Certainly, Thernstrom and his claims do not need yet another media sounding board--he has made his victimization at the hands of undergraduates and The Crimson known to numerous national newspapers and magazines and in best-selling books, such as RTLsh D'Souza's Illiberal Education. Yet it still puzzles me that a tenured professor, particularly at Harvard, would claim that he was the powerless victim in a struggle between a few undergraduates and their teacher.
Given that the struggle was precisely about scholarship and the language of scholarship, it is no wonder that the campus newspaper would seek to discuss the issue and it is no wonder that Thernstrom might feel threatened. Yet in the aftermath of his attacks on The Crimson, the effect of shouting "p.c." has been less speech and not more; it has forced students into silence, and merely amplified the professorial bully pulpit that the professor, by profession, already possessed.
A few students, in their impertinence, dared to question the personal implications of their professor's language and of his exclusion and inclusion of certain texts in the syllabus. Such a personal interest, magnified as a public interest, became from the Right a "politically correct" interest.
By drawing attention to himself and away from the question of language and its political power in the classroom, Thernstrom used the personal (his person) to cover and efface the political altogether. The issue of "racial insensitivity" became an issue about Thernstrom, and not about the students or the concerns that had been raised by them.
The very term "politically correct," I would argue, works not unlike the convert rhetoric of the Holocaust advertisement or the Peninsula "special" issue. Indeed, these texts themselves were heavily invested in the "p.c." debate. This debate has opened the flood gates for a covert Right-wing hostility that pretends to operate independently from structures of social, cultural and institutional power. To term an opinion "politically correct" has come to be a power play in itself that delegitimizes the content of the opinion, placing it outside debate and outside what need be debated.
AN OP-ED IN THE most recent Harvard Magazine terms a Core class "politically correct" because it assigns books written by "African American Women Writers." The author, William Cole, proposes to translate the hidden agenda for us: "read: Novels of Social Criticism by Black Women, Written Primarily Since 1960 or So." I have to imagine, since Cole doesn't specify, that what he is telling us here is that "Black" and "African American" are merely political distinctions, with no scholarly consequence; that to specify race is to specify "social criticism"; and that a course about presumably contemporary authors (his presumption) is so ambiguous as a truly "Core" necessity that we can't even pinpoint the dates and must rely on a mere "or So" to describe the period.
Cole's argument is that Black students, particularly Black women, flock to this course and, thus, not to a course on Dante (his example). Social segregation between Black and white students, he contends, is reinforced by intellectual and academic self-segregation. Moreover, a Core education should include texts chosen "by dint of their universality," texts that "transcend the confines of historical and cultural context," he argues.
Who is he kidding? We seem to be back to the myth of veritas all over again. And given the slim distinction between curricular and extracurricular for those of us who have spent so many Harvard hours at The Crimson, it should seem no wonder that the academic debates over multiculturalism and "p.c.," over objective truth and professional discipline, seem so closely related to the problems we face as journalists.
Cole calls Literature and Arts A-50 both "popular" and "politically correct," as if, like Thernstrom, he would like to suggest that the canon, the institution, even the tenured professor, is being threatened by the overwhelming collective power of identity politics. Way back when Cole was an undergraduate at Columbia--in the 1980s--all the kids had to study "mainly the works of dead white males," but nobody seemed to mind, he says. I am not particularly interested here in a debate about the relative merits of Harvard and Columbia's core systems; it seems to me of little difference that there are, perhaps, a handful of courses here that address non-canonized texts, while Columbia has remained more traditional. What disturbs me about Cole's argument is his refusal to acknowledge difference whatsoever, that differences of experience among students, professors and course authors reflect real dynamics of social, professional and rhetorical power.
Time and time again, the effort to assert these differences, particularly in institutions that precisely insist upon certain assumptions of universality, has been met by strong backlash and not a little anxiety. From Professor Thernstrom's railings to William Cole's reactionary tirades, the signs of conservative distress are apparent. That those who call for "reopening" debate so often seem to have controlled the debate all along is an irony not without consequence. It reminds us that the slogan "politically correct" has come to identify the correcting discipline of the politically powerful.
JUST AS THE REASONED grammar of the Holocaust ad, Peninsula and "political correctness" tends to efface individual and personal differences, liberal arguments for multiculturalism have too often emphasized rhetorical strategies that do not translate into substantive reconfigurations of power. As Susan Faludi `81 wrote in The New York Times Magazine this weekend, the writer must "[assert] herself from behind the veil of the printed page." Faludi, a former managing editor of The Crimson and author of Backlash, was calling for public speech that actually touches people and that forces us into the public. As writers, as journalists, such a call might also apply to writing; it might demand that we acknowledge the personal and political implications that such "veils" conceal.
Last fall, as I sat in my office at The Crimson, a reporter, J. Eliot Morgan `92, came to report that his audio tapes had been seized by his interviewee, City University of New York Professor Leonard Jeffries. Morgan's life had been threatened, and he was scared. Jeffries's actions came after Morgan had provided some information about the leadership of the newspaper. From my name, and from the names of other top executives, Jeffries determined that the Crimson was a "Jewish newspaper" that would merely manipulate his comments. In some measure, it was my name, torn from behind my comfortable veil, that had provoked his angry words. It was Jeffries's anti-Semitism, directed towards me, that had brought Morgan to my door.
Despite the power of our disciplines, neither journalists nor academics can entirely control the personal and political investments that we make from day to day. Nor, as I have learned, can we entirely ignore the investments that are made in us. If anything, the attempt to regulate such controls, with the assumption of success or of necessity, tends to undermine the important distinctions that both people and their politics require.
If hostile rhetoric these days tends to confine itself to (and confine others under) covert tactics, one might wonder how a "parting shot," with its aggressive invocation, should be received. With suspicion, I think. The "shot" and the author may be modified by the apparent safety of their concurrent departures, but such stable assurances come not without some reverberation or without some consequence to the violence that is done here.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz '92 was president of The Crimson in 1991.