Upside Down in the Groves of Academe

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Imagine places where it is considered racist to speak of the rights of the individual when they conflict with the community's prevailing opinion. Where it is taboo to debate the moral fitness of homosexuals as parents, and sexist to order a Domino's pizza because the chain's chairman donates money to an antiabortion group. Imagine institutions that insist they absolutely defend free speech but punish the airing of distasteful views by labeling them unacceptable "behavior" instead of words -- and then expel the perpetrators.

Imagine a literature class that equates Shakespeare and the novelist Alice Walker, not as artists but as fragments of sociology. Shakespeare is deemed to represent the outlook of a racist, sexist and classist 16th century England, while Walker allegedly embodies a better but still oppressive 20th century America. Finally, imagine a society in which some of the teachers reject the very ideas of rationality, logic and dialogue as the cornerstone assumptions of learning -- even when discussing science.

Where is this upside-down world? According to an increasing number of concerned academics, administrators and students, it is to be found on many U.S. college campuses. And it is expanding into elementary and secondary school classrooms.

For most of American history, the educational system has reflected and reinforced bedrock beliefs of the larger society. Now a troubling number of teachers at all levels regard the bulk of American history and heritage as racist, sexist and classist and believe their purpose is to bring about social change -- or, on many campuses, to enforce social changes already achieved.

This new thinking is not found everywhere, to be sure, but in many places professors contend it is becoming dominant. While American universities and colleges have always been centers for the critical examination of Western assumptions and beliefs, the examination has taken a harsh and strident turn. At times it amounts to a mirror-image reversal of basic assumptions held by the nation's majority.

To the dismay of many civil libertarians, the new turns of thought are fostering a decline in tolerance and a rise in intellectual intimidation. Says Leon Botstein, president of New York's liberal Bard College: "Nobody wants to listen to the other side. On many campuses, you really have a culture of forbidden questions."

Obfuscatory course titles and eccentric reading lists frequently are wedded to a combative political agenda or outlandish views of the nation's culture and values. At Duke University in North Carolina, an English-department course uses plays and films to pursue the theme that organized crime "is a metaphor for American business as usual." Another Duke offering condemns a heterosexual bias in traditional Western literature; its professor has written about such topics as "Jane Austen and the masturbating girl."

A University of Texas professor of American studies has constructed a course on 19th century writers to alternate between famous white men one week and obscure women the next, in part to illuminate "the prison house of gender." A woman who has been visiting professor at both the University of Hawaii and the University of Texas describes traditional liberal arts as prone to "a fetishized respect for culture as a stagnant secular religion." Mary Louise Pratt, a Stanford professor of comparative literature, has objected to "the West's relentless imperial expansion" and its "monumentalist cultural hierarchy that is historically as well as morally distortive."

Although most students at most colleges continue to take courses bearing at least some resemblance to what their predecessors studied, even the traditional curriculum is often read in new ways. Valerie Babb, an assistant professor of English at Georgetown, is teaching a course this semester called White Male Writers. Among them: Hawthorne, Melville and Faulkner. The title reflects one of the course's chief assertions: that just as women or black writers are studied as a class that shares a particular sensibility, so too should these white male artists be. However great their works might be, they speak merely as "one element of the large and diversified body of literature."

The flowering of new and at times exotic theory is in keeping with the great tradition of liberal-arts education. But many of the new critics have a hostile view of traditional scholarship and seem to judge ideas by their "political correctness" (abbreviated as P.C.) -- that is, on the basis of whom they might offend.

The University of Delaware barred Linda Gottfredson from accepting money for her educational research from the controversial Pioneer Fund because it had financed unrelated studies into possible hereditary differences in intelligence among the races. The review committee judged that by underwriting such studies, Pioneer had exhibited "a pattern of activities incompatible with the university's mission." The University of Michigan student newspaper condemned sociologist Reynolds Farley for, as he phrases it, "lack of ideological perspective, for not directly attacking gender and racial differences in wages." A male philosophy professor at Pomona College in California has been fighting a lonely and losing battle to get a course critical of feminist theory listed among women's studies. Several schools have punished students for expressing religious objections to homosexuality or, as at the University of Washington, questioning a professor's assertion that lesbians make the best mothers.

Taboos on fields of inquiry are increasingly accompanied by bans on language. According to a growing number of academic theorists, the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech can be legitimately laid aside for worthy reasons. Chief among them is if it interferes with what is billed as a new and nonconstitutional right: the right to avoid having one's feelings hurt, or what Botstein calls a "subjective interpretation of harm." Thus dozens of universities have introduced tough new codes prohibiting speech that leads to, among other things, a "demeaning atmosphere," and some of them have suspended students for using epithets toward blacks, homosexuals or other minorities, not only in classrooms but also in dormitories, in intramural sports and even off campus altogether.

"Freedom of expression is no more sacred than freedom from intolerance or bigotry," says John Jeffries, a black who is associate dean of the graduate ( school of management and urban policy at New York City's New School for Social Research. But on some campuses, hostility to white males is more or less condoned. The University of Wisconsin at Parkside suspended one student for addressing another as "Shaka Zulu"; yet the university's Madison campus held that the term red-neck was not discriminatory. At some schools, professors teach that white males can never be victims of racism, because racism is a form of repressive political power -- and white males already hold the power in Western society.

