Dear John/Jane Doe,
Let me begin by saying that I envy you your coming four years at Brown, despite anything I might say in the course of this missive. I still find it more than a bit depressing that I will not be returning to cozy College Hill this fall, as had come to seem routine, but rather will find myself a small fish in a far larger pond (UCLA). But I digress.
As it was, my time at Brown was dear, in every sense of that word. I only had three years, because I transferred from NYU as a sophomore. In that sense, like immigrants who tend to see the United States in ways its native-born have long ago forgotten, I may have a slightly richer—or at least different – vantage point from which to examine the institution that has just welcomed you.
First off, I will not mince words: Brown is a wonderful place. Its sometimes intense politicization is a double-edged sword of which there will be much critique, but it remains that for those interested in the political and social issues of the day, as well as those philosophical ones of all days, opportunity will knock and not cease knocking. My basic example is simple: At NYU I wrote for the newspaper, as I would at Brown. NYV’s newspaper is better funded than Brown’s, with far more professional facilities. A reporter who managed a cover story actually received $10 for it, so the paper was shelling out $40 or so a day to its writers, unimaginable at the Brown Daily Herald. It was all for naught though, as not a single person I met the entire year read it, despite its ample stocks delivered day in, day out, to all relevant dorms and buildings. I admit that not even I read it after the first few weeks, and I wrote for it.
Fast forward to my sophomore year at Brown: I began to work for the post, the Brown Daily Herald’s Friday arts section, and on a lark wrote a guest editorial for the opinions section about one of my pet obsessions, hip-hop and its potential for academic study. Looking back I find it middling to poor, but was shocked in the days after it was published to find that peopleactually cared.Comments – sometimes inexplicably virulent ones, which I quickly became accustomed to – were splattered beneath it on the Herald website, and I received e-mails from people I did not know to either dissent, praise or inquire further. Nothing at NYU had prepared me for this, which was actually pretty mild compared to what would come, when I became a full-time (if you can call it that) columnist and wrote about subjects like foreign policy and race relations.
Week after week, I was delighted to see that what I wrote was actually arousing debate and discussion, and am not ashamed to say that it is quite an ego massage to have a stranger come up to you on the main green or in Faunce House to say “Hey, aren’t you Alex Schulman? I [insert past tense verb] your last column.” By junior and senior years, 1′m sure many thought I had no social life whatsoever, as my name would be plastered all over Heraldsphere and the Daily Jolt, hours having been spent responding to the responses to the responses, etc. And keep in mind that I was one of many; other columnists, writers and posters could tell the same stories. I had never encountered any such intellectual engagement at NYU, and not because the people there are any dumber – it was simply a different culture, more pragmatic, less given to the tendentious and idle spilling of ink, or late-into-the-night bull sessions on everything from AIDS to Israel. And I do not regret a single paragraph or rant, even those put out in anger and lack of thought (or sleep). This is not to say there is no place for you at Brown if you tend to keep out of politics; many people I met were blissfully apolitical, and I see nothing wrong with that. But if you are as addicted to the public debate as I am, and especially if you love to write as I do, you have stumbled upon a gold mine. Take advantage.
The politically engaged and intellectually curious must also prepare themselves for the dark underbelly of all this, though, which is the incessant ideological cancers that have metastasized in the academy over the past 30 or so years and show no sign of abating anytime soon (despite my best efforts). So that is the true core of this letter, friends, for though I often would comfort myself with one of my favorite Biblical aphorisms (“this, too, shall pass… “), the truth is that American education as a whole is in deep, deep trouble, and it is up to us to turn the tides.
You will see soon, if you have not already, that the political compass at Brown, as at most elite schools, leans heavily toward the left. (Incidentally, what you are currently reading is Brown’s first startup conservative publication since the 1980’s.) Many are content to cite this as the problem itself and be done with it, but that misses most of the point. It is of course sad that the parameters of debate are so skewed that what one witnesses more often than anything is an argument between the liberals on one hand and the socialists or Greens on the other. But while simply busing in conservative professors and students would be an improvement on the status quo, it is not the real philosophical reform that is needed across the board.
