Inside American Education (32 page)

Student Fees as Political Subsidies

One of the most remarkable symptoms of the politicization and partisanship of academic institutions has been the widespread practice of automatically deducting part of students’ fees to be turned over to off-campus organizations promoting the ideological views associated with Ralph Nader. Called Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), these organizations exist in states across the country, as CalPIRG in California, MassPIRG in Massachusetts, ConnPIRG in Connecticut, and with similar names in other states.

The sums of money deducted tend to be small individually—four dollars per semester for MassPIRG from each Wellesley student, six dollars for the Minnesota PIRG from each student at Carleton
⁸⁷
—but even a small college like Wellesley has had more than $13,000 a year extracted involuntarily from its students for this ideological cause, while CalPIRG at one time collected automatically more than $52,000 annually from fees paid by students at the University of California at Santa Cruz, more than $57,000 from student fees at UCLA, more than $124,000 from Berkeley students, and more than $135,000 from tees paid by students at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
⁸⁸

With substantial sums of money being extracted from students on many campuses from coast to coast, whether at private institutions like Tufts or on the multiple campuses of the University of Minnesota and other state institutions, a very large amount of money is being funneled into a political movement through a privately levied tax, rather than through voluntary donations. PIRGs are unique in having this privilege.

Defenders of this extraordinary arrangement claim that the donations are “voluntary” because each student has a legal right to demand a refund of his own contribution and the campus has collectively voted to establish such a check-off system. Both claims are shaky, however. Students and parents who receive college bills totaling thousands of dollars may or may not check every item costing a few dollars. Moreover, getting a refund is not always quite as easy as PIRG advocates claim.

Defenders of MPIRG at Carleton College said that “each student has the opportunity to have their money refunded during
the fiscal refund period of each year.”
⁸⁹
But this means that only those who act within a given span of time can retrieve their money. When CalPIRGs operated at the University of California at Santa Cruz, each student had to hand-deliver his request for a refund in writing to the organization or to the college registrar.
⁹⁰
At Carleton College, according to a critic of the Minnesota PIRG, each student must either “contact the business office directly or request a refund from MPIRG at the very beginning of each year or term from MPIRG.”
⁹¹
At Wellesley, the waiver is not sent out with every bill.
⁹²

Claims of being democratic are likewise suspect. One class$ vote can bind subsequent classes to pay, through an automatic check-off, and small voter turnout allows the organized PIRG supporters to carry the day with much less than a majority of the student body. At Wellesley, for example, only 37 percent of the students voted on the issue in 1987 and only 19 percent favored such a system—but these 19 percent were a “majority,” whose votes bound not only its own class but subsequent classes as well,
⁹³
until a 1989 vote narrowly overturned this system.
⁹⁴
MassPIRG$s defeat at Wellesley was all the more remarkable because its supporters mounted a major campaign to maintain its privileged position and the ballot proposition was so worded as to suggest that the issue was whether the organization could continue to exist on campus. A separate question as to whether
any
student organization should “have the right to have a line item on the tuition bill/comprehensive fee bill” received a resounding rejection by a vote of nearly three to one.
⁹⁵
Getting the automatic “contributions” to PIRGs stopped on other campuses has likewise been an arduous process. In California, it took an act of the university regents in September 1990 to end the practice on the various University of California campuses.
⁹⁶
At Rutgers University, it took a lawsuit to stop the local PIRG from continuing to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars from the various campuses of that state university.
⁹⁷
The automatic cheek-off still remains in place on many other campuses.

That such a system of commandeering students’ money (for a cause which they might not support voluntarily) should have been instituted in the first place speaks volumes about the academic mindset and its ideological double standards. Other organizations are permitted no such direct levy on students
and it is unthinkable that any such arrangement would even be considered for organizations with opposing views.

“
Residential Education
”

Traditional college dormitories have in recent years been subtly transformed into places where organized indoctrination efforts have become routine, under the title “residential education.” These indoctrination efforts may be frequent or sporadic, subtle or heavy-handed, depending largely on the style and zeal of the resident adviser or resident assistant. At Stanford, where there is a “department of residential education,” one of the resident assistants said: “I tried soft sells like putting up cartoons of episodes in African-American history in the bathroom stalls, but some people complained, ‘can’t escape this multiculturalism stuff anywhere.’” The same RA admitted “often frosh told me, ‘I’m so sick and tired of multiculturalism.’”
⁹⁸

Stanford’s “residential education” program has expanded to the graduate level, creating a multicultural theme house for graduate students—whether they want it or not. Despite the efforts of the resident assistant there and ten theme coordinators who organize “events such as multicultural film series, minority guest speakers and parties celebrating different cultures,” the RA expressed disappointment at the “apathy” of the students. Only about 15 of the 115 graduate students in this house were active in the theme house’s activities. He attributed this Lo the fact that their academic work “tends to drain their energy.”
⁹⁹
Considering the workload of Ph.D. students at a top-tier university, it is amazing that anyone would have sought to intrude ideological programs into their lives in the first place, but this is done not only at the multicultural theme house, but to a lesser degree in all of the other graduate dormitories as well.
¹⁰⁰

