Reason Magazine - Contributors

Rose-Colored Glasses

akors@sas.upenn.edu (Alan Charles Kors) — Mon, 01 Apr 2002 00:00:00 EST

Sex, Drugs, Jews, and Rock 'n' Roll

akors@sas.upenn.edu (Alan Charles Kors) — Thu, 01 Nov 2001 00:00:00 EST

Dimness at Noon

akors@sas.upenn.edu (Alan Charles Kors) — Fri, 01 Dec 2000 00:00:00 EST

Thought Reform 101

akors@sas.upenn.edu (Alan Charles Kors) — Wed, 01 Mar 2000 00:00:00 EST

At Wake Forest University last fall, one of the few events designated as "mandatory" for freshman orientation was attendance at Blue Eyed, a filmed racism awareness workshop in which whites are abused, ridiculed, made to fail, and taught helpless passivity so that they can identify with "a person of color for a day." In Swarthmore College's dormitories, in the fall of 1998, first-year students were asked to line up by skin color, from lightest to darkest, and to step forward and talk about how they felt concerning their place in that line. Indeed, at almost all of our campuses, some form of moral and political re-education has been built into freshman orientation and residential programming. These exercises have become so commonplace that most students do not even think of the issues of privacy, rights, and dignity involved.

A central goal of these programs is to uproot "internalized oppression," a crucial concept in the diversity education planning documents of most universities. Like the Leninists' notion of "false consciousness," from which it ultimately is derived, it identifies as a major barrier to progressive change the fact that the victims of oppression have internalized the very values and ways of thinking by which society oppresses them. What could workers possibly know, compared to intellectuals, about what workers truly should want? What could students possibly know, compared to those creating programs for offices of student life and residence, about what students truly should feel? Any desire for assimilation or for individualism reflects the imprint of white America's strategy for racial hegemony.

In 1991 and 1992 both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal published surveys of freshman orientations. The Times observed that "orientation has evolved into an intense ...initiation" that involves "delicate subjects like...date rape [and] race relations, and how freshmen, some from small towns and tiny high schools, are supposed to deal with them." In recent years, public ridicule of "political correctness" has made academic administrators more circumspect about speaking their true minds, so one should listen carefully to the claims made for these programs before colleges began to spin their politically correct agendas.

Tony Tillman, in charge of a mandatory "Social Issues" orientation at Dartmouth, explained in the Journal that students needed to address "the various forms of `isms': sexism, racism, classism," all of which were interrelated. Oberlin "educated" its freshmen about "differences in race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and culture," with separate orientations for blacks, Hispanics, gays and lesbians, and Americans of Asian descent. Columbia University sought to give its incoming students the chance "to reevaluate [and] learn things," so that they could rid themselves of "their own social and personal beliefs that foster inequality." Katherine Balmer, assistant dean for freshmen at Columbia, explained to the Times that "you can't bring all these people together...without some sort of training."

Greg Ricks, multicultural educator at Stanford (after similar stints at Dartmouth and Harvard), was frank about his agenda: "White students need help to understand what it means to be white in a multicultural community....For the white heterosexual male who feels disconnected and marginalized by multiculturalism, we've got to do a lot of work here." Planning for New Student Week at Northwestern University, a member of the Cultural Diversity Project Committee explained to the Weekly Northwestern Review in 1989 that the committee's goal was "changing the world, or at least the way [undergraduates] perceive it." In 1993, Ana Maria Garcia, assistant dean of Haverford College, proudly told the Philadelphia Inquirer of official freshman dormitory programs there, which divided students into two groups: happy, unselfish Alphas and grim, acquisitive Betas. For Garcia, the exercise was wonderfully successful: "Students in both groups said the game made them feel excluded, confused, awkward, and foolish," which, for Garcia, accomplished the purpose of Haverford's program: "to raise student awareness of racial and ethnic diversity."

In the early 1990s, Bryn Mawr College shared its mandatory "Building Pluralism" program with any school that requested it. Bryn Mawr probed the most private experiences of every first-year student: difference and discomfort; racial, ethnic, and class experiences; sexual orientation; religious beliefs. By the end of this "orientation," students were devising "individual and collective action plans" for "breaking free" of "the cycle of oppression" and for achieving "new meaning" as "change agents." Although the public relations savvy of universities has changed since the early 1990s, these programs proliferate apace.

The darkest nightmare of the literature on power is George Orwell's 1984, where there is not even an interior space of privacy and self. Winston Smith faces the ultimate and consistent logic of the argument that everything is political, and he can only dream of "a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason."

Orwell did not know that as he wrote, Mao's China was subjecting university students to "thought reform," known also as "re-education," that was not complete until children had denounced the lives and political morals of their parents and emerged as "progressive" in a manner satisfactory to their trainers. In the diversity education film Skin Deep, a favorite in academic "sensitivity training," a white student in his third day of a "facilitated" retreat on race, with his name on the screen and his college and hometown identified, confesses his family's inertial Southern racism and, catching his breath, says to the group (and to the thousands of students who will see this film on their own campuses), "It's a tough choice, choosing what's right and choosing your family."

Political correctness is not the end of human liberty, because political correctness does not have power commensurate with its aspirations. It is essential, however, to understand those totalizing ambitions for what they are. O'Brien's re-education of Winston in 1984 went to the heart of such invasiveness. "We are not content with negative obedience.... When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will." The Party wanted not to destroy the heretic but to "capture his inner mind." Where others were content to command "Thou shalt not" or "Thou shalt," O'Brien explains, "Our command is 'Thou art.'" To reach that end requires "learning... understanding [and] acceptance," and the realization that one has no control even over one's inner soul. In Blue Eyed, the facilitator, Jane Elliott, says of those under her authority for the day, "A new reality is going to be created for these people." She informs everyone of the rules of the event: "You have no power, absolutely no power." By the end, broken and in tears, they see their own racist evil, and they love Big Sister.

The people devoted to remolding the inner lives of undergraduates are mostly kind and often charming individuals. At the Fourth Annual National Conference on People of Color in Predominantly White Institutions, held at and sponsored by the University of Nebraska last October, faculty and middle-level administrators of student life from around the country complained and joked about their low budgets, inadequate influence, and herculean tasks.

Their papers and interviews reveal an ideologically and humanly diverse crowd, but they share certain assumptions and beliefs, most of which are reasonable subjects for debate, but none of which should provide campuses with freshman agendas: America is an unjust society. Drop-out rates for students of color reflect a hostile environment and a lack of institutional understanding of identity and culture. What happens in the classroom is inadequate preparation for thinking correctly about justice and oppression.

They also share views that place us directly on the path of thought reform: White students desperately need formal "training" in racial and cultural awareness. The moral goal of such training should override white notions of privacy and individualism. The university must become a therapeutic and political agent of progressive change.

Handouts at the Nebraska conclave illustrated this agenda. Irma Amirall-Padamsee, the associate dean of student relations and the director of multicultural affairs at Syracuse University, distributed the Office of Multicultural Affairs' brochure. Its "philosophy" presupposes that students live "in a world impacted by various oppression issues," including "racism." "OMA's role," it announced, "is to provide the...leadership needed to encourage our students...to grow into individuals willing to take a proactive stance against oppression in all its shapes."

Molly Tovar, who has done this sort of work both at the University of Oklahoma and at Oklahoma State University, passed out a 22-page guide she co-authored, "How to Build and Implement a Comprehensive Diversity Plan." The guide explains the three "kinds of attitudes" that agents of cultural change will face: "The Believers," who are "cooperative; excited; participative; contributive"; "The Fence Straddlers," who are "suspicious; observers; cautious; potentially open-minded"; and "The Skeptics," who are "critical; passive aggressive; isolated; traditional."

Ronnie Wooten, of Northern Illinois University, distributed a handout, "Inclusive Classroom Matters." It adapts a variety of common academic sources on multiculturalism, including a set of "guidelines" on how to "facilitate learning about those who are different from you." The students in this "inclusive classroom" would have to abandon what might be their sincere inner beliefs, replacing them with such professions of faith as "We will assume that people (both the groups we study and the members of the class) always do the best that they can." The guidelines make it clear that one may not restrict one's changes to the intellectual: "We will address the emotional as well as the cognitive content of the course material. We will work to break down the fears that prohibit communication."

Sharon Ulmar, assistant to the chancellor for diversity and equal opportunity at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, handed out a flyer titled "Can [A] Diversity Program Create Behavior Changes?" Her program's mode of self-evaluation was to measure "the number of participants that took action based upon the awareness they learned from [the] program." Among the units of "awareness" successfully acquired were the following (some of which surely might strike one as more problematic than others): "gays and lesbians no different than [sic] others"; "handicap accessibility is for those who are handicaped [sic]"; "difficult to make a decision about own beliefs when others are watching"; "module allowed participant to witness subtle behaviors instead of hearing about it"; and the ineffably tautological "understanding commonalities of each individual may be similar to yours."