The crisis in the University, to put it broadly, is the politicization of life and art on every scale. For example, as an English major (which I would not recommend, by the way; read literature on your own time), I have been told in a classroom, by a charming and erudite professor, that in Wordsworth’s beautiful poem “Tintern Abbey” his sister Dorothy is brought in at the end “only to be oppressed.” It was not his theory, but the “exciting” discovery of a “radical feminist” at Yale whose name I took care to forget. This occurred during my first semester, and I decided then and there that anyone who looks at “Tintern Abbey” and sees gender oppression should not be teaching literature, and that only a diseased system would award tenure to those who consider such nonsense either exciting or a discovery. And said classroom was not at all an anomaly.
What we have in the academy these days is essentially a more dishonest version of the party-line “socialist realism” imposed on the arts by the Soviets in Stalin’s days, except race and gender issues have replaced the struggle of the workers at the top of the agenda. If you have already cruised the humanities quarters of Brown’s Online Course Registration (BOCA) you know the refrain so common as to be farcical: “pays specific interest to issues of gender, race and class.” I do not deny that anyone goes into reading a novel or poem with their own set of preconceptions and agendas, but it is another thing entirely to have them imposed upon us by teachers whose salary comes from our tuition.
Great literature may be about many things at once, and of course may bring up interesting gender/race/ class issues along the way. But in the end, if you are reading Melville to demonstrate that he was a racist (or that the “social forces” surrounding him were racist) then you are spitting on the memory of every great creator of art and thought, and demeaning the magic of reading itself, that magic that led us to create departments for its study in the first place. It is the tail wagging the dog-in that contemporary ideological fads are imposed backwards upon the Canon; it is cutting off the nose to spite the face, in that the legions of historically oppressed are now supposedly avenging their oppressor by making the great books pay for his crimes. It’s not only that students going to college expecting training in literature are fed politics, it’s that they are fed horrifically bad politics, politics of alienation and nihilism and ennui, politics of eternal victimhood, politics of bad faith.
A newspaper study a few years back caused a minor stir when it was revealed that on Amherst College’s course reading lists, Toni Morrison received more citations than Shakespeare. Morrison is a great writer and I am not denying she should be studied, but what this points to is not simple racial politics (the department chair actually responded “I’m not interested in anything male or white,” as if she were a caricature from some William Bennett book) but a general collapse of aesthetic, intellectual and even moral standards. At Brown University, you could conceivably graduate a B.A. in English without having read “King Lear.” I see little difference, except the obvious practical one, between this and a medical school that does not require its students to have taken elemental human biology. The great books are not a hard science, but they are definitely a lot more than a parlor game for language “deconstruction” or group therapy for assuaging white liberal guilt. I enjoyed Brown’s leniency with course requirements, as you surely will also, but just because it feels good doesn’t make it right. I favor a general return to a core curriculum in the Western Canon along Columbia and University of Chicago lines.
The politicization of Wordsworth’s poem is a microcosm of the problems on campus as a whole. Wordsworth, long dead, may no longer be able to speak for himself, but he also doesn’t have to experience the witch hunts in real time. When the “radicalism” of our Yale professor’s reading room spills over into the day to day lives of her students, it is not only great books that are trashed but whole lives.
As time passes, you mayor may not hear about the various scandals that have plagued Brown during the days “political correctness” was thrust into the spotlight by the likes of 60 Minutes and Dateline. I suspect a list from any elite school would yield similar sorrows, but in any case, I’ll be brief. A few years before I arrived, a student named Adam Lack was accused of date rape on charges that were almost surely trumped up. Sources close to the case have convinced me that any sex that took place was consensual (even if liquored up) and that the girl in question was only made to believe a rape took place days after the fact by her woman peer counselor (WPC). The facts of the night, par for the college course as far as 1′m concerned, are less the point than what occurred after the acc.usation, which was a violation of Lack’s due process at every turn, sanctioned at every level of the University bureaucracy. Lack recently received settlement money from Brown, but it does not change the fact that he was driven out of college and had his life, essentially, torn apart for no reason.
