[First published in a special issue on Political Correctness, edited by Phyllis Artiss, of Philosophy and Social

Action 19.1-2 (January-June 1993): 85-109. An earlier version of this annotated bibliography appeared in the
Supplement on the Political Correctness Controversy, ACCUTE Newsletter (March 1992): 2-13, where it
followed my essay 'Outside Agitators,' Inside Activists.]

[Index: political correctness, higher education]

[Date: January 1993]

Political Correctness: An Annotated List of Readings

Michael Keefer

A previous version of this list appeared in March 1992 as a Supplement to the

Newsletter of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English.
Like that version, the present list contains books as well as newspaper and journal
articles; annotations have for the most part been confined to texts of the latter category. A
number of items relating to Paul de Man's wartime writings have been included, in the
grounds that the de Man scandal appears to have suggested to neoconservative
polemicists the possibility of demonizing a wide variety of new developments in the
humanities by associating them with anti-democratic and authoritarian ideologies.
Abella, Rosalie. Equality and human rights in Canada: Coping with the new Isms.
University Affairs/Affaires universitaires (June-July 1991): 21-22. Distinguishing
between civil liberties and human rights, Abella argues that There is absolutely
nothing to apologize for in giving the arbitrarily disadvantaged a prior claim in
remedial responses.
----. The new Isms and universities. University Affairs/Affaires universitaires (Aug.Sept. 1991): 17. In this sequel, Abella defends strategies of employment equity,
remarking that it is insulting to suggest to women and minorities that their
increased participation is an invitation to violate the merit principle, rather than
an attempt to acknowledge it.

Abramowitz, Lenny. Why it isn't wrong to be correct. The Globe and Mail (30 Dec.
1991). An analysis of the political correctness debate in terms of Isaiah
Berlin's distinction between negative and positive liberty. This application of
Berlin is contested in a letter by Josef Skvorecky, Deadly Correctness (9 Jan.
1992): A14.
Adler, Jerry, et al. Taking Offence: Is This the New Enlightenment on Campus or the
New McCarthyism? Newsweek (24 Dec. 1990): 48-54. This anecdotal survey of
speech codes and of curriculum developments in the humanities includes
interviews with Stanley Fish at Duke University and with a National Association
of Scholars organizer at the University of Wisconsin. According to this article,
PC is, strictly speaking, a totalitarian philosophy.
Allemang, John. The Rise of the New Puritanism. The Globe and Mail (national
edn., 2 Feb. 1991): D1, D4.
Amiel, Barbara. A challenge to the new chancellors. Maclean's (24 June 1991): 11.
After suggesting that Oscar Peterson and Rose Wolfe owe their appointments as
chancellors of York University and the University of Toronto to the fact that one
is black and the other a Jewish woman, Amiel invites them to take a public stand
against political correctness.
Aronowitz, Stanley, and Henry A. Giroux. Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture,
and Social Criticism. Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press,
1991.
Artiss, Phyliss. The real threat to academic freedom is those who feel threatened by
change. St John's Evening Telegraph (29 June 1991): 5. A response to Peter
Boswell's column of 15 June 1991.
Asante, Molefi Kete. Multiculturalism: An Exchange. The American Scholar
(Spring 1991); rpt. In Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 299-311. A defense of
multiculturalist education and Afrocentrist scholarship in response to Diane
Ravitch's Multiculturalism: E Pluribus Plures, which appeared in The
American Scholar (Summer 1990) and is rpt. in Berman, pp. 271-98.
Atlas, James. On Campus: The Battle of the Books. The New York Times Magazine
(5 June 1988): 24-27, 72-74, 95, 94. A survey of debates over the literary canon,
based largely on interviews with members of Duke University's English
department.
Bate, Walter Jackson. The Crisis in English Studies. First published in Harvard
Magazine (Sept.-Oct. 1982). Rpt. in Scholarly Publishing 14 (1983): 195-212.
Beers, David. PC? B.S. Behind the hysteria: how the Right invented victims of PC
police. Mother Jones (Sept.-Oct. 1991): 34-35, 64-65. This essay contains a
detailed account of the manner in which a single student's interruption of a
lecture for some four minutes at SUNY-Binghamton in March 1991 became, in

the hands of National Association of Scholars publicists and unscrupulous

journalists, something comparable to the Nazis' heyday, Stalin's reign of
terror, and Mao's cultural revolution.
Bennett, William J. To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher
Education. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1984.
Berger, Joseph. Conservative Scholars Attack 'Radicalization' of Universities. The
New York Times (15 Nov. 1988). This article describes a conference attended by
some 300 conservative academics concerned to 'reclaim' the universities from
leftist scholars described by one of them as the barbarians in our midst.
Berman, Paul, ed. Debating PC: The Controversy Over Political Correctness on
College Campuses. New York: Dell, 1992. The contents of this book (many of
the essays are reprinted from other sources) are separately itemized in this list.
Bernal, Martin, and Michael E. Dyson. On Black Athena: An Interview with Martin
Bernal. Z Magazine (Jan. 1992): 56-60. Bernal argues that his book
undermines the crusade against political correctness by documenting the
influence of racism and anti-Semitism on modern interpretations of ancient
history, and thereby exposing as false the claim that Afrocentrists and others are
politicizing a previously objective domain.
Bernstein, Richard. The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct. The New York
Times (28 Oct. 1990): section 4: 1, 4. The author is alarmed by statements made
at a meeting of the Western Humanities Conference at Berkeley on 'Political
Correctness' and Cultural Studies.
Brub, Michael. Public Image Limited: Political Correctness and the Media's Big
Lie. The Village Voice (18 June 1991): 31-37. Rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating
PC, pp. 124-49. A lively analysis of Allan Bloom's unfathomable lapses,
Roger Kimball's vast array of dismissive Edwardian interjections, John
Taylor's innuendo and confusion, and Dinesh D'Souza's inanities.
Blattberg, Charles, et al. The constructive challenge of feminism. University of
Toronto Bulletin (20 Jan. 1990): 16. In the wake of the murder of 14 women as
feminists at the cole Polytechnique de Montral on December 6, 1989, a
group of men at the University of Toronto produced this meditation on the need
for men in the universities to support a feminist agenda and to come to terms
with the extent to which they contribute to a climate in which being a woman is
uncomfortable or unsafe.
Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster,
1987.
----. Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960-1990. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.
Boswell, Peter. Political correctness: the bane of academic freedom. St John's
Evening Telegraph (15 June 1991): 5. In an article largely derived from the 27