Denise Bynes, program coordinator for Adelphi University's Center for African-American Studies Programs, distributed a "Conflict Resolution Styles Questionnaire" for students, all of whom are to be categorized at the end as one of the following: "competing, avoiding, accommodating, compromising, and collaborating." The handout also presents the "basic values" of each American ethnic group. For white Americans, these are "Freedom/liberty/privacy; equality/fairness; achievement/success; individualism/self-interest; economical use of time; comfort." For African-Americans, "Ethnic pride, heritage, history; kinship bonds/family/motherhood; equality/fairness; achievement; respect; religion/spirituality." For Asian-Americans, "Reciprocal social duties; self-control/courtesy/dignity; devotion to parents; tradition (family, culture, the past); duty/hard work/diligence." Each group also has its own particular "overview" of nature, logic, time, society, and interpersonal relationships. Whites wish to "control" nature, for example; Hispanics, to live in "harmony" with it; blacks, to "overcome" it; and Asians, to "be adjusted to" and "accept" it. Whites are "rational, logical, analytical"; Hispanics, "rational, ethical"; blacks, "allegorical and synthetical"; and Asians, "intuitive, holistic, tolerate inconsistencies."

According to a formal presentation by Bynes and her colleague at Adelphi, Hinda Adele Barlaz, all of these materials were acquired during "training" by the U.S. Department of Justice Community Relations Service, a program so effective that "it was very hard to get any of the other white members of the committee [Barlaz was white] to go for the training that the Department of Justice provided free of charge. The white members of the [Adelphi Prejudice Reduction] Committee had been so alienated by the training that they didn't want to go back."

What do these presenters in Nebraska, typical of those now governing offices of student life and residence, believe about the re-education of our college students? The keynote speaker at the conference was Carlos Muñoz, professor of ethnic studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He explains in an interview that to create an appropriate environment on campus, one has "to do as much outreach as possible away from the classroom, into the dorms, into the places where students live." Such work should begin during freshman orientation, continue throughout a college experience, and be mandatory.

Amirall-Padamsee from Syracuse argues that "students of color need to be nurtured as insightful leaders of our community" and that "they must be formally trained in anti-oppression theory and related skill building." "White students," in turn, "have to be trained as allies in change." (Ally is a code word in sensitivity training circles. As the "diversity facilitator" Hugh Vasquez of the Todos Institute explains in a widely used manual, an "ally" is someone from "the dominant group" who is aware of and articulates his unmerited privilege and who intervenes on behalf of mistreated groups.)

The goal of such training, according to Amirall-Padamsee, is "to produce graduates who are individuals committed to educational and social justice, and not just a tolerance of, but a validating of difference." To accomplish that she says, "we need to define and implement ways to translate education to behavioral change." In addition, she boasts, she has access to federal work-study funds, and she uses that position--and her capacity to dismiss people-- "to try to make a positive change in the way that the student is thinking."

Tovar, formerly of Oklahoma State University and now at the University of Oklahoma, declares in an interview at the conference that "at OSU we have all kinds of sensitivity training." She describes an incident involving fraternity brothers who had been disrespectful of Native American culture: They ended up "incredibly emotional....These fraternity kids broke down." OSU also has mandatory multicultural freshman orientation sessions.

Bynes, also the co-chairman of the Prejudice Reduction Committee at Adelphi University, says the committee's emphasis is on training individuals how to interact "with a diverse student body," with "separate training for students...[and] special sessions on student leadership training." This "cultural and racial awareness training would benefit all members of the Adelphi community, both in their university and personal lives." The committee would get people to talk about "`what I like about being so-and-so,' `what I dislike about being so-and-so,' and `the first time I encountered prejudice,'" all exercises that the facilitators had been shown and had experienced in their own "training" by the Justice Department.

Bynes is a kind, accomplished, candid, and well-meaning woman. As she explains, "White people must have...sensitivity training...so that they can become aware of white privilege." Mandatory sensitivity training ideally should include both students and faculty, but "there are things that we can't dictate to the faculty because of the fact that they have a union."

There are painful ironies in these attempts at thought reform. Individual identity lies at the heart of both dignity and the flourishing of an ethnically heterogeneous society. Black students on American campuses rightly decry any tendency of university police to stop students based on race. Their objections are not statistical but moral: One is an individual, not an instance of blood or appearance. The assault on individual identity was essential to the horror and inhumanity of Jim Crow laws, of apartheid, and of the Nuremberg Race Laws. It is no less inhuman when undertaken by "diversity educators."

From the Inquisition to the political use of Soviet psychiatry, history has taught us to recoil morally from the violation of the ultimate refuges of self-consciousness, conscience, and private beliefs. The song of the "peat bog soldiers," sent by the Nazis to work until they died, was "Die Gedanken sind frei," "Thoughts Are Free," for that truly is the final atom of human liberty. No decent society or person should pursue another human being there. Our colleges and universities do so routinely.

The desire to "train" individuals on issues of race and diversity has spawned a new industry of moral re-education. Colleges and universities have been hiring diversity "trainers" or "facilitators" for 15 years, and the most famous of them can command $35,000 for "cultural audits," $5,000 for sensitivity workshop training, and a sliding scale of honoraria, some for not less than $3,000 per hour, for lectures.

This growing industry has its mountebanks, its careerists, its well-meaning zealots, and its sadists. The categories often blur. Three of the most celebrated facilitators at the moment are Edwin J. Nichols, of Nichols and Associates in Washington, D.C.; Hugh Vasquez, of the Todos Institute in Oakland, California; and Jane Elliott, the Torquemada of thought reform. To examine their work is to see into the heart of American re-education.

Nichols first came to the attention of critics of intrusive political correctness in 1990, when he led an infamous "racial sensitivity" session at the University College of the University of Cincinnati. According to witnesses, his exercise culminated in the humiliation of a blond, blue-eyed, young female professor, whom he ridiculed as a "perfect" member of "the privileged white elite" who not only would win "a beauty contest" but even "wore her string of pearls." The woman, according to these accounts, sat and sobbed. These contemporaneous revelations did not harm Nichols' career.

According to the curriculum vitae sent by his firm, Nichols studied at Eberhardt-Karls Universität in Tubingen, Germany, and at Leopold-Franzens Universität in Innsbruck, Austria, "where he received his Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology and Psychiatry, cum laude" (a rare degree). In some publicity material, he states that he founded a school of child psychology in Africa; at other times, he modestly withholds that accomplishment.

Nichols' schedule of fees is almost as impressive as his schedule of thought reform. He charges $3,500 for a three-hour "Basic Cultural Awareness Seminar," plus travel and per diem. For a plain old "Workshop," he gets $4,000-$5,000 plus expenses. This makes his staple offering--a "Full Day Session (Awareness Seminar and Workshop)"--a bargain at $5,000 plus expenses. For a "Cultural Audit," he gets $20,000-$35,000 (he recently did one of these for the University of Michigan School of Medicine). The Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Department of Labor paid him $15,000 for diversity training; the Environmental Protection Agency got him cheaply at $12,000.

Business is booming. Nichols has brought awareness to the employees of six cabinet departments, three branches of the armed services, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and the FBI; the Goddard Space Center, the Naval Air Warfare Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and NASA; the Office of Personnel Management, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Social Security Administration. He has enlightened city and county governments, whole school systems, various state government departments, labor unions, several prestigious law firms, and the Archdiocese of Baltimore. His clients include "Fortune 500 Corporations, foreign governments, parastatals, associations, health and mental health systems," and he has been a consultant to offices of "The British Commonwealth of Nations" and "organizations in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Japan, Latin America...Singapore, Malaysia, and China." He has a very long list of academic clients, and he was a centerpiece of Johns Hopkins' 1999 freshman orientation.

What does Nichols believe? He believes that culture is genetically determined, and that blacks, Hispanics, and descendants of non-Jewish Middle-Eastern tribes place their "highest value" on "interpersonal relationships." In Africa, women are the equal of men. Whites were altered permanently by the Ice Age. They value objects highly, not people. That is why white men commit suicide so frequently when they are downsized.

Nichols calls his science of value systems "axiology," and he believes that if managers and administrators understand these cultural differences, they can manage more effectively, understanding why, according to him, blacks attach no importance to being on time, while whites are compulsive about it. Whites are logical; blacks are intuitive and empathetic. Whites are frigid; blacks are warm and spontaneous. Whites are relentlessly acquisitive; nonwhites are in harmony with nature. White engineers, for example, care about their part of something; Asian engineers, managers should know, care about the whole. Whites are linear; nonwhites have a spiral conception of time. Nichols has a handout that he frequently uses. Whites, it explains, "know through counting and measuring"; Native Americans learn through "oneness"; Hispanics and Arabs "know through symbolic and imagery [sic]"; Asians "know through striving toward the transcendence [sic]." Asking nonwhites to act white in the workplace is fatal to organizational harmony. Understanding cultural axiology is essential to management for the 21st century. Now, reread his list of clients.

