PETER SHAW
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goals in our teaching." She goes on to quote Robert Giroux's belief
that a professor's goal should be "to teach what students need to know
to improve the social order." And Sharon Crowley explains how the
profess0rs' social aims are to be pursued: "We must give up our
traditional subscription to liberal tolerance," she writes, "if we are to
bring about social change through [the students]."
As the coerciveness of the academy has become inceasingly visible,
some more nimble academics have repositioned themselves as moderates.
They now aver that they reject the most radical and intolerant tenden–
cies of their colleagues. Yet when in 1993 Carol Iannone, writing in
Commentary,
analyzing books in which such repositioning took place -
by Frederick Crews, Henry Louis Gates, Gerald Graff, David Bromwich,
and James Atlas - she found that the authors in effect continued to sup–
port the tendencies that led to political correctness. Rhetorically distanc–
ing themselves from both the extreme left and the (putatively) extreme
right they turned out above all to be advancing "PC with a human
face."
Political correctness is not difficult to grasp.
It
is a matter of intimi–
dation ranging from the busybodyish to physically threatening coercion,
that in any of its forms damages the integrity of academic and intellectual
life.
It
took little more than the glare of press exposure to bring about
public condemnation of such practices - and to put the politically cor–
rect on the defensive. In contrast, the attacks on "logocentrism" and on
the Western canon launched by deconstructionists and other poststruc–
turalists have been less easy to counter. Based as these attacks were on a
philosophical relativism, they required a more subtle analysis - of a kind
not eligible for journalistic reporting. This more scholarly part of the
struggle was and is an internal academic matter, albeit one with equally
important public consequences.
The relativists hold that we can never say we have understood
something correctly. All analysis, and indeed all thought is a projection
of accumulated prejudices arising from the circumstances of one's back–
ground. No such thing as an unfettered, objective judgment exists.
Instead, race, class, and gender produce prejudices and distortions of
which we are unaware. A "bourgeois," for example, will inevitably em–
ploy language and thought to advance the interests of his class. At least
so goes the argument.
The trouble for poststructuralists lay in their own invariability: they
seemed always to end up denouncing the bourgeosie, which was seen as
an habitual producer of racists and homophobes, as well as political op–
pressors of the working class. Eventually such a caricature proved impos-