May 1991 issue of Maclean's (see Fennell), Boswell cites the Cannizzo and
Rushton cases as evidence of a potential threat to free speech and independent
thought, and worries about hiring quotas and curriculum changes. Response by
Artiss.
Brantlinger, Patrick. Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America.
New York and London: Routledge, 1990. An introduction to a scholarly project
that has been demonized by polemicists like Roger Kimball.
Brodkey, Linda, and Sheila Fowler. Political Suspects. The Village Voice (23 Apr.
1991). This account of the controversy over English 306, a proposed writing
course at the University of Texas at Austin which was withdrawn after widely
publicized accusations by members of the National Association of Scholars and
others that it amounted to indoctrination, was written by two members of the
committee which created the new syllabus.
Brooks, Peter. Western Civ at Bay. Review of Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs, and
Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals. Times Literary Supplement (25 Jan. 1991): 56.
Bruning, Fred. Playing politics with political correctness. Maclean's (10 June 1991):
11. Bruning suggests that the Bush Republicans intended to make political
correctness the Willie Horton issue of the 1992 presidential campaign.
Burd, Stephen. Chairman of Humanities Fund Has Politicized Grants Process, Critics
Charge. The Chronicle of Higher Education (22 Apr. 1992): A1, A32-33. This
article documents claims that under its present chair, Lynne V. Cheney, the
National Endowment for the Humanities in the U.S. has routinely rejected grant
applications which are judged excellent by peer reviewers but which do not
conform to Cheney's political and methodological conservatism.
Bygrave, Mike. Mind Your Language. Weekend Guardian (11-12 May 1991): 14-15.
Rpt. in Guardian Weekly (26 May 1991): 22. Initially patronizing ('PC' is
identified with the loony leftonly, being Americans, they're twice as
loony), this article also outlines the context (of privatization, systemic racism,
and the secession of the wealthy) within which American universities have
been trying to meet minority demands that the rest of society now routinely
rejects.
Cheney, Lynne V. Humanities in America: A Report to the President, the Congress,
and the American People. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the
Humanities, 1988.
Christensen, Jerome. From Rhetoric to Corporate Populism: A Romantic Critique of
the Academy in an Age of High Gossip. Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 438-65.
Clark, George. Upholders of 'political rightness' are the ones stifling debate. The
Globe and Mail (10 July 1991). Clark argues that The much repeated dogma
that 'political correctness' threatens intellectual freedom is a bogus claim to

justify suppression of dissent, another version of McCarthyism.

Concern for Arts, Research Funding Follows Rust. Academe: Bulletin of the
American Association of University Professors (Sept.-Oct. 1991): 5-6. The U.S.
Supreme Court's decision that the government can withhold funding from family
clinics that provide information in any instance about abortion has direct
implications for U.S. government funding of university research.
Conlogue, Ray. How long might it take to repair the damage wrought by the PC
movement? The Globe and Mail (11 June 1991): C1. Conlogue suggests a
comparison between the PC movement and the Red Guards of Mao's Cultural
Revolution.
Cordes, Helen. Oh No! I'm PC! But can we still be friends anyway? Utne Reader
(July-Aug. 1991): 50-56. A lighthearted survey of journalistic writings on both
sides of the issue.
Corn, David. Beltway Bandits. The Nation (13 May 1991): 6-20. Corn remembers
Dinesh D'Souza boasting at a conference for conservative students in 1982 that
the Dartmouth Review had printed material stolen from Dartmouth's Gay Student
Alliance. D'Souza's denials of the charge are shown by further investigation to be
untrue (see Letters, 24 June and 8 July 1991).
Culler, Jonathan. The Humanities Tomorrow. Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its
Institutions. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. 41-56.
Davidson, Cathy N. 'PH' Stands for Political Hypocrisy. Academe: Bulletin of the
American Association of University Professors (Sept.-Oct. 1991): 8-14. Rpt. in
CAUT/ACPU Bulletin 39.4 (Apr. 1992): 18-19. In the course of a wide-ranging
analysis of the PC debate, Davidson remarks that the media have done little
to examine connections between seemingly moderate aspects of the PC
controversy (such as the demand that courses in Western civilization be restored
to the general curriculum) and the ultra-right hate rags springing up on campuses
all across the nation. This is hardly surprising considering the interconnections
between the hate rags, mega-corporations, the government, conservative policy
institutions, and the national media.
Davis, Lennard J., and M. Bella Mirabella, eds. Left Politics and the Literary
Profession. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
Decline and fall of the North American educational system. Taipan (Mar. 1992): 6-7.
This article blames the inadequacies of American secondary and university
education upon a rewriting of history by 'politically correct' academics which
threatens to have a negative effect on the progress-oriented work ethic of the
U.S., and could result in the redistribution of property rather than the creation
of new wealth. The solution proposed is a continued privatizing of the
educational system: If just 15% of the government's education budget ends up
in private hands by the year 2010, it will mean billions of profits for the savvy
entrepreneurs who act now.

DePalma, Anthony. In Battle on Political Correctness, Scholars Begin a

Counteroffensive. The New York Times (25 Sept. 1991): A1, B8. This article
reports the founding of Teachers for a Democratic Culture by 30 notable
scholars, among them Stanley Fish, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gerald Graff,
who condemn the storm over political correctness ... as an attempt to derail
affirmative action and legitimate attempts to revise curriculum.
The Derisory Tower. The New Republic (18 Feb. 1991): 5-6. According to this
editorial, multiculturalists in American universities are attempting to replace
pluralist thought with one of the most destructive and demeaning orthodoxies of
our time, according to which race is the determinant of a human being's mind,
which is therefore unable to wrest itself from its biological or sociological
origins.
Diamond, Sara. Readin', Writin', and Repressin'. Z Magazine (Feb. 1991): 45-48.
This essay contains information about the network of American corporate
foundations (among them Coors, Mobil, Smith-Richardson, Earhart, Scaife, and
Olin) which provide generous funding to the National Association of Scholars
and the affiliated Madison Center for Educational Affairs (which in turn funds
some 60 right-wing campus newspapers, among them the notorious Dartmouth
Review).
Doyle, John. A new dogmatism is taking hold in Canadian universities. The Globe
and Mail (29 Apr. 1991). Alluding to controversies at several Canadian
universities over material published in student newspapers, Doyle argues that
What is happening is a cultural revolution that has chilling echoes of the
fanaticism that decimated intellectual life in China two decades ago.
Drainie, Bronwyn. Food for thought or anorexia of the mind? The Globe and Mail
(29 Dec. 1990): C1. Anxious reflections on literacy, multiculturalism, and
traditional Western thought.
D'Souza, Dinesh. Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. New
York: Free Press, 1991.
----. Illiberal Education. The Atlantic Monthly (Mar. 1991): 51-79. Writing here for a
liberal audience, D'Souza represents himself as a would-be occupant of the
middle ground who finds that It is not always possible in such disputes for a
reasonable person, in good conscience, to take any side....
----. The New Segregation on Campus. The American Scholar (Winter 1991): 17-30.
D'Souza argues that affirmative action admission policies and the encouragement
of minority separatism by university administrations are to blame for racist
backlashes on American campuses.
----. The Visigoths in Tweed. Forbes (1 Apr. 1991): 81-84. Claiming that the
propaganda of the new barbarians threatens to do us in, D'Souza urges his
corporate readers to de-fund the humanities. Resistance on campus to the

