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PARTISAN REVIEW
"fundamental principle," but protecting freedom of speech and law and
order at his own university is up for grabs. Opportunism anyone?
The spectacle of Sheldon Hackney as the president of a great univer–
sity was profoundly disturbing. The prospect of him heading the
National Endowment for the Humanities is even worse . The NEH was
founded to preserve and transmit what is best and most lasting about our
culture. Under Mr. Hackney's rule, one can be certain that those ideals
will be utterly forgotten in the name of cultural activism. Radical multi–
culturalism, "gender studies," Afrocentrism, wacko feminism: one can be
sure that the entire politically correct smorgasbord of academic cultural
offerings will henceforth occupy a prominent place in the NEH's roster
of interests. This is bad enough in itself, but it is even more disturbing for
what it says about the evolution of political correctness. For a brief
moment around 1990, "the long march through the institutions" for
which sixties radicals agitated seemed to be complete with the more or
less total capitulation of most American universities and cultural organi–
zations to the forces of political correctness.
Unfortunately, it now appears that the takeover of the universities
and organizations like the Modern Language Association and the
American Council of Learned Societies was only the first step. What
Sheldon Hackney's appointment signals is the opening up of a new
front: the aggressive application of political correctness beyond the clois–
tered purlieus of the academy to cultural life writ large. As Hillary
Clinton has said, she doesn't want government simply to govern, she
wants it
to
change people's lives. The cultural mandarins in the Clinton
administration and their sympathizers in the academy and its satellites
know what virtue is, and they want to force you to become virtuous.
It
is said by some well-meaning commentators - even, on occasion,
intelligent well-meaning commentators - that although the methods
and, as it were, the manners of political correctness are deplorable, its
"goals" are, at bottom, noble. For example, Martin Amis, in his
New
Yorker
review of Andrew Motion's controversial new biography of the
poet Philip Larkin, speaks of political correctness "at its grandest" as "an
attempt to accelerate evolution." Make no mistake, Mr. Amis comes
down very hard on the politically correct campaign against Larkin for his
unenlightened views on women and blacks - a campaign, incidentally,
that allowed an unnamed columnist for the British Library Association
Record
to suggest that Philip Larkin's books "should be banned." But
Mr. Amis nevertheless insists that political correctness, since it is "against"
nasty things like racism and sexism must, in theory if not in practice, be
on the side of the angels. This is a conclusion as naive as it is dangerous.
Recall the paving stones of the road to Hell. And recall that Robespierre
