|
 ard on the heels
of its decision not to print the Horowitz anti-reparations ad, the
Harvard Crimson
is
being torn apart by yet another scandal pitting ethnic sensitivities
against free speech. A March 15
opinion piece critical of Asian student self-segregation by one
of the Crimson’s own writers — himself Asian — brought
hundreds of angry letters and launched a march on the Crimson’s
offices by a hundred outraged students. There followed an abject apology
for having printed the piece by Crimson President Matthew MacInnis,
and a well-taken condemnation of said apology by the Wall Street
Journal.
Anyone who understands the academy will know that the Horowitz incident
is the merest tip of the iceberg--that rare publicized case of overt
censorship floating above a veritable mountain of self-censorship
and disguised suppression of thought. How many students have swallowed
their criticisms of multicultural orthodoxy for fear of becoming
targets of the sort of intimidation we now see out in the open?
A second dramatic case drives the point home nicely, but there’s
more to the Crimson’s Asian incident than that. The inside
story of the Crimson’s decision to apologize for Justin Geoffrey
Fong’s opinion piece shows us how much what happens on our campuses
matters. And Fong’s incendiary but important piece on Asian self-segregation
may itself mark a milestone in the growing revolt against campus
multiculturalism.
“Provocative” is an understated way to describe Fong’s piece, which
makes devilishly direct and self-conscious use of nearly every available
stereotype of campus Asians. Fong has obviously got his tongue in
his cheek, but he also half-means his exaggerated portrayals of
Asian men as “scrawny, impotent, effeminate brainiacs” and Asian
women as “sex-fiend hotties whose bones everyone wants to jump.”
Fong doesn’t do anything that Camille Paglia hasn’t done a hundred
times before. But then, Camille Paglia is still at the Philadelphia
College of Textiles. The elite colleges won’t have her.
But there’s a method to Fong’s incendiary madness. His deeper point
is that Asian self-segregation is perpetuating both the image and,
to a degree, the reality of the Asian clichés. Fong says quite clearly
that he’s using blatant stereotypes, to which there are many exceptions.
It’s obvious (or ought to be obvious to a discerning reader) that
this is satire with a purpose. But Fong refuses to drop his provocative
stance and language. He sees that the only way to get at the reality
of self-segregation is to turn the power of the stereotypes it has
spawned back on itself.
Of course many of those who’d reject this defense of Fong’s language
are quick to manufacture reasons why the government ought to subsidize
the naked chocolate-smearing antics of Karen Finley, “Piss-Christ,”
or pictures of a naked woman in place of Jesus at the Last Supper.
Asians can’t provoke Asians free of charge in a college newspaper,
but Christian bashing, we’re told, is an investment in America’s
future.
In his apology for running Fong’s column, Crimson President
Matthew MacInnis tried to separate Fong’s legitimate point about
Asian self-segregation from Fong’s “unsupported generalizations”
about Asians. Fong, MacInnis claimed, failed to live up to the Crimson’s
“standards of argument.” Double-standards would be more like it.
During their tense behind-the-scenes deliberations on whether to
apologize for Fong’s Op-Ed, some Crimson staffers claimed
that Fong’s piece was being held to a unique standard. Few Op-Eds
in college papers — or other papers for that matter —
invoke statistics or footnotes to prove their generalizations.
In fact some influential, and very politically correct writings
on Asian identity from the late sixties say much the same thing
as Fong (although granted, in milder language). Amy Uyematsu’s essay
on “The Emergence of Yellow Power,” written in the wake of the Black
Power movement, laid out many of the same stereotypes discussed
by Fong, as did an important contemporaneous essay by Jan Masaoka.
Like Fong, Masaoka and Uyematsu said the typical Asian stereotypes
were actually “fairly accurate.” These authors could get away with
such statements, though, because they blamed the problem on white
prejudice instead of Asian self-segregation. Yet having tried the
multiculturalist solution for thirty years, the very same stereotypes
are still around — if anything reinforced by multiculturalist
self-segregation. Fong’s real crime was to expose the connection.
