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Radicalism in Power: The Kafkaesque World of American Higher
Education
By Abraham H. MMer MY remarks today are about the decline of
American higher education. This is not a de- cline that has-taken
place-across all- disc@plipes and in all institutions. It is a
decline that has taken place principally within the social scienc e
s and humanities and in those institutions where administrators
have abandoned their sacred responsibilities. These
responsibilities require administrators to lead an institution
designed to preserve the best we have produced as a civilization
and faithfu l ly to transmit it to the next genera- tion. In far
too many instances, administrators have chosen to abandon the roles
of preserver and transmitter for the more politically pragmatic
ones of crisis manager and distributor of resources among competing
poli t ical interest groups. These administrators have chosen to
act as if they were cogs in some corrupt urban political machine
that functioned merely to dispense patronage. In taking on this
role, they have made the decision to practice aca- demic triage.
The y have sacrificed the humanities and social sciences in order
to preserve the integrity of the institution's "real" work, as they
see it. Left elements in the social sciences and hu- manities
assisted this decision by eagerly offering their disciplines for
sacrifice. What many of us in higher education find to be burning
intellectual and societal issues are in reality only significant to
us and certainly not to those with institutional authority.
IFMIsdale College's President, George Roche, and Boston Unive r
sity's President, Dr. John Silber, are well known exceptions that
prove the rule. If we had more university administra- tors with
their integrity and vision, American higher education in the social
sciences and hu- manities would not be the fodder for edi t orial
satire that it has become. -Current "Priorities." From the
perspective of interest-group politics, the "real issues" on campus
these days concern attracting overhead money, providing sufficient
parking and dor- mitory space, making sure there are en o ugh
accessible condom dispensers, recruiting enough women and blacks to
satisfy the government record keepers, seeing that gay pride week
receives sufficient publicity, and making sure there is a store of
functional ignorance- in the event the NCAA does f i nd out how the
athletic team recruits. As one of my col- leagues is fond of
saying, once you get your priorities straight everything else falls
into place. University administrators have responded to political
forces both within the university and the sur rounding community.
In fact, the role of the community is one of the least under-
Abraham H. Miller is a Bradley Resident Scholar at The Heritage
Foundation and Professor of Political Science at the University of
Cincinnati. He spoke at The Heritage Foundation on June 13,1990.
ISSN 0272-1155. 01990 by The Heritage Foundation.
stood aspects of the politicization of the university that began in
the post-war era with Berkeley's so called Free Speech Movement of
1964. Even Roger Kimball, in his excellent bo ok on academia,
misses this point. He talks about the irony of Berkeley's Free S
qeech Movement giving birth to the current left-wing ortho- doxy
that is restricting debate. But Berkeley's Free Speech Movement was
not about free speech. It was about using the resources of the
campus, violating its constitutionally man- dated partisan and
sectariarrneutrality,-for offxcapp,@s political action. 2
Similarly, the ethnic studies conflict at San Francisco State
College in the fall of 1968 was about using the col l ege to
mobilize the minority community for political action. This crisis
was precipitated when George Murray of the English department was
suspended after he urged his students to achieve new intellectual
heights by bringing guns on campus. 3 There had be e n some
questions about Mr. Murray's capacity to teach English since he al-
legedly had only a seventh-grade proficiency in the language. But
that was overshadowed, according to some, by Mr. Murray's life
experience achievement as Minister of Education in t he Black
Panther Party. Those who objected to his role in the department
were called racists" and told that they were ill equipped to assess
Mr. Murray's pedagogical compe- tence, as he had been hired to
teach black English. The Black Panthers, of course, were not
synonymous with the black community no matter to what extent the
radicals sought to cre- ate that illusion. Dysfunctional Violence.
Throughout the 1960s most campus conflict produced minimal results
in terms of community mobilization and a lot of dysfunctional
violence. In 1969, the "freaks," as they called themselves, of
Berkeley's South Campus district and campus mili- tants
precipitated a violent confrontation over a piece of
university-owned land that became known as the "People's Park. A
When the violence ended, one man was dead, another was blinded,
scores were wounded, and the armed might of the California National
Guard and several police departments con- trolled the park and the
streets. That episode represented a watershed in radical thin king.
What could not be won in the streets with violence could be won
within the university itself by subverting the minds of captive
audiences of college students.
1 Roger Kimbal% Tenured Radicals. How Politics Has Corrupted
Higher Education (New York: Har per and Row, 1990), p.69. 2 C.
Michael Otten, "Ruling Out Paternalism: Students and Administrators
at Berkeley," American BehaWoral Sciends4 Volume XI, No. 5
(May/June, 1968), pp. 28-33. 3 James McEvoy and Abraham Miller,
eds., "On Strike... Shut It Down, " in Black Power and Student
Rebellion: Conflict on the American Campus (Belmont, California:
Wadsworth Publishing, 1969). For a series of different perspectives
on the same episode see: ]bid., pp. 197-298. 4 Abraham H. Miller,
"People's Park: Dimensions o f a Campus Confrontation," Politics
and Society (Summer 1972), pp. 423-457.