academic revolution is outgunned, he adds, and sorely needs outside

reinforcements.
----, and Robert MacNeil. The Big Chill? Interview with Dinesh D'Souza. In Paul
Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 29-39. A transcript of D'Souza's interview on The
MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour (18 June 1991).
Duster, Troy. They're Taking Over! and other myths about race on campus. Mother
Jones (Sept.-Oct. 1991): 30-33, 63-64. Challenging claims that
multiculturalism and affirmative action programs are responsible for campus
conflict and a lowering of standards, Duster also quotes the findings of a poll of
35,478 professors at 392 institutions, according to which 4.9% described
themselves as far left, 36.8% as liberal, 40.2% as moderate, and 17.8% as
conservative.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Challenge for the Left. Democratic Left (July-Aug. 1991);
rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 333-38. Remarking that The American
new right is becoming more and more like the new right in Europewhich has
always focused on nativist and racist issues, Ehrenreich proposes that a leftist
defense of multiculturalism must also address its tendencies towards relativism
and identity politics: There can't be a left if there's no basis for moral judgment,
including judgments that will cut across group or gender or ethnic lines.
Ehrenreich, Rosa. What Campus Radicals? The PC undergrad is a useful specter.
Harper's (Dec. 1991): 57-61. According to Ehrenreich's experience as a student
at Harvard, American campuses are no more under siege by radicals than is the
society at large. It has been clever of the Kimballs and D'Souzas to write as if it
were so. It is always clever of those in ascendance to masquerade as victims.
Ellis, John. Radical Literary Theory. Review of Peter Washington, Fraud: Literary
Theory and the End of English. London Review of Books (8 Feb. 1990): 7-8.
While criticizing his slash-and-burn mode of argument, Ellis shares
Washington's hostility to the politics of Radical Literary Theory.
Elson, John. Academics in Opposition. Time (1 Apr. 1991): 64. A sympathetic
account of the National Association of Scholars as the cutting edge of
opposition to multiculturalist, feminist, and minority curricula. The N.A.S. Is
funded in part by four conservative foundations, but [N.A.S. President Stephen]
Balch insists, 'We follow our own lights.'
Epstein, Joseph. The Academic Zoo: Theoryin Practice. The Hudson Review 44.1
(Spring 1991): 9-30. An attack on recent developments in English studies.
Response in Hudson Review 44.3.
Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York:
Crown, 1991.
Farrell, Lennox. Power and 'political correctness'. The Toronto Star (6 June 1991):
A25. Farrell turns the tables on anti-PC polemicists by inviting his readers to

imagine how they would respond to a world governed by a repressive Afrocentric matriarchy.
Fennell, Tom. The Silencers: A New Wave of Repression is Sweeping Through the
Universities. Maclean's (27 May 1991): 40-43. The evidence of repression
adduced in this article is slender in the extreme. (No mention is made of the
murder of fourteen women at the cole Polytechnique de Montral in 1989.)
Fernndez, Enrique. P.C. Rider. The Village Voice (18 June 1991); rpt. in Berman,
ed., Debating PC, pp. 322-25. Reminding us that Whatever 'Western' means,
one thing should be obvious: Latin-American and Anglo-American letters are
either in it or out of it together, Fernndez advocates an integrationist
multiculturalism: If it's human, it's yours. Take it. Share it. Mix it. Rock it.
Fish, Stanley. The Common Touch, or, One Size Fits All. In Gless and Smith, eds.,
The Politics of Liberal Education, pp. 241-66. A strenuous and witty analysis of
the ethicist assumptions and the classically fissured paranoia of conservative
interventions in debates over literary canons and academic politics.
----. There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing, Too. in Berman,
ed., Debating PC, pp. 231-45. Arguing against First Amendment objections to
academic speech codes, Fish maintains that there is no class of utterances
separable from the world of conduct, and that the category free expression is
therefore an empty one; it follows that because everything we say impinges on
the world in ways indistinguishable from the effects of physical action, we must
take responsibility for our verbal performances.... Citing the Keegstra case, Fish
contrasts the sensible contextualism of the Canadian Criminal Code and
Charter of Rights with the categorical absolutism of American First
Amendment law.
Fraser, Laura. The right's new boogeyman. New York Daily News (1 Sept. 1991): 3.
Reflections on a survey of college administrators which suggests that the idea
that the Politically Correct are taking over universities and the world is, well,
incorrect.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Master's Pieces: On Canon Formation and the AfricanAmerican Tradition. In Gless and Smith, eds., The Politics of Liberal
Education, pp. 95-117. Refusing to assign a celebrated face to the forces of
reaction and thereby give too much credit to a few men who are really
symptomatic of a larger political current, Gates outlines an answer to the
question of how the debate over canon formation affect[s] the development of
African-American literature as a subject of instruction in the American
academy.
----. Whose Canon Is It, Anyway? The New York Times Book Review (26 Feb. 1989);
rpt. In Berman, ed. Debating PC, pp. 190-200. A shorter version of The
Master's Pieces.
----. It's Not Just Anglo-Saxon. The New York Times (4 May 1991): Op-ed section,