Two diversity training films widely used at major universities reveal the techniques and the characters of two other leading thought reformers. Skin Deep, the 1996 film funded by the Ford Foundation, records an encounter at a retreat between college students from around the country. The facilitators are not active in the film, but the published guide tells you what they do and identifies their leader as Hugh Vasquez.

Skin Deep begins with ominous news clips from the major networks about "racial violence," "racism," "slurs," and "racist jokes" on campus. It announces that "at these training grounds for our future leaders, intolerance has once again become a way of life." We meet white, Hispanic, black, and Asian-American students from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of California at Berkeley, and Texas A&M. The whites have terrible stories to tell: They have grown up in white neighborhoods; their families have prejudices; and they feel rejected by people of color. The people of color have terrible stories to tell: They suffer frequent abuse in white America, and they are sick of it.

Neither group is typical of a college population. The whites, we gradually learn, have been members of organizations working for racial understanding. The students of color all use terms like "allies," suggesting that they've been through sessions like this before. There is a Jewish woman who objects to being thrown into the nightly "white caucus," where she doesn't really belong. She also anguishes over whether all of the things she has been told at the encounter about the Jewish role in the suffering of people of color are true. (Vasquez responds candidly to an inquiry on this, revealing that some of those allegations were outright anti-Semitic, and that the Jewish girl was looking for "allies" who would not "scapegoat" Jews.) In short, the white students talk about the stereotypes they have learned, and the students of color reflect deeply on the cruelty of race in America.

When white students initially suggest that they personally did not do terrible things, the students of color fire back with both barrels. A first reply goes immediately to the heart of the matter: "One thing that you must definitely understand is that we're discussing how this country was founded, and because you are a white male, people are going to hate you." A black student explains, more patiently: "Things are going on presently: the IMF, presently; the World Bank, presently; NAFTA, presently; Time Warner, presently; the diamond factories, presently; reservations, presently; ghettos, presently; barrios, presently. Slavery still exists." (Diamond factories?) The Chicana, Judy, lets them know that "I will not stop being angry, and I will not be less angry or frustrated to accommodate anybody. You whites have to understand because we have been oppressed for 2,000 years. And if you take offense, so?" (Two thousand years?) And from Khanh, a bitter Vietnamese student: "White people need to hear that white people are very affected by internalized racism....As a person of color growing up in this society, I was taught to hate myself and I did hate myself. If you're a white person, you were taught to love yourself....If you don't know that you have shit in your head, you'll never deal with racism."

By the end, the students of color have had the grace to state that if the white students become real "allies," their victims can let go of their anger a bit. White students have come to realize that the pieties their parents taught them, such as an honest day's pay for an honest day's work, apply only to whites in America.

In short, what moves the film (and American thought reform) is a denial of individual identity and responsibility, an insistence on group victimization and rights, and the belief that America is an almost uniquely iniquitous place in the world, without opportunity, legal equality, or justice. "I want you to know," an Hispanic male explains, "that because of the system, my cousin was shot...and then another cousin was shot." The tribalism of the exploited Third World expresses a core truth: You are your blood and history. Let the children of the guilty denounce their parents. Let the victims stake their claims. Let the cultural revolution begin.

Vasquez is a frank and warm man by e-mail. He explains that the filmmaker never showed the facilitators because she wanted to focus solely on the students, but that "it took a great deal of planning and structure and facilitation to make what happened happen." In his own mind, he was devoted to eliminating "blame, ridicule, judgements, guilt, and shame" among all of the students in the group, and he sounds sincere when he writes that his goal is to eliminate "individual and institutional mistreatment of any group or culture." But his effect, whatever his intention, is frightening, atavistic, and irrational, and his means are deeply intrusive.

Americans surely need to study, discuss, and debate, frankly, matters of race and ethnicity. Reasonable people disagree on profound questions. Some of the issues are empirical: Is aversion to difference acquired above all from culture or evolution? Should we be more startled by America's success in creating a nation of diverse backgrounds or by the difficulties it has in doing so?

Some of the issues are moral and political: Should we favor legal equality with differential outcomes or equality of outcomes even at the price of legal inequality? Are today's whites responsible for the crimes of 19th-century Southern slave owners? What are the benefits and costs of a society based on individual responsibility? These are not issues for indoctrination. Indeed, they do not even reflect everyone's chosen intellectual or moral agenda, and free individuals choose such agendas for themselves.

Vasquez's "Study Guide" for Skin Deep explains that the final goal of using the film in "colleges, high schools, corporations, and the workplace" is to produce "action strategies and... networks for working against racism," for which there is a page of strategy. The guide further explains the necessity of affirmative action, the "myths" of reverse discrimination and balkanization, and the reality of white privilege. It teaches the need for the privileged to become "allies" of the oppressed, and it focuses on the nightmare of "internalized oppression." The internalization of oppression manifests itself in "self-doubt...fear of one's own power; an urgent pull to assimilate; isolation from one's own group; self-blame for lack of success; [and] fighting over the smallest slice of the economic pie."

The guide also has a rare explicit endorsement of "political correctness," reminding facilitators that "language was a prime factor" in the murder of 6 million Jews, that language perpetuates racism, and that it is wrong to believe that "anything people say should be left alone simply because we all have the right to free speech....The challenges to political correctness tend to come from those who want to be able to say anything without repercussions." (He did not have Khanh in mind.)

Skin Deep is a kid's cartoon, however, compared to Jane Elliott's Blue Eyed. Elliott has been lionized by the American media, including Oprah Winfrey, and she is widely employed by a growing number of universities. Disney plans to make a movie of her life.

Blue Eyed arose from Elliott's elementary school class in Riceville, Iowa, where, starting in 1968, she inflicted upon her dyslexic students an experience in which they were loathed or praised based upon their eye color. According to Elliott, she was ostracized for this experiment, her own children were beaten and abused, and her parents (who were racists, she informed a Dutch interviewer) were driven into isolation, bankruptcy, and despair because they had raised "a nigger lover" (one of her favorite terms).

In her modest explanation, once news of her exercise with the children made it onto national television, the people of Riceville feared that blacks across America would assume that everyone there was like Elliott and would move to their town. To punish her for that, they stopped buying from her father. Elliott also revealed to her Dutch interviewer that she abandoned teaching school in 1984 to devote herself full time to diversity education, for which she receives $6,000 per day from "companies and governmental institutions."

In Blue Eyed, masochistic adults accept Elliott's two-and-a-half-hour exercise in sadism (reduced to 90 minutes of film), designed to make white people understand what it is to be "a person of color" in America. To achieve this, she divides her group into stupid, lazy, shiftless, incompetent, and psychologically brutalized "blue eyes," on the one hand, and clever and empowered "brown eyes," on the other. Some of the sadism is central to the "game," but much is gratuitous, and it continues after the exercise has ended.

Elliott is unbearably tendentious and ignorant. To teach what an IQ test truly is, she gives the brown eyes half of the answers to an impossible test before the blue eyes enter the room, explaining that, for people of color, the IQ exam is "a test about which you know absolutely nothing." IQ tests only measure "white culture." They are a means of "reinforcing our position of power," and "we do this all the time in public, private, and parochial schools," using "culturally biased tests, textbooks, and pictures on the wall...for white people." (Fortunately for Elliott, it appears there were no Asian-Americans or psychometricians in her group.)

Elliott often describes the 1990s as if they were the 1920s; indeed, in her view, nothing has changed in America since the collapse of Reconstruction. Every day in the United States, she explains, white power keeps black males in their place by calling them "boy" (two syllables, hissed), "and we do it to accomplished black males over 70, and we get away with it." We tell blacks to assimilate, which means merely to "act white," but when they try that, we put them in their place and change the rules. For example (this in 1995), whites now are building up Colin Powell, but as soon as they build "this boy" up, they will kick him down. For Elliott, the Powell boom was a conscious conspiracy to humiliate and disorient blacks.

She teaches her "blueys" with relish that protest accomplishes nothing, because if blacks protest, "we kill them." It is not smart to speak up or act clever, which is why blacks appear passive and stupid. The lesson: "You have no power, absolutely no power. ...Quit trying." Blacks might try to "win" on the inside, but it is almost impossible to validate oneself when white society puts you down "all day, every day."