The next year, a black student of questionable stability, Ebony Thompson, was involved in an altercation at her dorm with three white athletes; she accused them of physical aggression and racial slurs. Again, the disputed events of the case are not as important as the aftermath, in which angry crowds marched on the main green demanding that the athletes be summarily expelled, long before the facts had even been explored by any sort of impartial body. Simply the accusation is enough, it seems, as long as blackwhite or male-female tension (better yet both) is involved.
The clincher for me came the spring of my first year, when I had already written for the paper a while. The Herald, on standard freedom of expression grounds, published a paid full-page advertisement from conservative commentator David Horowitz arguing against the slavery reparations movement. I had read the exact same piece in the e-journal Salon the previous summer, and found it cogent and eminently reasonable. Some of its points were tendentious, but most were actually strikingly obvious, and would not be considered beyond the pale, I suspect, by any sampling of average Americans outside the academy, black, white or whatever.
The reaction was, quite literally, insane. A “Coalition of Concerned Students” was immediately drawn up from the membership of all the usual suspects (the Third World Center, the International Socialists, etc… get used to those names) and they stormed the offices of the newspaper, demanding that the money paid by Horowitz be immediately given over to them (as reparations, I suppose) and that a racial sensitivity expert be dispatched to look over the Herald’s work from then on. When the editors refused this ridiculous attempt at extortion, a whole day’s run of newspapers was stolen, and replaced with a sheet of paper promising the same would happen every day until the demands were met – ideological racketeering, I called it. They did not get another day’s haul (or their money, thank God) but the point was clear: free speech meant nothing if racial offense was involved.
It got worse. Someone had happened to walk by the distribution point at Faunce House while coalition troops were pilfering our product, and he took a picture in which several of the thieves were identifiable. Now, any cursory reading of Brown’s tenets of community behavior cannot indicate anything but that a gross crime against the values of the University had been committed, and that suspension or expulsion was in order for those involved. But the students were not punished at all; they were coddled by the University at every turn, and in the acrimonious debate that followed, it was always clear that the only crime whose punishment was to be discussed was the Herald’s for its publishing the ad, or Mr. Horowitz’s for composing it in the first place. The disgusting apogee was a “faculty forum” at which six professors gathered around a table and each said virtually the same thing – that the text was racist and beyond the pale, and the Herald wrong to print it. One professor even referred to our then editor-in-chief as an “opportunist” in front of the entire student body, slander if I ever heard it. The administration promised a debate, but gave us a one-sided rally – reporters were not allowed inside, no pro-Herald viewpoint was provided, and anyone who stood up to dissent was routinely shouted down by black students in attendance. I understood that night how Stalinism worked. Do not ever complacently think “it could not happen here.” It will be your work to fight for true intellectual freedom and real justice, in place of racial and sexual gamesmanship.
There have been other, more minor incidents, but the Horowitz affair crystallizes pretty well the essence of what you are up against. Race is not necessarily the crux, but at Brown I came to believe that it is our most painful and important thorn. The sexuality crusades are largely on the wane. Though academic feminism remains a pox on the humanities, it is fighting a rearguard battle, as much of the more exciting work in neurobiology and sex difference is now actually being done by women, who have bravely weathered the storm of accusations that all such stuff is a chauvinist plot. When Camille Paglia first came to Brown in the early 1990’s, she was protested and nearly physically assaulted; I think if she returned today not only I but many female friends of every political stripe would be there to welcome and guard her, for my money the most brilliant intellectual alive. So there is cause for hope – these things are much easier to call out as bullshit (if you’ll par don my French) than they were, say, when Dinesh D’Souza wrote IlliberalEducation. More and more students of all colors are rejecting the canards of the politically correct commissars. But we have a long way to go to dismantle the institutional vices that propagate the poison.
