Political correctness, you all should know, is a term that seems tocome from students, not from faculty. I told my son about the newphrase I was hearing from my colleagues, and he said, "Oh, we usedto say that three or four years ago." Ultimately I supposepolitical correctness comes from the Communist Party, where onepresumes it was not used sarcastically.

Now political correctness is connected to politicization. Theuniversity is politicized, the politicizers say. But they do notrecoil, appalled at their conclusion that every scholar deep downis a politician. Nor do they try to minimize the fact which they'veuncovered. No, they embrace it. They furthermore say, "It'snecessary to replace the politics we've had up to now with ourpolitics, or, rather, my politics." This is a claim oftyranny, somewhat disguised by the demand in the speech ofthe politicizers to democratize everything.

Politicization, therefore, leads to political correctness, thenew orthodoxy to replace the old one. And those who speak of it arequite open about it: We must give scholarship, we must give theuniversity a progressive perspective, an ethnic one, a homophilicone, and so on. Scholarship must not only be inspired by, butinfused with, political correctness.

Now these two things - politicization and PC - are manifest inthree aspects of the universities: first, in the admission ofstudents and recruitment of faculty, and the related question ofaffirmative action; second, in campus life and the demand forsensitivity; and third, in the curriculum and the criticism of thetraditional canon.

Affirmative action I won't discuss, except to mention the twoparts of the questions that I think are raised by thepoliticization of campus life: first, justice; and second,pride.

As to the justice of affirmative action, I think that to mostpeople it's gradually sinking in that two wrongs don't make aright. And as to the matter of pride, affirmative action is theonly government program that's ashamed of itself and that cannotidentify its beneficiaries: "Here is the new affirmative actioncandidate we've just found." That cannot be said, of course,without hurting the candidate's pride.

Affirmative action is perhaps not yet on the run, but I thinkit's on the defensive. It's of course very strong in theuniversities, entrenched in bureaucracy. Everything else will beexcused there, even certain conservative views, if you acceptaffirmative action. But the new Harvard president, I was encouragedto see, has said that the problem of affirmative action is aproblem of supply, of finding sufficient and qualified minorities.The suggestion is, therefore, that it's not a question ofrecruitment. (Of course, the original premise of affirmative actionis that the problem is not supply, but rather in the racism -conscious or unconscious - of the recruiters.) So I think that's aconsiderable advance.

I turn now to the politicization of campus life. We've becomefamiliar with speech codes on the campus that require students andfaculty to avoid speech that may be offensive to certain groups.These have been set up in many universities, not yet at mine,Harvard, which does, however, have regulations on sexualharassment, requiring professors to teach classes "withoutunnecessarily drawing attention to the sexual difference."

What about the use of "he or she"? Would that kind of speech berequired to avoid sexually harassing your audience? That usage tome seems compulsive and ridiculous. Ridiculous because "he or she"is a formula intended to draw attention away from the sexualdifference, and instead it does the opposite. Indeed, this newusage seems to say that there is no impersonal pronoun, and it isbased on the premise of feminism, or at least of the originalfeminism. Everywhere there is a "he" you could put a "she," andeverywhere there's a "she" you could put a "he." In other words, itis based on the interchangeability of the sexes.

It's also compulsive. The most recent example of this I saw wasin a letter from our chairman, in which he spoke of "anyone worthhis or her salt."

"He or she" is, I think, a prime example of politicalcorrectness and the way it works, which is not confined touniversities, or even to ideologues. It's an attempt to create anatmosphere of self-censorship, also known euphemistically as"raising consciousness."

Self-expression at HarvardThere was a sensitivity incident - widely reported - at Harvardthis last spring. A young woman put out a Confederate flag from herdormitory window as an act of self-expression to display herpolitical views. She was attacked as insensitive to the opinions ofothers, and she was defended as giving us an instance of freespeech, which, of course, has been expanded, as we all know,to "free expression." Harvard did nothing to prevent this youngwoman from hanging out her flag. It accepted the reason why she didit. It spoke of the right of free expression, but deplored thisparticular use of it. This was very much, I think, in line with thepolicy of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Question: should conservatives - or, rephrase that: shouldreasonable or sensible people - adopt the ACLU view of this matter?A short-term alliance with them might be all right, but what abouttheir view? I think not. It's time to reconsider the identificationof free speech with free expression. Of course, I'm not the firstto suggest this; Justice Scalia has been making the point for sometime. This identification first began with the Flag Salute cases inthe early 1940s; so it has a history.

