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About the Author
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg served for 30 years as a university president. He is now president emeritus and university professor at the George Washington University, where he teaches courses on the university presidency in America. He is also an adviser to Korn/Ferry International, where he is helping to find the next generation of university leadership. In June 2008 Simon and Schuster will release his new book Big Man on Campus: A University President Speaks Out On Higher Education. B.A. Columbia, M.P.A. Harvard, J.D. Yale. Fifteen honorary degrees. A swell guy. But not much of a dancer.He will blog about issues torn from the headlines dealing with higher education. Contemporary topics of pressing, current concern. And some serious matters too.
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Political Correctness on Campus: 2008
The phrase “politically correct” began its life about a century ago as a satire on gentlemen who had all the right opinions, thoughts, and — no small thing — prejudices. They worshipped alike, belonged to the same clubs, and shared the tepidity of utterly unshakable belief.
When the phrase was taken over by American communists in the 1930s, the joke was squeezed out of it, the communists being thoroughly humorless. To them, to be politically correct was unshakably to follow the party line, whatever contortions that effort might require — and surely that was no joking matter, given (among other things) Stalin’s and Hitler’s brief minuet danced to the tune of the von Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.
It is not surprising that “politically correct” lost currency, and I imagine when the phrase came back in the 1970s and ‘80s, those who used it probably did not know that they were unearthing an unlamented turn of speech. No matter. The resurrected phrase, as we still hear it, is simultaneously earnest and satirical, depending on who was, or is, using it.
It is good news that today we don’t hear “politically correct” very often, and even better news that political correctness itself appears to have run its course. I believe this because, whatever its original motives, modern American political correctness turned out to be an impediment to free academic discourse and possibly thought. The modern politically correct, like earlier ones, have been unshakable in their righteousness.
Granted, given about 4,000 institutions of higher education, any generalization I make about the demise of political correctness can be challenged here and there. In the spring of 2007, for example, Tufts University, uncharacteristically, sanctioned a conservative student publication for satirical articles about black and Islamic students that were offensive to some and, to nearly everyone else, dimwitted and childish. The shield of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution also, I believe, protected them. Free speech and all that.
A hunch I have is that a structured form of political correctness — a speech code, for example — is no longer necessary because our culture has changed; in the last 30 years I have seen discourse shifting toward the better — gradually but definitely. The sources of this shift are hazy, but certainly the civil rights and women’s movements had a powerful effect. After all, we may see a woman or a black man as president of the U.S. one day soon. Political correctness may have been a mover behind this process as well. That is, aside from the occasional boneheaded and offensive utterance, the casual slurs and prejudices of the 1950s (my undergraduate years) have largely vanished from campus speech. I think this happened because policies about speech, general or rigid, changed several generations of high school students — made them aware that some words (and, lamentably, some ideas) were forbidden. Thus, over time, the policing of any academic community’s discourse has become less important and largely immaterial as new expectations were imported from high schools.
It is hard to tell if this means academia has reached a higher and finer sociological perch, or if we have simply scoured its language. I incline more toward the second possibility, but not entirely. Biting our tongues could mean that we are actually thinking before we speak, always useful to do. We have, I mean to suggest, become more tolerant of others and more aware of their proximity.
Moreover, if we have not arrived at a higher plane of social consciousness, we have visibly adopted, and adapted to, a more sophisticated, even sensitive, set of rules of engagement that reflects a common (if not universal) understanding of our expectations about how we talk to each other. How this has come about is hard to describe much further than I have, but another hunch tells me that it may be related to an expansion of the doctrine of “fighting words.”
I am not suggesting that the denial for First Amendment protection for words likely to cause a “breach of the peace” (Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire 1942) ever directly entered the public consciousness. But it seems credible that along with the racial integration of the armed services and schools (and baseball) and the social integration produced by the GI Bill, suburbanization, and the rights movements, a realization that fighting, or prejudicial, words are out of bounds further liberalized our cultural responses and, quite likely, later was given a leg up in the academy by structural political correctness.
