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Horowitz has reawakened the nation to the reality of campus censorship.
Yet many a pundit remains in denial.
Instead
of denouncing the pervasive atmosphere of intellectual intimidation
that made the Horowitz scandal possible, the critics dissect his personality.
We're told that if Horowitz would only get that chip off of his shoulder
— if he would just stop shoving his intentionally provocative
arguments down people's throats — all would be well.
Let Horowitz's critics go to the University of Alaska at Anchorage,
where an extraordinary and deeply revealing case of political correctness
is now playing itself out. The case is reminiscent of the Horowitz
affair — but for the fact that its protagonist is not an aging
white male conservative provocateur, but a mild-mannered socialist-feminist
poet of national renown.
Linda McCarriston, a teacher in the creative-writing program of
the University of Alaska at Anchorage, finalist for a national book
award, past fellow at Radcliffe's prestigious Bunting Institute,
stands accused of publishing a
poem that amounts to racist hate speech against Native American
Indians. Not only have there been calls to censor the poem, there
have been serious attempts to interfere with McCarriston's ability
to teach. And now a complaint against both McCarriston and the
university has been "accepted for resolution" by the U.S. Dept.
of Education's Office of Civil Rights — a complaint that charges
McCarriston with racial discrimination, as evidenced in part by
the fact that she gave a non-white student a B instead of an A.
All of these charges are patent nonsense. Taken together, they
constitute a threat to academic freedom far more deep and direct
than even the Horowitz affair. And remarkably, the victim in this
affair is a woman of the Left — a woman who is herself one-quarter
Native American. One of the many things that make the McCarriston
affair so important is that the entire dispute is, quite literally,
the criminalization of an intellectual disagreement originating
in the classroom. And the McCarriston affair also gives spectacular
support to Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield's controversial
claim that there is an intimate connection between grade inflation
and affirmative action.
The McCarriston affair began in a poetry class called, "Left Out."
The title refers to McCarriston's conviction that various poets
on the Left have been unjustly excluded from the literary canon
because of their politics. All went well until the course rolled
around to a discussion of the Hispanic poet, Jimmy Santiago Baca.
At that point, McCarriston suggested that Baca's life and poetry
might have hit a dead end as a result of his ethnically based politics.
An aficionado of classic socialism, McCarriston believes that class
solidarity can, and should, trump political division by race or
ethnicity. But McCarriston's critique of Baca's ethnic politics
raised intense objections from one Diane Benson, a Native American
poet and activist taking McCarriston's class. Instead of directly
engaging with her teacher's reading of Baca, Benson sat in angry
silence during McCarriston's critiques of identity politics, periodically
uttering the word "bulls***."
All of this can be gleaned, not only from McCarriston's account,
but from the numerous and impassioned letters — written by
the vast majority of students in the class — defending McCarriston
against the charges of racism now leveled against her by Diane Benson
— charges that have engulfed the Anchorage campus, and the
city of Anchorage itself, in months of conflict.
The struggle between Benson and McCarriston was confined to the
classroom until last December, when Diane Benson seized upon a just-published
poem by Linda McCarriston and e-mailed it around the nation and
the world, accompanied by a call to "squash" the poem's harmful
untruths. Benson's message also contained an expression of grave
concern at the fact that McCarriston was continuing to share her
"seriously flawed opinions" about poetry and ethnicity with her
students.
Benson took her complaint against McCarriston's allegedly racist
poem to university officials. Then Benson organized a student demonstration
against McCarriston to be held in McCarriston's own classroom.
The administration asked McCarriston to cancel that class, but she
refused, whereupon the administration insisted that the demonstration
take place outside the classroom. Meanwhile, dressed as a warrior,
and with an accompanying bodyguard, Diane Benson danced at the demonstration
she had called against her own teacher's alleged racism, during
a break in the class.
The Anchorage press has been preoccupied for months with attacks
by Native Americans on McCarriston's supposedly racist poem. But
what's really going on here is a classroom intellectual disagreement
gone wild. As both McCarriston and many of her students maintain,
Benson seized upon a poem that, under ordinary circumstances, would
never have stirred a protest, simply to retaliate against McCarriston
for her words in the classroom.
McCarriston's poem, "Indian Girls," describes the plight of Indian
women who flee their homes to escape child abuse, only to end up
at downtown bars, worse for the wear. According to Benson and other
Native American critics, the poem as much as accuses all Indian
men of being child abusers. But this is simply ridiculous.
"Indian Girls," is not saying that all Indian men are abusive.
McCarriston told me very clearly that she believes that sexual abuse
in any culture is "a very small percentage." McCarriston's point
is that, however limited its occurrence, the reality of sexual abuse
deeply shapes the relations of men and women in any culture. I
may not agree with McCarriston's feminist take on sexual abuse,
but it is no more legitimate to censor her view than it would be
to censor David Horowitz's ad. If McCarriston loses her free speech
in this matter, I lose mine. More than this, McCarriston's view
is not racist.
Far from being a condemnation of Indian culture, McCarriston's poem
is simply conveying her "Old Left" politics. In the poem, the narrator
tries to get the abused and fallen Indian women to see that she,
too, has experienced something similar. (McCarriston's poems are
often about her personal struggle with sexual abuse and her recovery
from alcoholism.) In effect, the poem can be read as saying to
Diane Benson, "Look, I know that Native Americans have suffered
deeply. But my people have too. I am also a victim of abuse and
alcoholism. And many whites, like many Indians, are victims of
sometimes oppressive men, and of the old patriarchal religions.