Even if a "bluey" understands the implications of the workshop, or even if a white woman understands male prejudice, it bears no real relationship to the daily suffering of every black: "You do not live in the same country as that [black] woman. You live in the USA, but you do not live in the same country as she does." Blacks such as Shelby Steele (singled out by name), who speak of transcending race, delude themselves, because one might transcend one's skin color but never society's behavior: "All you can do is sit there and take it." People call the exercise cruel, Elliott explains, but "I'm only doing this for one day to little white children. Society does this to children of color every day." She stands over briefly assertive "blueys" and humiliates them, explaining that if this makes you sick to your stomach for a few hours, now you understand why blacks die younger.

In short, this is America, and there truly is no hope. Nothing ever changes. No one can succeed by effort. Culture, society, and politics all are static. "White privilege" controls all agencies of power, influence, and image, and uses all the means that arise from these to render "people of color" psychologically impotent, confused, passive, and helpless. So either vent your hatred or assume your guilt.

There is no redemption except guilt, but there is a political moral. After "teaching" a "bluey" to submit totally to her authority, she asks if that was a good lesson. The workshop thinks it was. No, she says with venom, submission to tyranny is a terrible lesson, but "what I just did to him today Newt Gingrich is doing to you every day...and you are submitting to that, submitting to oppression."

The facilitators' guide and publicity for Blue Eyed states things honestly: Elliott "does not intellectualize highly emotionally charged or challenging topics...she uses participants' own emotions to make them feel discomfort, guilt, shame, embarrassment, and humiliation." Facilitators are urged to use the raw emotions of Blue Eyed (blueys do cry a lot) to tap the reactions of the viewers. They should not expect black participants to "bleed on the floor for whites," but they should get whites to "stretch" and "take risks." The facilitators should be prepared for very strong and painful emotions and memories from the participants. The ultimate goal of the film: "It is not enough for white people to stop abusing people of color. All U.S. people need a personal vision for ending racism and other oppressive ideologies within themselves."

Elliott does mean everyone. In 1996, she told her audience at Kansas State University that all whites are racists, whatever they believe about themselves: "If you want to see another racist, turn to the person on your right. Now look at the person on your left." She also believes that blacks were in America 600 years before whites. She told the students at Kansas State that if they were angry at her, they should write letters, but that they must do so without paper, alphabet, or numbers, all of which were invented by people of color. Whites, in Elliott's view, did have a certain creativity. Betraying a breathtaking ignorance of world history, she told the Australian Internet magazine Webfronds in 1998 that "white people invented racism." Other than that, however, whites were quite parasitic.

"You're all sitting here writing in a language [English] that white people didn't come up with," she told the magazine. "You're all sitting here writing on paper that white people didn't invent. Most of you are wearing clothes made out of cloth that white people didn't come up with. We stole those ideas from other people. If you're a Christian, you're believing in a philosophy that came to us from people of color."

Jane Elliott has lived through revolutionary cultural changes without taking note of any. She teaches only helplessness and despair to blacks and only blood-guilt and self-contempt to whites. She addresses no issue with intellectual seriousness or purpose. She also is the reigning star in thought reform these days. On May 7, 1999, CBS News ran a feature on her that declared: "For over 30 years, Jane Elliott has waged a one-woman campaign against racism in America." CBS might want to rethink the notion of "racism."

Even traditionalist campuses now permit the ideologues in their offices of student life to pursue individuals into the last inner refuge of free men and women and to turn students over to trainers who want them to change "within themselves." This is a return of in loco parentis, with a power unimagined in prior ages by the poor souls who only tried to keep men and women from sleeping with each other overnight. It is the university standing not simply in the place of parents but in the place of private conscience, identity, and belief.

From the evidence, most students tune it out, just as most students at most times generally have tuned out abuses of power and diminutions of liberty. One should not take heart from that. Where students react, it is generally with an anger that, ironically and sadly, exacerbates the balkanization of our universities. The more social work we bring to our colleges and universities, the more segregated they become, and in the classifieds of The Chronicle of Higher Education during the last few years, colleges and universities by the hundreds have advertised for individuals to oversee "diversity education," "diversity training," and "sensitivity training."

Orwell may have been profoundly wrong about the totalitarian effects of high technology, but he understood full well how the authoritarians of this century had moved from the desire for outer control to the desire for inner control. He understood that the new age sought to overcome what, in Julia's terms, was the ultimate source of freedom for human beings: "They can't get inside you." Our colleges and universities hire trainers to "get inside" American students.

Thought reform is making its way inexorably to an office near you. If we let it occur at our universities and accept it passively in our own domains, then a people who defeated totalitarians abroad will surrender their dignity, privacy, and conscience to the totalitarians within.

Cracking the speech code

akors@sas.upenn.edu (Alan Charles Kors) — Thu, 01 Jul 1999 00:00:00 EDT

For some 15 dark years, American academia has acquiesced in, if not demanded, the suppression of its most fundamental rights. Speech codes--the "verbal conduct" restrictions in colleges' "harassment" policies--have been pervasive on our campuses.

During this time, there have been a few minor free speech victories. On some campuses, defenders of liberty modified the worst aspects of speech restrictions; on others, students or faculty used media attention and ridicule to force administrators to abandon the most embarrassing parts of their codes. At a few state schools, students sued for their constitutional rights and won. Now, however, a faculty has itself voted to restore its freedom of speech. On March 1, 1999, the Faculty Senate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison surprised almost everyone by voting to abolish the code that had regulated professors' speech for more than a decade.

For a year and a half, Wisconsin had been weighing only two choices: to keep or to modify the code. No one thought that there could be a successful third option: free speech. Liberty's at least temporary victory in Madison, won with the telling involvement of students, had its own context, its revealing contingencies, and, above all, its heroes.

A Winnowing Tradition

The difficulty of restoring free speech at Wisconsin is ironic, given the school's dramatic history of academic freedom. In 1894, Oliver E. Wells, a member of the state Board of Regents, charged Professor Richard T. Ely with teaching and advocating "socialism." The board appointed a committee to examine the charges.

Ely was not a stalwart defender of the values that his case came to represent. He allowed that if the charges were true, he should be dismissed, but he denied that he was a "socialist" at all. The committee, however, went beyond Ely's agenda. It not only exonerated him, but proclaimed the value of a campus where one could express oneself without fear: "Whatever be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found."

That commitment to "fearless sifting and winnowing" survived the state's unlamented senator, Joseph McCarthy, but it could not survive political correctness. By 1989, the threat to academic freedom at Wisconsin came from the administration and faculty. Equating "racist" and "sexist" speech with discrimination by race and sex, a faculty committee dominated by law school professors drew up a "code" that banned "racist or discriminatory comments, epithets or other expressive behavior," in "non-academic matters" that were either "directed at an individual or on separate occasions at different individuals." The code gave specific protection to discussions of group characteristics in the classroom, and it explicitly exempted the faculty.

The law professors reassured the university that the code was wholly constitutional, and Chancellor Donna Shalala (now President Clinton's secretary of health and human services) enthusiastically and successfully urged the Board of Regents to adopt it. A group of students, however, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, challenged the code, and a federal district court declared it manifestly unconstitutional in 1991.

As a result, most Wisconsin faculty members assumed that they enjoyed full freedom of expression within the law. They were wrong. They were still governed by a separate policy, "Prohibited Harassment: Definitions and Rules Governing the Conduct of UW-Madison Faculty and Academic Staff."

This code, drafted in 1981 and given its final form in 1989, prohibited "harmful" speech in both "noninstructional" and "instructional" settings. The latter category, which included speech in classrooms, laboratories, on field trips, and in academic offices, was more protected. Let us, then, examine the policy in its least repressive guise.

Discipline and Punish

The UW code forbade "demeaning verbal and other expressive behavior." The phrase expressive behavior included conduct "through which a faculty or academic staff member seeks to communicate with students...[including] but not limited to the use of visual materials, oral and written statements, and assignment of visual, recorded, or written materials." The policy claimed to "protect" the "selection of instructional materials," any "opinion or statement germane to the subject matter of the course in which the behavior occurred," and "expressive behavior related to teaching techniques."

The code existed, however, among other reasons, precisely to permit a faculty member to be charged and "disciplined" for those specific "protected" behaviors. Thus, one's selection of instructional materials lost protection if the claim of germaneness was "clearly unreasonable." The claim of germaneness itself lost protection if it, in turn, was "clearly unreasonable." One's teaching techniques lost protection if "an appropriate hearing or review [found] clearly unreasonable the...claim that the objective cannot be accomplished as effectively by techniques less likely to cause harm."

Everything lost protection if the hearing rejected the claim of protection and found that the behavior was a) "commonly considered by persons of a particular gender, race, cultural background, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or handicap to be demeaning to members of that group"; b) occurred after a prior request not to engage in that conduct "or conduct of substantially the same kind"; and c) the conduct either "interfere[d] with" the student's academic work or made the instructional setting "hostile, or intimidating, or demeaning to members of the group of average sensibilities."