Free speech is something necessarily associated with reason;it's offering an opinion containing a reason. When you give areason, you give some common ground, offered to convince orpersuade someone else. It's not me imposing on you. Therefore freespeech implies a community, a common citizenship. The originalpurpose of free speech was to make possible democratic government:How can we get together to decide things if we don't have thecapacity to speak freely before and during our deliberations?

Free speech makes you think of someone else. Even if you have aselfish reason, you must claim that the other person would do thesame. A man comes to a fancy dinner party. A plate of asparagus ispassed around, and he cuts off all of the tips and sweeps them ontohis plate. The lady sitting next to him looks at him in horror andsays, "Why, sir, why ever did you do that?" "Because, madame,they're much the best part."

Now, "free expression," by contrast with this example of sweetreason, is self-centered: You express yourself, and you expressyourself as opposed to others. It's my identity, my roots, myvalues. The Harvard student was from Virginia, and she hung out theConfederate flag to celebrate George Washington's birthday. GeorgeWashington led a movement for secession from Britain, so he wouldhave therefore approved the movement of secession of the South in1860!

The Right to offendWith self-expression you have no duty to placate or appeaseother people. If you do that, you're not being honest to yourself.So self-expression culminates in the right to offend. It doesn'tmatter that this student had so much trouble in identifyingherself, in finding her ethnicity, that she had to go searching inthe Confederacy.

The student was offending black students at Harvard. She didn'tmean to, or so she said, but this wasn't believed. And the blackstudents had a right therefore to take offense at this. One of themput out a Nazi flag. Well, it's hard to see the meaning of that,but it's clear that this student wanted to do her worst. You takeoffense by giving offense.

This is not a recipe for a happy, or even for a stable, society,not to mention a university. Such a system can work only throughthe forbearance of certain groups who give up their right to giveand take offense. Some groups have a right to offend; others don't.And the point of the Confederate flag was to challenge thatarbitrary system.

The ACLU doctrine, the identification of free speech with freeexpression, leads to this result: Do your worst, because you're notfree unless you can carry freedom to an extreme; rather to anunhealthy extreme, indeed, to an admittedly unhealthyextreme.

Besides, the identification of free speech with free expressionis open to the possibility of reversal. Instead of considering theConfederate flag as symbolic speech that is, understandingexpression as speech - you might consider a tirade of racial slursas an expressive act - that is, understanding speech as a deed. Andthen, logically, you could prevent the speech, because it amountsto an offensive action. That's what Brown University did recentlyin expelling a student. Because almost all human actions arecapable of some meaning or some imputation of meaning, it's hard todraw a line between meaningful free speech and a meaningful act.Therefore, I think, it's foolish to throw away the distinctionbetween speech and expression. It's a difficult distinction intheory, but in practice it makes sense.

Academic FreedomAnd another distinction is needed, one between free speech andacademic freedom. The purpose of free speech is to make democraticgovernment possible. The purpose of academic freedom is to furtherinquiry. Inquiry means becoming more aware, not becoming moresensitive, and being "aware" means being open-minded to what isnew, and is reflected in a desire to learn.

Giving and taking offense is especially inappropriate to acampus. It's perhaps part of politics, but certainly not part ofinquiry. Unlimited free inquiry requires courtesy, academicetiquette. Miss Manners made this point recently, and I think verycorrectly. There should be, I think, no right to protest atuniversities. There should be, on the contrary, a duty tolisten. Universities should teach courtesy and require it oftheir students. But, of course, professors should feel free toembarrass the hell out of their students, to shame them for theirlack of knowledge. The end of education is greater awareness,greater openness, not greater sensitivity.

Education is a drawing-out, literally. It doesn't mean findingyour roots in the sense of creating your values. Those things arepre-rational. Too many students nowadays come to universities tofind out where they're coming from instead of where they're going.In education, your goal is more important than your roots.