This may have helped to refine our sense of tolerance, but it is not all to the good. “Breach of the peace” may be a broad idea, but it is readily understood and has hundreds of years of common-law experience to clarify it — specifically, that fighting words are likely to produce fights, and the state has an abiding interest and obligations to keep the peace.
When fighting words become those that may create a “hostile learning environment,” the clarity of the original concept is lost because both the idea and the way we state it are slippery. The most gentle and constructive criticism can appear hostile to some, while gross insults pass others by. Can a Socratic interrogation by an instructor that publicly reveals a student’s failing of logic produce a hostile environment, or is the student simply corrected for not thinking clearly? And isn’t that a fundamental operation of higher education? The notion of a hostile environment created by speech is so imprecise that it actually can thwart the education that it was intended to advance.
This lack of precision — not righteousness — may have been what has diminished political correctness and may see it off altogether. It is one thing, and a good one in my book, for a cultural desire for equity to be in the air. It is quite another to give equity a structure in a printed speech code. As soon as colleges and universities began writing down what could be said and what could not, the idea of forbidding certain examples of speech began collapsing under the weight and feebleness of its excruciatingly detailed specifics: Codes not being able to predict every exemplar of hostile speech, what meant to be specific turned out to be only muddy. Formal speech codes, unlike a belief in tolerance and equity, proved to be impractical in a culture committed to free expression, innovation, and criticism — and often seemed ridiculous, nannyish, and an unneeded intrusion of someone else’s superego.
I know that academic ideas and fashions come and go, eventually exhausting themselves, often for reasons we can’t see or name. I am glad to see a decline of political correctness on American campuses. But I would like to see even more.
Attempts to silence or intimidate speakers and those who have invited them to campus have been justified by saying the speakers’ views are incorrect or even hateful, and so they may be. One of the most prominent was Hamilton College’s cancellation of a speech by Ward Churchill, a troubling and troublesome man, in the face of threats of violence. In other cases, speakers have been heckled into silence, people have invaded stages and swiped the microphone, or otherwise derailed academic freedom because they did not like the speakers or their thoughts. The proper response when speakers have something obnoxious to say is not to listen to them (leave the room) or to confront or counter them with a rational argument. Good for those who do so with civility and poise. And shame on those who give in to intimidation because a speaker is horribly incorrect.
A take-away thought: Academic freedom is still a work in progress, and academic progress always works slowly.
Posted at 05:16:42 PM on January 27, 2008 | All postings by Stephen Joel TrachtenbergComments
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The issue is media really. A professor, whose name escapes me, at a conference last year, pointed out to me that her grandmother went to hear communist speakers in the 1920s in America, fearing not a whit what they said and the way it covered up “democratic centralism” dictatorial internal party politics. It was “just a person talking” that is all. The hateful bitterness of American college students and their vile violent refusal to hear people speak, their insistance the people “cannot be allowed to say things I disagree with”—comes from their exposure not to “people speaking “ but to media presence of people speaking. It is the media that, like Rousseau said centuries ago, seek out the extreme, the distorted, the bitter, the vile, to get “audience” and “attention”, that make students equate “someone speaking” with “me and others losing power”. It used to be that someone speaking was just that, someone speaking. But add media to the equation and you get mass national presence and repetiton of whoever is vilest and most extreme. Tannen has it right too in her analyses of argument culture. This fear of “someone speaking” and this insistance that “no one has a right to say things I disagree with” because that is “abuse of rights”—comes in part from fear that word spoken (in media presence) sway people regardless of the thoughts and will of those people. We have bought a media story that mere repetition in the media makes a statement into a reality. We fear the statement of an idea itself, now, as mere statement becomes “policy implemented” or just as good as that. In our grandmothers’ day, someone speaking was just some one person speaking, and the most likely outcome of their words was boredom and everyone forgetting all that they said a day or two later. Student fears, today, that words from someone speaking are more than that, come from buying into a media idea that mere media repetition of any idea, however bad, gives power to that idea.
