96
PARTISAN REVIEW
Statements made at the much-publicized 1993 Duke University
conference organized to counter attacks on political correctness were
particularly striking. The speakers seemed unfazed by the attacks. They
maintained that their radical and deconstructionist programs were
enlightened and forward-looking. One speaker, Richard Rorty, described
the conference as "a rally of [the] left." The audience chortled derisively
at mention of William Bennett, Allan Bloom, or E. D. Hirsch,
Jr.
and
nodded respectfully at the names of Nietzsche, Derrida, Gramsci, or
Foucault.
Rorty was not.entirely approving. He went on to dismiss poststruc–
turalist theorist Frank Lentricchia's left-inspired, guiding principle that
"our society is mainly unreasonable." Rorty took care to proclaim
himself a "reformist." But he had disclosed and criticized the left politi–
calization of the academy.
Despite its politically correct atmosphere, the conference was notable
for concessions to the traditionalism it was laughing at. For example,
Phyllis Franklin, former chairman of the politically correct Modern
Language Association, gave the following account of her organization's
workings:
I receive letters from MLA members commenting on intellectual and
professional questions, and some of the authors of these letters ask
that I not reveal their names. They fear that colleagues in their de–
partments and in the MLA will treat them badly because of their
views. Some of them are right. I have observed occasional exchanges
in meetings at our annual convention when participants all but pre–
vented someone who wished to be heard from speaking.
Still, Franklin's organization did not change its politically correct
policies and attitudes. Finally, Todd Gitlin, a leftist scholar, conceded
that "a bitter intolerance emanates from much of the academic left."
Thus, within a short period, practitioners and apologists for political
correctness have gone from denying its existence to inadvertently
confessing it, to explicitly admitting its existence, or to disavowing it, as
Hackney did.
Yet just how predominantly rhetorical all these admissions proved to
be is evident from the continuing coercive behavior of less prominent
academics. Some of these write articles describing with self-satisfaction
the political coercion they further in their classrooms. Patricia Bizzell
avows without self-consciousness that "many of us in literature and in
composition studies wish to serve politically left-oriented or liberatory
