by Bruce Bawer
Yes, there are many students—alas—who get turned by identity studies into little commissars who see it as their purpose in life to be Thought Police. They don’t know enough about the history of the twentieth century to realize that they are the philosophical progeny of the uniformed thugs who led freethinking people off to the gulag in Stalin’s Russia and to reeducation camps in Mao’s China. They don’t know enough about the history of ideas to understand that the ideas to which they have pledged their loyalty are not ideas at all, in any authentic sense, but fierce, rigid, airless, totalitarian orthodoxies.
The fact that at least some college students rebel against these orthodoxies is cheering proof that intelligent young people do have a natural eagerness to learn—to learn, not be brainwashed—that cannot easily be quenched. They have a thirst for real knowledge, a thirst to understand the world around them—a natural inquisitiveness about life that is, after all, when it comes down to it, what the humanities are really all about. And they are savvy enough to recognize that identity studies and all these other bogus “studies” do not address any of their questions.
There are other reasons for hope. These “studies” first gained ground—and grew, and grew—because administrators were scared of being called bigots, racists, misogynists, homophobes. But today such accusations have been hurled around so much that they are steadily losing their power. One can only hope this will spell the beginning of the end for “disciplines” founded entirely on guilt-tripping.
Then there is the Internet. It has its pluses and minuses. The minuses are mostly obvious. One plus is that the Internet makes it impossible for propaganda-slinging professors to control the flow of ideas to their students. To Google anything is to discover criticism of it. It is, accordingly, impossible for any teacher to fool a truly curious student into buying, for example, the notion that social constructionism is a universally accepted scientific concept in the same way as the second law of thermodynamics.
And there is yet another cause for hope: the existence of intrepid champions of the true humanities who have been struggling against these noxious trends for years.
The time: late one night in 1993. The place: a dorm at the University of Pennsylvania. Eden Jacobowitz, a freshman, is writing a paper in his dorm room when a group of women outside begin singing and chanting so loudly that he finds it difficult to work.
“Shut up, you water buffalo!” he shouts out the window.
The subsequent events occur in rapid succession. The women, who are black, charge Jacobowitz with racist harassment. The university agrees, arguing that the water buffalo is an African animal. (It is Asian.) When Jacobowitz refuses to accept a settlement that would oblige him to plead guilty of racism and attend a racial-sensitivity seminar, the administration decides to prosecute him, an action that could lead to his suspension or expulsion.
At this point Jacobowitz engages Alan Charles Kors as his advisor. Kors, in turn, brings in the Pennsylvania ACLU. Intensive research establishes that there is absolutely no record of “water buffalo” ever being used as a racist epithet in English or in any other language. But “water buffalo,” it emerges, is the English translation of a Hebrew slang word for a thoughtless or rowdy person—a word that was part of Jacobowitz’s vocabulary when he was a yeshiva student.
The evidence exculpating Jacobowitz is overwhelming; that against him is nil. The story gains international attention. Newspapers around the world criticize the university’s persecution of the innocent student. In the Wall Street Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz calls it “Kafkaesque.” On NBC Nightly News, John Chancellor comments: “The language police are at work on the campuses of our better schools. . . . The culture of victimization is hunting for quarry.” But university administrators are determined to prove their racial sensitivity by destroying Jacobowitz.
The public criticism mounts. Finally the accusers buckle. Claiming that the media frenzy has made it impossible for them to get justice, they withdraw their charges. Then, and only then, does the university drop what is now known as the “water buffalo” case.
That case had immense repercussions. It led Kors and civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silvergate to establish the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) in 1999. Over the years, FIRE has fought many battles around the United States, successfully challenging “diversity” requirements and political litmus tests for hiring, tenure, and promotion, and defending students’ and faculty members’ First Amendment rights in cases involving allegedly offensive speech, the stifling of dissent, and much else.
The case also led Kors to devote much of his time to delivering lectures about the dire changes that have transformed the academy in recent decades. Kors spells out the differences between then and now sharply: the pre-sixties secular-humanist university was founded on the ideas of free speech promulgated by John Stuart Mill; the humanities today are founded on the selective censorship advocated by post-sixties icon Herbert Marcuse, who called for “the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race or religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.”
Kors chides university administrators who “have given over the humanities, the soft social sciences, and the entire university in loco parentis to the zealots of oppression studies and coercive identity politics”—an act that, he writes, has resulted in “a soft tyranny of groupthink, unconscious bias, and self-inflated sense of a mission of demystification.” American universities, he charged in a 2006 lecture at the University of Cape Town,
believe that blacks, women, gays, and lesbians stand in need of special protections not afforded to others. Where all these groups, in fact, have struggled so fiercely and at such cost for legal equality, our academic leaders believe that they must be protected from arguments or even from the punch lines of jokes, as if these heroic souls were too weak to live with freedom. . . . The assignment of official group identity always worsens, not betters, human relations at campuses and in the broader society, creating barriers and defensiveness along with injustice.
