Richmond Fontaine: Capsized
Rare Complaint
Here’s a piece so rare that I almost can’t believe I just read it: an academic- an administrator, no less- demanding that the education mass media and the education community address biases in class both in journalistic and financial priorities. It’s a response to a spate of stories of how elite institutions are handling the budget crisis precipitated by the recension. Drew A. Bennett (chancellor of Missouri State University-West Plains) says things have to change.
First, Bennett says, the media need to “stop drawing attention to the alleged sacrifice of doing without cookies [at Harvard] and ask what’s wrong with a system where some institutions have that much money in the first place.” This is a fact of life in education that’s almost never discussed. Yet, as Bennett notes, while ” a million-dollar gift to an institution like Harvard or Princeton is a drop in the bucket, while the same gift to a two-year, rural college is a tsunami.” As always, the poor and working people take the hits most often.
What’s so interesting is that so few people either feel the outrage that Bennett so nicely dramatizes or so few feel free to openly discuss these class discrepancies in higher education. Yet he’s only scratched the surface of these inequities. Material privileges of this sort are hidden right out in the open and so naturalized that they almost never generate critical examination. It’s as if at some level we believe that the well-off, in education and elsewhere, are well off for good reason. Who are we to question what they have?
The Limits of Irony
In the 1980s we used to joke about people that we called “politically correct.” My favorite example was people who felt they had to try to precisely mimic the pronunciation of Spanish words– never mind that most of the words they were mimicking had been a part of English for at least 300 hundreds years. They never did this with French, or German, or any other langauge, just Spanish.
It was an odd over-earnest attempt to show respect for Hispanic culture, of course, and we joked about it not because it was wrong but because it seemed exaggerated. “Politically correct” was ironic because it both recognized the important of showing respect for other people while trying to deflate a kind of pretentiousness. It was a gentle prod among friends.
Through some mysterious Orwellian process the U.S. right wing took up the notion of political correctness, carefully removed the irony, and used the crude remaining idea to bludgeon anyone they didn’t like. (In a similar way the right seems to miss the humor of the term “Tea Bagger”). Amazingly, “political correctness” has now been taken up by people who should know better.
One of these “you should know better groups” is the ACTA. (Always a favorite for anyone who watches the right wing academic cadres.) A recent post “Reforming the politically correct university,” seems typically disingenuous. David Azerrad begins by noting the obvious: “Some argue there is no such thing, while others point to case after case demonstrably proving that PC is very real indeed.”
He quickly dismisses the ambiguity. “After all, the endpoint is not to show that PC exists — but to find ways to restore free inquiry, robust debate, and intellectual fairness at our colleges and universities.” In other words, there’s no reason to try to figure out if in fact political correctness exists; we can simply assume that it does and move on to what can be done about it.
This is not to say that “bad things never happen” on campus; many of the incidents cited were misguided at best. But the real question is whether or not these incidents add up to a pattern of stiffing intellectual debate. The symbolic code of the right is important to note here. Azzerad is not defending all intellectual debate; he’s saying that right wing ideas are suppressed.
That’s why this post-ironic notion of political correctness is so deceptive, even though career have been founded on it. There’s always been a very vigorous right wing on campus, from the pro-business economics departments to the union-busting administrators to the traditional defenders of the cannon in the English department. Reaction, I guess, isn’t supposed to be rational.
Monsters of Folk: The Right Place