15. One of two articles (the other by Donald Kagan) published under the heading
Whose Culture Is It, Anyway? Gates argues that it's only when we're free to
explore the complexities of our hyphenated culture that we can discover what a
genuinely common American culture might actually look like.
----. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992.
Genovese, Eugene D. Heresy, YesSensitivity, No: An argument for counterterrorism in the academy. Review of Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education. The
New Republic (15 Apr. 1991): 30-35. While critical both of D'Souza's
condemnation of black studies and women's studies programs and of his attack
on black separatism, Genovese accepts his case studies at face value, and calls in
violent language for a coalition that cuts across all the lines of politics, race,
and gender to close ranks in defense of academic freedom against atrocities
like those documented by D'Souza.
Gibbs, Nancy. The War Against Feminism. Time (9 Mar. 1992): 38-43. An extended
discussion of Susan Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American
Women.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. Masterpiece Theater: An Academic
Melodrama. Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 693-717. When an undescribed text is
found chained to the railroad tracks in Boondocks, Indiana, a large cast of critics
and cultural theoristsfrom Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
to William J. Bennettassembles at the scene of the crime.
Gitlin, Todd. Incorrect Call. The Village Voice (23 Apr. 1991). While critical both of
the illiberalism of academic leftists and of the right's panicky reaction, Gitlin
argues that Authentic liberals have good reason to worry that the elevation of
'difference' to a first principle is undermining everyone's capacity to see, or
change, the world as a whole.
Glazer, Nathan. Point. One of two reviews (under the heading of That D'Souza
Book: Two Views) of Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education. Change (Sept.-Oct.
1991): 56-58. Glazer praises the book as a balanced, well-researched
meticulously documented account of disputes around race in a number of major
American universities....
Gless, Darry L., and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, eds. The Politics of Liberal Education.
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992. These essays (except for the
contributions of Stanley Fish and Francis Oakley and the introduction by
Barbara Herrnstein Smith) are reprinted from a special issue of The South
Atlantic Quarterly 89.1 (Winer 1990). A number of the essays are listed
separately here.
Gordon, Ted, and Wahneema Lubiano. The Statement of the Black Faculty Caucus.
In Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 249-57. (A version of this text appeared in the
Daily Texan [3 May 1990].) Gordon and Lubiano offer an agenda for

transforming the University into a center of multicultural learning: anything

less constitutes a system of education that ultimately reproduces racism and
racists.
Gray, Mary W., et al. Statement on the 'Political Correctness' Controversy.
Academe: Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors (Sept.Oct. 1991): 48. This statement was issued in July 1991 by a special committee
appointed by the president of the AAUP.
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Best Way to Kill Our Literary Inheritance Is to Turn It Into
a Decorous Celebration of the New World Order. The Chronicle of Higher
Education (12 June 1991): B1, B3. Rpt. in The Council Chronicle: The National
Council of Teachers of English (Nov. 1991): 16. A response to George F. Will's
Newsweek column of 22 Apr. 1991.
Hairston, Maxine C. Required Writing Courses Should Not Focus on Politically
Charged Social Issues. The Chronicle of Higher Education (23 Jan, 1991): B1,
B3. A writing specialist and professor of English at the University of Texas at
Austin outlines her objections, both pedagogical and ethical, to the controversial
English 306 writing course.
Hamacher, Werner, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Kennan, eds. Responses: On Paul de
Man's Wartime Journalism. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press,
1989.
Heller, Scott. Scholars Form Group to Combat 'Malicious Distortions' by
Conservatives. The Chronicle of Higher Education (18 Sept. 1991): A19, A21.
Gerald Graff, Houston Baker, Jr., Jane Gallop, Wayne Booth, Henry Louis Gates,
and Stanley Fish are named as founding members of the Teachers for a
Democratic Culture, an organization which wants to set the record straight
about such incendiary issues as 'political correctness' and free speech on
campus, and which criticizes what it calls the 'blatant hypocrisy' of 'right-wing
ideologues' such as [Dinesh] D'Souza and Lynne V. Cheney, chairman of the
National Endowment for the Humanities.
Henry, William A, III. Upside Down in the Groves of Academe. Time (1 Apr. 1991):
62-64. Henry claims that in the upside-down world of many U.S. campuses,
Obfuscatory course titles and eccentric reading lists are frequently wedded to a
combative political agenda or outlandish views of U.S. culture. He criticizes
new Afrocentric curriculums and developments in feminist and gay studies.
Hentoff, Nat. 'Speech Codes' on the Campus and Problems of Free Speech. Dissent
(Fall 1991); rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 215-24. Hentoff sides with
Yale President Benno Schmidt, according to whom the idea that values of
civility and community should be allowed to supersede freedom of expression
is wrong in principle, and, if extended, is disastrous to freedom of thought....
Hill, Patrick J. Multiculturalism: The Crucial Philosophical and Organizational
Issues. Change (July-Aug. 1991): 38-47. A discussion of four frameworks for

explaining diversityrelativism, universalism, hierarchism, and democratic

pluralismleads into an argument for a new curriculum that would incorporate
the currently marginalized.
Hirsch, E.D. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Need to Know. Boston:
Houghton, 1987.
Hirschman, Albert O. The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Of direct relevance to the 'PC'
debate.
Hollander, John. Reading as Was Never Read. ADE Bulletin 98 (Spring 1991): 7-13.
Howe, Irving. The Value of the Canon. The New Republic (18 Feb. 1991): 40-47.
Rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 153-71. In reasserting the value of a
traditional literary canon, Howe deploys Lukcs, Trotsky, and Gramsci against
the contemporary cultural left.
Hughes, Robert. The Fraying of America. Time (3 Feb. 1992): 44-49. Defining
America as a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral
territory, this article blames the fraying of a sense of collectivity and mutual
respect upon right-wing demagogues as well as upon pushers of political
correctness who would like to see grievance elevated into automatic sanctity.
While criticizing cultural separatism and Afrocentrism, Hughes also
denounces the ongoing frenzy about political correctness, whose object is to
create the belief, or illusion, that a new and sinister McCarthyism, this time of
the left, has taken over American universities and is bringing free thought to a
stop. This is flatly absurd.
Hurst, Lynda. 'Politically correct'? Think before you speak: New watchwords
'politically correct' cause controversy. The Toronto Star (2 June 1991): A1, A12.
A balanced discussion, focussed principally on the University of Toronto, of
debates and disputes over issues of gender and of race (the Cannizzo incident).
Jayne, E. Academic jeremiad: The neoconservative view of American higher
education. Change (May-June 1991): 30-41.
Jenish, D'Arcy. A War of Words: Academics Clash Over 'Correctness'. Maclean's
(27 May 1991): 44-45. Recycling anecdotes from Taylor and D'Souza, this
article also quotes opinions of people on both sides of the curriculum debate in
the U.S. (apportioning space to opponents and supporters of new developments
in a ratio of about 8 to 1).
Jonas, George. Politically Incorrect. Toronto: Lester Publishing, 1991. A collection of
journalistic essays by a writer who, as David Olive rather cruelly suggests, is
unlikely ever to rise above the status of tabloid philosopher (Olive, Rants
unworthy of raves, The Globe and Mail [21 Dec. 1991]).
Jouzaitis, Carol. Scholars stand up for colleges: Political-correctness charges a bum

