Political Correctness

Multiculturalism

The arguments over political correctness were not new to the 1990s, but took on a life of their own when discussions of college and school curricula were hotly debated in the media. On one side stood reformists who wished to see the inclusion of multicultural history and literature, on the other, conservatives who argued for a basic core curriculum that retained much of what had been known as the heart of the western civilization. In an ever-expanding field of knowledge, what was essential and what could be saved for later, more in-depth study? Proponents of the need to expand the concept of history argued that the dominant, "dead white males" of typical Western Civilization courses were but a small fraction of the picture of our past and needed to be expanded to include the contributions of women and those of various ethnic heritages. Critics charged that to forego the study of crucial individuals and facts in order to emphasize contributions by all subgroups of the population failed to provide students with a basic foundation to interpret the events, movements, and eras of history.

NEH

The media's attention was drawn to the debate as it centered on the national history standards proposed by a team of educators and historians supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Eliciting harsh criticisms, the standards first developed in 1995 were finally revised in 1996. Much of the controversy arose from the wording of sample history assignments in the original version of the standards because the negative portrayals of U.S. history and heroes were questioned. Gary Nash, history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and codirector of the group that wrote the guidelines, argued that the standards were designed to encourage students to "exercise their own judgment in reading conflicting views of any piece of history and understand that there are multiple perspectives." A vocal opponent of the standards as written, Lynne Cheney, former chair of the NEH, countered that although history should be inclusive, "it's a very great error to quit teaching basic history in the name of political correctness." As an example of some of the problems with the standards, she pointed to the absence of teaching that George Washington was the first president. Lawrence Levine, in a December 1993 article in the Journal of American History concluded, "To teach a history that excludes large areas of American culture and ignores the experiences of significant segments of the American people is to teach a history that fails to touch us, that fails to explain America to us or to anyone else. We need, not a new history, but a more profound and indeed more complex understanding of our old history."

Speech Codes

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, several colleges yielded to public concern embodied by racial harassment and instituted so-called speech bans. In an effort to protect the civil rights of frequently "historically underrepresented or disadvantaged" people, schools put into practice rules that prohibited verbal or symbolic behavior that could be construed as derogatory, abusive, or demeaning. Each campus had its own version of the rules, but all came under fire from the academics in the institutions that enacted the policies. Citing a conflict with the entire notion of freedom of speech and with the notion of academic freedom, critics used a 1993 example at the University of Pennsylvania of how the rules could be unfairly applied (black sorority members accused a white student of racial harassment for calling them "water buffalo"). In some cases, the constitutionality of the rules was debated. And yet, universities across the country continued to try to find a balance between the right of free speech and the "right" to be free from harassment.

Academic Freedom

The political correctness debate continued with charges against faculty members for using sexual examples to explain ideas or demeaning ethnic heritage through the use of offending terms. Shocked academics spent thousands of dollars on legal fees defending themselves from what they considered ludicrous accusations. And yet, the debate continued. In some cases, university administrators viewed the process as one of sensitization to the issues. Racism and sexism would not be tolerated in an arena where academic freedom was paramount.

Battleground

The label "political correctness" itself was hotly debated by academics. Resonating with the history of repressive thought that the Right associated with communism and the Left with McCarthyism, the idea of a campus succumbing to instances of political correctness was repugnant to all. It seemed whenever a school instituted a change that someone did not like, charges of political correctness were lobbed. Ultimately the battle continued, although it confined itself more to the college campuses where it began than in the general media where wide public attention held sway.

Sources:

Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silvergate, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses (New York: Free Press, 1998).

Louis Menand, ed., The Future of Academic Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

"National Standards for History Discussion on H-Net Lists," H-TEACH, Internet website.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH?

In 1993, Eden Jacobowitz, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania called a group of young black women "water buffalo" and touched off a battle over freedom of speech at the elite Ivy League school. While studying one night, he and several others in the vicinity had yelled out requests for quiet while a group of sorority sisters began a late night celebration under his dormitory window. After about twenty minutes, he returned to the window and hurled, "Shut up, you water buffalo! If you want a party, there's a zoo a mile from here." Investigations followed, and Jacobowitz, the only identifiable participant who confessed to shouting at women he identified as black, was charged with violating the university's racial harassment rules. Jacobowitz and his supporters steadfastly denied that he had used a racial epithet.

After months of hearings and involvement of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other outside organizations, the charges were dropped and Jacobowitz expressed his regrets. The scars left on the university community, however, ran deep. The media used the incident to highlight the running debate on college campuses over freedom of speech and the destructive nature of harmful speech.

Source:

Facts on File, volume 53 and 54 (New York: Facts on File,, 1993, 1994).

Political Correctness

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The term political correctness was first used in the innumerable and acrimonious discussions among Communist ideologues that took place, both in Russia and among members of Communist parties abroad, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The term was used, without any irony, to judge the degree of compatibility of one’s ideas or political analyses with the official party line in Moscow. Because the Kremlin position kept twisting in response to nationalist and personal interests much more than to ideological consistency, staying politically correct required agile intellectual gymnastics.

After the demise of international Communism around 1990, when there no longer was a correct, official line to be measured against, political correctness took on a second life as a term of derision used mostly by ideologues on the Right. The term was now meant to ridicule or stigmatize conformity with the opinions, or simply the vocabulary, of liberal or leftist intellectuals, mostly in academic circles. The principal targets of that ridicule were generally movements aiming to reduce prejudice and stigmatization against racial and ethnic groups, women, homosexuals, people with disabilities, and other marginalized groups.