Academic freedom is more wide-ranging than free speech; inprinciple it is unlimited. Academic freedom, for example, wouldtake up the question whether democracy is a good thing; whether allmen really have been created equal. Under a healthy regime of freespeech, these questions might be taken for granted in a liberaldemocracy.

But academic freedom also requires greater decorum than freespeech in society at large. The right to speak, therefore, must inuniversities be accompanied by the duty to listen.

Now to my third point, the curriculum and the canon. This arisesout of the question of academic freedom. The politicizers speak ofa traditional curriculum - the great books - as a "canon." Whenthey use this term they compare a university curriculum to thedecision of the Catholic Church as to what writings are theword of God. The implication is that the curriculum is anauthoritative decision in favor of certain books that uphold thepower of the decision makers. Living white males require thereading of books authored by dead white males. We should not acceptthis tendentious term, canon. It's an example of what it claims todeplore, an arbitrary and authoritative decision given withoutreason.

There's no need, I think, to defend the traditional curriculumor great books curriculum as untouchable or unchangeable. PaulCantor at the University of Virginia has recently made this point.There are perhaps great authors in our time, even in the ThirdWorld: Vargas Llosa, Salman Rushdie. William Faulkner, FlanneryO'Connor and

John Steinbeck are American classics, not so long in theirgraves. We should keep an open mind, examine candidates forinclusion, but on the basis of their quality, not of their PC.

There's another reason not to be so touchy about Westerncivilization: All civilization is more or less Western now. Westerncivilization is a relatively new expression, dating, I think, fromthe late 19th century, characteristic of an historical - or,rather, historicist - way of thinking. It makes it seem as if theessence of our civilization is merely its location on the globe,"west of east." The distinction between "west and east" gives ahint of the uniqueness of the West. But it's necessary, especiallynow, to be a little bit more explicit.

It's fashionable today to doubt the value of the great booksbecause they do not promote equal rights against discrimination bysex, lifestyle, and race. Another objection is that they areethnocentric, because they're Western. You can use the secondobjection against the first. In no Eastern classic will theprinciple of equal rights be found. That principle is best arguedin Western classics, authored, generally, by bourgeois whitemales.

Self-criticismLet us define "Western" as having access to the Greeks, whodiscovered philosophy and science. Philosophy and science permitall human beings who know them to be self-critical. Only in theWest does one find such a term as "ethnocentric," such a science asanthropology, or such a philosophy as relativism. Those who accusethe great books of being Western forget that their very accusationis Western. It's impossible for the great books really to reflectWestern values, because Western values are in tension. Westernphilosophy and science are opposed to Western divine revelation,custom, tradition, to whatever resists reason.

One cannot become aware of Western values without realizing thatthey present a problem, rather than furnish a solution. What booksare great is not decided by a local board of censors or by anygovernment, but by common consent of the educated over generationsand across national boundaries as to which books most memorablypose a human problem; for example, justice in Plato'sRepublic, love in Cervantes' Don Quixote.

So the authors of the great books are not agents of oppression.Authors who defend tyranny or lie for a cause soon lose theirfollowing when times change. Many of the great authors, it is true,were not revolutionaries. They were anxious to preserve thecritical stance in all circumstances, and so they did not givetheir hearts to a political ideal, but offered their criticism inthe soft voice of irony.

Indeed, the critics of the great books today are notrevolutionaries either; they merely repeat the dominant values ofour time, those of equal rights, which they often assert with thecomplacent outrage of a newspaper editorial. Such critics seem torisk nothing, neither life nor liberty nor career. In fact, ofcourse, they risk everything. When small critics try to demeanlarge ones, reason turns on itself and the principle of criticismis in danger. That principle is the only friend that equal rightshave ever had.

I recently saw Spike Lee's movie "Do the Right Thing." It's amovie that is full of thought, I was surprised to see. It ends, asyou know, with two quotations from dead black males; one fromMartin Luther King against violence, and one from Malcolm X infavor of violence. One character in the movie says, "You've alwaysgot to do the right thing." But what is the right thing? The movieends with a question mark. And that, I think, is Westerncivilization at its best. I perhaps don't share all of Spike Lee'sopinions, but he isn't politically correct, I'll hand him that.