Once published, Fong’s piece provoked a storm of opposition--along
with a healthy chorus of cheers from people who felt he’d said something
true and important. Asian self-segregation hadn’t been an open issue
on the Harvard campus before. Now it is. That’s how free speech
is supposed to work. But our multicultural magnates and their fawning
liberal courtiers just don’t get it. Think what fun they could have
had answering the outrageous Mr. Fong with their own blistering
satire in the pages of the Crimson. There’s plenty of importance
that can and should be said in reply to Mr. Fong. But no. Yet another
march on a college paper, followed by yet another craven apology
is what we got instead. Seng Dao Yang, a protest organizer, told
the Boston Globe, “We fully support freedom of speech and
freedom of the press, but we believe the article is not acceptable.”
Say what?
Yang’s acuity on the matter of free speech was matched by famed
postmodernist Stanley Fish, who told the New York Times,
regarding the Horowitz battle, that student editors aren’t obligated
to print just any ad or article, regardless of content. True enough,
but freedom of speech is more than the letter of the law. For its
great defender, John Stuart Mill, freedom of speech is a spirit,
a public attitude toward the importance of expression that values
what we can and ought to permit, not merely what we legally must
permit. Yet the frightening truth is that we have raised up a generation
to which the deeper ethic of free speech is alien.
Or maybe not. The measure of the danger and the promise that we
face was taken in the debate that played out behind the scenes when
Crimson President Matthew MacInnis decided to knuckle under
to the demonstrators and issue an apology for running the Fong story.
Fong’s decision was sharply opposed by Frances G. Tilney and Victoria
C. Hallett, the editors of Fifteen Minutes, the Crimson’s
magazine, where Fong’s opinion piece appeared. Tilney and Hallett
thought long and hard, and consulted others at the Crimson,
before publishing Fong’s piece. “I knew it might be offensive,”
said Tilney, “but I wanted to do it. I felt uncomfortable editing
out his voice.” Some on the Crimson’s staff disagreed, but
in the belief that more voices, not fewer, ought to be heard, Tilney
and Hallett went forward.
Tilney and Hallett were determined to stick by their decision to
publish the piece, and were deeply dismayed by MacInnis’s plan to
apologize. But MacInnis had come under intense pressure from former
Crimson editors, many of them now working for major media
outlets throughout the country. Four of these influential former
editors demanded that the paper apologize by issuing an editorial
“retraction.” And all four, Sewell Chan, Ariel R. Frank, Andrew
A. Green, and Amita M. Shukla, demanded that Tilney, Hallett, and
anyone even indirectly involved in publishing the Fong piece,
be considered for dismissal. With current editors depending on the
Crimson alumni network for future jobs, this pressure cannot
be taken lightly.
But Tilney and Hallett fought back. Invoking the Byzantine bylaws
of the Crimson, they demanded a late-night meeting of the
Crimson’s “super-board,” the only decision making body capable
of over-ruling the president’s decision to apologize. The meeting
was convened at 11PM in the special room at the Crimson offices
known as “The Sanctum.” In the end, Tilney and Hallett lost, and
the president’s decision to apologize was affirmed.
Now Hallett is worried about the chilling effect of the apology
on the Crimson as a whole--and the magazine in particular.
“A lot of what [the magazine] does is highly irreverent, and we
could really get into trouble if it was taken the wrong way. A lot
of what we do is poke fun at stereotypes, and when stereotypes get
too sacred, they get perpetuated. That was really [Fong’s] point.”
Our worries for the Crimson’s future are balanced by the
knowledge that there are still editors like Tilney and Hallett out
there who understand what free speech is about.
The message in all this is mixed. That ex-Crimson editors
now climbing their way up the media ladder would actually try to
pressure the paper into firing Tilney and Hallett shows just how
far we’ve fallen. The criticism of the conduct of college papers
in the Horowitz affair by the “adult” press has created a false
picture. It isn’t just a few kids on college campuses who don’t
get free speech; it’s grownup media players, now out of school and
rising through the ranks. But the national embarrassment following
on the Horowitz flap and the Fong affair, and the conduct of courageous
young journalists like Tilney and Hallett, hold out some hope that
the days of multicultural madness may be numbered. Having cornered
all available rope on campus, the Left just might be in the process
of hanging itself.
|
