The Culture of Fear (7 page)

For faculty members in the meantime, to be openly gay or lesbian at many colleges was to risk being denied tenure, promotion, and opportunities to move into administrative positions, research showed.
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The PC scare demonstrates how an orchestrated harangue can drown out a chorus of genuine concern. Faculty and students would raise
questions about inequities at their schools only to find themselves made into
causes célèbres
of anti-PC fear mongering.

Imagine how surprised people must have been at Chico State University in 1996 and 1997, when just about every prominent conservative commentator took out after them. “Totalitarianism didn’t disappear with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s alive and well on many American college campuses today,” wrote Linda Chavez in a column in
USA Today
in reaction to an event at the previously unnoticed California school. Her comment was typical of the commentary by conservative essayists. Reading them, you would have thought that Chico State was under some sort of military occupation. The conservatives in fact were reacting to a one-word alteration in a help-wanted ad. “We are seeking a dynamic classroom teacher ... ,” the draft of an advertisement for a philosophy teacher had read. When a member of the university committee that reviews job ads questioned whether
dynamic
was the best word to describe the kind of teacher the program was actually seeking, the word was replaced by
excellent.
Some highly effective teachers do not have dynamic personal styles, the English professor had observed, and vice versa, some high-spirited teachers do not actually have much worthwhile knowledge. In addition, she suggested, the term
dynamic
may unintentionally discriminate against candidates from certain Asian and Hispanic backgrounds in which personal styles tend to be more unassuming.
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Just about everyone involved at Chico State had concurred with the editorial revision, yet in the months that followed the editing of the ad conservatives took every opportunity to assail the modification as PC degeneracy. “This episode typifies the sorry state of higher education today: Academes are so afraid of offending people that they’re afraid to ask for strong teachers,” Debra Saunders, a columnist for the
San Francisco Chronicle,
blasted without bothering to explain her assumption that excellent teachers are not strong. In San Francisco’s other paper, the Examiner, Paul Roberts of the Cato Institute suggested that the secret plan at Chico was to exclude white men from faculty positions. “All qualifications are restrictive, which explains their de-emphasis and the plight of overrepresented white males in our brave new world of equal outcomes,” Roberts wrote.
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By this point in the PC scare sense and sensibility had become optional. Once a pseudodanger becomes so familiar it ends up in the dictionary (not to say the title of a popular TV show hosted by comedian Bill Maher), argument and evidence are dispensable. Indeed, in the late 1990s some of the best-known conservative columnists, no longer feeling obliged to diagnose particular incidents of political correctness in any depth, simply threw out bunches of ostensible examples. George Will, in a piece disparaging what he called “sensitivity-soaked Chico,” went on to complain about an entry in a mail-order catalogue for kindling wood “felled by lightning or other natural causes.” Even mail-order companies have to act PC, Will bemoaned, “lest the friends of trees have their feelings hurt.” John Leo, of U.S.
News & World Report,
likewise included Chico in a laundry list of what he dubbed “p.c. crimes and misdemeanors.” His sardonic subhead—“Wanted: Lethargic New Teacher”—was rather mild compared to some others in the same column. Beneath the heading “Tired of Education? Try Gender Courses” Leo warned that “p.c. folk” have been “working to replace useful college courses with dubious ones.” He cited as examples “The Politics of Dance Performance” offered at Swarthmore and “Christianity, Violence and Victimization” at Brown.
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Both Leo and Will banked on the improbability that anyone would look into their examples. The courses Leo cited did not replace other courses; they were added as electives. Nor did the courses represent dubious additions to the curriculum. A well-educated student of a particular art form ought to know something about its political dimensions, and the serious study of a religion necessarily includes attention to dishonorable as well as glorious moments in its history. As for the mail-order catalogue—the company was merely trying to make an unexceptional product sound special, a common practice in direct marketing.

If so many of their examples were untenable, how did conservatives engender such a successful scare? How did it come about that
politically correct,
a phrase hardly used in the media prior to Bush’s speech in
1991, appeared in the nation’s major newspapers and magazines more than 5,000 times a year in the mid-1900s? In 1997, the last year for which data were available, it appeared 7,200 times.
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The short but not incorrect answer is money. Behind the scenes millions of dollars were spent to generate that level of noise. Right-wing foundations such as Coors, Olin, and Bradley, along with corporate and individual contributors, provided funding for a national network of organizations: such think tanks as the Cato Institute and American Enterprise Institute; conservative college newspapers, including the
Dartmouth Review,
where Dinesh D’Souza got his start; magazines such as William F. Buckley’s
National Review
and David Horowitz’s
Heterodoxy;
and faculty groups, most notably the National Association of Scholars. With an annual budget in the vicinity of $1 million, the NAS had the wherewithal to provide politicians and the press with an unending supply of sound bites, anecdotes, and op-eds.
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In an article in
Skeptic
magazine on what he termed “the great p.c. conspiracy hoax” Brian Siano of the University of Pennsylvania compared the strategies of the NAS to a national magazine that asks its readers to send in accounts of psychic experiences or sightings of flying saucers. Such a request would inevitably produce loads of testimonials. “One might be able to debunk one or two accounts, but the rest of this database would remain ‘unchallenged,’ to be trotted out by the faithful as often as possible,” Siano suggests. “Now imagine,” he adds, “if you could spend a half dozen years and millions of dollars on such a project.”
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Siano’s comparison is apt. The NAS continually collected reports of political correctness gone amiss, packaged the best, and peddled them to the media. Anyone who dared challenge the reports quickly discovered the power of NAS’s home-court advantage. In 1996 after
USA Today
quoted an NAS official’s assertion that Georgetown University, as part of a general “dumbing down” of its curriculum, had decided to drop Shakespeare as a requirement for English majors, the dean at Georgetown responded that the school was doing nothing of the sort. Georgetown’s curriculum for English majors includes more, not fewer, Shakespeare classes than in the past, he pointed out. Moreover, regardless
of their major, all Georgetown students must complete twelve courses of general-education requirements, including two literature courses. This factual information from the dean did not appear, though, in the news story, but only later, in a letter-to-the-editor column.
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When Robert Brustein, artistic director of the American Repertory Theater, picked up on NAS rhetoric and proclaimed that “most English departments are now held so completely hostage to fashionable political and theoretical agendas that it is unlikely Shakespeare can qualify as an appropriate author,” journalists found the quote too juicy to resist. The image appeared widely in the press of PC thugs in ivory towers forcibly evicting the Bard. But when John Wilson, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, suspicious of the claim, consulted data from the Modern Language Association, he discovered that fully 97 percent of English departments at four-year colleges offered at least one course on Shakespeare. Almost two-thirds, he learned, required English majors to take a Shakespeare course. In the MLA’s on-line bibliography, Shakespeare received nearly 20,000 entries—more than three times the next runner-up (James Joyce), and thirty-six times as many as Toni Morrison, reported Wilson.
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Wilson’s correction to the NAS and Brustein et al. appeared, however, in the
Chronicle of Higher Education,
the equivalent of a trade magazine.