PC at the universities is the suicide of the intellect. In theWest now we find many intellectuals who take part against theintellect. If you want an example, look at Richard Rorty in theJuly 1, 1991 New Republic. Consider his philosophy ofanti-foundationalism. There is no foundation to things discoverableby the intellect, and no foundation to the things that we believe,no reason to believe them; they're mere assertions. And being mereassertions, they're ultimately political assertions. Activatingyour intellect, using your bean, doesn't help. It doesn't changeanything. The rational merely endorses the non-rational, so theuniversity should merely endorse political views, the correctpolitical views.

The Ivory TowerSoon after I graduated from college, there was a commencementspeaker at Harvard, a famous art historian whose name was ErwinPanofsky, who gave a speech on the ivory tower. Since he was an arthistorian, he was interested in the image, and the history of theimage, of an ivory tower to represent a university. But he alsogave a defense of the ivory tower. It signifies a certain moralsuperiority based on intellectual superiority, and therefore notopen to the usual ills of moral superiority, namelyself-righteousness and intrusiveness. (It's not that professorscould do better at politics than politicians can; they can't. Butpoliticians are looking not for truth, but for power. Professorsare more naive than politicians, not out of ignorance, but becausethey're more knowing.) Now, however, the ivory tower no longerbelieves in the ivory tower, and you wouldn't hear that speech at acommencement these days. This development has a long history. It'sa phenomenon known as "post-modern."

Once upon a time, in the Renaissance, philosophers formed theidea that the intellect would reform and spread civilizationthrough an enlightenment of all mankind. The name for this came tobe "modernity." It was a great project for the relief of man'sestate, as one of the philosophers described it. Now Rousseau wasthe first modern philosopher to question that project, the firstpost-modem. Rousseau was represented in the figure of the noblesavage. The noble savage is not civilized, obviously, buthe's noble; or, rather, he's not civilized, andtherefore he's noble. Rousseau represents modern Westerncivilization in criticism of itself

Rousseau's noble savage could remind you of the multiculturalismtoday, which says that we in the West shouldn't be so proud of ourmechanical, material civilization. It destroys nature, neglectshuman creativity. But there's this difference between the noblesavage and multiculturalism: To be politically correct we dare notcall our noble savage noble, and we dare not call him a savage. Wecan't call him a savage because all civilizations are equal.There's really no such thing as civilization, no such thing asbeing civilized; there are only cultures, and being in a culture isnot the same thing as being cultivated. Cultures have replacedcivilization. You cannot call the Third World uncivilized, butalso, and for the same reason, you cannot call it noble. We wantsomething noble, but we're so far from it as to be unable topronounce the name.

But education is a noble thing. Every society has socialization,but only civilized society has education. Education is the intrepidquestioning and self-criticism of reason: only the West hasinstitutions of self-criticism. Those are our universities. Allother cultures have self-expression only. You don't need auniversity to express yourself; you can do that with an army.

So, self-criticism is our uniqueness and our special nobility.I've been trying to show that the problem of politicization and PCgoes very deep. It has to do with the rise and fall of modernity inWestern politics and Western philosophy.

Our test now is, in part, intellectual - to understand ourpredicament. But, of course, it's also practical; it's to rally indefense of our universities. The universities have to take theirhelp where they can get it, from Washington even, from theAmerican people, who have more and better appreciation of educationthan our educators. And above all, we in the universities must stirourselves; we must begin to oppose things we professors haveallowed to happen at our universities without protest. We mustn'tlet things get by that we know are wrong; we must start to raise alittle hell. We shouldn't despair, because the cause of theuniversity is the highest there is. It's up to us to give it morepower - the power to teach, the power to learn, and the power toquestion.

Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. is Frank G. Thomsonprofessor of government at Harvard University.

Dr. Mansfield's remarks were delivered to an audience of SalvatoriFellows at a colloquium sponsored by the Heritage Foundation onJune 26, 1991 al the University Club in Washington, D.C.

ISSN 0272-1155. 1991 by The HeritageFoundation.

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Political Correctness and the Suicide of the Intellect ...