COLLOQUY

The National Association of Scholars says the culture wars are alive and well on U.S. campuses. Indeed, to insure a constant drumbeat in the battle, the group designated "Multiculturalism

ALSO SEE: Join the debate: Are the culture wars over? If so, who won? (The responses) "A Truce Prevails; for the Left, Many Victories Are Pyrrhic," by Todd Gitlin, 3/6/98 "If Harsh Realities Prevail, We All Will Continue to Lose," by Annette Kolodny, 3/6/98 "Struggles Are a Small Price to Pay for Diverse Universities," by Lawrence W. Levine, 3/6/98 "The Vision of the University Is Still at Stake," by Gertrude Himmelfarb, 3/6/98 "Battles Are Far From Over in Culture's Private Clubs," by Nell Irvin Painter, 3/6/98 "The Spotlight Is Shifting to Students of Color," by Evelyn Hu-DeHart, 3/6/98 "Too Many in Academe Stayed Grandly Above the Fray," by Ray Suarez, 3/6/98 FOR SUBSCRIBERS: A special section containing eight years' worth of stories and opinion pieces about the culture wars

and the Future of Higher Education" as the theme of its annual meeting in December. I happen to agree that the culture wars are far from over. I see the battleground shifting, however, from an obsessive focus on curricular matters to a harsh spotlight on students of color, particularly African-American and Latino students. Today's critics of multiculturalism are boldly questioning the qualifications of students from minority groups to attend elite colleges and universities, while simultaneously challenging those institutions' firm and public commitment to diversity and aggressive affirmative- action programs.

This shift in focus is not surprising, since recent student activism has been led by coalitions of students of color and their white allies, who have demanded the creation or expansion of race and ethnic studies. What better way to weaken such challenges than to decrease the number of African- American and Latino students enrolling in college in the first place?

In my view, the first volley in this latest round of the culture wars was fired in 1994 by Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein in The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (The Free Press). By reviving theories that intelligence is genetically based, this book provided cover for white supremacists to oppose affirmative action. It allowed them not just to decry the violation of a presumed colorblind Constitution, but also to insinuate that affirmative action has been and will be useless, because of minorities' inherited inferiority.

Since that volley, the oppressive public scrutiny of black and Latino students has been unrelenting. In California, the combined efforts of Governor Pete Wilson, Ward Connerly, and other conservative regents of the University of California are dismantling affirmative action in the university system -- immediately and severely cutting the numbers of black and Latino students at all U.C. campuses and professional schools. The ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Hopwood v. State of Texas has had similar consequences in Texas.

Last year, Lino A. Graglia, a University of Texas law professor, unabashedly characterized most black and Latino students as academically incompetent, the product of morally deficient cultures "where failure is not looked upon with disgrace." Last fall, Linda Chavez, a former director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and head of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Washington, declared with much fanfare that the center's research showed that many students who have been admitted to public colleges and universities in Colorado under affirmative-action programs are academically unqualified black and Hispanic students -- hence doomed to failure in college.

Keeping the public pressure going, the Center for Individual Rights (the same right-wing outfit that financed the Hopwood litigation), filed suit late last year against admissions practices at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Next, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom's well-timed tract on race, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (Simon & Schuster, 1997), equated affirmative action with racial preference and thus implied that unqualified minority students have been given educational opportunities that they don't deserve, at the expense of more- deserving whites and Asians.

As this latter example suggests, one of the underlying and insidious goals of the anti-affirmative-action forces these days is to drive a permanent wedge between Asian-American students and black and Latino students. By playing to the fears, anxieties, and, most of all, ambitions of the largely immigrant Asian-American population, right-wing culture warriors hope to weaken a coalition of students of color that has periodically and successfully mobilized over the past 30 years to push a multicultural agenda in higher education. Otherwise, the right has demonstrated a lack of interest in, if not outright hostility toward, Asian Americans.

Witness the way in which conservative politicians and their media allies have handled the "Asian connection" in the campaign-finance scandals, characterizing Asian Americans as sleazy influence peddlers. But when it comes to fighting the campus culture wars, the same politicians and opinion makers are inordinately solicitous about the welfare of Asian- American students. In feigned tones of moral outrage at alleged injustices perpetrated against these students, a December 17 editorial in The Wall Street Journal proclaimed that "racial preferences" are the "most anti-Asian laws operating in America today." Not surprisingly, the culture warriors continue to be predominantly white and male and well-educated, largely affiliated with the right wing of the Republican Party and well-financed by conservative think tanks and foundations.

One notable dissenter, if not yet outright defector, emerged from the ranks of the culture warriors last year. In his 1997 book We Are All Multiculturalists Now (Harvard University Press), Nathan Glazer, a professor of education and sociology at Harvard University, voiced serious misgivings about the consequences of ending affirmative action, for African-American students in particular and for American society in general. I see no signs, unfortunately, that he has persuaded others in his camp to rethink their extremely harsh attacks on African-American and Latino students.

Those of us committed to a vision of a more just and inclusive America see no signs that the culture wars are over; but we remain as committed as ever to diversifying the student body and transforming the curriculum.

Evelyn Hu-DeHart is a professor of ethnic studies and chair of the department of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the editor of TransPacific Articulations: Asian Americans in the Age of Globalization, to be published this fall by Temple University Press.

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