At Harvard, the minority affairs dean handpicked and assigned “designated race relations tutors” to each house to “monitor the racial atmosphere,” report “violations of community,” and “raise consciousness” among the students. She also engaged an outside “facilitator company” to conduct “house workshops” on racism. Among the material used in this
consciousness-raising operation was a pamphlet which presumed students guilty of racism
a priori
. The pamphlet urged students to “accept the onion theory, that they will continue to peel away layers of their own racism for the rest of their lives.” Even a “Back to the Fifties” party by dining-hall employees was denounced as “racism” by the minority affairs dean, on grounds that the 1950s were a racist decade.
¹⁰¹

Like other fashions which begin at the most prestigious colleges and universities, “residential education” has spread across the country and down the academic pecking order. A student at the University of California at Santa Crux, reports: “Many dorms have begun to require residents to attend sensitivity workshops where students are taught the ‘proper’ beliefs regarding race, gender, and sexual preference.”
¹⁰²
A member of the board of regents at the University of Michigan reported receiving “many complaints from parents and students” about “indoctrination sessions” in the dormitories.
¹⁰³

At trendy colleges and universities, “multicultural diversity” is much more than simply “an appreciation of different cultures and values,”
¹⁰⁴
as a devotee innocently characterized it. It is a whole elaborate set of beliefs and attitudes, covering everything from homosexuality to Western civilization. Moreover, these beliefs and attitudes are not simply part of the marketplace of ideas. They are institutionally imposed. Few things are as one-sided as so-called “diversity,” which has a “politically correct” response to every issue. As Oberlin College president S. Frederick Starr put it, the word “diversity” has come to mean in practice “subscribing to a set of political views.”
¹⁰⁵
The dogmatism behind the concept was inadvertently captured by a headline on the front page of
The Chronicle of Higher Education
:

Racial Tensions Continue to Erupt on Campuses Despite Efforts to Promote Cultural Diversity

The very possibility that these “cultural diversity” efforts themselves may have contributed to the tensions was not mentioned anywhere in the accompanying story.

While the Stanford resident assistant who prided himself on his “soft sell” approach admitted that some other RA’s were “overzealous,”
¹⁰⁶
he did not reach the deeper question:
Why were there such cultural
Gauleiters
in the first place, and why were students’ campus homes becoming re-education camps? Such brainwashing operations make a mockery of attempts to get parents out of their children’s lives, on grounds that the latter’s autonomy and self-development must be respected.

FRAUDULENT DEFENSES

In the face of bitter criticisms from around the country that double standards are being applied on campus, according to the ideological or biological group to which individuals belong, defenders of the prevailing practices have repeatedly chosen to ignore this charge completely, and to reply instead with defenses of their own beliefs and social goals.

Thus, a dean at Rutgers defends those accused of political correctness as people whose goal is “bringing about change”—as if there has ever been a time in the history of the world when change was not going on. Generic “change” has never been an issue. Only specifics are an issue, and a flight into vague generalities is an evasion of issues. Professors interviewed by
The Chronicle of Higher Education
denounced the term “politically correct” as an “epithet to discredit new policies meant to make campuses more hospitable to women and minority groups.”
¹⁰⁷
In other words, it is all a question of different intentions.
The Stanford Daily
likewise posed the issue in terms of “the goals of the progressive movement.”
¹⁰⁸

In addition to those who simply refuse to address the issue of double standards in the application of institutional rules and policies, there are others who deny that these transgressions are widespread. To Michael Kinsley of
The New Republic
, for example, “anti-PC diatribes” and “hysteria” are based on “suspect anecdotes.”
¹⁰⁹
Similar dismissals of charges as “vastly overblown” or as showing an “hysterical attitude” have appeared in
The Chronicle of Higher Education
and in
The New York Times
.
¹¹⁰
However, as to the sheer quantity of episodes, no book small enough to be hand-held could contain all the instances of institutional double standards in judging and punishing behavior, or even all the instances published in student newspapers across the country. Given the physical limitations on
how much can be covered in one place, claims that “selective” examples have been used are misleading at best. More fundamentally, some episodes have implications that reach far beyond those directly involved, whether because of the grossness of these episodes, by the official sanctions they embody, or the clear, chilling message of intimidation that they convey.

When a college or university takes no official action against disruption and violence by some sets of students, while threatening, punishing, or expelling others for such non-violent behavior as flying an American flag during the Gull War, skating out onto a hockey rink at half-time in costume, seating people at a reserved table, or turning in a paper without footnotes, then this sends an unmistakable message whose implications reach far beyond the particular individuals involved. Moreover, it is not just the particular episodes themselves, but the
institutionalized apparatus
which has been created to impose conformity on an on-going basis—the propaganda machines of “residential education,” the “sensitivity” workshops for faculty and students, the whole industry of “diversity consultants,” and the “speech codes” which claim to be protecting against gross insults,
¹¹¹
but whose power to punish extends into the most nebulous areas. This use of imaginary horrors to acquire power to punish a wide range of behavior is not unlike the technique of bait-and-switch advertising.

This is not to say that there are no real horrors, but these are typically either violations of the law or are committed clandestinely, which is to say, beyond the reach of speech codes. What speech codes do is to create a vast penumbra of proscribed behavior, reaching far beyond the horror stories used to justify the codes. Often the horrors were amply covered by existing rules, as at Stanford University, where students could be expelled for failure to show “respect for order, morality, personal honor, and the rights of others”—
before
the newspeech code prohibited any words or deeds which “stigmatize” anyone.
¹¹²
No one familiar with the double standards at Stanford seriously expects that anyone from any of the approved “victim” groups will ever be found to have “stigmatized” anyone else, while anyone who addresses or replies to what they say will have to walk on eggshells.