2
Those baptized by the confrontations of the 1960s and early
1970s are now in power. The society has provided them with tenured
sinecures and pays them to think up new methods t o destroy Western
culture and civilization in the name of race, class, and gender,
while the academic crisis managers attempt to contain the damage to
the social sciences and humani- ties. In so doing they insure the
balkanization of the curriculum, the d e struction of Western
values, and the undermining of the legitimacy of the higher
educational enterprise. Remarkablyl.on most campuses few care and
many of those who do are reluctant to speak out because of
McCarthyite intimidati6nd6jiu-ch lib@@ds "ra-ic'. 1 -sif' and
sexist.' Because ac- ademic politics is always fraught with a
peculiar brand of viciousness, once the accusations are made,
others will line up to reinforce those accusations if there is even
a remote politi- cal advantage in it for them. As the left
political agenda has become current orthodoxy reinforced by major
academic organizations and university administrators, who sanctify
one another's idiocy with campus awards, the office seekers, and
opportunists, too, have learned to mouth appropriate cliches in
order to advance their careers. Thus the left agenda is now current
wisdom. Those who challenge its policies are shouted down with now
trivialized accusations of "racist" and "sexist." As disheartening
as the current campus experience is, one's being in Washington
provides a perspective that is even more disheartening. With the
possible exception of Dr. Lynne Cheney and a few conservative
members of the federal education bureaucracies, people in
Washington care even less.6 From the vantage point of the Potomac,
the academy is not even a player in the policy process. On the Hill
and in the executive branch, political life goes on and policy
decisions are made without anyone even having so much as a
subscrip- tion to the American Political Science R eview. The view
in Washington is that academicians talk mainly to other
academicians -who cares what they do? Who cares if Duke University
Professor Eve Kosofky Sedgwick chaired a panel at the last Modem
Language Association meeting titled, "The Muse of M a sturba-
tion," and that her MIA colleagues wrote papers with such titles as
"Desublimating the Male''Siiblimq: Autoerotics, Anal Erotics, and
Corporeal Violence in Melville and William Burroughs"? That is not
a problem for policy concern. Masturbation may be an appropri- ate
topic for the MLA!s deconstructionists, but there is no sign that
Congress will be taking it up in a legislative context. Since most
students can see unvarnished idiocy and faddism for what they are,
the new faddism is not going to gai n many converts. The more
likely result will be that Hillsdale Col- lege, St. John's College
and Boston University are going to get a flood of serious and
gifted
5 Chester E. Finn, Jr., "The Campus: An Island of Repression in a
Sea of Freedom," Commentary , Volume 86, No. 3 (September, 1989);
Alan Charles Kors, "it Is Speech Not Sex the Dean Bans Now," 77se
Wall Street Journal, October 12, 1989, op/ed. 6 Lynne V. Cheney,
Humanities in America. A Repon to the Presiden4 the Congress, and
the American People (Washington: The National Endowment for the
Humanities, 1988). 7 Publications of the Modem Language
Association, Volume 104, No. 6 (November 1989), p. 1028.
3
students in numbers larger than they can absorb, and market forces
are going to cause other colleges and universities to respond
accordingly.
Relativism Thrives on the Racial Issue I would be unconcerned if I
thought those were the only results. But that analysis over- looks
one significant aspect: the faddism is part of a left agenda to
attack Wes tern civiliza- tion and it is doing so by hitching
itself to the racial issue.. It is the racial issue more than any
other that opened-th-e-university's-doorto a
partisan-perspective-and-an abdication of the classical ideal of
the pursuit of objectivity. T he Left teaches that all knowledge is
relative and truth is nothing more than the shared perceptions and
convictions of a community of speakers: a community that can be
divided along race, class, and gender lines. The Feminist
Exploitation. Although the d e mand for a black perspective opened
the way to narrowly defined partisanship taking root in the
curriculum, no group has been more vocal or more active than the
feminist scholars in higher education in both promoting them-
selves as victims and in carving out a "theoretical" structure that
explains social behavior in terms of ideology.8 Feminist criticism
of the structure of the curriculum starts with the premise that all
of historical knowledge is tainted with a male bias, a bias infused
into the culture b y this exploitative and dominant sex. As
Marxists see the societal superstructure - art, literature,
science, and learning - to be a reflection of the economic base and
an instru- ment of the preservation of an exploitative class
structure, feminists rewr i te the base and su- perstructure
relationship in terms of gender, although they are certainly not
averse to incor- porating Marxist notions of class exploitation and
motifs of racial subjugation. But it is gen- der that is for
feminists the most important aspect of all human relations, and, as
a result, all understanding of society, both across time and
culture, must be viewed through the prism of gender. Clear-Cut
Ideology. Virginia Hyman, Professor Emeritus of English at Rutgers,
sees femi- nist literary interpretation as a clear-cut case of
ideology, where texts are transformed into mirror images of the
reader's values and where knowledge is not an end in itself pen to
analysis and debate, but a means toward the achievement of a
political objective. Wher e feminist interpretations are open to
free debate, uninhibited criticism, and, where appropriate,
empirical testing, they can play a meaningful intellectual role. A
historical study, for example, that is aware of the issue of gender
can be richer for the i nsights gained. But a historical study that
embraces gender as a piece of blind faith and ideology is all the
worse off for the attachment. The political agenda of the militant
feminists has nothing to do with incorporating new modes and
orientations of s cholarship into the curriculum. If that were all
it was about,
8 Christina Hoff Sommers, "Feminism and the College Curriculum,"
Imprimis, Volume 19, No. 6 (June 1990), P.I. 9 Virginia R. Hyman,
"Principles of Feminist Scholarship," Academic Questions, Volume 1,
No. I (Winter 1987-88), p. 9.
