Candace Under Fire
SUNY seeks to dismiss a trustee for daring to criticize a black-studies program.

Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the Hudson Institute
February 25, 2002 8:40 a.m.

acism is wrong. That's for certain. The trouble is, in an age of few certainties beside our determined rejection of prejudice, accusations of racism have turned into easily abused tools of personal destruction. We've seen how opponents of Charles Pickering's appointment to the federal bench have tried to ruin him by pretending to discover in his judicial conservatism the taint of personal racism. The African Americans in Pickering's hometown know better, and their willingness to say so has embarrassed Pickering's accusers. Now a false charge of racism has brought a call for the dismissal of Candace de Russy, an outspoken trustee of the State University of New York, who dared to publicly criticize the SUNY system's African-American-Studies programs for their political bias and lack of rigor.

De Russy has been a thorn in the side of the Left-leaning faculty at the SUNY system for years. It was de Russy who kicked up a controversy some years ago by criticizing the women's studies conference at SUNY New Paltz that included the solicitation of students by members of a sadomasochistic lesbian club and the demonstration and sale of sex devices (with minors present). Worse still, de Russy was at the forefront of a board effort that resulted, three years ago, in the creation of a genuine core curriculum at SUNY, provoking hostility from programs like black studies, whose courses were not included in the core. Now, simply because de Russy argues that black-studies programs tend to neglect the positive achievements of America, while relentlessly emphasizing our society's historic wrongdoing, she has been labeled a racist. The United University Professions, the 27,000-member union of faculty and staff at the SUNY system has passed a resolution calling for de Russy's dismissal from the board.

It's obvious to anyone with eyes to see that the SUNY faculty has concocted a false charge of racism out of de Russy's reasoned and reasonable criticisms of black-studies programs-all as a way of removing the most effective conservative critic from the SUNY board of trustees. And de Russy's free speech? We're dealing with the modern American university here. If you want free speech, try the Internet or cable TV.

De Russy's crime was to be quoted in a Newsday article about recent controversies over black-studies programs. That article featured critical comments about such programs from NRO's John Derbyshire and Hoover Institute fellow Shelby Steele. No doubt, the SUNY faculty would be happy to have the heads of Derbyshire and Steele, if they thought could get them. But it's de Russy they're out to destroy. And for what?

In the Newsday article, de Russy argues that most black studies departments have become "flabby feel-good programs that carry an anti-American bias and do little to advance knowledge." Many such programs, de Russy maintains, have become "therapeutic," more interested in consciousness raising than scholarship.

Asked to elaborate on these points, de Russy is measured and reasonable. She happily concedes that there has been a good deal of distinguished African-American scholarship in recent years, pointing to the work of William Julius Wilson, for example. What bothers de Russy is that black-studies departments have come under the control of professors with a single point of view. Instead of open-ended exploration, says de Russy, these departments push students to come to predetermined political conclusions. The views of conservative black scholars such as Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell, for example, are rarely presented.

De Russy doesn't want to eliminate the study of the African American experience from the university. What she advocates instead is "mainstreaming" programs like black studies and women's studies by integrating them with traditional departments. De Russy thinks it's the separation of black studies and women's studies from conventional departments that has encouraged the political bias, therapeutic ethos, and grade inflation that regularly plague such programs. De Russy's right, I think. But is it fair for even those who disagree with her to turn a difference of opinion on this question of departmental structuring into a charge of racism and a demand for de Russy's dismissal?

It so happens that de Russy has a thoughtful and important article out in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education on the tyrannical treatment of traditionally religious faculty members and students in the contemporary academy. The piece contains some real horror stories-the student who was accused of sexual harassment and threatened with expulsion because he prayed for the reform of homosexuals; the student who caused a crisis at a weekend retreat for "resident advisors" when he asked to go to church on Sunday. But beyond the horror stories, de Russy's piece is filled with thoughtful analysis of the plight of religious believers in today's university. What an irony that at the very moment she has published a well-considered defense of religious freedom, de Russy's own freedom of speech — indeed her position in the university — has been so viciously assaulted.

De Russy is even a board member of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), an organization that has distinguished itself as the foremost defender of the freedom of religion and speech in the contemporary academy. In fact, especially since Sept. 11, FIRE has gone to bat for any number of Left-leaning faculty members who have been harassed and threatened for opposing the war on terrorism. Given her distinguished sponsorship of this beacon of freedom in today's academy, how sad it is that de Russy herself should be defamed and attacked by a Left-leaning faculty union who's own freedom of speech is far safer today for the work her organization has done.

Of course, the de Russy affair is only the latest in a long line of incidents in which those few souls courageous enough to venture open criticisms of black studies programs are tarred with charges of racism and targeted for retaliation. Readers will recall the dust-up at Harvard over President Lawrence Summers's criticisms of Cornell West, but the problem has a much longer history. Last year, of course, there were the attacks on the offices of student papers that had published the David Horowitz ad opposing slave reparations. And remember the attempts to silence Harvey Mansfield's campaign against grade inflation at Harvard, simply because he argued that affirmative action played a role in promoting the practice?

A lesser-known incident was the assault this past November on Professor Barry Shain of Colgate University. Like de Russy, Shain had expressed some concerns about black-studies courses at his university that focused more on politically tinged consciousness raising than on mastery of a body of knowledge. And like de Russy, Shain was worried that such courses tempted students with easy grades for de facto group-therapy sessions instead of challenging them to master the art of writing. All of this was said in a private e-mail to a student, and never meant for general dissemination. But Shain quickly found his e-mail message broadcast to the entire university, and himself the target of outraged protests and demands that he and faculty sympathizers undergo mandatory sensitivity training. Seventy students, many of them black, occupied the Colgate admissions office and put their demands against Shain. Left-leaning faculty members chimed in by labeling Shain a bully (for a private e-mail message!). Of course, the real bullies were Shain's enemies, who effectively criminalized an intellectual and pedagogical disagreement by concocting a false charge of racism. And as with the de Russy flap, the real motive in the Shain affair was to destroy the one professor at Colgate who regularly shows the courage to criticize the plans and programs of a Left-leaning faculty.

The list of such incidents and tactics can be extended indefinitely, going back to the origins of black-studies programs in the late Sixties. At SUNY Stony Brook, for example, the black-studies program was instituted in 1968 after black students shut down the campus for days. The most famous incident of all was at Cornell in 1969, where black radicals armed with shotguns took over an administration building and threatened the lives of faculty who opposed their demands for, among other things, a program in black studies.

There can be no doubt that slavery and racism together constitute the most shameful chapter in American history. The study of that sad past, like the study of the struggles and positive achievements of black Americans, was unjustly neglected prior to the late Sixties. It is right and proper that these subjects be taken up in our institutions of higher learning, and it is a tribute to the movements of the Sixties that we do so today.

Yet there is plenty of room for legitimate disagreement about the best way to integrate the study of minorities and women into the academic curriculum. Those who feel that the separation of ethnic and women's studies programs from traditional departments has been a tragic mistake are not, for that, sexists or racists, and it is high time that criticism of such programs was answered with argument and honesty, instead of defamation and calls for dismissal.

The legacy of slavery and racism is tragic, real, and important. Yet in the last 35 years, another disturbing legacy has taken root in the United States. It is the legacy of intimidation launched against any who dare to demur at the demands of organized minorities. We shall know that racism has finally been defeated in the United States when the "demands" of America's minorities can be subject to the same sort of rough and tumble criticism as the views of anyone else. In the meantime, we must do what we can to defend the freedom and integrity of brave souls like Barry Shain and Candace de Russy.