Another Crimson Moment
Our multicultural magnates and their fawning liberal courtiers just don’t get it.

By Stanley Kurtz, fellow, the Hudson Institute.
March 22, 2001 8:45 a.m.

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.