Wholly unprotected, also, were "epithets, comments, or gestures" that demeaned on the basis of "gender, race, cultural background, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or handicap condition," subject, again, to the double criteria of what a group found "disparaging to members of that group" and either interference with "learning or other academic performance" or the creation of a "hostile or intimidating, or demeaning" environment. The policy did not require any proof of intent in instructional harassment.

Of Codes and Kangaroo Courts

The code was breathtakingly vague and offered frightening discretion to any panel charged with implementing it. Professors were investigated for violations of both its instructional and noninstructional provisions, drawing them into long, Kafkaesque procedures where they had no clear knowledge of the charges against them, no confrontation with accusers, and no rights to formal hearings. In short, at a state university, they found themselves both investigated for their speech and deprived of even minimal due process.

A professor of art history, during a period of heated curricular and ideological debate within his department, was treated derisively by students on the other side. Annoyed at a repeated, mocking salutation, he replied to them, "Sieg Heil!" As a result, he was investigated for anti-Semitism and other "isms" for a year. A professor of philosophy used the term Injuns in a class, and he too was investigated. A professor of history failed to use gender-neutral language, and he, too, was subjected to an inquisition. In the course of such proceedings, professors were asked intrusive questions about their friendships, their views of sexuality, their inner beliefs, and their values.

Defenders of the code now point to the fact that none of these illiberal, unconstitutional, indecent, and chilling investigations led to a single conviction, thus demonstrating the code's acceptability. In fact, its acceptance was largely a product of ignorance. Almost all the professors at Wisconsin with whom I have spoken were unaware for many years that the faculty rules had survived the court's rejection of the student code.

How could the code operate without widespread public knowledge? As is true on most campuses, professors investigated under it simply never spoke to their colleagues about their difficulties (or, if they did, they swore them to secrecy). The issue might be "speech," but the charge might be sexual or racial "harassment," and no one wants such an accusation known. One professor did retain a successful lawyer, who got the school to end its investigation and to pay $12,000 to $15,000 in a confidential settlement.

As the code gradually became known from 1993 on, however, several colleagues of the accused professors became uneasy, and they found it impossible to remain silent.

Free Speech Talks Back

Madison, unlike most American campuses, has had several conspicuous defenders of liberty across the political spectrum. Historian Stanley Payne, for example, formed a Faculty Committee on Academic Freedom and Rights to serve as a legal defense fund for those caught in the web of the speech code. Longstanding opponents of political correctness, such as economist W. Lee Hansen, political scientist Donald Downs, and members of the Wisconsin Association of Scholars all lent their voices to the cause of curbing politicized abuses of power.

Lester Hunt, the professor of philosophy investigated in 1992 for using the term Injun, had been astonished when the Office of Affirmative Action gave him a copy of the speech code. Though exonerated, Hunt began to address his colleagues frequently about their real and potential plight under this policy. He also brought speakers to campus to denounce the code, including Alan Dershowitz, who termed it one of the worst he had ever seen, "an abomination."

By 1997, these activities had produced one convert on the University Committee, an elected faculty executive committee of six that organizes much of the agenda of the Faculty Senate, serves as a liaison between that Senate and the administration, and, in theory, works for the interests of the faculty. (The Senate has about 200 members--many of whom do not attend meetings--elected by disciplinary constituency.)

Mary Anderson, a professor of geology, was struck by Payne's, Downs', and Hunt's activities, and convinced her colleagues on the University Committee to open discussions with faculty members who believed that the code trashed free speech rights. They established an ad hoc committee to examine the code and recommend possible revisions to the Faculty Senate. Ten voting faculty members served on the ad hoc committee; they would be joined by four academic staff members, named by the staff governing body, and by three students, named by the student government.

The issue was profoundly divisive, but no side succeeded in achieving strategic superiority in the makeup of the ad hoc committee. Of the four staff members, three supported some strong version of the code; one supported its serious revision. Of the 10 voting faculty members, only one, Donald Downs, was a known critic of the policy, and a few were known to be strong supporters. It was not obvious how the other faculty members would vote. The student government interviewed students who desired to serve on the committee, and by all accounts it chose the three who seemed the best informed about the issue, without pressing them on their substantive views.

At the last minute, the University Committee appointed an author of the speech code, law professor Ted Finman, as a nonvoting member of the ad hoc committee, ostensibly to provide it with "expertise." Instead, he dominated its meetings--which were public--convincing many that the university would suffer legally and financially if it did not keep something close to the current code.

Throughout 1997 and 1998, the ad hoc committee met some 40 times. In October 1998, it divided (at first 10-7 and eventually 9-8) between a majority and minority report, issuing both. The majority report called for "reasonable pedagogical justification" for, among other things, a "comment" or "technique" that "debases and degrades students in the class." The minority report charged that such a criterion left too much to the subjective discretion and temper of a hearing panel, and it asked simply for "pedagogical justification." The two sides also differed, without much clarity, over the burden and degree of proof required to convict.

Out of the Mouths of Undergraduates

Undergraduates are potentially the greatest force for restoring liberty on campuses, once they understand the patronizing nature of special protections and selective enforcement. There were, in fact, four diehards for outright abolition on the ad hoc committee--Downs and all three of the students: Jason Shepard, president of the senior class, an openly gay student who had come out in a column in the mainstream campus newspaper and a member of the board of directors of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered Campus Center; Amy Kasper, an Asian-American undergraduate; and Rebecca Bretz, a law student.

Those who worry about the future of liberty should take heart from these students. Shepard joined the committee, he tells me, wholly open-minded, but, like the other two students, he kept asking for a "justification" for the code. He was amazed by how little justification the proponents could offer. By the end of three weeks, he and the other two students arrived at a common position, "without caucusing," because of their skepticism about why anyone would want to silence anyone else at a university. "At first," Shepard says, "a lot of faculty members wrote us off, just assuming that being students, we blindly would support a speech code, especially because we were gay, female, and Asian-American female."

In March 1998, Shepard made a motion for outright "abolition" of the code; it attracted only two votes in addition to those of the students and of Donald Downs. From that moment on, Shepard felt obliged to abandon abolition and to work for the most free-speech-friendly committee report possible.

For Shepard, the year's deepest lesson was the gulf between the rhetoric of "minority" student leaders and the views of the constituencies they were supposed to represent. For example, the Ten Percent Society, a gay and lesbian organization on campus, voted in November 1998 on the majority and minority reports of the ad hoc committee. It split down the middle, barely favoring the majority report. On the gay student listserve, many students wrote about the essential value of free speech. The president of the society, however, sent a message saying that now that a vote had been taken, she expected them all to show solidarity and to end any opposition to the stronger version of the code. She informed Shepard, he told me sadly, that he was a disgrace to every gay student at Wisconsin.

To Shepard, this incident signaled "how this small number of leaders is so out of touch with actual minority students." In his words, "There is a handful of self-appointed leftist activists who claim the right to speak for every minority on this campus." Far from being representative of those minorities, these activists "are some of the most authoritarian, oppressive people I've ever met." They try to intimidate a campus and chill debate: "Anyone who challenges their views is called `sexist,' `racist,' or `homophobe,'" he says.

"Although they claim to be fighting for equality and freedom for minority students," he concludes, "they silence any opposition within their minority group." Shepard saw the issue in straightforward terms. "It makes me cringe to defend bigots," he says, "but that's part of what defending the First Amendment is all about."

Amy Kasper also had a problem with so-called student leaders. They testified to almost "universal support" of the code, she tells me, when, in fact, the student body appeared deeply divided on the issue. In the end, she observes, the student government and all minority associations voted to endorse the majority report, but only 3 percent of Wisconsin students had bothered voting for the student government, while the minority groups were divided and had low numbers involved on this issue. Like Shepard, she also thought that everyone simply assumed that the two of them, "students from historically oppressed groups," instinctively would support the code. They were denounced as "dupes" and "traitors" for opposing it.

Kasper had fought against the code from the beginning. Believing that free speech was indispensable to fundamental rights and academic freedom, she was shocked to discover that a faculty code existed at all, and she believed it an obvious violation of the federal and state constitutions. Further, she says, fighting bigotry by means of oppression was useless. Indeed, she insists, it "has the opposite effect; it makes people bitter; and it is a horrible assault upon the conscience."

"The tide is changing," she says. She is sure her generation understands the sad irony of fighting for equal rights with arbitrary power: "History constantly has shown us that every time you give a coercive authority the power to censor, it is abused, and minority groups suffer the most."

Like Kasper, Rebecca Bretz was convinced from the start that there was something absurd about a speech code at a university. Early on, she notes, the three students were in agreement with each other, and, a rarity on committees with a faculty presence, were the most insistent voices. "We all wanted to know what our professors really thought. We didn't want them to be muzzled or gagged."