At Brown University, President Vartan Gregorian redefined the racist, wee- hours tirade of a drunken student as unacceptable behavior rather than as protected free speech and, having thereby finessed First Amendment concerns, expelled the offender. Although Gregorian insists he was responding to the whole set of circumstances, his explanation is widely disputed. Says Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, a First Amendment activist: "Gregorian is engaged, unwittingly I suppose, in classic Orwellian speech."

In an unlikely tactical alliance to ban such activities, Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois, a conservative Republican, this month introduced a bill with the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union. The measure is designed to discourage private colleges from disciplining students "solely on the basis of conduct that is speech or other communication." It is given a good chance of passage.

In the nation's elementary and secondary schools, the polarization is not yet so extreme. But increasingly curriculums are being written to satisfy the political demands of parents and community activists. In some cases, expediency counts for more than facts. New York State officials, for example, have responded to pressure from Native American leaders by revamping the state high school curriculum to include the shaky assertion that the U.S. Constitution was based on the political system of the Iroquois Confederacy. In Berkeley, chicana activist Martha Acevedo, who is vice chairman of the school board, has blocked adoption of new textbooks despite state approval for their multicultural approach. According to her, the books lack "positive role models." She cites the depiction of a 19th century Hispanic Robin Hood-style figure who is shown in one text on a wanted poster.

Perhaps the most problematic development is the emergence in dozens of cities of "Afrocentric" curriculums. All of them legitimately seek to ) bolster black children's confidence in their ability to achieve and to debunk the patronizing notion that black American history and culture began with the Emancipation Proclamation. When pursued with intellectual discipline, the Afrocentric idea can be inspirational. Says Franklyn Jenifer, president of Howard University, in recalling his own education at that historically black school: "Every course I took was infused with some sense of our destiny or my personal destiny and the possibility of my achieving it."

But through zealotry or inadequate research, too many of these courses have expanded their claims far beyond the generally accepted list of black attainments. Among the most controversial assertions: that ancient Greece derived -- no, stole -- its culture from black Africa; that black Africans invented science and mathematics; that the Egypt of the pharaohs was a black culture; and that a racist white Establishment has systematically hidden these and other black achievements. The hazard of such courses is that they may instill less pride than resentment.

Ethnic material increasingly is taught to children of all races; conventional history increasingly is not. In education-minded Brookline, Mass., where 79% of high school graduates go on to college, parents have had to fight to restore a European-history course that was canceled as Eurocentric and elitist. Meanwhile, students have been enticed into fringe electives with such sales pitches as "Have you ever wondered what goes on in the mind of a voodoo doctor?"

Why are Western cultural and social values so out of favor in the classroom when so much of the rest of the world has moved, during the past couple of years, to embrace them? Roger Kimball, conservative author of Tenured Radicals, a book harshly critical of the trend, blames the coming of age of the academic generation shaped by the struggles of the '60s. Its members, he says, vowed back then to transform campuses into engines of ongoing social change; now they are in a position to impose their will. A much less conspiratorial interpretation is that American schools and colleges are dealing with a demographic change that will take another couple of decades to grip society as a whole -- the shift, because of higher birth and immigration rates among nonwhite and Hispanic people, from a majority-white to a truly multiracial society. These nonwhite and Hispanic students want a curriculum that gives them more dignity. So do women and gays -- and faculty from all those groups. Says the Rev. Clarence Glover Jr., who teaches a course about the sins of "the European-American male" at Southern Methodist University in Dallas: "People of color have always been a majority in the world and are now becoming a majority in America. The issue becomes, How do we begin to share power?"

Courses that explore these questions are increasingly popular among students in general, but the primary audience for minority-oriented curriculums is usually the minorities themselves. Typically, they seek courses that reassure as much as instruct them. At San Francisco State College and also in that city's two-year City College, students can minor in gay and lesbian studies, with such offerings as Gay Male Relationships and Sexual Well-Being. The City College department was founded in 1989, says chairman Jack Collins, because "it will raise the self-esteem of lesbian and gay students who will realize that they are complete people, that we do have recognizable and describable cultures."

The chief risk in any ideologically based curriculum is that it can promote tribalism and downplay the value of discovering common cultural ground. The very idea of the melting pot, of assimilation, indeed of a common American identity, is under fire in some academic circles. Warns Diane Ravitch, adjunct professor of history and education at Columbia: "If we teach kids to connect themselves to one group defined by race or language or religion, then we have no basis for public education. We need to retain a sense of the common venture."

Colleges are as subject to fad and fashion as the rest of society -- perhaps more, for the client base of students turns over quickly. But few scholars believe the current intellectual battles will end soon -- particularly as the confrontation permeates other levels of education. In the process, the American tradition of tolerance in diversity, an uneven tradition at best, may be strained as rarely before.

With reporting by Anne Hopkins and Daniel S. Levy/New York, with other bureaus