[First published in the Canadian Federation for the Humanities Bulletin 14.1 (Summer 1991).

[Index: Political correctness, Shakespeare, literary theory, higher education]

[Date: July 1991]

Political Correctness

Michael Keefer

Is something seriously wrong with the humanities departments of our universities?

In 1987 Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind set out to tell us, in the lurid
wording of its subtitle, How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished
the Souls of Today's Students. Similar messages have been repeated with increasing
vehemence in books like Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals and Dinesh D'Souza's
Illiberal Education, as well as in a spate of journal and newspaper articles in the US,
Britain, and more recently, Canada.
The problem, by most accounts, is that professorial exponents of something
variously denounced as multiculturalism, political correctness and a new
McCarthyism are on the rampage, uprooting the classics of Western literature from the
curriculum, and silencing any murmur of dissent from their more sensible colleagues.
D'Souza refers to the new forms of criticism now dominant in humanities
departments as a cancer which as it metastasizes induces a kind of intellectual free
fall (The Atlantic Monthly, March 1991). Claude Rawson mutters darkly in the London
Review of Books (April 25) about professional misconduct, and claims there has been a
hijacking of the classroom by militant proponents of special interest groups. President
Bush, in his May 4 speech at the University of Michigan, declares free speech to be
under assault by the politically correct throughout the United States. And Maclean's,
in much the same mode, informs us in its cover story of May 27 that a new wave of
repression is sweeping through the universities.

Behind so much smoke there must be fire. But what kind of fire? The reader who
detects a whiff of paranoia in these metaphors of disease and terrorism may be interested
to know that D'Souza, under whose editorship the Dartmouth Review published overtly
racist articles, subsequently served as a domestic policy advisor in the Reagan White
House; that Rawson, even after the Thatcher government's elimination of one-sixth of the
posts of university teachers of English in Britain, seems to feel that there are more such
people around than is necessary or healthy; and that Bush, whose time in executive
office has seen the greatest transfer of wealth from poor to rich in American history,
incorporated his claims about a threat to free speech into an attack on the attempt of
Lyndon Johnson's Great Society social programmes to provide for the destitute.
Is it possible, then, that we are being manipulated?
Consider the Maclean's story about political correctness in Canadian
universities. Behind its windy headlines, the evidence that is offered of a wave of
repression seems strangely thin. It amounts, in fact, to four distinct incidents.
One of thesethe harassment of anthropologist Jeanne Cannizzo at the University
of Toronto by activists who interpreted as racist an exhibit she had curated at the Royal
Ontario Museum in 1990is genuinely disturbing. A second case, however, that of
psychologist Philippe Rushton at the University of Western Ontario, cuts in the opposite
direction. The issue raised by Rushton's claims about race, sexuality and intelligence, and
the subsequent calls for his dismissal, seems to me less one of free speech than of
professional competence.
What remains of the wave, if we keep to actual incidents as opposed to anxious
speculation, would scarcely fill a teacup. Maclean's is shocked that at a Vancouver
Shakespeare conference some feminists criticized the 16th century playwright for being
sexist and racist. And case number four is a matter of feminists at Acadia University
who wrote to protest the reproduction in the university calendar of an Alex Colville
painting which they believe dehumanizes women. Maclean's does not us whether their
letter was rude or insensitivenor in what sense Colville, who is also chancellor of the
university, was repressed by it.
How then should we interpret the controversy that (in George Bush's words) the
notion of 'political correctness' has ignited?
I see two basic reasons for this furore. The first is a matter of anxieties provoked
by recent developments within the human sciences; the second is more crassly political.

Until recently, most university teachers of literature took for granted the autonomy
and organic unity of the texts whose complicated but stable meanings they unfolded for
their students. A knowledge of background material, though it might enhance one's
appreciation of literature, was often thought unnecessary, as was any notion of taking the
interpreter's own historical situation, or gender, or race, or social class into account. The
result, all too often, was an unconscious remaking of literary classics in the image of their
interpretersa supposition that the universal values of literature happened to coincide
with those of mid-20th century white, male, middle-class professors.
Feminism, deconstruction, cultural materialism, and new historicism (to name
only the most prominent new modes of criticism) have changed all this. Although these
very diverse currents are far from composing a single monolithic tendency, they do share
a common insistence that texts and their interpreters are alike historically conditioned.
Meanings are thus inconstant and unstable, both because that is how language
seems to work (as T. S. Eliot wrote a half-century ago, words slip, slide, perish, / Decay
with imprecision, will not stay in place), and also because the conferring of meaning is
an ongoing dialogue between texts produced in specific historical contexts and readers
who have themselves been shaped by very different ones.
Modes of criticism which lay bare the social constraints and power structures that
inform any act of literary creation or interpretation have an obvious potential as
instruments of liberation. It is no accident that the widespread adoption of such styles of
criticism has coincided with a new sensitivity to previously neglected aspects of literary
classics, with an opening up of the curriculum to women, minority, and transcultural
writersand with a belated recognition on the part of universities of the need to remedy
the gross underrepresentation of women and minorities in their faculties and student
bodies.
These are all matters that deserve serious and sustained public debate. But the
political correctness furore which has developed in the US has very little in common
with reasoned debate: the claims of the New Right about current tendencies in the
universities rest for the most part upon distortions no less gross and palpable than those of
the Maclean's political correctness issue.
Dinesh D'Souza, for example, in claiming that Stanford University's revised
liberal arts survey course substitutes Third World texts for European classics in a
wholesale manner, does not both to mention that seven of the eight tracks available to

students retain the traditional structure. Moreover, since the presence of a good number of
European classics in the eighth track as well cannot be disguised, D'Souza objects to the
manner in which these are taught, finding it an indignity to suggest that Shakespeare in
The Tempest drew on contemporary reports of natives in the recently discovered new
world. Has D'Souza perhaps not bothered to read this play?
George F. Will, the Newsweek columnist, has strong opinions about the same
Shakespearean text. On April 22 of this year, he denounced the Modern Language
Association of America as a bolt-hole for academic subversives who think The Tempest is
'really' about imperialism. (The Tempest is of course about many thingsbut is
imperialism really not one of these? Perhaps Mr Will has also not read the play.)
The reason for Will's outburst? The MLA, on behalf of the 29,000 college and
university teachers who are its members, had opposed President Bush's nomination to the
advisory council of the National Endowment for the Humanities of a junior scholar
whose sole qualification for the post, apart from three modest scholarly articles, appeared
to be her activities as a political ideologue. Describing the nomination of this person as
premature, the MLA emphasized that it would not object to the appointment of a more
distinguished scholar with similar right-wing views.
But this moderate stance did not appease George F. Will. In his April 22 column
he described Lynne Cheney, the Chairman of the NEH (who had in the meantime
delivered a televised attack upon the MLA), as secretary of domestic defence; in his
view, The foreign adversaries her husband, Dick, must keep at bay are less dangerous, in
the long run, than the domestic forces with which she must deal.
This story, it turns out, has a Canadian angle. For the current president of the
MLA is none other than Professor Mario Valds of the University of Toronto, the
distinguished Hispanist and comparative literature specialist. It might well be alarming
for Mr Will to think that his most fearsome domestic adversary is, as it happens, a foreign
one as well. But as members of the Canadian academy could assure him, Professor
Valds is not just a first-rate scholar and teacher, but one who to the best of our
knowledge has not once committed a terrorist outrage. Nor (unless in accepting the
presidency of the MLA) has he ever invaded a neighbouring state.
Should we not perhaps be taking these frothy denunciations of political
correctness with a large grain of salt?

Michael Keefer, University of Guelph

President-elect of the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English