To the extent that great literary works were being withheld from America’s youth, PC forces were seldom to blame. The real censors, though they received scant attention, were people like the school superintendent in Maryland who banned Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon in 1997 after some parents called the classic of African-American literature “trash” and “anti-white.” And they were conservatives in the U.S. Congress and state legislatures. “The real danger to Shakespeare,” Katha Pollitt accurately noted in
The Nation,
“is not that he will cease to be compulsory at elite colleges like Georgetown but that he will cease to be made available and accessible to a broad range of students.” Throughout the 1980s and 1990s conservatives slashed budgets at the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, and other public programs. Among the unfortunate results of
those reductions in funding, such places as the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, Shakespeare and Company in Massachusetts, and the Folger Shakespeare Library had to curtail programs that train teachers and reach wide audiences.
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Conservative politicians had whipped up popular support for such cuts in the first place by—you guessed it—portraying the public agencies as hotbeds of political correctness.

Once a scare catches on, not only do its advocates have the offensive advantage, as the Shakespeare follies illustrate, but they can also use the scare as a defensive weapon in other disputes. This chapter concludes with an important case in point, in which the PC label was actually used to countermand a scientific fact.

Anyone who commuted by bus or train in the Washington, D.C., area during the mid-1990s or sought an abortion in the South in that period will probably remember this fear campaign. More than one thousand advertisements appeared in buses and subway stations around Washington and Baltimore alluding to a scary statistic: “Women who choose abortion suffer more and deadlier breast cancer.” In Louisiana and Mississippi legislators passed laws that require doctors to inform women twenty-four hours before an abortion that the procedure can increase their risk of breast cancer.
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Some antiabortion activists had been pushing the point since the early 1980s, when it first became apparent that as the number of abortions rose in the years after 1973, when the procedure became legal, rates of breast cancer also increased. Not until 1994, however, did the news media pay much attention to prolifers’ fear mongering. That year,
the Journal of the National Cancer Institute
published an article in which researchers estimated that having an abortion might raise a woman’s risk of breast cancer by 50 percent.
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To their credit, journalists were circumspect about the study. In contrast to coverage of some other pseudodangers (road rage among them), the news media generally did an excellent job of putting in
perspective the 50 percent figure. Reporters noted that other studies had found no increased risk, and that even if future research confirmed the figure, the import would be minimal for most women considering abortion. A 50 percent increased risk may sound large, but in epidemiologic terms it is not. It does not mean that if all women had abortions, half again as many would develop breast cancer; rather, it means that a woman’s lifetime risk goes up by 50 percent. If she had a 10 percent probability of developing breast cancer, abortion would raise it to 15 percent. Heavy smoking, by comparison, increases the risk of developing lung cancer by 3,000 percent. Some studies suggest that living in a city or drinking one glass of alcohol a day raises the risk of breast cancer by greater than 50 percent.
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Reporters generally did a laudable job the following year as well, when anti-abortion groups heralded two more studies. One estimated a 30 percent increased risk of breast cancer for women who have abortions; the other put the figure at 23 percent. Journalists explained that both studies suffered, as had earlier research, from a potential reporting bias that could substantially skew their results. They quoted the lead researcher on one of the studies, the epidemiologist Polly Newcomb of the Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, who noted that women battling breast cancer might be more likely than others to inform researchers that they had had abortions. Cancer patients are more accustomed to giving full and accurate medical histories, Newcomb suggested, and they are searching themselves for an explanation for their illness.
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Strikingly, the lead researcher on the other study in 1995, an endocrinologist at Baruch College named Joel Brind, offered no such caveats. On the contrary, he told CNN, “The evidence is quite clear, in fact, it should have been out long ago.” Brind advocated that every woman considering abortion be informed of the potential increased risk of breast cancer. When reporters checked into Brind’s background, however, they learned that he is an antiabortion activist who contributes frequently to newsletters and web sites published by prolife groups. Richard Knox of the
Boston Globe
reported that Brind told him
he had conducted the study specifically to provide legislators with justification for requiring doctors to warn women about a cancer risk.
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