, the in£lmous Water Buffalo inci–
dent, in which a white male student was hauled up before a disciplinary
committee because in a moment of exasperation he had referred to some
black female students as "water buffalos" when they were making noise
outside his dormitory window. Would that Eveyln Waugh were present
to anatomize that incident!
Less funny , and even more disturbing, was the case of the missing stu–
dent newspaper, which also made national headlines. This past April , a
group of black activist students, unhappy about a conservative column in
The Daily Pen.n.sylvanian,
set out to steal the entire press run of the news–
paper. Breaking into various university buildings - the medical school,
the university art museum, et cetera - they made off with nearly fourteen
thousand copies of the newspaper. To most of us, this sounds like crimi–
nal trespassing and theft. But to Mr. Hackney and his politically correct
administration the black students were engaged in "protest activity" -
and so it was the security officers who intervened, not the students, who
were held to be at fault.
In
fact, as the columnist Charles Krauthammer aptly put it, the re–
sponse of the administration was a " little piece of campus fascism." One
security officer was reassigned to desk duty pending an investigation of
his behavior. His crime? Apprehending two women he saw running out
of the university art museum with three large plastic bags. Nor was that
the end of the incident. The findings of the university panel appointed to
study the theft has recently been released. As
The Wall Street JOllrnal
re–
ported, it absolves the students of all wrongdoing except failing
to
show
their identification cards.
So Kafkaesque are its findings that, if one did not know better, one
might think the university report was a surrealistic spoof For example,
the panel found that a security guard on duty at the medical school
"behaved in a discourteous manner toward the students by ordering
them to leave before determining who they were or giving them an op-
*Divine intervention failed to intervene: Mr. Hackney has been duly appointed.
