I’ll give you an example. After the famous incident with the alleged vandalization of the Intercultural Center, I went to a meeting with some very angry and upset students, many of whom were students I liked, respected, and wanted to help. At that point, it was still reasonable to suppose that someone had in fact crapped and vomited in the IC on purpose, but in another way, the truth of the incident was only an occasion for a lot of these students to feel through and express some of their own bad experiences at the college. Now, yes, in every meeting of that kind, there’s someone who is expressing a self-aggrandizing, performative complaint about their own identity; there are other young people who are just trying to figure out who they are and what they are. But there’s plenty of other folks with genuinely bad experiences (both here and elsewhere) who want to talk as well. So what’s my job there? Tell them they’re all wrong, they’re politically correct, etc.? No, I don’t think so, not the least of which is because some of them have valid issues and the incident itself could be something real. Is my job to pontificate about the history of race and identity? I don’t think so–some faculty might, though. In the end, what I mostly did was to inject a note of pragmatism in terms of the things the students wanted the administration to do. Several people wanted a full-fledged police investigation–I pointed out that on other occasions, they would be wary of the police, so why did they suddenly see police power as a desirable thing? What did they seriously think the police would find? Did they really want someone to be criminally prosecuted for this act, if it happened? Why were they so absolutely certain about what they thought had happened anyway, in advance of an investigation, etc.

I’m sure that for some people, even that kind of pragmatism or gentle skepticism is seen as insulting or unsupportive, maybe even complicit in racism. It’s easy to see why many faculty would just say, leave it all alone, let them get it out of their system, it’s none of my business. It’s also easy to see why some faculty might choose to express their support in terms that I myself find to be a bit patronizing. There aren’t any simplistically good choices here precisely because the questions that concern you happen in the everyday life of the institution and the community. There isn’t a simple professional role for faculty to take up any more than there is in the real life of our real life communities. What do I say to an activist fighting for racial justice on the national stage when I disagree with some of the way they’re going about it? I dunno, it depends on circumstance. Maybe most of the time, I should just shut my yap: it’s not like this society has any shortage of middle-aged white guys with a lot of opinions about everything under the sun. Same thing applies inside the institution, only complicated by the fact that we claim that what happens within the everyday life of the institution is part of the educational service that our students are paying for and within which they are supposed to receive guidance.

This has been a very good discussion, thanks for posting the question and responding consistently. In the course of reading all these posts, particularly your last response to me, I realized a key distinction between the experiences of professors and the experiences of students. This, I think, explains a lot of the disconnect.

Most of what passes for political correctness – passing judgment on people who disagree with you, effectively suppressing dissenting opinions – DOES NOT TAKE PLACE IN THE CLASSROOM.

It takes place in the cafeteria, in dorm rooms, in meetings of campus groups, at parties. Etc., etc. Political correctness is mostly a social phenomenon, not necessarily an institutional one. I experienced very little political correctness actually in the classroom. Even my most politically liberal professors (Hugh Lacey, Braulio Munoz), were very open-minded and perfectly willing to entertain and discuss opposing political viewpoints. Hugh and Braulio were two of my favorite professors. About the closest I came to a PC experience was taking a class on contemporary women’s poetry. There wasn’t anything wrong with the professor or the students – they were all pretty cool. But it really was not a good idea for a young, straight white male to be reading very angry lesbian poetry from the 1970′s. I thot I was being very “sensitive,” but, in retrospect, I was putting myself in the crosshairs of some very angry women. But, again, the anger was on the page, not in the classroom. Not the best decision on my part, listening to people who had very legitimate reasons to be angry at people who looked like me. But that’s water under the bridge.

But back to my point about where political correctness happens. This, I think, is why people like Al Bloom deny that political correctness is at Swarthmore: it’s below their radar. If any kind of authority figure, from a visiting professor to the president of the college, is involved in a discussion, it’s going to be much more nuanced, and people are going to be much more careful, than they would be late at night at the social center. Not that there is a conscious decision on anyone’s part to be more judgmental when the adults are out of sight. Political correctness, like just about any kind of peer pressure, is largely unconscious.

But that doesn’t excuse faculty and staff from being oblivious. Political correctness is mostly under the radar. But isn’t the whole purpose of the liberal arts to uncover hidden truths? Isn’t a key raison d’etre of a liberal arts college to ensure the greatest possible range of freedom of expression? If someone says that you aren’t meeting that responsibility, aren’t you obligated to take that accusation seriously?

I could go on about the particular aspects of both academia and Swarthmore that facilitate the social phenomenon of political correctness, but I think this is good for one post.

I think you’re absolutely right that a lot of the complaint against PC, or “politicization”, is used as a way to artificially simplify the permanently uncertain and uneasy difficulties involved in teaching and producing knowledge–and that’s before we even get to questions of identity, diversity, pluralism and so on.

I think that’s another piece of the puzzle that I didn’t bring up in the main post that’s crucial–I suppose I was getting so frustrated by some of the discussions of KC Johnsn’s blog elsewhere that I left it out. But at least some public anger at academia is provoked by the fact that institutionally, academia is seen as being committed to diversity or affirmative action. At least some of Johnson’s readers at his blog get fairly ugly on racial terms with some frequency–for a few of them, the sin of the Group of 88 just seems to be that they a) aren’t white and b) write and teach about being not white in some respect.

