Thank your preferred deity for Camille Paglia, who, if not always right, has the virtue of being unfailingly interesting. At The Smart Set, a publication of Drexel University’s Pennoni Honors College, Paglia has a new essay entitled “Free Speech & the Modern Campus” that suggests why and how the former disappeared from the latter. A few excerpts:
What is political correctness? As I see it, it is a predictable feature of the life cycle of modern revolutions, beginning with the French Revolution of 1789, which was inspired by the American revolution of the prior decade but turned far more violent. A first generation of daring rebels overthrows a fossilized establishment and leaves the landscape littered with ruins. In the post-revolutionary era, the rebels begin to fight among themselves, which may lead to persecutions and assassinations. The victorious survivor then rules like the tyrants who were toppled in the first place. This is the phase of political correctness — when the vitality of the founding revolution is gone and when revolutionary principles have become merely slogans, verbal formulas enforced by apparatchiks, that is, party functionaries or administrators who kill great ideas by institutionalizing them. What I have just sketched is the political psychobiography of the past 45 years of American university life.
Paglia argues that the cultural revolution that commenced in the postwar period (Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Elvis on Ed Sullivan, Lenny Bruce, Mario Savio, &c.) was primed to reconstitute the university’s provincial, arch-conservative approach to the humanities by breaking down the departmental structure and promoting wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study: “sex and gender, film, African-American and Native American studies,” yes, but also Xenophon and Milton and the rest. But that’s not what happened. Instead, to deflect concerns about “relevance,” administrations established new, ideologically charged programs “virtually overnight.” The result was “balkanization” and isolation:
Today’s campus political correctness can ultimately be traced to the way those new programs, including African American and native American studies, were so hastily constructed in the 1970s, a process that not only compromised professional training in those fields over time but also isolated them in their own worlds and thus ultimately lessened their wider cultural impact. . . For every new department or program added to the U.S. curriculum, there should have been a central shared training track, introducing students to the methodology of research and historiography, based in logic and reasoning and the rigorous testing of conclusions based on evidence. Neglect of that crucial training has meant that too many college teachers, then and now, lack even the most superficial awareness of their own assumptions and biases. Working on campus only with the like-minded, they treat dissent as a mortal offense that must be suppressed, because it threatens their entire career history and world-view. The ideology of those new programs and departments, predicated on victimology, has scarcely budged since the 1970s.
The faculty of those departments, then and now, come in for sharp rebuke:
Here we come to one of the most pernicious aspects of identity politics as it reshaped the American university — the confusion of teaching with social work. The issue of improper advocacy in the classroom has never been adequately addressed by the profession. . . . Because of the failure of American colleges and universities to seek and support ideological diversity on their campuses, the humanities faculties have trended so far toward liberal Democrats (among whom I number myself) that they often seem naively unaware that any other beliefs are possible or credible.
And, especially noteworthy:
A tragic result of the era of identity politics in the humanities has been the collapse of rigorous scholarly standards, as well as an end to the high value once accorded to erudition, which no longer exists as a desirable or even possible attribute in job searches for new faculty.
Paglia also has a thoughtful explanation of the way in which language has been transformed into “violence” under the current campus regime:
Another problem in 1970s academe was a job recession in the humanities that arose just as deconstruction and post-structuralism arrived from Europe. . . . Post-structuralism, in asserting that language forms reality, is a reactionary reversal of the authentic revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, when the arts had turned toward a radical liberation of the body and a reengagement with the sensory realm. By treating language as the definitive force in the world — a foolish thesis that could easily be refuted by the dance, music, or visual arts majors in my classes — post-structuralism set the groundwork for the present campus impasse where offensive language is conflated with material injury and alleged to have a magical power to create reality.
Finally, Paglia has a few thoughts about what might be done. But for those, click over to the full essay. Highly recommended.