Measuring Political Correctness: Has It Waned or Simply Metastasized?
Donald A Downs, The University of Wisconsin, Madison

A lot of ink has been spilt over the threats political correctness has posed to academic freedom and free speech on America’s campuses over the course of the last twenty years. Readers of this website are no doubt aware of the plethora of books, articles, editorials, and speeches that have addressed this topic, most of which have drawn pessimistic conclusions about the status of these principles in higher education. Much evidence supports this pessimism on many fronts, as John Leo summarizes in a recent article in City Journal, a policy journal of the Manhattan Institute.

Nonetheless, two schools of thought have challenged this pessimism. The first school has dissented all along, accusing the critics of political correctness of overstating the problem and of “cherry picking” selective cases rather than presenting sufficiently systematic accounts. Political scientist Jon Gould makes this claim in his noteworthy 2005 book, Speak No Evil, which is a methodologically systematic account of the use and effects of speech codes in higher education. The second school of thought is more nuanced in terms of its estimation of harm. This school concedes that political correctness was harmful in its day, but maintains that this day has passed, like so many other fads. Three years ago the noted legal historian Kermit Hall wrote that “the era of political correctness is over,” an observation that was echoed by a writer in the New York Times.

Several authors have presented extensive examples of the stifling of freedom on campus, including Alan Kors, Harvey Silverglate, Richard Bernstein, Roger Kimball, and Nat Hentoff. Their conclusions are supported by a visit to the web page of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and other estimable sources. But even if one considers the conclusions of Hall and others to be decidedly unduly optimistic, as I do, the fact remains that these studies -- however well done and suggestive -- are largely anecdotal in nature. In order to be more credible, critics of higher education bear the burden of substantiating their claims in a more systematic manner. Thus far, none such work has appeared.

But such an undertaking is no easy matter. One problem is the distinct possibility that many cases have taken place beneath the radar screen of public awareness. The Committee for Academic Freedom and Rights (a privately funded group of professors who have been defending academic freedom and related principles for a decade at the University of Wisconsin) has discovered several such cases at Madison, and there is no reason to think that the Wisconsin experience is unique in this respect. Indeed, it is very possible that the cases reported by FIRE and other sources are merely the tip of the iceberg. But we do not know.

A colleague of mine at Madison made a remark a couple of years ago that altered my thinking about this issue. He said that “political correctness is not dead -- it has metastasized." If so, political correctness may no longer have to deploy public persecutions to accomplish its ends. Instead, it can rely on more subtle forces, such as changes in attitudes and the soft despotism of social and academic conformity. (Contrary to its pretensions, the modern academy is hardly immune to Tocqueville’s famous observations concerning herd instincts and the tyranny of the majority). Consistent with the metastasizing theme, the stifling of dissent might often take place inside of the smaller subunits of universities, where everyday life carries on beneath the radar screen of public knowledge. One is reminded of another Frenchman, Michel Foucault, who taught that modern power usually manifests itself in more subtle ways, in the nooks and crannies of polities and institutions rather than in the glare of the public sphere.

But how does one go about garnering more systematic evidence to support or refute these reasonable presumptions? This is the challenge researchers need to meet as the intellectual dispute over the status of academic freedom moves to the next stage of analysis and engagement. In the meantime, some recent actions by academic leaders provide yet more suggestive evidence that the negative effects of political correctness continue to live on. In the next essay, I will discuss the American Historical Association’s recent refusal to condemn speech codes in the aftermath of that venerable organization’s decision to condemn the Student Bill of Rights.

NAS2:19 PM

Myopic Diversity
Jay Bergman, Central Connecticut State University

In American higher education, "diversity" is the reigning mantra administrators and faculty invoke to impress on students the virtues of admitting and promoting certain "underrepresented" minorities for the unique perspectives they purportedly bring to issues ranging from racial profiling and discrimination to astronomy and physics.*

Only by doing so, the argument goes, will universities produce graduates capable of prospering in an America that is increasingly multicultural. According to Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, diversity is more important to a university than studying Shakespeare and mathematics.

But the fetishization of diversity based on skin color and ethnicity has had the effect of blinding us to the more profound and powerful forms of diversity -- those based on what people think as opposed to how they look -- that determine so much of what happens in the world. The atrocities that al-Qaida and other Islamic terrorists commit in the Middle East are not only repellent to most Americans but incomprehensible to them because our colleges and universities are not educating students about the kinds of diversity -- in al-Qaida's case a religious fanaticism alien to even the most militant religious sects in the United States -- that matter most.

Another kind of diversity too often ignored is that reflective of the distinctive cultures nations and nationalities produce. As a Russian historian, I begin every semester telling my students that the Russians, while obviously sharing certain universal human traits and aspirations, are in many ways not like us; that they are the product of a profoundly different national culture and history; and that they simply don't see the world the way we do.

Evidence of this abounds in the part of the former Soviet Union that again calls itself Russia. There, the increasingly repressive regime headed by Vladimir Putin is basically a state staffed by former Soviet secret policemen without the messianic communist ideology, intent primarily on recovering what Russians call the "Near Abroad" -- Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and all the other components of the Soviet Union that went their own way in 1991 when the U.S.S.R. collapsed.

As the spate of recent assassinations, almost certainly engineered by agents acting on orders of the regime, makes amply clear, the autocratic habits Putin and his cronies acquired as Soviet policemen are not easily discarded. Nor is the democratization that seemed triumphant in the early 1990s likely to resume anytime soon.

None of this implies that there is a new Cold War between the United States and Russia. The original Cold War between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union reflected a conflict not only of interests but of ideologies. In contrast, Russian-American relations before the Bolshevik Revolution were based mostly on calculations of national interests, which sometimes coincided, and sometimes not, and the same applies to these relations today.

In sum, what Americans are witnessing today in Russia is the reassertion of a national culture that predates the Soviet Union and whose origins are traceable literally hundreds of years into the past. In its rejection of the individualism that is at the core of Western Civilization; in its stark equation of liberty and anarchy; in its assumption that territorial expansion is the principal criterion of a country's moral and political health; and in its paternalistic notion that the Russian people are children and therefore lacking the rationality and maturity to share in governance, this culture is almost diametrically the opposite of our American one.

It would be a grave mistake for those in Washington entrusted with the formulation and execution of foreign policy to ignore this fundamental truth.

And it would be just as serious a mistake for colleges and universities in America to continue to confine their concept of diversity to the holy trinity of race, gender and ethnicity. It is an obsession that blinds them to the diversity of national culture and history -- a diversity that helps to clarify much in the world today that would otherwise be strange and inexplicable.
NAS1:23 PM