Racism and sexism generated this fear too because they uncovered how “mere terminology” common to everyone’s speech, really did support an entire culture of slighting people, bias against their hire and voting, and more serious“slights”. But that was “nearly everyone” speaking not “someone speaking”. There is a difference between nearly everyone speaking something and one person speaking it.
Finally, my European colleagues assure me that Americans and American culture ahbor differences. Americans are among the least tolerant people in the world of differences of many types, they say. That includes not tolerating ideas that differ from one’s own. Political correctness via campus students refusing to hear others and their differing views, is just part of the inability and unwillingness of Americans to tolerate all sorts of differences. Just look at the uniformity of the “gap” look on American streets compared to comparable streets a few kilometers away in Canada. Nothing could be more obvious than that Americans do not tolerate fashion diversity. Of course we all insist it “ain’t so” because we “personally love everybody”. But our actions are quite intolerant.
— Richard Tabor Greene · Jan 29, 06:31 AM · #
Bravo. I’m glad to hear from academics who are tired of our supposedly tolerant (but really quite intolerant) culture of political correctness.
It is truly a pity that in an effort to be politically correct, we have taught our children that nobody is right or wrong, and that there is no truth. Because if there is no truth, we cannot teach them how to distinguish truth from pure rhetoric. And if we cannot teach them to recognize truth and defend it, we cannot trust them to listen to speakers with whom we don’t want them to agree (the ones that are wrong… even though truth is relative…oh wait). And therefore, we have taught them or they have learned to reject and silence anything with which they disagree.
It doesn’t help that there is a feeling that an invitation to a speaker is an endorsement of what he says; a feeling that is due to the fact that it has been a practice, if not a policy to invite only those with whom we agree. And it doesn’t help that speaking fees are high. It’s hard to stomach the idea of paying someone thousands of dollars to give him a platform from which to spread his error. (Yes, I just used the politically incorrect masculine to refer to man or woman — as language has done for millennia.)
And I think this is at the root of the problems with politics in this day and age. Very few people will read anything more about a politician’s stance on anything than the sound byte. The result is that politicians only give sound bytes and anytime they give more, they run the risk of being quoted out of context and therefore misunderstood.
— becky · Jan 29, 11:21 AM · #
The term “politically correct” has become pointless on all sides.
Currently, the term is used to label everything from a campus which refuses to let an unpopular speaker speak, to an individual who points out to another individual why they think particular words are hurtful. In other words, it has become a way of denigrating things that are both a curtailment of free speech (such as cancelling unpopular public speeches) and that are part of free speech (such as telling Becky, for example, that my point of view is that just because we have used a turn of phrase for quite some time, does not mean that it continues to be appropriate. After all, for most of Western history, public experience was an almost entirely male experience. Now it is not. What is wrong with our language reflecting that change?)
I firmly believe in dialogue as an educational and social process, and free speech is integral to real dialogue. I also recognize that some people shut down dialogue by refusing to listen to other people’s point of view unless they use the “proper” words. However, all too often the charge of “political correctness” now serves to shut down reasonable comments—much in the way that opponents of “political correctness” say that “poltical correctness” does! In other words, to oversimplify, if the liberal student calls the conservative student’s languge “racist”, and the conservative student says the liberal student is just “politically correct”, then no one is listening, and we’re not getting anywhere.
The problem is less with the particular label, and more with the inability of each of us to lay down our ideologies and really listen.
— J. Kaszynski · Jan 29, 02:03 PM · #
“…my European colleagues assure me that Americans and American culture abhor differences. Americans are among the least tolerant people in the world of differences of many types, they say. That includes not tolerating ideas that differ from one’s own.”
Do any of these “European colleagues” work at La Sapienza?
— Gustave · Feb 2, 03:05 AM · #
A beautifully made case on an important issue. President Trachtenberg’s observations should be read aloud at every college and university convocation.
— Joseph Lestrange · Feb 12, 01:04 PM · #