For Bretz, the fundamental issue was deeper than the legal or semantic technicalities that the committee kept debating: "How could we, as students, expect to have freedom of speech ourselves without our faculty having it?" In her view, the ability to hear both what other people believed and how they spoke was an essential part of her own freedom.

Once the motion for abolition failed, Bretz, Kasper, Shepard, and Donald Downs worked to get the best possible minority report. As Bretz explains, "We fought for abolition, but it was a futile effort." The question became, "What is the next best thing?" Her decision was to work to get the code as close as possible to freedom of expression. She found the situation on the ad hoc committee inherently ironic. The issue was faculty freedom, and the loudest voices on its behalf were those of the students. "We were somewhat surprised at this," she says dryly.

Professor Robert Drechsel, chairman of the committee, tells me one could not overemphasize the "extraordinary importance" of the students on the committee: "The students forced us to consider the most fundamental issues, and they put repeal on the table. They had a great impact by saying, `You're protecting us, but we don't want that protection.' They were articulate and courageous."

When Professors Stood Up

In November 1998, the University Committee endorsed the majority report and passed it along to the Faculty Senate for consideration. The Faculty Senate would discuss it at meetings in December and February, then vote on the report in March 1999. The December meeting of the Faculty Senate, however, surprised all parties and changed everything. One after another, in a wholly uncoordinated event, close to 20 faculty members spoke, almost all standing to reject both the majority and minority reports and to call for abolition, pure and simple. To the astonishment of both sides, the issue stirred not politically correct passions but passions for liberty. Individuals who never had spoken up publicly or expansively on free speech and academic freedom now found their voices; senators who skipped routine meetings now attended to make their views known.

Charles Cohen, a professor of history, began by speaking for the majority report, declaring that "the minority report allows instructors to derogate students with impunity," but he was virtually alone in defending the majority. Indeed, most speakers opposed the notion of any code at all.

Ken Thomas, a psychologist, observed that in one generation Wisconsin had gone from standing for academic freedom to standing for political correctness. He noted that "speech codes are totally inconsistent with the sifting and winnowing tradition," adding that "guests on the Jay Leno show probably fear censorship less than UW professors."

Biochemist Lawrence Kahan reflected on the fact that he used the example of drunken drivers in his classroom: "If you are an alcoholic...you may feel this example derogates you on the basis of your disability." Ken Mayer, a political scientist, proclaimed a speech code similar to a flag burning amendment, calling them both inappropriate.

Movingly, Javier Calderon, a professor of music who described living under dictatorial regimes in Latin America, expressed his dismay that colleagues would limit their own freedoms, describing the Bill of Rights as something "precious." Silvia Montiglio, a classicist, expressed her confidence in students' intellectual powers and denounced the sponsors of speech codes as "ideologues."

The meeting changed everyone's sense of what was possible. In the campus paper, Downs observed that the Faculty Senate "spoke with the language of free men and women," and he noted that "we could become the very first university in the country to take back a code by a faculty vote rather than a court order."

Jason Shepard recalls: "I sat there in awe. I was so moved by it." It made him realize that there was a world in Wisconsin beyond the debates of the previous 18 months. "On the ad hoc committee," he says, "I was brainwashed into thinking that this was how the faculty thought. At the December 1 Faculty Senate [meeting], clear, rational thinkers analyzed the issues on the merits."

Lester Hunt, a senator, tells me: "I was completely taken by surprise. It was a sea change of public opinion. But no one was more surprised than the pro-code people." The meeting put abolition back on the table, at one extreme, and many authors of the minority report now felt that their position was a compromise that could satisfy everyone. Few truly believed that full abolition was a possibility.

A Niggardly Display of Evidence

The next meeting of the Faculty Senate, also for purposes of discussion, was on February 1. The pro-code forces tried mightily to win the argument about the requirements of harassment law and to discover campus cases that would justify the code. They did neither. Speaking for the majority of the ad hoc committee, Carin Clauss, a law professor adamantly in favor of a strong code, took up much of the meeting explaining both proposals, urging the greater clarity of the majority report, and insisting that the university would be exposed to dreadful liability if it did not have a code.

On January 27, Charles Cohen, the pro-code historian, had written, "as a spokesman for the Majority," to the dean and associate dean of students, asking for information about possible relevant "debasing and derogating expression in the classroom." The deans took their best shot, but most of their examples further alarmed anyone who cared about free speech: "Professor showed slides and made comments that made female students uncomfortable"; "Complainant feels faculty makes light of homophobia during lecture"; "Complainant reports prevalent homophobia and heterosexism in a language class"; "Faculty allegedly made insulting reference to the student's country (other than the U.S.)." Presumably, an insulting reference to the United States would not have been actionable.

Minority group leaders also had been searching for two months for incidents to relate, but their offering blew up on them. Amelia Rideau, a junior English major and vice chairwoman of the Black Student Union, told the Faculty Senate at its February meeting how a professor teaching Chaucer had used the word niggardly (she was unaware of the related controversy, the week before, in Washington, D.C.), and how he continued to use it even after she told him that she was offended. He was trying to explain its meaning--Chaucer used the term--but classmates, she complained, knew what it resembled. "I was in tears, shaking," she told the faculty. "It's not up to the rest of the class to decide whether my feelings are valid."

Rideau's plea was a reality check. If the proper use of a Chaucerian term while teaching The Canterbury Tales could be construed as harassment of a student who did not know the word's spelling or meaning, then the code was teaching some interesting expectations indeed. Many "abolitionists," as they now were called, believe that Rideau's speech, widely reported, was the turning point, setting the stage both for greater attendance at the March meeting and for the final vote. John Sharpless, a history professor, asked, "What other words are to be purged from our language? Thespian?"

On February 2, 1999, the Wisconsin State Journal editorialized, "Thank you, Amelia Rideau, for clarifying precisely why the UW-Madison does not need an academic speech code....Speech codes have a chilling effect on academic freedom and they reinforce defensiveness among students who ought to be more open to learning."

The Politics of Compromise

On the evening of February 1, Harvey Silverglate, who co-authored The Shadow University with me, addressed an eager audience on the Wisconsin campus, sponsored both by the student chapter of the ACLU and by the student Coalition for Conservative Leadership. He told them that a faculty speech code at a public university was "legally so absurd as barely to justify a debate" and that the selective enforcement characteristic of such policies undermines the essential doctrine of equality before the law. The vote between the majority and minority reports, he argued, was meaningless, because both positions were unconstitutional. There was only one option when it came to speech at the public University of Wisconsin: freedom.

Hoping to salvage something, and desperate not to fall too far behind the faculty on this, the University Committee now reversed itself and proposed abolition to the Faculty Senate meeting that would occur on March 1. The anti-code minority of the faculty on the ad hoc committee, however, feared that they could not secure a victory without the support of their pro-code colleagues, and they almost lost sight of their actual goal. Working with the committee majority and with members of the University Committee, they labored to find compromise language that might command the overwhelming support of the Faculty Senate. Faculty politics can do such things to otherwise rational people.

Near victory, the anti-code faculty members on the ad hoc committee did not want to insult code co-author Ted Finman, and at a University Committee meeting a few days before March 1, Finman succeeded in getting two clauses added to what was supposed to be the abolition proposal. All expressive behavior by faculty members was permitted unless 1) it constituted illegal discrimination or 2) it was unprotected by the First Amendment and by academic freedom.

This, however, was a breach large enough to drive an entire engine of repression through, because in leftist "critical legal theory," any expression that "demeans" the powerless is illegal discrimination, and nothing that creates "a hostile environment" is protected by the First Amendment or by academic freedom. The seemingly sensible "compromise" in fact invited prosecutions that still would be decided on a case-by-case basis.

Free Science, Free Speech

By the time the Faculty Senate considered this motion on March 1, it was beset by ambiguous and confusing language and by a profusion of tortured amendments. Clause after clause was proposed to modify Finman's language, and no one quite could explain what anything meant. By everyone's account, the meeting was in chaos, until it was rescued by William Onellion, a professor of experimental physics whom almost no one knew.

Onellion proposed an amendment putting a period after the declaration abolishing the code and deleting everything after that--namely, Finman's two conditions. Someone asked who would make the decisions necessitated by Finman's language. A pro-code professor, Bernice Durant, probably secured the abolitionists' victory by answering "the Office of Equity and Diversity Resources," which many faculty associated with such things as an earlier failed campaign to demand sensitivity training of any faculty member with a federal research grant. Downs argued that the office was always sympathetic to a complainant. The Faculty Senate approved Onellion's abolitionist amendment by a vote of 71 to 60.