rap, they say. Chicago Tribune (2 Oct. 1991): 1, 10. This article reports the
founding of Teachers for a Democratic Culture by Gerald Graff and others.
Rather than choking debate, as their critics claim they have, members of the
new organization say they are trying to open the discussion on campuses and
educate the public about new literary theories and teaching approaches.
Kagan, Donald. Western Values Are Central. The New York Times (4 May 1991):
Op-ed section, 15. One of two articles (the other by Henry Louis Gates)
published under the heading Whose Culture Is It, Anyway? Kagan writes that
Western culture and institutions are the most powerful paradigm in the world.
As they increasingly become the objects of emulation by peoples elsewhere,
their study becomes essential for those of all nations who wish to understand
their nature and origins.
Keefer, Michael. Political Correctness. Canadian Federation for the Humanities
Bulletin 14.2 (Summer 1991): 7-8. This article attacks the frothy denunciations
of 'political correctness' by such writers as Dinesh D'Souza, Tom Fennell,
Claude Rawson, and George F. Will.
----. Ellis on Deconstruction: A Second Opinion. English Studies in Canada 18.1
(Mar. 1992): 83-103. An analysis of the 'PC' furore forms part of a critique of the
scholarship and politics of an opponent of deconstruction.
Kimball, Roger. Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher
Education. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.
----. The Periphery v. The Center: The MLA in Chicago. In Berman, ed., Debating
PC, pp. 61-84. (A version of this essay appeared in The New Criterion [Feb.
1991].) Finding much to displease him in the papers presented at the MLA
conference, Kimball argues that the substitution of certain political causes for
disinterested appreciation may be said to have become the raison d'tre of the
Modern Language Association.
King, Nina. Classroom Notes: A Controversial English Department Deserves High
Marks for Teaching. The Washington Post (7 Apr. 1991): Educational review
section 12-13. An account of Duke University's English program by one of the
few journalists who has made any attempt to witness what supposedly PC
academics do in the classroom.
Kingwell, Mark. Enter the campus thought police. The Globe and Mail (15 Apr.
1991). Repeating (though with ironic overtones) claims that north America's
colleges are ruled by the PC police, Kingwell contrasts the radical insights of
Marxist critique to the superficial relativism of PC thinking. Response by
Ripstein.
Kinsley, Michael. Hysteria Over 'Political Correctness': Where's this left-wing reign
of terror on campus? The Washington Post (3 May 1991): A25. A comparison of
attacks on the leftism of the academy in 1951 and 1991. Kinsley remarks that
the academic speech codes now excoriated as politically correct were in many

cases instituted in the early 1970s by academic conservatives in response to leftwing student activism.
Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Pedagogy in the Context of an Antihomophobic Project.
In Gless and Smith, eds., The Politics of Liberal Education, pp. 145-62. This
essay offers an analysis (by a former student) of Allan Bloom's protectiveness of
the canonical culture of the closet, and at the same time of the homophobia
uniformly enjoined on teachers throughout the primary and secondary levels of
public school; it argues that The invaluable forms of critique and
dismantlement within the official tradition, the naming as what it is of a
hegemonic, homoerotic/homophobic male canon of cultural mastery and
coercive erotic double binding, can only be part of the strategy of an
antihomophobic project.
Kramer, Hilton. The Prospect Before Us. The New Criterion (Sept. 1990); rpt. in
Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 315-21. Kramer complains of the imposition of
politicsabove all, the politics of race, gender, and multiculturalismas the
only acceptable criterion of value in every realm of culture and life; this liberal
McCarthyism is the work of what he calls the barbarian element.
Krauthammer, Charles. Hail Columbus, Dead White Male. Time (27 May 1991): 61.
For Krauthammer, the destruction of Inca civilization is outweighed by the
consideration that its destroyers represented a culture of liberty that endowed
the individual human being with dignity and sovereignty.
----. Clarence Thomas and Liberal Orthodoxy. The Washington Post (12 July 1991).
Making it appear that effective power is in the hands of the liberal
establishment and the civil rights establishment, Krauthammer insinuates that
for the Senate to make an issue of the qualifications of opinions of presidential
appointees like Carol Iannone and Clarence Thomas is improper.
Lazere, Donald. Conservative Critics Have a Distorted View of What Constitutes
Ideological Bias in Academe. The Chronicle of Higher Education (9 Nov.
1988): A52.
Leahy, David. Au diable l'htrogne: les attaques contre le 'correction politique'.
Spirale [Montral] (Feb. 1992): 13. Dans cette introduction aux mythes
hystriques anti-'PC', et aux dbats qui entourent la question PC, Leahy
suggre que le Nouvel Ordre mondial est incapable de tolrer, mme au nom
de la diffrence symbolique, des universitaires qui aimeraient voir leurs
institutions contribuer au renouvellement et la transformation sociale.
Lehman, David. Deconstructing de Man's Life: An Academic Idol Falls into
Disgrace. Newsweek (15 Feb. 1988): 63.
----. Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. New York:
Poseidon Press, 1991. Reviewed by John Sturrock, Alarms off-campus, Times
Literary Supplement (25 Oct. 1991): 22.

