From Civil Rights and Affirmative Action to Language Lunacy and Cancel Culture
This post reports a few anecdotes from the progression from high-minded policies of the 1960s through political correctness beginning to flourish in the 1970/80s to contemporary rank “woke”ness; a textbook example of good intentions paving a hell-bound road.
The necessary, proper elimination of legal institutional barriers to equal opportunity lapsed into attempts at mandated, top-down changes of hearts and minds, attempts to hasten cultural change by fiat: attempting the impossible, and continually doubling down when the impossible was not accomplished.
I happened to observe all of this from close up in academe.
A laudable desire to stand up for underdogs, tinged somewhat by leftish political leanings, led many adults into excessive, thoughtless support of extremist student activism, cowed by the “moral capital of victim-hood”, in D’Souza’s apt phrase[i].
A cousin happened to be at the time at Berkeley, the San Francisco center of the iconic Free Speech Movement; and shared with me many years later his disappointing experience in finding the movement’s leaders more interested in self-aggrandizement than in the principles that formed their public slogans[ii].
I was a member of the American Association of University professors (AAUP), having long admired its decades-long stance on the necessity of academic freedom and tenure. But in the 1960s, AAUP sided with activist graduate students supported by teaching assistantships who felt entitled to all the privileges enjoyed by full-time faculty. That absurdity led to my resignation from AAUP, by no means the last time that a group or institution or community to which I belonged, or whose aims I shared, abandoned what I took to be their core principles or values. Teaching assistance are not teachers, they do not choose details of the curriculum; they are students fortunate enough to be able to support themselves with congenial work.
As Dean of Arts & Sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University for some 8 years beginning in 1978, I saw the harm being done as political correctness began its take-over of academe, accompanied by lies and hypocrisy and disregard of intellectual standards.
Public statements of our efforts to hire faculty from “under-represented” groups emphasized “Goals, not quotas”; but the reality shared quietly through the administrative hierarchy was quite different, in essence something like the opposite. Departments were able to hire faculty even in the absence of a vacant position, if only the right type of human could be attracted[iii]; and without the need in that case for the open advertising of the position that was the vaunted stance of equal opportunity and fairness claimed by the University in its official public statements.
I have described elsewhere[iv] how the appointment of our first Women's Affairs Director, Nancy Reynolds, enabled a group of activist feminists to engineer the departure from our faculty ranks of our most popular and acclaimed teacher, nationally renowned and also outstandingly active in public service activities, the charges being that the jokes he had been using openly in class for 20 years somehow now constituted sexual harassment.
I had once asked to meet with leaders of the Women's Network to discuss possible joint actions it to support the University's female employees. I thought that our largely female secretaries and assistants of many sorts could benefit from the provision of child-care facilities and a discounting of parking fees, which were the same for staff as for faculty who earned much more. That idea was not taken up; I was told that the Network’s aims focused on more important matters, for instance that all the Academic Deans should resign so that half of them could be replaced by women.
A PhD in physics had long been worth little or nothing In the academic marketplace. One unfortunate young holder of such a degree came to see me every couple of weeks to threaten that if the university did not find him a job, it would lose the services of his wife, who held a faculty position in math education.
When I returned to the teaching faculty from my administrative stint, I became rather well known on campus for my opposition to political correctness. I once participated in a panel discussion between proponents and opponents of affirmative action. After an hour or two, the University's Vice-President for Equal Opportunity entered the auditorium. Given the opportunity to comment from the floor, without having heard anything I had said, he warned against “negative people” like “ Professor Bauer and Jesse Helms” [v].
That V-P, Cornel Morton, also mandated that every search committee for a faculty position needed to have as one of its members a woman or a person of color; and of course every effort had to be made and documented to have in the pool of candidates at least one member of an under-represented group.
Morton also organized sensitivity training sessions, some of them presented by outside consultants or groups. Most faculty found these sessions embarrassingly without sensible substance, for example playing table games to illustrate or teach cooperative behavior; or being treated to such absurd assertions as that racism bespeaks wielding power and that therefore black Americans could not be racist since they had no power; Morton himself of course very much enjoyed wielding his power over the defenseless white faculty.
When the National Association of Scholars was founded in 1987, I was delighted to join this sorely needed alternative to the AAUP. I was active in the Virginia chapter and edited its Virginia Scholar until I retired in 1999[vi].
[i] Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal education: the politics of race and sex on campus, Free Press, 1991. The book remains worth reading and relevant three decades on, unfortunately.
[ii] At the University of Kentucky in the 1960/70s, students campaigned to drop the foreign-language requirement for B.S. and B.A. degrees. The campaign originated with an activist student who had flunked his French exams more than once. I don’t recall whether that campaign succeeded in establishing a BGS, Bachelor of General Studies, with no language requirement.
[iii] Such potential recruits were described as “targets of opportunity” by a bureaucracy presumably ignorant of the origin of that term in WWII: if bombers could not reach the target they really wanted, then they dropped their bombs in any less desired place, just anywhere they could.
[iv] “The trivialization of sexual harassment: lessons from the Mandelstamm Case”, Academic Questions, 5 (1992) 55-66; “Affirmative Action at Virginia Tech: the tail that wagged the dog”, Academic Questions, 6 (1992-93) 72-84
[v] Long-serving senator from North Carolina, notoriously vigorous opponent of civil-rights legislation, affirmative action, and other “leftish” ventures
[vi] and became Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for Scientific Exploration