4
there would be no issue. Scholarship should be closed to no
perspective that is willing to subject itself to refutation.
Feminist principles, however, are neither hypotheses nor
impressions, but basic premises of an ideology that has immunized
itself from refutation. Feminists have openly debated whether
women's studies should be ghettoized, as black studies cur r ently
are in the acad- emy, or assimilated into the mainstream
curriculum, but they have chosen neither option. Basically,
however; they see the means to enshrine gender as the -dominant
factor in social analysis to be best ichiev'ed-b@'dei&oy'mg
the'-tra d ifloiiid cu"m"'*'c-'ul^u'm"i'tse'I'Lio Yielding
Intellectual Turf. Feminists now have joined with militant blacks
to attack the traditional curriculum in an effort to politicize the
university and destroy the basic ethos of Western civilization. The
unive r sity, wrapped in guilt, yielded intellectual turf first to
mili- tant blacks. And militant feminists have been exploiting that
opening for their own gender imperialism ever since. The basic
confluence of interest is to assert, as the Marxists long have, t h
at there is no such thing as objectivity or truth. All claims to
objectivity or truth are merely the means of one group of
exploiters preserving an ideology that enables them to maintain a
rationale for their exploitation. To feminists, Western civilizati
o n is the chronicle of the exploiters of women, and to militant
blacks it is the chronicle of the predatory race. Since truth is
noth- ing more than the shared ideology of a community or class, so
goes this argument, it is time that the community of victim s be
heard. These arguments are nothing less than an assault on our very
existence as a nation and a society. If truth is relative to select
communities, who outside those communities will de- fend it? How
will such thinking inspire us to defend our freedo m as have the
captive people of Europe who rose up to fight for theirs? Eastern
European dissidents have demonstrated a belief in good and evil,
truth and falsehood, that is not reducible to cultural relativism.
For those ideals they were willing to go out in the streets to
fight and die. What will a gener- ation indoctrinated with
relativism be willing to fight and die for? 11 Opening Wedge. The
racial issue speaks volumes for the relativists. It is the opening
wedge that-creates pseudo communities of vict i ms, demands for the
legitimacy of partisan perspectives, and a balkanization of the
curriculum and truth itself. The Uft now embraces the racial issue
as if it owned it, and pushes the campus to pursue policies such as
preferential hiring and admissions, i ntellectually isolated black
studies pro- grams, "decency codes," Orwellian definitions of
racism, and racial sensitivity sessions. In doing so, it has made
relativism unassailable orthodoxy and fueled the racial conflict
that so dominates campus life and is becoming increasingly
explosive.12
1 0 Thomas ShoM "'Diversityand'Breaking the Disciplines,'"Academic
Quesdons, Volume 1, No. 3 (Summer 1988), esp. pp. 23-25. 11 Erazim.
Kohak, quoted in 7he Chronicle of HigherEducation, June 13,1990, p.
B2. 12 After giv ing this lecture, I was delighted to see that
columnist George F. Will, "The Journey Up From Guilt," Newsweek,
June 18, 1990, p. 68, arrived at the same conclusion.
5
Of all the issues that dominate life on campus none has received
the attention or crea ted as much controversy as those surrounding
race. To simply raise the issue of preferential hir- ing in the
academic world is to incur the opprobrium "racist." Even such black
scholars as Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, and
William Julius W ilson have been called "racists" and worse,
because they sought to point out that the aspirations of
preferential treatment as public policy and the realities are very
different. Few white scholars have demonstrated the singular
courage of the distin uish e d Ernest van den Haag,
professo16fiaw'' aitFordhar@,'whoolacidx6dfi offfeNa-ifiFf6rcaimpus
racism on affirmative action. As he bluntly puts it, "I find
affirmative action practices to be racist. Thus, the racial
incidents they inspire do not surprise me., , 13 Running Afoul of
Orthodoxy. Take the well-known case of Professor StephanThe-
rnstrom, Harvard's Winthrop Professor of History. Thernstrom, one
of Harvard's leading professors and ever sensitive to the demands
for topics to which black students could r e - spond, dared to
enter the quagmire of racial and ethnic issues. He found that his
knowledge as a professor ran counter to the beliefs of some of his
black students and was charged with racism. His crime: he used a
book he had edited that described affir m ative action as "gov-
emmepi enforcement of preferential treatment in hiring, promotion
and college admis- 1 sions."" I think most everyone in this
audience, especially those who work daily in domes- tic policy,
would have no trouble with that definition. In any event, as
Professor Thomas 15 Short notes, this definition was not
Thernstrom's but that of a contributing author. But definition was
not the only flaw some black students found with Thernstrom"s
course. He dared to read aloud from white plantation
owners'journals "without also giving the slaveps point of view"16 _
as if such journals themselves would not be an indictment of the
inhumanity of slavery. Although the Harvard faculty rose to defend
Thernstrom's academic freedom, his college dean dp5crib e d him as
"insensitive," for not anticipating the "unintended import" of his
words." Who among us is so prescient as to comprehend fully the
unintended import of his words? Kaft's Code of Decency. It is
incidentally this very standard that resulted in the resigna- tion
of seventy-year-old Professor John Strenge at the University of
Maryland last fall. Strenge, in what he perceived as paternalistic
advice, told the only black female in his class
13 Ernest van den Haag, "Affirmative Action and Campus Racism, "
Academic Questions, Volume 2, No. 3, (Summer 1989), p.68; Thomas
Sowell, "Affirmative Action: A World-Wide Disaster," lecture to The
Heritage Foundation, May 24, 1990, expressed the same sentiments.