So let us join hands across our cultural differences and fight these
oppressive forces together."
This is the message that Linda McCarriston was trying to convey
to her class. It is the message that Diane Benson has rejected
and assaulted as a threat to the politics of ethnicity that she
favors. The tragedy is that craven university administrators —
and now, perhaps, the federal government — out of fear of offending
minority sensibilities, have allowed a single angry student to transform
a simple classroom difference of opinion into a profound threat
to academic freedom and standards of excellence.
The initial response of University of Alaska administrators to the
McCarriston affair was shamefully weak. In addition to the attempt
by the administration to cancel her class, McCarriston had to deal
with the efforts by Ronald Spatz, the chair of her department, to
appease her critics by downplaying their calls for censorship —
and by referring complaints about the poem to higher-ups for possible
action.
For a moment, the tide was turned, thanks to the intervention of
Alan Kors of the Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education, who helped to make Mark R. Hamilton,
the president of the University of Alaska system aware of the situation.
Hamilton rightly concluded that threats to investigate a professor
simply for writing a poem posed a danger to academic freedom. President
Hamilton — himself a poet — issued a ringing defense of
Linda McCarriston's intellectual freedom, and categorically demanded
that all threats to "investigate" her be immediately dropped. Hamilton
also asked the chancellors at the U of A's three campuses to endorse
his statement on academic freedom and disseminate it widely.
President Hamilton's forthright and courageous declaration brought
praise from many quarters, and has, to a degree, shifted the climate
at the University of Alaska against the calls to punish or censor
McCarriston for her poetry. But for weeks after Hamilton's letter
was issued, the chancellors at the U of A's three campuses offered
no endorsement of his views. Nor was the president's statement
"disseminated widely," as he had ordered. Worst of all, in the
wake of President Hamilton's ringing declaration that no investigation
of McCarriston is called for, the United States Department of Education's
Office of Civil Rights has announced its own investigation of an
anonymous student's charges of racism against Linda McCarriston.
It is not difficult to guess who that student is.
The OCR is investigating allegations that a minority student was
treated differently by McCarriston because of her race; that her
complaints of racism were ignored by McCarriston; and that, out
of racism and retaliation, the student was given a grade lower than
she deserved. On the near certain assumption that the complainant
here is Diane Benson, it is possible to say that these charges are
sheer nonsense — although, given the profound threat they pose
to academic freedom, those charges are anything but trivial.
The letters by the students in McCarriston's class make it clear
that Benson was in no way treated differently by McCarriston because
of her race. The letters do describe Benson's repeated efforts
to commandeer class discussion, and her fury when McCarriston tried
to bring discussion back to the texts, and to her interpretations
of those texts. But this is hardly racism.
As for Benson's grade, it could only have been a B, rather than
an A. (The university's grading system does not include pluses
or minuses.) Out of fourteen students in the class, seven got A's
and seven B's. With so inflated a grading system, are we now to
take a B as evidence of racism? The McCarriston affair, it seems,
is much more than a threat to academic freedom. It is also a "smoking
gun" confirmation of Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield's controversial
claim that grade inflation is linked to affirmative action.
Of course the notion that a B instead of an A might be evidence
of actionable racism makes the pressures involved in grading minority
students stunningly clear. But things don't end there. Linda McCarriston
has been directly pressured by her department chairman, Ron Spatz,
to be "more solicitous" of the success of Native American students
than of others whom she grades. Because of her belief that grade
inflation was depriving students in general of "the right to recognition
for their excellence," McCarriston has considered creating a two
tiered grading system--a transcript grade, and a "real" grade.
So without knowing it, McCarriston is proving the claims of —
and walking in the footsteps of — Harvey C. Mansfield.
What makes this case more interesting still is that "affirmative
action," in the official sense, is not at work. The University
of Alaska at Anchorage has an open admissions policy. Nonetheless,
with a local Native American population of 17 or 18 percent, and
with intense competition among universities for students, there
is a tremendous push to draw in more minorities — a push that
creates a kind of de facto affirmative action, even under conditions
of open admissions. That drive to enroll more minorities at the
U of A explains the attempts by administrators to placate Native
American demands for the punishment or censorship of Linda McCarriston.
And all of this shows that the corrupting effects of affirmative
action on the core values of liberal education extends far beyond
our elite, selective universities.
It is difficult to catalogue the many implications of this remarkable
case of political correctness. The investigation by the OCR shows
how easy the system now makes it to literally criminalize intellectual
disagreements originating in the classroom. The chilling effects
on academic freedom of this federal investigation can hardly be
exaggerated. The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights
was perhaps the central engine of campus P.C. during the Clinton
years, and the McCarriston affair shows how important it now is
to find someone to run this office who can stem the damage it is
doing every day to higher education.
But the most interesting thing about the McCarriston affair may
be its revelation of the sheer breadth of the threat to free speech
on campus. When even a nuanced and well-meaning feminist poet on
the Left gets the Horowitz treatment, we know that something truly
menacing and pervasive is at work. The liberal pundits now bashing
Horowitz ought to take an honest look at what their rationalizations
for campus P.C. have wrought. The Left is now devouring its own.
And all of us are paying the price.
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