Kors also criticizes many of his fellow academic historians for their “tendentiousness”—for “seeing their work as an extension of their politics, and merely looking for evidence, however nonrepresentative, to support what they wish to believe. The excitement of being an historian, however, whatever the reason we choose a topic, is precisely to be surprised and forced by evidence to modify our deepest views.” For himself,
I don’t want disciples of my worldview. I want students who know how to read deeply, how to analyze, how to locate the essential points of similarity and divergence among thinkers, and, indeed, how to understand, with intellectual empathy, how the world looks from the diverse perspectives that constitute the history of European thought. I know that I am not alone, but I also know, alas, that I am in a distinct minority in my pedagogical goals in the humanities and the so-called social sciences.
Twenty minutes or so by foot from the Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia is a narrow, tree-lined block of Sansom Street dotted with charming trattorias and bistros. On a hot day in early May 2010, I meet Kors there for a modest lunch and a couple of hours of conversation.
Kors, who with his trim gray beard and suit jacket looks like the distinguished professor that he is, talks about identity politics in the university today. “It’s dysfunctional for American education,” he says. “It’s dysfunctional for the groups it purports to speak for. And it’s dysfunctional for intergroup relations—for individuals meeting across group lines. It enforces stereotypes. It tells people ‘if you are X, there are certain voices, and only those voices, that speak for you.’ And if you dissent from those voices that ‘speak for you’ then you have ‘internalized oppression’—the intellectual equivalent of Lenin’s ‘false consciousness.’ You don’t really want what you t
hink you want. It’s infantilizing.”
He speaks about these issues frequently at college campuses, and he says there’s often a pattern to these appearances. “There’s a moment in my talk when I see a group sent over by the Multicultural Center or the Women’s Center. A hostile group. I look in their direction and I say the following from the marrow of my being: ‘It’s the right of every free individual to decide the relative importance or unimportance of their race, sex, and sexuality. No one has a right to invade the inner sanctum of your conscience. The promise of this country has been to include everybody in the circle of equal rights. Groups have struggled to enter that circle. No one who tells you that you are too weak to live with freedom is your friend.’ When I say that, it’s a turning point, and after that I get friendly or probing questions rather than the hostile questions that I might have expected.”
He talks about the way in which the American academy “assigns an official group identity” to students, eliminating the distinction “between voluntary association and imposed group identity.” For example, “a Jewish student who is totally assimilated—whose Jewish identity is totally unimportant to him—goes to college and is assigned a special Jewish advisor.” The academy also distinguishes between people who “own” their sexual, racial, or gender identity and those who, in its view, have “internalized their oppression.” For example, Kors says, Walter Olson, a tort reform expert at the Cato Institute who happens to be gay, “is not really gay because he doesn’t understand the sources of his oppression.” Thomas Sowell, an African American author based at the Hoover Institution, “isn’t really black.” And “Daphne Patai, a founder of Women’s Studies at Amherst, isn’t really a woman because she identifies with the oppressive culture around her. So in the humanities, when they speak of diversity, the one kind of diversity they don’t mean is individuated intellectual diversity.” On the contrary, there’s a process of “vetting against individuation. The people who are most discriminated against, then, are not straight white males who just roll over and play along, but rather libertarian and conservative blacks, women who are critics of feminism, and gays and lesbians who are critics of the ‘official’ gay and lesbian positions on every issue in the world.”
As one of those gays, I happen to know that Kors is right. He dismisses, however, the notion that all this academic groupthink is the work of some vast, organized left-wing conspiracy. “There is no conspiracy, no network. That’s where the right gets it wrong. It’s an unofficial consensus. It’s not conspiratorial. They look at a [job] candidate who is conservative and they don’t say, ‘He’s conservative,’ they say the person isn’t bright.” Then there’s the illusion on the part of many university folk that they’re providing some kind of ideological corrective:
If I put my colleagues on truth serum, they honestly would say that K–12 is one long celebration without criticism of American hegemony and the free-market system. Most faculty send their kids to expensive private schools with progressive agendas or they’re in college towns which they think of as aberrations. So they think that what’s being taught in ordinary public schools in America is something very different from what their own kids are taught. They think kids are still being told about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree—they see K–12 as a mystification of kids who are further mystified by pop culture, music, movies, TV, ads. All except rap, which they consider transgressive—even though the lyrics are the most misogynistic and antigay around.
Back in 1971, when Kors was an assistant professor, he and another assistant professor, who was gay (Kors is straight), cofounded something called College House. It was intended as “an alternative to the old fraternity or sorority model”; the idea was to give students an opportunity to mix with people unlike themselves. Half of the residents were male and half were female, living on the same floors. “We mixed Black Power advocates with southern whites; Campus Crusaders for Christ with the earliest members of the gay rights movement; Maoists and College Republicans. People rubbed against each other in the wrong way all the time, and they learned to talk to each other.”
