---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 13:59:29 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Policing the academy
Policing the academy
<http://www.msnbc.com/news/663403.asp>
A growing campaign for patriotic correctness on campus
By Eric Alterman
MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR
Nov. 29 -- America's response to the terrorist attacks has been a mixed
bag. The war is going at least as well as anyone predicted, but the home
front has given plenty cause for concern. The FBI has no good leads on the
anthrax threats and murders. Attorney General John Ashcroft wants to take
this opportunity to do away with a bunch of pesky Constitutional
protections, while Congress plans to use it to give billions away to
wealthy corporations and individuals. With all of these candidates,
therefore, you might never guess that "the weak link in America's response
to the attack" is actually the nation's corps of college professors.
THAT'S THE WORD from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), an
organization founded by Second Lady Lynne Cheney which also boasts the
enthusiastic support of Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe
Lieberman. The danger arises from the fact, as Saturday's New York Times
also noted, that people on campus are saying things that have the potential
to warp their young minds and weaken the war effort. The offenses include
such clear and present dangers as the observation that the United States
"should "build bridges and relationships, not simply bombs and walls,"
(Jesse Jackson at Harvard Law School); that the United States should bring
Osama Bin Laden "before an international tribunal on charges of crimes
against humanity," (Joel Benin, professor of history at Stanford
University); and "Ignorance breeds hate," (Wasima Alikhan of the Islamic
Academy of Las Vegas).
POLICING THE ACADEMY
Mrs. Cheney, listed as chair emeritus on the organization's masthead, has
made a career of just this kind of thing. Before her husband became vice
president, she earned her stripes as a loyal ideological soldier in the
army of patriotic correctness by policing the academy for any sign of
disloyalty among faculty, and then taking to the airwaves, the op-ed pages,
and eventually, bookstores to decry the threat facing America and its
youth. Her most significant campaign came in 1994, when a set of National
History Standards were published with National Endowment of the Humanities
funding. The new standards were developed after more than two years of
meetings involving 6,000 teachers, administrators, scholars, and parents,
along with 35 organizations, ranging from the American Association of
School Librarians to the National Council for the Social Studies. Cheney
had headed the NEH under President George H.W. Bush when the original grant
was made, and went on the warpath against the carefully balanced and
reasoned document. She told ABC News that the proposed standards were a
"disaster." She authored a vituperative Wall Street Journal column
declaiming the standards were a sell-out to feminism, reverse-racism and
political correctness. These charges were picked up by the likes of Rush
Limbaugh, Charles Krauthammer, John Leo, and then trumpeted in Time and
Newsweek.
Almost everything on this subject that Cheney claimed to be true turned out
to be false. Professor Gary Nash of UCLA, one of the principal authors of
the history standards, responded to Cheney's charge that they had
deliberately downplayed the achievements of "dead white European males" in
order to trumpet those of women and minorities, by counting up their number
of mentions for each. It turned out that the hated DWEM received over 700
citations, "many times the grand total of all women, African Americans,
Latinos, and Indians individually named." The New York Times blasted
Cheney's deliberate "misrepresentation." Reviewing her book, "Telling the
Truth," the conservative libertarian magazine Reason called it, "a dizzying
whirlwind of innuendo and invective." But that obviously did nothing to
damage the credentials of Cheney among top Republicans, and perhaps most
importantly, top Republican funders.
CONSERVATIVE CRUSADE
Cheney and ACTA, however are hardly alone in their crusade to enforce a
conservative line in the academy. The organization Accuracy in Academia is
doing its own police work, bemoaning on its Web site the fact that a
Columbia University philosophy major named George Melillo, would mourn
"indiscriminately the loss of all human lives, terrorist and civilian,"
while UC-Berkeley student Teddy Miller suggested dropping food and
electronic goods on Afghanistan instead of bombs." The ideological warrior
David Horowitz is also devoting his Web site to the political cleansing of
our university system of views with which he and his funders do not agree.
Under the headline "The Enemy Within," Horowitz's Web site, FrontPage
offers up its critique of what it terms "A shameful roster of traitors,
cowards, defeatists and fifth-columnists flourishing in America's
heartland." Among the most dangerous are those "campus defeatists." After
reporting on a North Carolina teach-in where a variety of antiwar views
were heard, the Web site advised its readers to "Tell the good folks at
UNC-Chapel Hill what you think of their decision to allow anti-American
rallies on their state-supported campus."
CONSERVATIVE KIDS
There is a great deal of irony to be found in the midst of all this
excitement. In the first place, recent polls of college students
demonstrate that they are pretty conservative and supportive of the war. So
if their teachers are engaged in a covert plot to indoctrinate them into a
dangerous leftist cult, it ain't working. Second, by staking out a fringe
position designed to appeal to Republican ideologues, funders, and
virtually no one else, these self-appointed scourges of groupthink are
making themselves irrelevant to a battle that could be joined by moderates
and liberals across America's campuses: the fight for free expression for
both left and right. As an occasional temporary faculty member at local
universities, I am constantly amazed that my students think it is enough to
tell me that something in my lesson has "offended" them, and they do not
care to even argue the point. This is anti-intellectualism at its most
pristine, and it is enabled by cowardly administrators who have placed free
speech at the bottom of a list of concerns that the university must defend
below "diversity," "comfort" and "empowerment." Many faculty members would
be eager to join in such a fight on behalf of genuine freedom of expression
on campus, for it is sorely needed.
America is in no danger of disloyalty from its campuses. The real danger is
an enforced intellectual mediocrity; a dumbing-down that comes from
mouthing platitudes to please political forces on both the right and the
left. Mrs. Cheney and her allies who seek to police the political discourse
on campus by declaring out of bounds any view with which they happen to
disagree, are actually doing the work of their adversaries; proving that
free speech is a little more than convenient slogan to be invoked only when
the "right" side is losing. Talk about a Fifth Column^.
----------
Eric Alterman is a columnist for The Nation and regular contributor to MSNBC.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sun Dec 02 2001 - 20:17:52 EST