14 Thomas Short, "A'New Racismon Campus?" Commentary, Volume 86,
No. 2 (August 1988), p.46. 15 bid., p. 47. 16 Loc. cit. p. 47. 17
Loc. cit., p. 47.
6
that she would have to work extra hard because she was competing
in a field dominated by white males. She took it as a racist and
sexist remark and went to h is dean. Strenge was per- ceived to be
in violation of the university's "decency code" which holds faculty
and students responsible for what they might "inadvertently
communicate. ,18 Weeks earlier the Univer- sity of Michigan's code
had been struck down b y a federal judge who called its language so
vague that persons of common intelligence could only guess at its
meaning.19 Rather than jump through the administrative hoops in one
of these Kafkaesque proceedings attempting to
enforce-a-code-that-is patentl y
-unconstit-ut-ionaIrSt-renge-resigned-.-As.a- sorrowful foot- note,
he died some months later. His family says that the episode had a
profound effect on him. Professor Thernstrorn, in contrast, taken
to the bosom of his Harvard colleagues, got the last wo r d. He
stated that the "ideological assault" would discourav him and would
discour- age others from ever teaching courses on racial and ethnic
issues. In the end, the students lost access to a distinguished
scholar who would have provoked them to think in t erms be- yond
the narrow confines of their own ideology. The overreaction to
racial issues on campus has grown as black enrollment has fallen.
Large proportions of blacks have failed to graduate, the dropout
rate bein ,A estimated as high as 70 percent fo r those admitted
under special admissions programs. Campus isola- tion and racial
issues are perceived by the media as major ingredients in this
tragic equa- tion. Yet, as black enrollment falls, the enrollment
of Hispanics has increased; and for As- ians t he increase is
nothing less than extraordinary. 22 The decline in black enrollment
in graduate programs presents an especially difficult problem for a
society committed to incorporating blacks into the mainstream of
American academic life. The proposed so l ution has been for more
affirmative action, "decency codes," awareness programs and
flexible standards throughout all phases of the academic system.
Divisive Solutions. These very attempts at solution, like massive
government intrusion into an economic cr i sis, are contributing to
the problem. As Thomas Sowell has eloquently ...noted,affirmative
action has caused a mismatch between students and schools. Since
elite schools that take the top 2 to 3 percent of white students
often reach down to the fiftieth p ercentile to achieve their quota
for black students, these black students are thrown into un-
18 Abraham H. Miller, "Clipping Campus Free Speech," Frederick Post
(Frederick, Maryland: October 27, 1989), op/ed, distributed
nationally by the Scripps-Howard National Wire. 19 "Michigan Member
Helps Defeat University Harassment Code," National Association of
Scholars, Newsletter, Volume 1, No. 1 (Spring 1990), p.l. 20 Short,
op. cit., p. 47. 21 . Thomas Sowell, Education: Assumption versus
History (Stanford, C alifornia: Hoover Institution Press, 1968),
pp. 134-135. 22 "Why Fewer Blacks Are Graduating," U.S. News and
World Report, Volume 102, No. 22 (June 8,1987), p.76; U.S. News and
World Report, Volume 104, No. 12 (March 28,1988), p. 53.