Onellion is amused to find himself a hero in his colleagues' eyes. "I'm not a very political person," he tells me. "I have better things to with my life expectancy than campus politics." An elected senator, he had decided to attend his very first meeting because he wanted to vote to abolish the speech code. After 75 minutes of parliamentary wrangling, however, "I was bored out of my mind."

In Onellion's view, there were only three choices: retention, revision, or abolition. At a certain moment, "I saw that I could get what I wanted by putting a period at the end of a sentence and deleting everything that followed it." When a proponent of the code described his amendment as "just another ploy by the abolitionists," it took Onellion "three minutes to realize what abolitionist meant" in this context. Raising a point of personal privilege, he said that since his family descended from pro-Union Louisianans, he had no trouble being called an abolitionist. "I can play the game of cheap rhetorical tricks also," he observes.

I ask Onellion why he got involved in this controversy. He replies that scientists, unlike colleagues in the social sciences and humanities, are not "preoccupied" with social and political issues. Professors of physics are probably some of the most liberal voters in the country, he continues, but where "issues of free speech and censorship are involved," they part company with the politically correct: "It's a question of both principle and practicality. You can't get at the truth with-out pushing people and arguing wholly freely."

Scientists, he says, have a frame of reference for all this: "We remember the fate of science in Nazi Germany and of Lysenko in the Soviet Union." He draws a moral that professors would do well to learn: "If government has the power over discussion, the search for truth ends." Onellion reminds us why it is so important for the scientists at our universities to join the struggle for liberty.

Will the opponents of free speech find ways to stop this revolt? Will the vice chancellor for legal and executive affairs, the chancellor, or the Board of Regents block the repeal on legal grounds? When the University of Wisconsin's Office of Affirmative Action declares the abolition of the speech code to be a violation of employment law, will the administration force the faculty to take their university to court? Stay tuned.

In the meantime, as student Amy Kasper says, the tide is changing. Keep your eyes and ears on the undergraduates, for from them may come the most auspicious changes of all. I ask Jason Shepard how he felt after the vote for abolition. He says, "We were a couple of students who truly changed the face of this university. To play a small role in defending free speech is humbling. You have to spend your lifetime chipping away at oppression and censorship."

Amen. At Wisconsin, they did more than chip away.

What's Left?

akors@sas.upenn.edu (Alan Charles Kors) — Tue, 01 Dec 1998 00:00:00 EST

Liberalism and Its Discontents, by Alan Brinkley,

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 384 pages, $27.95

The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America, by Richard J. Ellis, Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 426 pages, $34.95

Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, by Richard Rorty, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 159 pages, $18.95

The American left is in crisis. For most of the 20th century, it thought that the only significant debates were among its own factions. Now it has lived through the election and re-election of Ronald Reagan. It has witnessed the collapse of planned economies. Political correctness, the left's latest gift to an ungrateful nation, has become the object of popular derision. Republicans control both houses of Congress, and politicians run from the appellation "liberal." The left increasingly asks what went wrong and where it should go from here. These works are three diverse contributions to that discussion.

In Liberalism and Its Discontents, Columbia historian Alan Brinkley offers a set of essays and lectures loosely linked under the topic of what has happened to liberalism. They are uneven in quality, covering topics that range from the young FDR to Southern politics to the career of Allard Lowenstein, the prime mover of the revolt against LBJ's candidacy in the Democratic Party in 1968. In his brief history of the 1960s, "The Therapeutic Radicalism of the New Left," Brinkley rightly sees the counterculture as a revolution of rising expectations. He fails, however, to understand the authentic passion of anti-Stalinism on the Old Left (would anyone keep referring to anti-Hitlerism as an "obsession"?) and blames the apolitical hippies rather than the ultraradical crazies for the counterculture's "failure" (if he's right, we can chalk up one more obligation to the hippies).

It is a mark of the sad state of American history as a profession that Brinkley correctly congratulates himself for the freshness of his own view that there has been serious opposition to modern liberalism in America, alive in various populisms, sundry traditionalisms, and a vibrant libertarian school of thought. Despite his best efforts, however, Brinkley hopelessly confuses these three intellectual and political tendencies. "The Problem of American Conservatism" (meaning its problem for historians, not its internal problem) conflates F.A. Hayek, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and the Chicago school of economics, among many equally disparate other elements, as "the right." For mainstream American historians, the "problem" apparently remains.

The heart of Brinkley's thesis about the fate of liberalism is that the inspirational vision of the New Deal gradually has been undermined by regional differences, unsolved problems, structural changes, and the whirlwind of the New Left and the '60s. Brinkley is best as a scholar of the New Deal and its legacy. His narrative of the phases, improvisations, camps, debates, and transmutations of the New Deal is fresh and probing, and it sheds genuine light on individuals, tensions, and turning points. He understands well that the deep recession of 1937 caught the New Dealers wholly by surprise and forced more-radical revisions in their thinking than the experience of 1932. He accurately concludes that the New Deal "did not end the Great Depression and the massive unemployment that accompanied it." Rather, it "greatly, and permanently, expanded the role of the federal government in American life." Although this was more a "symbolic" than "substantive" change as measured by the quality of people's lives, it altered their expectations of government, which now became the broker among competing demands for security, protection, and advantage.

In the final analysis, Brinkley writes, activist government reconciled the reformist instinct with the essentials of capitalism. That is not a new thesis, of course--the radical left, above all, has looked at the New Deal that way--but it is well argued here. In contrast to left-wing, right-wing, and libertarian critics of the New Deal, Brinkley sees this reconciliation as an inspirational accomplishment that freed liberals to pursue their other exhilarating but problematic "crusades": "fighting for civil rights, eliminating poverty, saving the environment, protecting [the world from] communism, reshaping the world." He does not assess their success in any of these.

Richard Ellis's The Dark Side of the Left is an effort to explain what seems problematic to him though obvious to many of us: How does it happen that leftist egalitarians in America often begin with humanitarian idealism and end in violent intolerance? Before tackling this question, Ellis, a professor of politics at Willamette University, seeks to establish his liberal bona fides. He makes certain we know that he voted for Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, and Clinton (twice); that he supports, among other things, public broadcasting and environmentalism; and that he believes "politicians, bureaucrats, and the federal government generally make this country a better place." Thus assured of his wisdom and virtue, we are prepared for his attempt to "toughen" the liberal tradition by criticizing it.

Ellis examines how egalitarianism turned "illiberal" in three periods of American history: the 19th and early 20th centuries (radical abolitionists, utopian communities, elitist democratic disdain for common lives); the 1960s (Students for a Democratic Society and the New Left in general); and the 1980s and '90s (radical feminism and radical environmentalism). Ellis creates a confusing congeries by terming all of this "illiberal egalitarianism."

When the issue is self-ownership vs. slavery, for example, almost all lovers of liberty have embraced the tragic necessity of violence. David Donald's classic study of the abolitionists' hatred of Lincoln, Lincoln Reconsidered, tells us far more about the dysfunctional sides of the radical abolitionists' absolutist politics than Ellis's sense that there was something fearsome about their either-or approach. He calls their attitude "Manichean," even though this was one of the rare cases where the issues actually were, literally and metaphorically, black and white.

In his account of utopian communities, Ellis ignores the essential point that these were wholly voluntary associations. The inability of such communities to sustain or even realize their cooperative ideals may be instructive about human nature and small communities, but it is not of a piece with efforts to coerce others into ways of life in which they lose their freedom to choose.

Nonetheless, there is lots of grand stuff in Ellis's work. He is at his best, displaying a fine ear for detail, when examining the dissonance between the love of radical intellectuals for the masses in the abstract and their contempt for ordinary lives in
the particular. He probably errs, however, in seeing the myriad New York artists and intellectuals who fall into this category as the "heirs" of Walt Whitman, in whose work it is often difficult to distinguish between poetic hyperbole and actual judgment. He's got the textual goods on Whitman, but this poet usually overflows the categories in which we try to contain him, as a student of American culture should know.

On SDS and the New Left, Ellis offers an astute descriptive autopsy--pathologies, failures, ideological narcissism, self-defeating social organization, and sectarianism gone over the edge --even if he lacks a convincing theory about the etiology of the patient's fatal malady or about why the plague emerged in France, Germany, and England at the same time it appeared in America. Despite reiterated assurances that he is not doing so, Ellis wrongly contrasts the supposed tolerance of the New Left's first generation with the murderous furies and detachment of the second generation, which came of age after the Tet offensive. As he knows (well enough to qualify his thesis frequently but always inadequately), the "dark side" of the New Left was displayed first and foremost by its early members as they grew older. Ellis sees clearly that when the objects of the radicals' love, the American "underclass," refused to love them back--wanting, of all things, a better material life for themselves and their children--the radicals turned against an "Amerika" that could not even produce a worthy set of domestic victims and began their romance with revolutionary killers in the Third World.