Levine, Gerge, et al. Speaking for the Humanities. American Council of Learned
Societies Occasional Paper No. 7, 1989. A rejoinder to William Bennett's To
Reclaim a Legacy.
Lindenberger, Herbert. The Western Culture debate at Stanford University.
Comparative Criticism 11 (1989): 225-34. A brief account of Stanford's
Western Civilization (1935-c.1968), Western Culture (1980-88), and
Cultures, Ideas, Values courses.
Mangan, Katherine S. Entire Writing-Course Panel Quits at U. Of Texas. The
Chronicle of Higher Education (13 Feb. 1991): A16. An account of the
controversy over English 306 at the University of Texas at Austin.
McCormack, Thelma. The counterattack against feminism: How Maclean's helped
promote a media backlash. Canadian Forum (Sept. 1991): 8-10. Rpt. as
Politically Correct in CAUT/ACPU Bulletin (Apr. 1992): 17-18. A critique of
D'Souza and other polemicists, and a defence of curriculum reform and of
Women's Studies programs.
McIntyre, Sheila. The Campaign Against Political Correctness. Symposium: A
Student Arts Magazine [University of Western Ontario] (Dec. 1991): 6-7, 20.
This abridged transcription of a lecture delivered at UWO offers an analysis of
the philosophical differences underlying debates over PC and merit, and
points to inconsistencies and hypocrisy in the position of 'anti-PC' polemicists
(who, McIntyre argues, have never operated according to their own first
principle of formal equality).
Menand, Louis. Illiberalisms. Review of Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education. The
New Yorker (20 May 1991): 101-07. An analysis of inconsistencies and errors in
D'Souza's book (among them a wildly incompetent potted history of literary
criticism), supplemented by a brief account of his previous career as an opponent
of minority rights. While agreeing with some of D'Souza's arguments, Menand
remarks that It is not pleasant to see a man who did so much to poison the wells
turning up dressed as the water commissioner....
----. What Are Universities For? The real crisis on campus is one of identity.
Harper's (Dec. 1991): 47-56. Menand argues that right and left are alike
misguided in seeing the university as a social microcosm; the university should
renounce the role of model community and arbiter of social disputes that it has
assumed, and stop trying to set up academic housing for every intellectual and
political interest group that comes along....
MLA Survey Casts Light on Canon Debate. MLA Newsletter 23.4 (Winter 1991):
12-14. This survey suggests that the traditional literary canon is far from having
been displaced or usurped by matters related to new isms or to political
correctness.
The Modern Language Association's Statement on the Curriculum Debate. MLA
Newsletter 23.3 (Fall 1991): 5-6. Rpt. in the Supplement to the ACCUTE

Newsletter (Mar. 1992): 16-18.

Morrison, Paul. Paul de man: Resistance and Collaboration. Representations 32
(1990): 50-74.
Munroe, George B. The Case Against the Dartmouth Review. Wall Street Journal
(22 Oct. 1990): A14. An expos of the backing of the Dartmouth Review and
other off-campus newspapers by right-wing foundations, and an account of the
network of government agencies and public-policy institutes which have fostered
neoconservative polemicists like Dinesh D'Souza.
Nightingale, Kevyn D.I. Why being 'correct' isn't right. The Globe and Mail (20 Jan.
1992): A16. Offering (in response to Abramowicz) a wildly garbled account of
Isaiah Berlin's two freedoms, this article denounces affirmative action and claims
that progressive change will come through economic pressure levied by the
'invisible hand' of Adam Smith.
Nodelman, Perry. Is 'beauty' in the eye of the politically correct? The Globe and
Mail (25 June 1991): C1. Challenging the rhetoric of Ray Conlogue's article of
11 June 1991, Nodelman argues that Calling Shakespeare 'beautiful' is merely
an unscrupulous way of reinforcing a particular faction's power by denying that
it is factional....
Olivas, Michael A. Counterpoint. One of two reviews (under the heading That
D'Souza Book: Two Views) of Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education. Change
(Sept.-Oct. 1991): 58-60. Olivas argues that D'Souza often gets his facts
wrong, and that his slanted analysis resembles a debater's brief.
Paglia, Camille. Ninnies, Pedants, Tyrants and Other Academics. New York Times
Book Review (5 May 1991): 1, 29, 33. In characteristically overheated language,
Paglia claims that a comparison with 1960s American popular culture exposes
the followers of Lacan, Derrida and Foucault as the real fossilized
reactionaries of our time.
----. Academe Has to Recover Its Spiritual Roots and Overthrow the Ossified
Political Establishment of Invested Self-Interest. The Chronicle of Higher
Education (8 May 1991): B1-B2.
----. The nursery-school campus: The corrupting of the humanities in the US. Times
Literary Supplement (22 May 1992): 19. Arguing that Roger Kimball's tenured
radicals are not authentic leftists at all, Paglia also proposes that Leftists have
damaged their own cause, with whose basic principles I as a 1960s libertarian
generally agree, by their indifference to fact, their carelessness and sloth, their
unforgivable lack of professionalism as scholars.
Perry, Richard, and Patricia Williams. Freedom of Hate Speech. Tikkun (July-Aug.
1991); rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 225-30. Commenting on certain
ironies of free-speech opportunism in the reporting in the U.S. of campus
speech codes prohibiting verbal harassment and hate speech, the authors suggest

that One might instructively compare this situation with the new Canadian
constitution, which specifically limits the protection of certain kinds of hate
speech, without much evidence that this provision has started Canada down the
slippery slope towards being a Stalinist police state.
Pfaff, William. Universities burdened with pressures of changing values: Wellmeaning people are promoting a new form of academic repression. London
Free Press (28 May 1991): A7. No such people are identified in this article.
Pollitt, Katha. Why Do We Read? The Nation (23 Sept. 1991); rpt. in Berman, ed.,
Debating PC, pp. 201-11. In America today, Pollitt argues, the underlying
assumption behind the canon debate is that the books on the list are the only
books that are going to be read.... She resists the medicinal assumption she
find shared by both sides in the debate: the view that the chief end of reading is
to produce a desirable kind of person and a desirable kind of society....
Poston, Lawrence S. Review of Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education. Academe:
Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors (Sept.-Oct. 1991):
53-56. A careful, balanced, and finally rather devastating analysis of D'Souza's
arguments.
President Bush Names 8 Scholars to Sit on Humanities Board. The Chronicle of
Higher Education (22 Apr. 1992): A25. According to this article, four at least of
Bush's eight nominees to the National Council on Humanities, the advisory
board to the National Endowment for the Humanities, are members of the
neoconservative National Association of Scholars. Liberal academics are
reported to have criticized what they see as an ongoing 'packing' of the council
(at least four of whose 27 members are already members of NAS) with
opponents of multiculturalism and women's studies.
Raskin, Jamin. The Fallacies of 'Political Correctness'. Z Magazine (Jan. 1992): 3137. Raskin argues that while 'political correctness' purports to describe
censorious language or policies, it is in fact intended to render unspeakable or
unthinkable whole categories of belief about power. This article, which refutes
four recurrent fallacies of 'anti-PC' polemics, is to be followed by a sequel
entitled PC Sophistry and Do Conservatives Really Support Free Speech?
Ravitch, Diane. Multiculturalism: E Pluribus Plures. The American Scholar
(Summer 1990); rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 271-98. A critique of
particularist, as opposed to pluralist multiculturalism. A response by Molefi
Kete Asante (Multiculturalism: An Exchange) appeared in The American
Scholar (Spring 1991) and is rpt. in Berman, pp. 299-311.
Rawson, Claude. Old Literature and its Enemies. Review of Alvin Kernan, The
Death of Literature; Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry;
and David Lehman, Signs of the Times. London Review of Books (25 Apr. 1991):
11-15. According to Rawson, the rise of theory in literary studies has resulted in
professional misconduct, bordering on intellectual terrorism in extreme cases,
and a hijacking of the classroom by militant proponents of special-interest