Since the most noticeable change brought by such movements was the adoption and diffusion of neologisms and euphemisms aimed at enfranchising such groups, the semantics of tolerance became the main butt of ridicule, notably “gender-neutral” language (e.g., chairperson ); the use of new ethnic labels (such as Native American for American Indian, Roma for Gypsy, or Inuit for Eskimo ); or euphemisms (such as differently abled for disabled, or educationally challenged for slow learner ).

Soon, however, the critics of political correctness extended the scope of their attacks from the relative trivia of semantics to what they saw as a stultifying climate of hypocrisy and conformity, rampant, they alleged, on college campuses. Political correctness, they argued, stifled intellectual discourse in and out of academia, or, worse, punished the pursuit of legitimate research on, for example, the genetic bases of human behavior, sexual orientation, or gender differences.

Some scholars found themselves under assault from both the Left and the Right. For instance, the few social scientists who tried to suggest (and show) that human behavior was the product of biological as well as cultural evolution were simultaneously berated as “secular humanists” by fundamentalist Christians and as racist and sexist by their colleagues in the mainstream of their disciplines.

Intellectual climates keep changing, however, so that what may appear to be the menacing shadow of political correctness from the Left may eventually be neutralized by a rising tide of conservatism from the religious Right and the “intelligent design” movement. Reason and sanity, it seems, are always under attack, from the Left, from the Right, or, indeed, from both simultaneously. The university campus is the main theater for such jousts, and thus, also, the main depository of much nonsense. In the end, each swing of the ideological pendulum leaves a little residue of good sense. We must, however, be vigilant that the university remains the one venue where anything can be said fearlessly, and, thus, where political correctness has no place. Any restriction on intellectual discourse, even when internally generated, clashes with the central mission of the university, namely the critical examination of ideas and the diffusion of knowledge.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Feldstein, Richard. 1997. Political Correctness: A Response from the Cultural Left. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Friedman, Marilyn, and Jan Narveson. 1995. Political Correctness: For and Against. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Newfie, Christopher, and Ronald Strickland, eds. 1995. After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Pierre L. van den Berghe

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS. Originally used by old-guard communists to mean toeing the party line, the term "politically correct" was resurrected in the 1970s and early 1980s by rightist writers and activists, who used it in an ironic sense to mock the Left's tendency toward dogmatic adherence to "progressive" behavior and speech.

The term entered general use in the late 1980s, when neoconservatives adopted "political correctness" as a disparaging name for what they believed was rigid adherence to multicultural ideals on college campuses. Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education (1992) became best-sellers indicting academic political correctness. They argued that academic extremists had corrupted higher education through, among other things, affirmative action in admissions, speech codes, and the substitution in the undergraduate curriculum of recent literature by women and minorities for the classics of Western civilization. Proponents of multiculturalism defended expansion of the curriculum and greater diversity within the undergraduate student body as a means of strengthening democracy. They also argued that conservatives often distorted the views of academic liberals, invented widespread oppression from isolated incidents, and used charges of political correctness to silence their opponents.

In the 1990s the use and meaning of the term continued to expand. "Politically correct" appeared on T-shirts and sports pages and in television show names, newspaper headlines, book titles, comic strips, and ordinary conversations. "P.C." became a label attached to a wide range of liberal positions, including environmentalism, feminism, and, in particular, use of inclusive, inoffensive terminology related to various groups. Rooted in dissatisfaction with university policies and fear of cultural change, charges of political correctness became a popular way to attack liberal activists and their causes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berman, Paul, ed. Debating P.C.: The Controversy Over Political Correctness on College Campuses. New York: Dell, 1992.

Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

D'Souza, Dinesh. Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

Levine, Lawrence W. The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

Wilson, John K. The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995.

PatrickAllitt/c. p.

See alsoAcademic Freedom ; Manners and Etiquette ; Multi-culturalism .

POLITICALLY CORRECT, short forms PC, P.C. ‘Marked by or adhering to a typically progressive orthodoxy on issues involving esp. race, gender, sexual affinity or ecology’ (Random House Webster's College Dictionary, 1991). The phrase is applied, especially pejoratively by conservative academics and journalists in the US, to the views and attitudes of those who publicly object to: (1) The use of terms that they consider overtly or covertly sexist (especially as used by men against women), racist (especially as used by whites against black), ableist (used against the physically or mentally impaired), ageist (used against any specific age group), heightist (especially as used against short people), etc. (2) Stereotyping, such as the assumption that women are generally less intelligent than men and blacks less intelligent than whites. (3) ‘Inappropriately directed laughter’, such as jokes at the expense of women, the disabled, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities. The abbreviation PC is also used as a term for people perceived as ‘politically correct’: ‘ “Community” is a rallying cry among PCs. They tend to use it.… as an all-purpose buzz word’ ( Mike Bygrave, ‘Mind your Language’, Guardian Weekly, 26 May 1991). Both the full and abbreviated terms often imply an aggressive intolerance of views and facts that conflict with their ‘progressive orthodoxy’. The Random House dictionary quoted above was accused by the reviewer Anne Hopkins (‘Defining Womyn (and Others)’, Time, 24 June 1991) of failing to ‘protect English from the mindless assaults of the trendy’ because its editors listed such usages as chairpersonship, herstory, humankind, and womyn alongside chairmanship, history, mankind, and women, thereby giving them, in the opinion of the reviewer, a respectability that they did not merit. Compare MULTICULTURALISM. See GENDER BIAS, SEXISM, STEREOTYPE.

po·lit·i·cal cor·rect·ness (also po·lit·i·cal cor·rec·ti·tude) • n. the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes, of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.

po·lit·i·cal·ly cor·rect / pəˈlitik(ə)lē/ (or in·correct) • adj. exhibiting (or failing to exhibit) political correctness: it is not politically correct to laugh at speech impediments.