That first year it was a success. But by the mid- to late seventies, the university had introduced identity politics not just into the curriculum but also into the residential system. “Penn built a Du Bois College House for black students, and we [at College House] lost a huge part of our black student population. Then they built East Asian House, and we lost our East Asian students. They built International House, so we lost our international students. Then there came Arts House, and we lost our musicians. They built Pre Med House, so that premeds who used to live with poets were now just living with one another. The underlying notion was that people are most comfortable being with ‘people like themselves.’ Then they politicized student life—freshman orientation became a PC ideological boot camp, with people from the LGBT center, the Women’s Center—people who haven’t individuated are presented as ‘voices of your community.’”
Kors notes that despite pressure to build an LGBT House (“LGBT” stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender), Penn has never done so—though the university does have an LGBT Center. Why, Kors asks, was the administration willing to build a special dorm for blacks but not for gays? Because there’s a pecking order in the academy: “sexuality trumps neutrality; race trumps sexuality; gender trumps race; and careerism trumps all.” (By way of example, Kors notes that a black intellectual who defends homophobic rap is tolerated, as is a feminist who goes after black misogyny.) “So they will not test the waters on building a ‘gay house’—because of the discomfort it might cause in certain circles. At every university one of the bitterest struggles is over trans students who object to having to choose between men’s and women’s bathrooms, saying that ‘you oppress me every time you ask me to choose between men’s and women’s bathrooms.’ So they add gender-neutral bathrooms, while also keeping men’s and women’s bathrooms.”
Pretty much everything that ails the postmodern academy, Kors says, comes down to a simple question: “Is identity individual or is it collective? If the former, then you have to draw a line in the sand about autonomy, rights, and dignity. We know historically that when identity is identified categorically, it’s catastrophic for the Other. When the left looks at Western society, it has the sensitivity of the princess and the pea. When it looks at anti-Western societies, all those sensitivities disappear. And yet this is the only country on earth where Hutus and Tutsis”—and he lists a number of other such examples—“can live side by side. It’s a historical miracle. What we’re seeing now is a revolution of rising expectations. When you’re totally oppressed, small things don’t bother you. When great progress occurs, the remaining discriminations, however slight, become unbearable. Forty years ago, it was unimaginable that there would be states where gay marriage is legal, and that you’d be able to live openly as gay. Forty years ago, if they’d told you that we’d have two successive blacks as secretary of state, and a black president, you’d have called it a utopian dream. But the more progress we have, the more unbearable the small slights become.” Wrapped up in all this, of course, is the fact that teachers and professors “haven’t given students any sense of history. These kids don’t understand the vast difference between being black or gay or female then—and now.”
Founded in 1987, the National Association of Scholars works, in its own words, to “defend the core values of liberal education” from “illiberal ideologies,” to “uphold the principle of individual merit” and “the Western intellectual heritage,” and to address such issues as “ideological litmus tests in faculty hiring,” “trivialized curricula,” “hollow baccalaureate requirements,” and, not least, “the post-modern evisceration of the humanities.” The identity studies establishment views the NAS as an enemy: in 1997, the National Women’s Studies Association equated the NAS with the KKK and neo-Nazi groups, arguing that it shared their determination to restore “white, Western, male hegemon
y.” (The NAS’s current board of advisors includes such white males as Gertrude Himmelfarb, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Shelby Steele.) The NAS publishes the journal Academic Questions, which stands for “humanism,” “intellectual freedom,” “integrity of scholarship and teaching,” and “tolerance and civility on campus.”
On a hot day in May 2010, I meet NAS president Steve Balch at the Princeton Junction train station in New Jersey. He drives us to a pleasant restaurant nearby, where we order lunch and he tells me about the organization’s history. In the 1970s, as a professor of American government at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Balch became “professionally disillusioned with radical ideologies” (which, he says, found their way into the academy earlier in New York than in some other places) and with “the general atmosphere of laxity” among his fellow academics. What’s more, he recognized that these two things—laxity and radicalism—were not unrelated. He was dismayed by “those who saw their teaching as providing cannon fodder for revolution.”
So in 1982 he helped found something called the Campus Coalition for Democracy, which would later become the NAS. His cofounders—among them Peter Shaw (a former professor of English at Stony Brook), Herbert London (a professor of humanities at NYU), and literary critic Carol Iannone—were, in his words, “New York neocon types.” “At first it was more political,” he says of the CCD; over time it became less so, serving as an alternative to increasingly politicized organizations such as the Modern Language Association (MLA). “We see ourselves,” Balch says, “as upholding the traditions of the academy as it existed in midcentury—the university as a temple of science, a free marketplace of ideas, a laboratory of investigation and inquiry, a cutting edge of intellectual discovery, a bastion of Western civilization.”