Debating P.C.

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Debating P.C. (Magill Book Reviews)

Some of the finest minds in the American academy are represented in this first-rate collection, among them Catherine R. Stimpson, John Searle, Edward Said, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stanley Fish, Barbara Ehrenreich, Molefi Kete Asante, and Diane Ravitch. After five major statements that function nicely as a “debate,” Paul Berman subdivides the book into sections on “Politics and the Canon,” “Free Speech and Speech Codes,” “Texas Shoot-out” (about events at the University of Texas), and “The Public Schools.” Berman’s introduction brilliantly sets the stage. He argues that an orthodoxy did develop on the cultural left in the early 1980’s, a blend of indigenous American concerns over racial and sexual oppression and schemes of analysis borrowed from French Marxism and literary theory. What conservatives have reacted to is this orthodoxy, which Berman calls “race/class/gender-ism.” Its most controversial claim is that education in the West has been fundamentally imperialistic, irredeemably biased in favor of white, heterosexual European males.

The conservatives Berman draws most heavily on are Dinesh D’Souza and Roger Kimball (authors, respectively, of ILLIBERAL EDUCATION: THE POLITICS OF RACE AND SEX ON CAMPUS and TENURED RADICALS: HOW POLITICS HAS CORRUPTED OUR HIGHER EDUCATION). Of the two, Kimball is the more substantive. He directs his harshest words at the ideal of multiculturalism, which he claims implies “a complete politicization of teaching and learning” and the fallacious idea that “all cultures are equally valuable and, therefore, that preferring one culture, intellectual heritage, or moral and social order to another is to be guilty of ethnocentrism or racism.” For Kimball, this cultural egalitarianism overlooks the fact that only in the West has liberal democracy—whose tolerant ethos permits the muticultural debate to flourish—taken full root. It therefore demands to be cherished and nurtured.

Readers looking for a middle ground between Kimball and cultural separatists like Molefi Kete Asante will find the articles by Catherine Stimson, Edward Said, and Michael Berube particularly enlightening. These writers have a sophisticated understanding of the French material; they use it to display the rich and complex relations of culture and power in the West, without surrendering the Western heritage. The piece nonacademic readers will find the most interesting is Katha Pollitt’s. She argues that the P. C. debate is a passionate one because America has ceased to be a place where books are important. This condition means that books required for college students may be the only ones they ever read. Therefore the stakes are unnaturally high. A healthily literate culture would not worry about excluding certain “classics” from college lists, because students would feel compelled to read them anyway to take part in a rich conversation about ideas and texts.