Though it is nearly a forbidden statement among the smart set in our universities, affirmative action has created many of these problems. Naturally, it is a chicken-egg situation, as AA came out of the general ideology of the 1960’s that has mutated into such a grotesque monster in the modern academy. But, pointing to specific programs, there is nothing as pernicious in higher education. Originally meant as an understandable stopgap to speed up the integration of blacks into the college system after the demise of segregation, it has morphed into a virus that feeds on the very problems required to keep it alive. It is a crutch that cripples minorities from the moment they fill out their first college application, and it is inarguable (though taboo, I warn you) that it sows the seeds of racial tension on campus.
AA has brought generations of under-qualified blacks, and later Hispanics, into elite schools where they then become symbols of oppression and racism, as such are the excuses for their being let in under the bar in the first place. This allowed for the setting up of a vast bureaucratic complex aimed at, among other things, nurturing the confusion AA created: sensitivity training seminars, special minority counselors, segregated dorms, orientations and fraternities and, of course, the interminable harping on racial issues in every facet of humanities coursework. Non-black students began to ask why blacks with professional parents, who grew up in their same neighborhoods and went to their same schools, got such an obvious advantage. In response, we heard of “structural racism,” a sort of invisible ether that permeates all American society; we breathe it into our bloodstreams like oxygen. It is still almost unutterable that the average young black person in America ca. 2003 has never experienced meaningful racism or any real institutional obstacle to success, but I suspect most of us believe it, to some extent, deep down. The chaos of AA has come to remind me of Solzhenitsyn’s famous-challenge to the Soviet establishment: these things we all know, but do not talk about. Well, we need to talk about it, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s disastrous decision this past summer.
For example, when the Horowitz affair blew up, an Africana Philosophy professor named Lewis Gordon made the claim that black students were calling his office to tell them that they couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t walk outside, etc. If an outsider had walked in at that point, he’d have to assume that bricks had been thrown through windows and crosses burned on lawns – who would believe it was all from an ad in a newspaper?! It was all the more unbelievable to me as I had found Horowitz’s tract not even slightly racist; however, even if the ad had been every horrible thing its detractors claimed, should that really drive basic bodily functions awry for someone practically an adult? I have no problem believing that these students have been infantilized by an evil system. It is only a few steps from “You don’t need the same SAT’s or GPA as your peers to go to school here” to “A perceived printed insult gives you a unique right to break the law and generally go bananas.”
A generation after implementation it was already patently clear that AA was not doing what it had promised. Black and Hispanic mean test scores climbed up, predictably in line with the socioeconomic changes wrought after segregation, but soon stagnated at about one standard statistical variation below whites and Asians. By the 1980’s, southeast Asian immigrants growing up in dire poverty, often having arrived with no knowledge of English, were regularly outperforming the minorities granted back-door entry, and soon said Asians – clearly no scions of wealth and power – were actually being crowded out of schools with AA regimes. So the new excuse became “diversity,” a sidelong way of admitting that dismantling race preferences would cause the number of blacks and Hispanics in elite institutions to drop considerably, as was said even in the stridently pro-AA tome “The Shape of the River” by William Bowen and Derek Bok. The “diversity” banner has twisted the debate further out of shape, as one is now accused of having bigoted ulterior motives – keeping blacks out – if one advocates colorblind admissions.
Obviously, a drop-off in minority admissions would not be a happyevent. But the tyranny of the “diversity” excuse has to stop. You must shout this from the rooftops: diversity is not a good in and of itself and it is especially not a good when only seen in terms of skin pigmentation (and as such, only applying to certain favored darker-skinned ethnicities). A true diversity, meaning diversity of viewpoint and life experience not necessarily tied to race, could be accounted for – imperfectly, but what in college admissions is not? – using the essay and short answer portions of the application. Checking a box must not suffice as evidence, especially in a changing America where intermarriage is making the categories, thankfully, harder and harder to pin down.
