I remember watching hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee on television as a very young girl, sharing my mother’s horror at the way in which Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy trampled on the Bill of Rights. I knew kids whose parents were public-school teachers who had hidden books away in the cellar or destroyed them for fear of being accused wrongly of some amorphous crime and losing their jobs.
Later, I was moved to tears by Eric Bentley’s dramatization of the hearings, which I heard on the radio. I have read endless accounts of that terrible time of redbaiting and blacklisting, ranging from the much-publicized stories of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett to the recent article in The New York Times Magazine by television producer Mark Goodson, father of a childhood friend and classmate. Each one chills my soul.
Imagine my feeling then, when I picked up the December 24 issue of Newsweek and found the cover story on integrating issues of race and gender into college curricula asking the question, “Is This the New Enlightenment -- or the New McCarthyism?” and referring to my own book, Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study (St. Martin’s Press, 1988) as the “primer of politically correct thought.” In fact, rather than trying to direct thought into approved channels, the book is an interdisciplinary text designed to allow students and teachers to examine the comprehensive and interconnected nature of racism, sexism, and class privilege within the United States. It employs scholarly writings from the humanities and social sciences, Supreme Court decisions and other historical documents, newspaper and magazine articles, poetry and fiction.
But I suppose I should not have been surprised by the headline. Three months earlier George Will, in a nationally syndicated column, had announced “Political Indoctrination Supplants Education in Nation’s Universities,” referring to me (mistakenly) as a “New Jersey sociologist” (my graduate training was in philosophy) and describing some of my work in terms so ludicrous they would have been funny were the man not so widely read or his conclusions so dangerous.
Earlier, The New York Times, as well as The Chronicle, had reported on the decision at the University of Texas at Austin to use my book as the primary text in its required composition course -- and the subsequent retraction of that decision in response to political pressure from inside and outside the university. Since that time, a steady stream of articles on “politically correct” thought have appeared in countless national, regional, and local publications. None of them, whether news stories or opinion pieces, makes even a pretense of presenting a fair and balanced account of the issues; each of them seems content to repeat the same set of half-truths and distortions being circulated by the National Association of Scholars, a Princeton-based organization of academics seemingly committed to curricula based on the Orwellian slogans: War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, and Ignorance Is Strength.
For example, the writer of an article in The New Republic reduced the comments I had made during a lengthy telephone interview to a single sentence that misrepresented what I had said. The article reported that I couldn’t name a single book that was so racist and sexist that it should be dropped from the canon. In fact, when asked to specify such works during the interview, I had refused on the grounds that transforming the college curriculum was not about banning books. I had added that other teachers might use very effectively books that I might find objectionable. Needless to say, this comment did not appear in the article.
In response to a curriculum-reform movement that seeks to expand the horizons of students’ learning to include all peoples and all places, the NAS and other opponents of a multicultural, gender-balanced curriculum propose the continued silencing of all but a tiny fraction of the world’s population. They have so little faith in this nation’s potential to realize the democratic values we have so long espoused that they mistakenly believe that identifying the racism and sexism in our past and present will weaken this nation rather than strengthen it. They have even managed to persuade some people that those who seek to decrease the violence of our language and our behavior somehow seek to limit the Bill of Rights rather than to extend its protections to all.
Recoiling in horror from those who advocate a critical reading of Shakespeare or Milton (I thought scholarship was about critical readings), they show no equivalent concern for the peoples and cultures rendered invisible by the traditional curriculum. At another time in history opponents’ attempts to misrepresent so completely the goals of curriculum reform might well have attracted little serious attention; at this moment they have gained a hearing because they express the collective fears of a small but still dominant group within the academy that sees its continued power and privilege in jeopardy. What exactly is the critique of the traditional curriculum they have tried so hard to silence -- and failing that -- to misrepresent? How does the traditional curriculum serve their interests and perpetuate their power?
The traditional curriculum teaches all of us to see the world through the eyes of privileged, white, European males and to adopt their interests and perspectives as our own. It calls books by middle-class, white, male writers “literature” and honors them as timeless and universal, while treating the literature produced by everyone else as idiosyncratic and transitory. The traditional curriculum introduces the (mythical) white, middle-class, patriarchal, heterosexual family and its values and calls it “Introduction to Psychology.” It teaches the values of white men of property and position and calls it “Introduction to Ethics.” It reduces the true majority of people in this society to “women and minorities” and calls it “political science.” It teaches the art produced by privileged white men in the West and calls it “art history.”
The curriculum effectively defines this point of view as “reality” rather than as a point of view itself, and then assures us that it and it alone is “neutral” and “objective.” It teaches all of us to use white male values and culture as the standard by which everyone and everything else is to be measured and found wanting. It defines “difference” as “deficiency” (deviance, pathology). By building racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class privilege into its very definition of “reality,” it implies that the current distribution of wealth and power in the society, as well as the current distribution of time and space in the traditional curriculum, reflects the natural order of things.
In this curriculum, women of all colors, men of color, and working people are rarely if ever subjects or agents. They appear throughout history at worst as objects, at best as victims. According to this curriculum, only people of color have a race and only women have a gender, only lesbians and gays have a sexual orientation -- everyone else is a human being. This curriculum values the work of killing and conquest over the production and re-production of life. It offers abstract, oppositional thinking as the paradigm for intellectual rigor.
The traditional curriculum is too narrow. It leaves out too much. Its narrow approach to defining knowledge implies that people who look different, talk differently, and embrace different cultural practices are not studied because they have nothing to teach “us.”
Not content to debate curriculum reform in a straightforward and intellectually honest fashion, the opponents of such reform are mounting a nationwide campaign to smear and misrepresent the work of responsible teachers and scholars all across the country who are committed to democratizing the curriculum. After serving as “thought police” for generations, effectively silencing the voices and issues of all but a few, they now attempt to foist that label on the very forces in the university seeking to expand, rather than to contract, the discourse. The opponents of curriculum reform seek to effectively ban books like my own that, among other things, survey U.S. history by asking students to read our Constitution, Supreme Court decisions, and other public documents so that the “founding fathers” and their descendants can speak for themselves. Perhaps their fear is justified. I read the Dred Scott decision in ninth grade and have never been the same since.
And what of white males’ scholarship and perspectives in this new and evolving curriculum? Will there be a place for them? The question is absurd, and the need to answer it reflects how far the misrepresentations have gone. The perspectives and contributions of that group are valid and valuable; there is much to be learned from them. The difficulty is not with their inclusion but with the exclusion of everyone else. The difficulty is with universalizing that experience and those interests.
Yes, Newsweek, there may well be a new McCarthyism. If so, it is coming directly from the irresponsible right and its fellow travelers. How ironic that those who actively attempt to dictate what books students will and will not read portray themselves as defenders of academic freedom. How ironic that those of us seeking to make the curriculum and campus climate less racist, less sexist, and less heterosexist are portrayed as threats to democratic freedoms rather than their champions. But in the end, war is not peace, slavery is not freedom, and no matter what the NAS may believe, ignorance is not strength.
Paula Rothenberg is director of the New Jersey Project, a statewide curriculum-transformation project financed by the New Jersey Department of Higher Education, and professor of philosophy and women’s studies at the William Paterson College of New Jersey.