Suleiman also question the accuracy of Loupan'sarticle.

Loupan's "allegations concerning the teachingof French literature at Harvard, by me and mycolleagues, are a web of lies," she writes.Suleiman later calls them a "work of theimagination, not of journalism."

"I find it incomprehensible that a major Frenchnewspaper could sink to the level of ignorance andcallousness manifested in the article by VictorLoupan," she writes.

Both Suleiman Jardine say they view the articleas a right-wing assault on American highereducation.

The intellectual movement against feminism andmulticulturalism began with the right-wing attackin the United States, and has been picked up byboth the French right-wing in the case of LeFigaro and also by some liberal Frenchjournalists and intellectuals, Suleiman says.

"I think the French, for reasons having to dowith debates in France over the role of minoritiesand 'French identity', are very open to what werecognize in the United States as the right-wingattack on multiculturalism," Suleiman says. "Butthe problem is that they don't recognize thepolitical nature of these attacks."

"Some people actually believe both here andthere that all feminist thought is 'dogmatic,close-minded' and so on," Suleiman says. "But thisis of course not true. It really is possible tobe a feminist and intelligent."

Political Correctness

Those who attack political correctness,Suleiman says, simplify and reduce what they wantto attack and then pick several "sensational"cases which they repeat and over.

An example of this, Jardine says, is theattack on feminism in America. Frenchjournalists, she says tend to mention only twopeople, Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin,even though "they do not represent all women orall feminists in the U.S."

"They take an extreme opinion or an extremestatement, and generalize it," Jardine says.

"But there thousands and thousands of collegeand universities in the U.S., and three or fourcases simply don't tell you how things reallyare," Suleiman says.

Richard Rorty, University professor of thehumanities at the University of Virginia, says thecase raises the issue of the appropriation of theP.C. debate.

"I think that a lot of silly things are beingdone by left-wing professors in the U.S. and inFrance, so the left does open itself to criticism,but it sounds as if Figaro, like WallStreet Journal, is using this silliness to mount acampaign against anything that opposes their ownright-wing view," he says, Rorty says Jardine andSuleiman are not examples of this "silliness."

Suleiman agrees that the media coverage seemsto be a reaction against the liberal educationalagenda, which focuses on the role of women andminorities.