Diversity is a pleasantly disingenuous way of saying that minorities do not attend college like the rest of us do: we may be here based on measurable qualifications in order to fulfill our professional or intellectual goals, but theyare here to teach us about life outside our manicured suburban lawns. It’s all horribly insulting, to both groups, and this turgid worldview, emanating the worst of liberal tokenism, needs to be swept aside. Conservatives like Ward Connerly have led the fight to dismantle race preferences, but the truly important step is convincing liberals to argue that AA is not a progressive idea, that it is in fact profoundly reactionary and even somewhat racist, in its patronizing insistence that certain peoples cannot compete on an equal footing of their own natural talents.
A good example of how AA fostered an entire grievance industry through its own internal contradictions can be found at Brown, and you may have already crossed its path. If one is a member of a box-check minority, (s)he is typically invited to a special orientation called the Third World Training Program (TWTP). “Third World,” in this nomenclature, does not refer to the term’s current geopolitical meaning, but rather to theorist Franz Fanon’s reference to a “third way” in his classic tract The Wretched of the Earth, “third” indicating rejection of both the capitalist Western alliance and communist Eastern Bloc models, and thus covering Latin American, Caribbean, African, Arab and Asian peoples.
Fanon’s “wretched of the world unite” revision of Marx never made much sense (look only to the mutual hatred exchanged between communist Vietnam, Cambodia and China immediately after the American departure), and those contradictions have followed him from Saigon to Providence. There have never been any shortage of whites at Brown who claim to resent their non-inclusion in TWTp, but last fall, when I threw my hat in the ring, I took a different tactic, pointing out that there is not even a remotely foundational logic to TWTP’s philosophy, whether or not its participants happen to enjoy it. There is no intrinsic commonality between Asians, Arabs, blacks and Hispanics that sets them all similarly apart from whites in a 21st century United States, and no reason to pretend that one still exists (if it ever did) besides the obviously ideological one of creating an ethnic divide among Brown students—solidarity on the one side, resentment on the other—before freshman year even starts. For example, anyone remotely attuned to American cultural trends during my generation knows that, if anything, Asians and blacks have probably had more tensions with each other than either has had with whites. It is also more than a bit ironic that, say, an Indian Hindu and Pakistani Muslim can be told they are brothers in the same vague struggle here on American shores, as it is only on said shores that they are free from the vicious hatreds that envelop their brethren overseas.
When I wrote this, however, I did not even know TWTP’s true origins. I later learned, at lunch with an iconoclastic professor dependably beating his boats against the PC current, that the prototype for TWTP was a remedial summer program set up for blacks after implementation of AA dictates. Blacks admitted to Brown in the wake of race preferences had often needed basic emergency training in high school math and elementary writing skills – obviously a distressing and embarrassing fact anywhere, but galling in particular at an Ivy League institution that prides itself on selectivity and that undoubtedly turns down valedictorians with every year’s pool.
Whether such a program outlived its usefulness (my sincere hope) or simply became too uncomfortable for liberal administrators to continue I do not know. Either way, it was not dissolved but quietly transferred to the ideologues at the Third World Center, who gave us the more psychologically palpable notion that ethnic minorities needed extra emotional, and not educational, preparation for Brown’s libraries and lawns. Thus those who depend on the racial grievance industry for their livelihood were able to paper over the disconnect that AA perpetuates between Fanon’s supposedly wretched. The fact that poor Asians outperform middle class blacks, on average, by every standardized measure, but do not reap any handouts, need not be discussed if a bureaucracy of identity politicians can successfully brainwash each and every non-white group into believing that their beloved ethereal “structural racism” has stained them all with the same broad brush. Indeed, I heard from more than a few students of all races who attended TWTP and were understandably disgusted, that when they politely told their commissars that they could not recall ever feeling that they had been the victims of racism, they were angrily informed that of course they had, they just hadn’t realized it. Is it a stretch to surmise that perhaps this makes for the student who will, a few years later, claim to be physically disabled by a newspaper advertisement?