7
fair competition. Whereas many of them would have a high
probability of success by being properly matched with an
institution that attracted students of similar preparation, the un-
fair competition, in contrast, has deleterious resultS.23 But elite
schools need black stud e nts to satisfy goals, quotas, and
timetables, so the mis- match continues. Sowell advises aspiring
black college students that their job is to get a col- lege
education. The administrator's job is to produce a statistic, and
the two are not neces- sarily c ompatible. 24 With elite schools
dipping deep into the limited pool of black college applicants,
lower- tier schools under the same pressure reproduce the same
mismatch. As a consequence, in each tier of the system white
students have their false stereoty p es of black abilities rein-
forced. But three out of four black students who failed to graduate
at Berkeley would have graduated at a lot of solid and reputable
middle-tier schools, and probably at some of those with
distinction. That, however, is not the only problem. For the one
out four of black students who man- ages successfully to meet the
challenge of an elite school's curriculum, that student will con-
tinue to be viewed by white classmates as an unequal competitor and
labeled with the deri- sive t e rm "quota." The problem was
expressed in a letter to the WaU Street Joumal by Alma
Clayton-Pederson (M.Ed.) a student at Vanderbilt University. As she
notes: "For the most part, white students who label us as such
["quotas"], have neither witnessed our ab i lity to ex- amine and
discuss critical issues in the classroom nor observed our ability
to solve complex problems in many different fields of study. We are
seen merely !Saffirmative-action quotas, not as real contributors
to the development of new knowled g e." But Ms. Clayton-Pederson's
battle is not just with her fellow students, but also with those
professors who fail to challenge the intellect of talented black
students who have survived the system. These professors treat even
these black students as if t hey are there to serve no other
purpose than to be a statistic. "Shame on you," she says to them,
and adds, "These tp26 professors do us and this country a great
disservice. Ending Orwellian Manipulations What if affirmative
action, defined operationally a s quotas, ended? What would be the
im- mediate result? Fewer blacks and Hispanics would be admitted to
elite schools, yet the ones who were would have a higher
probability of graduating, and their white peers would not view
them through tainted perception s . Those black students no longer
recruited by elite schools to beef up the numbers would enter good
second-tier schools where their prob- ability of graduating would
also be enhanced. Since mismatching would no longer take place,
there would be in effect "more" black graduates. And no white
student with high
23 Thomas Sowell, luncheon seminar, The Heritage Foundation,
Washington, D.C., May 24,1990; also see Thomas Sowell, "The Plight
of Black College Students, " in Sowell, Education: Assumptions
versus History (Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press,
1986), pp. 130-149. 24 Sowell, "Education," p. 131; Thomas Sowell,
Choosing a College (New York: Perennial Library, 1989). 25 Wall
Street Journal October 1 0, 1989, "Letters." 26 ]bid.
8
grades and high SAT scores would ever enter a second-tier school
with the belief and re- sentment that some black or minority
applicant displaced him from his first-choice school. There would
be other salutary results: Dean Baker, a University of Michigan
Regent, would no longer be expressing public concern that the value
of a Michigan degree "is in grave danger if the university
succumbs, for whatever reason to an admissions standard which
compromises... academic integrity . ',27 University of California
Berkeley's Faculty Committee on Budget and Interdepartmental
Relations would not be describing diversity, ep requ ir-gin-al
6andidates, nor as it did in a recent r " oi@ as i ' "iring the
granting of tenure to m would the com m ittee be searching for an
answer to the question of how affirmative action could co-exist
with Berkeley's time-honored tradition of requiring "superior
intellectual at- tainment... as an indispensable qualification for
appointment and promotion to tenure p osi- tions."28 White women
who, according to Professor Sowell, show higher intelligence scores
in every field than white males, come from solid middle-class
backgrounds, and historically have been part of the higher
education "system," would not be climbi n g on the backs of mi-
norities for preferential treatment. 29 And the scandal at Harvard
Medical College, which in pursuit of affirmative action, saw first
lower admissions standards, then pass/fail grading and course
repeats, and finally the awarding of a medical degree to a minority
student who could not pass the medical boards in five attempts,
would not have taken place. 30 A Mid- west political science
department would not have suffered the national embarrassment of
having passed on a doctoral examina t ion a minority graduate
student who could not spell the names of two of Europe's most
prominent political figures or appropriately show an un-
derstanding of the literature. 31 Multi-Cultural Friction. In any
multi-cultural society there is going to be fr i ction, whether
French and English in Quebec, Catholic and Protestant in Ulster,
Arab and Jew on the West Bank, or black and white in America. But
through preferential policies we have in- stitutionalized such
friction and made a veritable welfare industry out of it. These
frictions now feed on themselves, and wherever they arise the
solution inevitably is a call for more of those policies that
produced them in the first place. As a result of overreaction to
racism, some blacks and left-wing whites champion a defini- tion of
racism attributed to sociologist Dr. MuIuma Karenga, who argues
that racism is the oppressors' power to destroy a people's culture,
history, and ideas based on the oppressors' concept of race. The
phenomenon of racism, according to this authority, is unique to the
de-
2 7 Quoted in "Why Fewer Blacks Are Graduating," p. 76. 28 "Report
of the Committee on Budget and Interdepartmental Relations,
1988-89," for the meeting of March 20,1990, University of
California, Berkeley Division, Appendix I . 29 Thomas Sowell,
Education, pp. 78-79. This reference is to "equity ferninism,"
which sometimes operates independently of the militant feminist
attack on the curriculum. 30 Bernard Davis, M.D., Storm Over
Biology (Buffalo, NewYork: Prometheus Press, 19 86). The details of
this episode are discussed at length in the chapter on medical
education. 31 This episode was alluded to repeatedly at the
November 1989 Madison Center Conference, Washington, D.C.
9
velopment of European culture. 32 Karenga's definit ion is widely
used, and the code word for it is "institutionalized white racism."
