While writing a podcast episode on deconstruction as a method and an idea, I got sidetracked into doing a “close reading” and deconstruction of Chip Morningstar’s 1994 essay “How to Deconstruct Almost Anything”. It seemed to me that (1) the essay comes from a time when attacking “political correctness” in universities was popular, and (2) it used several common tropes of such attacks in a pretty revealing way. So I wanted to link Morningstar’s essay to those tropes. But as I started looking into them, I saw that they evolved over time. Understanding that evolution helps in understanding the essay, and may be of interest to intellectual pack rats.
I’ll organize the story mainly around key publications:
- To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education, William J. Bennett, 1984.
- The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom, 1987.
- Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education, Roger Kimball, 1990.
- Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, Dinesh D’Souza, 1998.
- Destructive Trends in Mental Health: The Well-intentioned Path to Harm, Robert H. Wright and Nicholas A. Cummings (eds), 2005.
From the 1930s to the 1980s
For fascists and communists in the 1930s, being “politically correct” was a good thing. A politically correct person channeled the opinion of the Party – that is to say, the correct opinion – in all cases where the Party had an opinion. If the Party developed an opinion on a topic it hadn’t cared about before, the politically correct person would adopt it, even if it conflicted with what he had thought he thought.
The New Left (from “the sixties” on) were rather more individually-minded, so the term came to be used, with a roll of the eyes, to refer to people who extend their ideology into everything. “In the early eighties, when feminists used the term ‘political correctness’, it was used to refer sarcastically to the anti-pornography movement’s efforts to define a ‘feminist sexuality’." – Ellen Willis
Those meanings disappeared when the term was appropriated by the US Right.
1984: The Bennett Report
Even though it doesn’t use the terminology “politically correct,” a good starting point for our history is the 1984 report “To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education”. The report was written by William Bennett, at the time the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“In March 1984 I invited thirty-one prominent teachers, scholars, administrators, and authorities on higher education to join a Study Group on the State of Learning in the Humanities in Higher Education. The study group held three public meetings during the spring and summer to seek answers to three questions: What is the condition of learning in the humanities; why is it as it is; and what, if anything, should be done about it?” (p. i)
In my reading, the report has two main points.
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The humanities are about building better humans. To the student, they promise to “enlarge and illuminate your life.” (p. 37)
“Properly taught, the humanities bring together the perennial questions of human life with the greatest works of history, literature, philosophy, and art. Unless the humanities are taught and studied in this way, there is little reason to offer them.” (p. 12)
“[A]n important part of education is learning to read, and the highest purpose of reading is to be in the company of great souls.” (p. 16)
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The humanities should also be about perpetuating a specific culture. The report’s epigraph is a good summary:
“Our civilization cannot effectively be maintained where it still flourishes, or be restored where it has been crushed, without the revival of the central, continuous and perennial culture of the Western world.” – Walter Lippmann, 1941
US culture is built on certain questions and answers and habits of thought. Students should learn them, so as to do their part in perpetuating that culture.
In 1984, those goals aren’t being met, for two main reasons.
First, the students don’t care. They are “preoccupied (even obsessed) with vocational goals at the expense of broadening the intellect.” (p. 19)
Second, the nature of being a humanities professor changed after World War II (emphasis mine):
“Dean Berdahl observed that most of today’s college faculty were trained during the 1960s and early 1970s, a period of rapid growth in the academic sector and increasing private and government support for research. As a result, they are oriented more toward research, publication, and teaching graduate students than toward educating nonmajors and generalists. ‘The successful career to which one is taught to aspire,’ wrote Dean Berdahl, ‘is to end up at an institution like that at which one received one’s doctorate, where the “real work” of the profession takes place and where, if one must teach undergraduates, one need only deal with majors or very bright students.'” (p. 24)
After World War II, the core task of a professor changed from professing what was known to discovering new knowledge. That applied to the humanities as much as to the sciences. Notably, the report doesn’t cast much blame in the direction of professors. The attitude seems to be that the job market changed, and job candidates responded. What else would you expect? It was only later that professors became malign.
Although the report caused a stir, its criticisms of humanities faculties are mild by the standards of the 1990s. However, there are scattered quotes that point to secondary issues that will later become very much the focus of attention. (My emphasis.)
“The study group was alarmed by the tendency of some humanities professors to present their subjects in a tendentious, ideological manner. Sometimes the humanities are used as if they were the handmaiden of ideology, subordinated to particular prejudices and valued or rejected on the basis of their relation to a certain social stance.
“At the other extreme, the humanities are declared to have no inherent meaning because all meaning is subjective and relative to one’s own perspective. There is no longer agreement on the value of historical facts, empirical evidence, or even rationality itself.
“Both these tendencies developed in the hope that we will again show students the relevance of our subjects. Instead of demonstrating relevance, however, they condemn the humanities to irrelevance – the first, by subordinating our studies to contemporary prejudices; the second, by implying that the great works no longer have anything to teach us about ourselves or about life.” (pp 22-3)
In sharp contrast to later rhetoric, the report claims that “the vast majority of students […] have chosen to vote with their feet, stampeding out of the humanities departments.” (p. 23) The idea that students are being brainwashed has seemingly not yet taken hold.
That will start changing in 1987…