This is the type of institutional hypocrisy you will find yourselves up against, black or white, male or female. It is particularly important to our common academic future that the allegedly crippled museum-piece groups fervently reject the condescending and false attention forced upon them by the administration and professorate and that they declare loudly and in no uncertain terms that they are students like anyone else – not mice in a social experiment, not means of assuaging the guilt of confused white liberals, not symbols of injustice to be paraded around as Park Avenue socialites once paraded around the Black Panthers as a fundraising tool for leftist causes. It is time for blacks to turn away from calling anti-AA voices secret Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmonds (even if that might be true in some cases) and to start challenging the inherently racist assumptions behind the white liberal views that created and now nurture AA long past its point of usefulness. Though dismantling AA will only be one step, I believe it will lead to parity in minority achievement within several generations, and an American campus far less Balkanized and racially obsessed than what obtains today.
Your task will not be an easy one. Since the 1960’s, American education has been handed over at all levels to mushy psychobabble and bargain-bin liberal ideology. Basic corp uses of learning, the core to any truly educated individual, have been scoffed at and devalued while personal emotions and “self-esteem” have been elevated to the level of demigod. Our public schools have nursed generations of Americans who have little in the way of deep literary, cultural or historical understanding. This not just unfortunate; it is tragic.
At Brown specifically, where we still generally reap the cream of the crop, our problems are not quite the same; nevertheless, there are links. It is the same mind set nursing a child’s feelings while shrugging off whether he ever learns the basic skills that also takes apart the Western Canon, our most valuable intellectual asset, in the name of modern theoretical fads-whether feminism, racial grievance, psychoanalysis, Marxism or, particularly worthless, insipid French-import post-structuralism. This same mindset rejects the central Enlightenment humanist value that true liberty and tolerance require that all be treated the same and not a single idea be unutterable, instead claiming to see said value as a mere veil for racial/colonial/imperial/sexual (whatever) exploitation. But there is a conflict of interest intrinsic there, as billions of dollars in tenure track appointments, book sales, and endowments are on the line, not to mention the entrenched teachers union and school board apparatus at the local level. A return to classical liberal ideals, berthed as they might have been among contradictions like the slave trade or the British Raj or the oppression of women, will be in the interest of all.
A final exhortation – eschew dogma. Beware of enthusiasms – yours and others’. Study both sides of any question, no matter how cut-and-dried it may seem. Read your teachers’ published work; if it seems to you someone cannot write a coherent or meaningful paragraph, then you are probably right, and should move on. Do not take classes where theories of art seem more valued than the art itself, where man’s vast and awesome tapestry of creativity is put to the sword of transient philosophical trends. Be skeptical of those who believe the worst about their own society while ignoring or even excusing the evils of others. Do not be conned by the hucksters who trade in grievance ideology of any sort, whether they are naming you predator or prey. Reject the canard that ethnicity is identity, as that tends to become self-fulfilling prophecy. Reject atomization-the division of naturally interconnected humanities fields into insular fiefdoms touting illusory “expertise.” Build bridges between the disciplines, both within the humanities and between them and the sciences. Reconstruct, do not deconstruct. Enjoy your four years, but stay vigilant, regardless of the personal alienation that may be involved in speaking out against conventional wisdom. Your opponents have powerful tools: no one likes being called a racist or an apologist for racism, a sexist or closet rapist, an imperial exploiter, or whatever have you. Basic social viability, counted in friendships and general quality of life, is on the line. It is truly a new McCarthyism—notice, though, how we now remember McCarthy. What is at stake is more important, ultimately, than anyone student’s psychic comfort. What is at stake is the American mind itself.