What kind of racial harmony is achieved through use of this flawed
concept is beyond comprehension, especially when black students are
encouraged to cite Karenga, demand "de c ency codes," sensitivity
sessions and then invite Minister Louis Farrakhan to campus to spew
his own brand of racism. 33 Given
Karenga's-OrweRian-definition,-M-i-nister-Faff-akhan- -has-every
right to speak be- cause he is not a racist: he lacks the criti c
al factor of "empowerment." Since only those who have power can be
racists, Minister Farrakhan, not being "empowered," is not a
racist. If one wanted to pursue this logic, what is being argued is
that Adolph Hitler was not a racist until 1933, when he con s
olidated his power in the Reich. Prior to that, he was not 99
empowered" and, therefore, was not a racist. The new
institutionalized use of such conceptions in campus bureaucrats'
treatment of ra- cial incidents is the equivalent of throwing
gasoline on a fire in an effort to extinguish it. Northern Illinois
University Associate Vice President Barbara Henly in a report on
racism in the residence halls uses a definition similar to
Karenga's. 34 That an educated person seeks to deal with such an
important is s ue as residence-hall racism by trivializing it and
put- ting the burden entirely on white students is a sign of the
Kafkaesque thinking currently in vogue on campus. Similarly, last
term when the issue. of racism came before the Bowling Green
University F a culty Senate, the motion put forward was not to
denounce racism, but only "institutionalized white racism. ,35
Racial Sensitivity Sessions. The architects of the new era of
racial harmony have addi- tional devices in their Orwellian tool
kit. One of the m o st prominent of these is the racial
sensitivity, or awareness session, which is increasingly becoming
required on campuses for both students and faculty involved in
certain activities. I have not attended one of these ses- sions;
however, I have spoken to students and faculty at different
universities who have done so or who are acquainted with the
procedures. ..Racial sensitivity can, indeed, be a meaningful
experience. A course drawing on the abun- dance of excellent social
science literature on racism, w ith a solid reading list, an
objective instructor, and a commitment to free-ranging discourse
that encourages students to draw their own conclusions from hard
data, is a course that could not only be a meaningful experi- ence
in terms of removing racial s tereotypes but also a moving
intellectual experience. Re- grettably, too frequently this is not
what happens, and the end product of much of the cur- rent practice
appears to be the creation of racism even where it did not
previously exist.
32 Cited in "S tudents Split on Racist Issues," 7he News Record
(University of Cincinnati) June 1, 1990, p. 1. 33 David Kurapka,
"Hate Story," 7he New Republic, March 30,1988. 34 "Students Split
on Racist Issues," p. 1. 35 Faculty Senate Minutes, "Racism@"
Bowling Green State University (Ohio), May 1990. The resolution was
introduced by Professor Bermen but was postponed.
1 0
Racial sensitivity sessions, as too frequently practiced, are
similar to what council govern- ments in England attempted with
civil servants. Arme d with a definition of racism based on
Scempowerment" - that only white people could be racists, white
civil servants were encour- aged to confess their racism to their
non-white glleagues, amid encouragement that was frequently
indistinguishable from int i midation. After several victims had
nervous break- downs, Margaret Thatcher stepped in and abolished
the funding source, bringing the pro- grams to a timely end. Black
St@dies. Whenever there is raciid conflict' on "campus, one of
thimost common re- flexi v e solutions is to urge that whites be
required to enroll in black studies courses. Com- mon knowledge
about campus life would suggest that no student was ever made happy
by staring an additional course requirement in the face. There are
black studies prog r ams with good, solid academic content and
standards, but there are also programs where the stan- dards are
weak, the material filled with propaganda, and the basic function
of the program is to gnhance the grade point average of black
students having diff i culty adjusting to campus life.37 There are
also certain themes in some black studies programs that tend to be
taug_ht as truths rather than as perspectives, and that would do
little to enhance race relations.38 In fact, these themes, most
likely, produce quite the contrary result. Here are some of those:
wars in Africa, a continent besieged by civil war (including the
famine in Ethiopia), are the product of white colonialism; the
Constitution of the United States is a racist document be- cause it
consider e d blacks to be a fraction of a human being and did not
end slavery in 1789; the founding fathers were slaveholders and
capitalist exploiters; and Columbus's discovery of the New World
should be properly viewed as the advance party of slavery and
genocide b rought about by a predatory race. Pseudo-Science. One of
the more publicized courses in black studies is taught by City
College of New York Professor Leonard Jeffries. 39 In this course,
which draws few whites, Dr. Jeffries teaches that whites are a
preda tory race which suffers from the environmental deprivation of
the last European ice age. This age Dr. Jeffries puts at between
10,000 and 8,000 years ago, a date that incidentally is off by some
12,000 years according to the most re-
36 "Lecturer Insisted That All Whites Were Racists," 7he Times,
(London), August 27, 1987, p. 2; "Realities of Racism Awarness,"
]bid., p. 10b; "When Staff Are Ruled By Ideology," ]bid., p. 10b;
and from personal interviews London, August/September 1987. 37
Vanden Haag, op. c i t.; "Ambush at Amherst," 7he New Republic,
June 27,1988, p. 342; Thomas Short," 'Diversity' and'Breaking the
Disciplines,"'; Sidney Hook, ed., "Stanford Documents," Partisan
Review, Volume 55, No.4 (Fall 1988); John Leo, "The Class That
Deserves Cutting," U.S. News and World Report, May 29,1989, p. 58.