The politics and practice of diversity inside the academy, within academic culture, are a whole different topic that I find harder and harder to navigate the older I get. I think we’ve gotten to a place collectively where it’s very difficult to have cathartically open conversations within our institutions about diversity because people are defending institutional projects of various kinds, some openly, others covertly. That in and of itself is a dangerous asymmetry–say, when you’ve got people arguing for diversity as a priority in hiring practices when it’s a committee meeting and then sandbagging that argument when private discussions of “merit” take place. You can’t even tell any longer what the determinative moment is, or what anyone is really trying to have happen.

But a lot of our institutional arguments–both those that people make openly and those they hold in private–come from what now strike me as confused premises. For example, when I look at the humanities, what’s keeping some kinds of diversity from happening? It goes all the way from the undergraduate pipeline into grad programs and then into hiring pools for actual positions. Which means it can’t just be a question of background or preparation or anything else–it’s potentially a question about pedagogy. What are we teaching, how are we teaching it? The stock answer is to assume that it’s the exclusion of identities, of race, and so on, which repels diversity–but I sometimes wonder if the banalization of race, or the orthodoxy of some identity arguments, is as much at fault–if we take questions that should be alive, and dangerous, and messy, and turn them into simple orthodoxies about bad racism and good diversity. And so students–both students of color and white students–who are looking to explore the lives they actually live go to something else that seems more useful. And what we’re left with is the students looking for ideology.

A concrete example for me is Forrest Carter and The Education of Little Tree–that a moving, seemingly “authentic” first-person account of Native American identity could turn out to have been written by a white author, and not just a white author but a segregationist and Klan member, is the kind of thing that scholars should excel at helping students (and colleagues) to think through, without knowing in advance what the results of that exploration will be. I get so tired of routinized stock narratives about appropriation, silencing, stereotype, and so on–the way we run the messiness of race, gender, sexuality through a kind of well-manicured machinery. In the book I’m writing now, I really want to leave a space for arguing that a given white colonial official might have been effectively an African, that another might have had a valid critique of local African political practice, that a chief who was a collaborator with the Rhodesians might also have been an effective steward of local indigenous knowledge, that living and constructing race in a white-dominated society could contain suffering, injustice, irony, lies, possibility, and even that it might at times have been irrelevant or unimportant.

I do feel at times that when an identity conversation begins within the academy, its results are choreographed by all the participants–that we have a prior implicit agreement not to let it go to any wild or dangerous places. Neither to let it become a catalogue of unexpressed anger or grievance nor to allow that we might challenge some of the conventional narratives that surround diversity practices–to ask, in an uncertain way once again, why we want diversity.

But in terms of the relationship between academia and a wider public, identity is a big part of it. There’s a danger in me playing “reasonable white man” given the fact that at least a share of the hostility out there is directed at the academy by people who resent the extent to which they see it to be feminized, queered, enracinated–almost to the point that you wonder if some people stopped valuing academia simply because it stopped being respectably white and male.

“That isn’t how it is with Kilmer, whose advocacy of letting other students in her class do her ideological bullying I found stunning to find in the AAUP’s official journal.”

Yes–most faculty, including myself, do some occasional subtle “missionary work” for some privileged point of view or argument. For instance, if I think that Realist international systems theory (the vicious pressures of the international system of states existing as an anarchy) is a better explanation for most governmental international action than, say, internal capitalist economic formation, I would lecture and favor that sort of analysis, and above all, give the reasons (evidence + logic) to the students concerning why I favor it. This is okay pedagogy, it seems to me–with one proviso: AS LONG AS one ALSO gives SERIOUS presentation to the students of the other and competing point(s) of view, and I mean a presentation of their best and most powerful arguments.

This doesn’t mean one has to present every silly alternative argument–say, the equivalent of “intelligent design” in international relations. I don’t think anybody (including Horowitz) advocates that. But even if he did, WE faculty can choose what is “presentable” and what is not, because as trained professionals we take our professonal knowledge seriously and can apply it and do apply it honestly. But this DOES mean presenting to the students all the powerful competing reconstructions. (And there always ARE competing powerful reconstructions.) This allows students to choose at least somewhat (!) for themselves (although they may know that a professor favors one particular reconstruction and–above all–why and on what grounds).

In that respect, one of the most formative moments in my own graduate education was when a fellow grad student wrote an entire two-semester research paper that was a criticism of the approach of the faculty-person giving the research seminar. I was a bit dubious of the project! But she assured me that our mentor was a profession who would accept professional arguments…and she got an “A” (and went on to teach at Cornell).

That’s how it should be.

That isn’t how it is with Kilmer, who advocacy of letter other students do her ideological bullying I found stunning to find in the AAUP’s official journal. It wasn’t how it was going to be with the person applying for a position in my Dept from American Studies who unselfconsciously proclaimed her desire to do political missionary-work in the classroom.

I dunno, AME. I would almost say that I see less of this almost cluelessly instrumental kind of pedagogical attitude than I used to. If I see anything like this around, it’s usually way more cunning, subtle and calculated. At some point, moreover, almost all teachers are doing a bit of “missionary work” for some point of view or privileged argument.