groups.
Ripstein, Arthur. In defence of shedding our blinkers. The Globe and Mail (22 Apr.
1991. Dismissing Mark Kingwell's talk of relativism, Ripstein argues that while
study of the works of dead European men is crucial to understanding the way
our culture views the world, there are reasons to doubt that 'the classics' provide
an appropriate vocabulary for groups that have been historically mistreated and
marginalized to voice their concerns.
Robbins, Bruce. Tenured Radicals, the New McCarthyism, and 'PC'. New Left
Review 188 (July-Aug. 1991): 151-57. Robbins' survey of the controversy
includes the suggestion that the whole purpose of the PC assault is to extend the
Reagan/Bush agenda, taking over or silencing institutions like the National
Endowment for the Humanities that fund and therefore set research agendas, and
above all preparing the public for a cut in federal funding of higher education.
Rothenberg, Paula. Critics of Attempts to Democratize the Curriculum are Waging a
Campaign to Misrepresent the Work of Responsible Professors. The Chronicle
of Higher Education (10 Apr. 1991); rpt. in Berman, ed, Debating PC, pp. 26268. The editor of a book widely denounced as a primer of politically correct
thought (Newsweek [24 Dec. 1990]) criticizes misrepresentations of it by
journalists and by the neoconservative National Association of Scholars.
Said, Edward W. The Politics of Knowledge. Raritan 11.1 (Summer 1991); rpt. in
Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 172-89. Said follows Frantz Fanon in offering a
critique of the separatism and mock autonomy achieved by a pure politics of
identity that has lasted too long and been made to serve in situations where it has
become simply inadequate. With respect to the canon debate, he suggests that it
may not finally matter who wrote what, but rather how a work is written and
how it is read.
Schorow, Stephanie. Tyranny of the Left: Freedom of speech under fire. London
Free Press (22 June 1991): E1. Based on material provided by the
neoconservative National Association of Scholars, this article claims that A
McCarthyism of the left has arisen on U.S. campuses....
Schrecker, Ellen W. No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986. A detailed and chilling account of the purges of
the late 40s and 50s which will challenge those who give credence to current
claims about 'political correctness' as a 'new McCarthyism.'
Scott, Ian. Feminist paper's editors receive death threats. The Halifax Mail-Star (8
Nov. 1991): A3. This article reports death threats received by the editors of
Pandora in Halifax, and a separate incident in which the editors of a bimonthly
newspaper at Queen's University received the following message in a newsprint
collage: Congratulations! Here's your politically correct death notices ... we're
gunna rape u dykes. In fact, we will kill any and all feminists slowly.
Scott, Joan Wallach. The Campaign Against Political Correctness: What's Really at

Stake? Change (Nov.-Dec. 1991): 30-43. Scott argues that in the campaign
against 'political correctness,' the entire enterprise of the university has come
under attack, and with it that aspect that intellectuals most value and that the
humanities most typically represent: a critical, sceptical approach to all that a
society takes most for granted.... We are experiencing another phase of the
ongoing Reagan-Bush revolution which, having packed the courts and privatized
the economy, now seeks to neutralize the space of ideological and cultural
nonconformity by discrediting it. She analyzes the 'PC' debate in relation to a
tradition of American anti-intellectualism, and comments on the manner in
which The logic of individualism has structured the approach to
multiculturalism within the universityon many sides of the question.
Searle, John. The Storm Over the University. Review of Roger Kimball, Tenured
Radicals; Darryl Gless and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, eds., The Politics of
Liberal Education; and Timothy Fuller, ed., The Voice of Liberal Leraning:
Michael Oakeshott on Education. The New York Review of Books (6 Dec. 1990):
34-42. Rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 85-123. Searle deplores what he
sees as the politicizing of the humanities by the cultural left; while
sympathetic to Kimball, he notes the thinness of his analysis.
Senate Committee Rejects NEH Council Nominee. MLA Newsletter 23.3 (Fall
1991): 1-4. A brief report on the Carol Iannone affair, in which the MLA, having
opposed the nomination to the advisory council of the National Endowment for
the Humanities of a scholar who had published only three refereed articles, was
widely denounced in the American press.
Siegel, Fred. The Cult of Multiculturalism. The New Republic (18 Feb. 1991): 3440. An attack on the academic cultism, paranoia and power-mongering which
Siegel identifies as features of a multiculturalist orthodoxy derived from
Foucault, from deconstructionism, and from black and feminist agendas.
Sinfield, Alan. Letter to the London Review of Books (23 May 1991): 4. A response to
Claude Rawson, Old Literature and its Enemies. On the same page a letter by
Penny McCarthy defends Sinfield against the charge of indoctrinating students.
Singer, Peter. On Being Silenced in Germany. The New York Review of Books (15
Aug. 1991): 36-42. Of relevance to the 'PC' debate on this continent.
Smith, Doug. The 'new McCarthyism'. Canadian Dimension (Sept. 1991): 8-13. A
detailed analysis of the biased and duplicitous coverage of the 'political
correctness' debate in the 27 May 1991 issue of Maclean's.
Smith, Jean Edward. The dangerous new puritans. The Globe and Mail (21 Oct.
1991): A15. A political science professor who believes that Milton wrote
Areopagitica to protest the censorship policies of King Charles I, and that
Princeton, where he studied during the McCarthy era, did not knuckle under to
the pressures of the moment (for another view, see Schrecker), attacks the
storm-trooper tactics of the moral vigilantes and purveyors of sensitivity
who make up the 'political correctness' movement.