38 Fred Rueckher, "Black Studies at the City College of New York,"
Measure, No. 73, May/June 1988. See also Note 39 below. 39 Fred
Rueckher, op. cit. Chester E. Finn, Jr., quotes the New Yont 77unes
as repor t ing that in the spring term 1990 Dr. Jeffries told his
students that "rich Jews who financed the development of Europe
also financed the slave trade." The Chronicle ofHigher Education
June 13, 1990, p. A40. Dr. Jeffries has appeared on Washington
Public T elevision Station Channel 32, where he discussed his ice
and sun theories.
11
cent scientific evidence. But then we are not dealing with science.
Whites, according to Jeffr- ies, only emerged from the cave, with
its hostile environment and its emphasis o n survival, some 8,000
years ago and have not yet discarded their predatory instincts. In
contrast, the course teaches: black civilization blossomed in the
benign environment of the African sun that led to the rise of
Ancient Egypt. To demean blacks and d e stroy their heritage,
whites have removed Egypt from Africa. The cultural wonders of
Greece and Rome were taken from Egypt; thus, blacks are the
progenitors of Western civilization. Before you dismiss Dr. "J," as
his students affectionately call him, cons i der the following. No
less a public figure than New York State Commissioner of
EducationThomas Sobol se- lected Dr. Jeffries to write the black
history component of the "Curriculum of Inclusion," grades K- 12,
which Sobol is lobbying the New York Regents t o implement.40 Dr.
Jeffries ap- pears on Howard University's Channel 32, where he is
accorded all the appropriate defer- ence of a reputable scholar
appearing on a university-based public television station. One
wonders how exposure to Dr. Jeffries's clas s , or one like it,
would remove racism. In fact, common sense at least would suggest
the opposite. What exists on too many of our campuses is an
environment where blacks and other mi- norities are accorded
preferential treatment in student admissions and f a culty appoint-
ments.41 One does not have to be an authority on Alexis de
Tocqueville to comprehend the evils of ascriptive preference. They
are written indelibly in America's tragic history of slav- ery and
segregation and in the current abomination that is known as
apartheid ever as strongly as they were written in France under the
"old regime." As Thomas Sowell demonstrates in his most recent
scholarly work, anywhere you have ra- cial or ethnic preference,
you have an exacerbation of the tensions inhere n t in a multi-cul-
tural society. Whether these tensions are between Africaner and
African in South Africa, Chinese and Malays in Malaysia or white
and black in America, they are all variations of the same theme.42
The solution is the elimination of prefer e nce not the
exacerbation of hostili- ties by creating more preference. .Thomas
Short in his analysis of the "new racism," argues that if the
purpose of the plans and policies of the type alluded to here is to
combat racism, "Why is it that racial tension i s at its heig%p,
recisely in those institutions in which they have been most
extensively adopted?' Thomas Sowell, in a recent lecture in this
very auditorium, argued that his anal- ysis of preferential
treatment across nations and across historical epochs strongly
suggests that preferential policies have all the potential of
creating the kind of ethnic violence we are now seeing in the Asian
republics of the Soviet Union.44
40 Leonard Jeffries, Jr., "Review of the New York State
Curricular Materials K-12 Focus: African American Culture,"
November 1988, unpublished. 41 Walter E. Williams, "Race,
Scholarship and Affirmative Action," Nadonal Review, May 5,1989,
pp. 36-38. 42 Th omas Sowell, Preferendal Policies. An
International Perspective (New York: William Morrow, 1990) 43
Short, op. cit., p. 49. 44 Sowell, lecture, op. cit.
1 2
What Is To Be Done As responsible thinking individuals, as
individuals who believe in the humanity and basic dignity of all
people, it is our moral obligation to speak out against the crisis
manager men- tality that on our campuses is achieving short-mn
quiescence and courting long-term racial disaster, which the crisis
managers are either too ignoran t to see or hope will not erupt
until after they retire. We must not- restrict,to-department--and-
faculty- meetings-theplaces-for -our objections to be heard. We are
often not only unable to make changes there, but too frequently we
can- not even get a fa i r hearing for our ideas in those fora. We
must take our objections to the American people in general and to
the parents of those who come to us for an education. We must use
whatever talents we have as writers and lecturers to gain access to
the edito- ri a l columns of the popular newspapers and magazines
and to the fora that exist within the electronic media. We must use
our academic and political freedom as a bulwark against
administrative in- timidation and speak openly to the public about
what is happen i ng to higher education in America. We must make
the curriculum, which is already a political issue on the campus
and across academic communities, a public issue during
gubernatorial and legislative campaigns. When the chief educational
administrator of a s tate seeks to implement a curriculum that pos-
sesses as its objective the destruction of Western culture and
civilization, we should make the voters aware of who appointed him
and what have been the consequences of that ap- pointment. Duke
University's F r ederic Jameson says, "To create a Marxist culture
in this country, to make Marxism an unavoidable presence in
American ... life, in short to form a Marxist intel- ligentsia for
the struggles of the future - this seemg to me the supreme mission
of the Marx - ist pedagogy and a radical intellectual life today.A
Earning Loyalty and Support. We should ask those whose charitable
contributions go to Duke'University if that is how they want their
money spent; if that is an agenda that they share. We should ask
the parents of Duke University students and the school's alumni if
that is the kind of education they wish to support. Wherever there
is an assault on Western culture and values, we should alert the
people whose largess and tuition money sustain the instituti o ns.
