PETER SHAW
95
Therefore, if an intellectual retreat has taken place, it has been one
without institutional consequences - or, rather, with consequences more
in keeping with an intellectual triumph than an intellectual rout.
Understanding this outcome - or no.n-outcome - requires taking a
careful look at both the counterattack by the traditionalists, and the
admissions, reformations, and recantations it brought about.
First, the intellectual retreat. This has been a sporadic, unpublicized
development. Among its relatively prominent evidence was the 1993 so–
called conversion of Sheldon Hackney during Senate hearings on his
nomination as Chairman of the National Endowment for the
Humanities. As president of the University of Pennsylvania, Hackney had
failed to control incidents of politically correct intimidation, and these
were on everyone's mind as he was questioned by a Senatorial commit–
tee. To the surprise of many who opposed his nomination, Hackney at
one point volunteered having second thoughts about the politically cor–
rect, coercive speech codes he had supported. He said that he now rec–
ognized the dangers of political correctness.
Hackney was confirmed, took over as head of the Endowment, and
then proceeded to fund projects conceived in the spirit of political cor–
rectness and hostility to the West. Yet, the projects he favored were by
no means the most extreme expressions of such hostility. He continued
to institutionalize the tendencies he had been associated with, but in a
milder way. Hackney's Senate recantation was genuine, even though the
habits of thought it disavowed remained with him in attenuated form.
Not long before Hackney, other prominent academics began to ac–
knowledge the coercive atmosphere that had come to rule the academy.
On William Buckley's "Firing Line" television program, Catherine
Stimpson, Rutgers professor and now director of the politically correct
MacArthur Foundation "genius" awards, as they are popularly known,
was as surprising as Hackney. "There is PC," she declared, and added that
she deplored its excesses.
Similarly, Stanley Fish , former chairman of the most politically
correct English department in the country at Duke University, eschewed
the usual evasions and denials. "I am supposed to tell you that political
correctness is a media-fabricated myth," a Duke student newspaper
reported his saying, "and the invention of political correctness is itself a
piece of political strategy. Well, I must disappoint; there is something
called political correctness, and I know this to be true for the best of all
reasons; I have seen it and experienced it."
It
would have been more accurate for Fish to say that he knew
about PC because he had been one of its endorsers. Still, his acknowl–
edgment added to the record.