Stimpson, Catharine R. Is There a Core in This Curriculum? And is it Really

Necessary? Change (Mar.-Apr. 1988): 27-31. An analysis of four competing
attitudes towards cultural literacy is followed by an outline of a syllabus which
would show culture, not as a static and immobile structure, but as a kinetic
series of processes, in which various forces often compete and clash.
----. New 'Politically Correct' Metaphors Insult History and Our Campuses. The
Chronicle of Higher Education (29 May 1991): A10. Challenging claims about a
'new McCarthyism,' Stimpson remarks that No US senator has stood up holding
a list of 'racists' and 'sexists' in higher education.
----. Big Man on Campus. Review of Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education. The
Nation (30 Sept. 1991): 78-84. While conceding that the curricular and
intellectual movements that have grown since the 1960s provide their share of
silliness, folly, rigidity and blather, Stimpson argues that D'Souza's book
saturates educational debate with slippery rhetoric, inconsistency and
falsehood.
----. On Differences: Modern Language Association Presidential Address 1990.
PMLA 106 (1991); rpt. in Berman, ed. Debating PC, pp. 40-60.
Sutherland, John. Down with DWEMs. Review of Charles Sykes, ProfScam; and of
Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals. London Review of Books (15 Aug. 1991): 1718. Commenting that The American press is waging a campaign against
American universities, assisted by a barrage of muckraking books, Sutherland
argues that The basic problem is much the same as it was in the Eisenhower
years. His review offers a brief but well-informed analysis of the bodysnatcher paranoia at work in much of the 'PC' furore.
Sykes, Charles. ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education. New
York: St Martin's Press, 1989.
Taylor, John. Are You Politically Correct? New York (21 Jan. 1991): 32-40. A
collection of anecdotes designed to show that American universities have
succumbed to a fascism of the left, and have substituted political
indoctrination for education. (The sensational account of the Stephan Thernstrom
case with which this article begins can be compared with Jon Wiener's
discussion of the same episode.)
Tight, Malcolm, ed. Academic Freedom and Responsibility. Milton Keynes: Society
for Research into Higher Education/Open University Press, 1988.
Valds, Mario. Answering Back. MLA Newsletter 23.3 (Fall 1991): 4-5. Comments
by the President of the MLA on the gross misrepresentations of the MLA by
American editorialists and op-ed writers over the issue of Carol Iannone's
nomination to the advisory council of the National Endowment for the
Humanities.

Washington, Peter. Fraud: Literary Theory and the End of English. London: Fontana,
1989.
West, Cornel. Diverse New World. Democratic Left (July-Aug. 1991); rpt. in
Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 326-32. Commenting on the multiculturalism
debate in the U.S., West argues that The political challenge is to articulate
universality in a way that is not a mere smokescreen for someone else's
particularity.
Wiener, Jon. Deconstructing De Man. The Nation (9 Jan. 1988): 22-24.
----. Dollars for Neocon Scholars. The Nation (1 Jan. 1990): 12-14. A detailed
account of the large sums ($55 million in 1988) being spent in American
universities by the John M. Olin Foundation in an effort to reshape the
curriculums, take the intellectual initiative away from the academic left and give
scholarly legitimacy to Reaganite social and economic policies.
----. What Happened at Harvard. The Nation (30 Sept. 1991): 384-88. On the basis
of interviews with the people involved in what Dinesh D'Souza represented as an
attack on the free speech of Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom by black
students and by administrators, Wiener concludes that almost every element of
the story D'Souza tells in erroneous.
Will, George F. Radical English. This nationally syndicated column was published
on 16 Sept. 1990, and rpt. in Berman, ed., Debating PC, pp. 258-61. Reporting
on debates over curriculum at the University of Texas, Will claims that there and
elsewhere political indoctrination [is] supplanting education.
----. Literary Politics. 'The Tempest'? It's 'really' about imperialism. Emily
Dickinson's poetry. Masturbation. Newsweek (22 Apr. 1991): 72. An attack on
the MLA's opposition to Carol Iannone's nomination to the NEH Advisory
Council. Will describes Lynne Cheney, the Chairman of the NEH, as secretary
of domestic defence, and declares that The foreign adversaries her husband,
Dick, must keep at bay are less dangerous, in the long run, than the domestic
forces with which she must deal.
----. Curdled Politics on Campus. Newsweek (6 May 1991): 72. Will speaks of a war
of aggression against the Western political tradition and the ideas that animate
it.
Winkler, Karen J. Proponents of 'Multicultural' Humanities Research Call for a
Critical Look at Its Achievements. The Chronicle of Higher Education (28 Nov.
1990): A5, A8-9. Scholars like Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West are
quoted as expressing concern over some of the directions taken by multicultural
research.
----. A Conservative Plans to 'Sound the Guns' at NEH. The Chronicle of Higher
Education (22 Apr. 1992): A33. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., a recent appointee to
the advisory council of the National Endowment for the humanities who opposes

multicultural curricula, affirmative action programs, women's studies and AfroAmerican studies, is quoted as claiming that the Constitutional principles that
shape American politics have lately come to be menaced by the increasing
democratization of politics. He adds that It's ironic that conservatives have to
use politics to rid the campus of politics, but we do.
Wong, Frank F. Diversity & Community: Right Objectives and Wrong Arguments.
Change (July-Aug. 1991): 48-54. An attempt to mediate between advocates of
cultural diversity (amongst whom Wong counts himself) and the views of
academic neoconservatives like Allan Bloom.
Woodward, C. Vann. Freedom & the Universities. Review of Dinesh D'Souza,
Illiberal Education. The New York Review of Books (18 July 1991): 32-37.
Judging D'Souza's investigation to be reasonably thorough and his
documentation to be fairly detailed, if sometimes very selective, Woodward
concludes that there is reason to hope that the current aberration in the academy
may be halted before it is too late. Several responses appeared in the NYRB (26
Sept. 1991): 74-75.
Yale Scholar Wrote for Pro-Nazi Newspaper. The New York Times (1 Dec. 1987, late
ed.): B1.
Zuckerman, M.B. The professoriate of fear. US News and World Report (29 July
1991): 64.