Professors must be free to teach their honest opinions, but
parents, and alumni, and philanthropic institutions should also be
free to find institutions worthy of their loyalty and support.
Those who have pushed a partisan agenda against Western value s
have claimed the high ground on the racial issue. We must expose
the falsehood of both their claims and their poli- cies, which are
now breeding racial confrontation on the campus. We must
demonstrate the linkages between those policies and the racial di
sasters which now visit the campus.
45 Quoted byT. Kenneth Cribb, Jr., in "Conservatism and the
American Academy," 7he Intercollegiate Review, Volume 25, No.2
(Spring 1990), p.26.
13
We must reach out in meaningful ways to the minority communities so
t hat they will un- derstand how their children are being exploited
as record-keeping statistics. We must en- courage the minority
communities to demand that their children be given an education,
not just a degree. We must make ourselves available to the mi n
ority communities to use our faculty skills and our knowledge to
enhance educational opportunities for minority children. This could
be pursued in a variety of ways;. One would be to bring into
special summer programs tal- n e' khool andhigh school studef i
ts'.1hes'e" programs m .u e ented mi ority grad st b' funded by
private contributions and through the donation of our own services.
We could use our sab- batical time to offer our instructional and
research services to minority high schools and col- leges . We must
not just oppose the exploitation and degree giveaways that the Left
has cre- ated as a mechanism of educational policy, we must replace
them with positive programs, even if it requires strong
conunitments of our own resources and energies. We mus t reaffirm
the principles of our democratic institutions and our cultural
inheri- tance. We must acknowledge our historical flaws, but not as
means of interpreting our en- tire historical and cultural
experience or as a determination of our historical dest i ny. In
the process, we must teach minorities that a cultural identity that
embraces Western values is no more a denial of their own ethnic
inheritance than poverty and despair are statements about their
ethnicity. We must make available to the public mean i ngful guides
to higher education so that every parent and prospective student
will know what kind of education really takes place on the campus.
Ending Corrupt Practices. Regrettably, we can not count on the
American Association of University Professors o r the professional
organizations to denounce the corruption of edu- cational
standards, whatever the basis for that happening. Tlese
organizations have been si- lent. When individuals have called upon
them to arrest the deterioration of standards in spe- c i fic
departments, the professional organizations have refused to become
involved. Conse- quently, we must call upon such organizations as
the National Association of Scholars, the Madison Center, and the
public media to investigate and expose the most egre g ious of
viola- tions of academic integrity. Once professors who give away
degrees and administrators who use the wizardry of electronics to
change grades behind professors' backs know they can be publicly
exposed, some of the more egregious of these corru p t practices
will be ended. Now is the most opportune time in recent history to
teach about Western values. As Marxism crumbles in Eastern Europe,
as the subjects of its oppression destroy its icons, rip its hated
symbols from their national flags, and ret u rn their cities and
towns to their true names the American Left is trying to rewrite
history to portray this as a victory for the Left.W This is an act
of pathetic desperation. The last citadel of left-wing orthodoxy is
on the American campus. But it is a vulnerable citadel, for it will
neither stand up to historical truth nor to the nightly news
footage from Warsaw, Prague, Bucharest, or even Moscow. We should
seize this opportunity.
46 Paul HoHander, "Communism's CoHapse Won't Faze the Marxists
in Academe," 7he Chronicle of Higher Education, May 23,1990, p.
A44.
1 4
Reopening the Free Marketplace. We must attack the Left's
ideology, not with their weapon of censorship, but by reopening the
free marketplace of ideas within the university and by divorcin g
the partisanship of the Left from its monopoly of the racial issue.
In a ro- bust intellectual environment their ideas will neither be
able to withstand the force of argu- ment nor the example of
history. If you think we cannot achieve this, I might rem i nd you
of what public choice school crit- ics have accomplished in the
public school arena. There we have gone from a misperception that
"choice" was an' anii-black weapon to an understand .ing thafit
is'the"ultimate empower- ment of poor blacks to shake u p a
bloated, dysfunctional educational bureaucracy. We now hear
Milwaukee's black legislator Annette "Polly" Williams tell the
top-heavy poverty bu- reaucracy: "I don't believe in funding
dependency and despair, but that is just what the pov- erty industr
y is doing. In us poor black folks the white liberals have a
captive market. Well I got news for you. We don't need to be
led.'3i I am confident that someday, in a similar fashion, minority
students are going to look at their professors and say: "I am not h
ere to fill a quota, to be part of your left wing political agenda
or to be passed through and given a degree. I am here to be
educated and to be- come a useful and productive member of a great
and decent society. And if you cannot help me achieve that, y o u'd
better at least get out of my way." Ultimately we will win because
the things minorities want for themselves and their chil- dren are
no different than what all people want for themselves and their
children. The Left agenda will be abandoned with the same emotion
that brought down the Berlin Wall. Let us hope and pray that this
happens long before the bizarre policies that now exacerbate racial
divisions produce catastrophic racial confrontations.
4 7 Quoted in "How'Conservative'Won Vouchers," Crain's Chicago
Business, Apra 16, 1990, p. 1.
15
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