In his discussion of SDS, Ellis raises a deep analytical issue that relates to what the German sociologist Robert Michels, in his 1911 book Political Parties, called the "iron law of oligarchy." Based on the experience of European socialist parties, Michels inferred that even in the most ostensibly egalitarian organizations, structural and psychological imperatives lead inevitably to division of labor, hierarchy, and a set of leadership interests distinct from the interests of the organization's nominal constituents. (In contemporary terms, Michels discovered revolutionary rent seeking.) For Ellis, the SDS experience was Michels's model in reverse. SDS's aversion to bureaucracy and organization led not to stable hierarchy but to charismatic leadership, disguised and unaccountable. Instead of making the organization more "conservative" than its rhetoric, as in Michels's model, charismatic leadership made it ever more radical and disconnected. Ellis does not explore his notion of charisma and its political effects adequately, but his use of Michels is provocative.

Ellis's discussions of radical feminism and environmentalism are less successful. The people in these movements are his contemporaries, which may explain why he moves too often from analysis to polemic. At times, he simply reacts rather than weighing his words. His discussion of Catharine MacKinnon, for example, is often ad hominem, and it asserts rather than demonstrates inconsistencies and betrayals of her own values. In effect, he argues against MacKinnon as she argues against others.

By contrast, alas, Ellis takes very seriously the work of Susan Okin, who believes that gender hierarchy lies at the heart of social injustice and argues that even if husband and wife choose to live in a hierarchical marriage, the state should not allow it, "for the sake of the children." Ellis finds Okin "lucid," "powerful," and "unsettling"--above all, because she acknowledges the conflict between "personal freedom" and "social justice." In the end, his strongest argument against her is that the abolition of voluntary hierarchy in marriage would give too much power to the state. He should worry more about her than about the abolitionists.

Concerning the radical environmentalists, Ellis is entertaining and informative, but they fit ill with his model of "egalitarianism." They are here because their "misanthropy" illustrates well his secondary theme of left-wing detachment from and contempt for ordinary lives, which he believes is at the heart of the radical greens' agenda and worldview.

For Ellis, the real problem with all these groups is not that they illustrate something fatal about the left but that they make it more difficult for the left to succeed. Seeking the millennium in the wrong way prevents the quiet, friendly confiscation and redistribution of other people's property. Ellis offers a primer on how to avoid the wrong way: Do not 1) engage in politically correct Manicheanism, 2) idealize the oppressed, 3) hold apocalyptic visions, 4) tolerate authoritarian or charismatic leadership, 5) attribute false consciousness to others, 6) succumb to radical certainty, 7) deny the real distinction between public and private, or 7) think that crimes are justified if you deem them "unselfish." Well, there goes the whole left!

Ellis believes the political theorist Benjamin Barber has grasped the means of avoiding moral catastrophe: The left must be democrats first and egalitarians only after that. Barber, recall, thinks of the West as McDonald's, but that doesn't attribute false consciousness to anyone, does it? No contempt for ordinary lives there. From Ellis's perspective, Barber is saved by his willingness to let us be coerced only by a full 51 percent of our fellow citizens.

Richard Rorty, professor of the humanities at the University of Virginia, also wants the left to succeed, and he also has a theory about why that is not happening, which he lays out in Achieving Our Country. For Rorty, who has moved from analytic philosophy to skeptical pragmatism to terminal silliness, the real problem is that contempt for country and the illusion of scientific truth have led leftists away from their rightful role as "agents" into a self-defeating role as "spectators." Agents do things like organize effective coalitions to take the fruits of one person's labor or estate and give it to another person. Spectators do things like teach university courses about phallogocentric hegemonies. (This is the only good argument that I've heard in favor of courses about phallogocentric hegemonies: Better a tendentious, fatuous theorist than a thief.)

Rorty believes there was a time when the left was Whitmanesque, celebrating America, despite her faults, as a set of possibilities, and when it was imbued with the spirit of John Dewey, eschewing scientific certainties and seeking a civic consensus on what the nation could become and achieve. Marx got in the way. He had an unfortunate commitment to notions of science and historical certainty. There went Whitman's festive spirit and Dewey's democratic pragmatism.

The New Left got in the way. It could have thought of certain phenomena (slavery, Jim Crow, exploitation, Vietnam, and the like) as our "tragedies," but instead it thought of them as our "sins," which made America unforgiveable rather than something that could be transcended and achieved. This alienated people who belonged to unions and rather liked their country. There went the natural coalition between labor and academics who read Dewey.

Postmodernism got in the way. It was attracted to science, in Rorty's singular estimation. With no trace of irony, he writes that "the Foucauldian Left represents an unfortunate regression to the Marxist obsession with scientific rigor." It spoke a jargon that put off the average working guy. It engaged in speculation instead of reformist coalition building.

Rorty's fondest hope for the species is that the "Cultural Left," which has done so much to reduce cultural "sadism" through what the defenders of the corporations call "political correctness," be united with the "Reformist Left," creating an effective coalition, just in the nick of time, to defeat the forces of "selfishness."

Why just in the nick of time? Consistent with his belief that there is no real correspondence between our "fictions" and any objective reality, Rorty asserts that 75 percent of the American people are descending into an underclass ripe for demagogic and chauvinistic totalitarianism. According to his analysis, "the average married couple, both working full time" already cannot "take home more than $30,000." If that family's "take home" versus its actual earned income--$51,000 in 1997--concerns him, he might consider lowering its taxes. Given that America provides neither public transportation nor public health insurance, "this income permits a family of four only a humiliating, hand-to-mouth existence." (He should travel more.) It will get worse. "Globalization" will drive down most people's wages in the industrialized West, and we soon will have an embittered, immiserated 75 percent of our people ruled by "the richest 25%," including "platoons of vital young entrepreneurs" who travel first-class on transatlantic jets (the horror!).

This will lead to "the formation of hereditary castes," with the ruling caste making "all the important decisions." They will buy off authors like Rorty, and readers bright enough to read him, to give the appearance of a "political class," "for the sake of keeping the proles quiet." They will get the intellectuals to devote themselves to culture. When the remaining middle class realizes that it also is going to be "downsized," however, it will refuse to be taxed "to provide benefits for anyone else," and "something will crack." Convinced that "the system has failed," voters will seek a strongman, and "a scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis's novel It Can't Happen Here may then be played out." Blacks, browns, women, and homosexuals will lose all of their gains, and "the words `nigger' and `kike' will once again be heard in the workplace." The new strongman will make his peace with the "superrich," and everyone will wonder how it happened so easily: "Where, they will ask, was the American Left?"

How might America avoid this catastrophe, and "the American Left" that damning question? First, the left must abandon theory for action. Second, it must form alliances with the patriotic labor unions, abandoning its anti-Americanism. Against selfishness, such a resurrected "American Left" would devise "a People's Charter," a list of constantly published and reiterated specific reforms, "imprinted on the memory both of professional people and of those who clean the professionals' toilets." Then we can achieve "our country."

These books unintentionally provide a partial answer to the question of why the left has fallen on such hard times. The left has learned almost nothing from history. It has not read or listened to those who predicted the fate of the New Deal, of socialism, or of state bureaucracy. Its understanding of economics is on a par with William Jennings Bryan's understanding of Darwinian biology. Its understanding of human motivation is untroubled by the world of fact and unchallenged by theories hostile to its premises.

Brinkley senses this, and he appeals to his fellow liberals to engage the traditions of those who criticize the modern so-called liberal order. Ellis seems open-minded enough, yet he poses the question of how democratic and egalitarian premises lead to authoritarian conclusions without even a soupçon of familiarity with Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, or Ronald Coase. He depicts "the Goldwater candidacy" as seeming to legitimate "the evils of segregation, the reactionary and often brutally violent resistance to civil rights for blacks, [and] the conspiratorial fantasies of the John Birch Society." He is certain that "redistributive or welfare measures are not inherently illiberal" and that we need "more today than ever before" a sharper sensitivity to "the inevitable and profound inequalities generated by capitalist markets." Such asides aside, however, Ellis argues in good faith, mind to mind.

Rorty, by contrast, recognizes no good faith among his adversaries. The left ("by definition," he asserts) is the agent of hope, because it alone works for the redistribution of wealth, the reduction of suffering, the end of sadism, and the defeat of selfishness. Critics of the left are "part of a larger attempt to discredit all critics of the cynical oligarchy that has bought up the Republican Party." When the data of history--the productivity of free men and women, and the catastrophe of state power --contradict one's view of reality, one either changes one's view of reality or denies the very notion of reality altogether. Rorty has chosen the latter course, responding to empirical claims with "fictions."

Unlike Rorty, Brinkley and Ellis seek lessons from history. May their coalitions broaden and deepen, open as they are to data and criticism. May Rorty theorize in peace, happily detached from the problems posed by human, historical, and natural fact.