Contrary to popular belief, the university campuses never really returned to a calm quiet state following the rebellions of the 1960s-1970s. Actually, the 1970s were filled with anti-war activism until as late as 1973, protests against tuition and fee increases, the organization of nationwide Women’s Studies and Peace Studies movements, and towards the end of the decade, the ignition of a draft resistance movement when the registration was restored. By the 1980s, campuses were increasingly the sight of militant student activism over university investments in South Africa, campus racism, CIA recruiters, the US war in Central America and Star Wars research. Although hardly on the scale of the student rebellions of the late 1960s, as Philip Altbach and Robert Cohen explain, it made its presence felt. “There has been some activism, and the revolution in attitudes and values started in the sixties has not completely disappeared.”[1]
From the ashes of the student anti-apartheid movement that reignited in the mid-1980s rose a nationwide student led effort not just to make the university accountable for the racism and discrimination in its investments abroad but in its everyday operation and character at home. Although later dubbed the “multicultural” movement, in actuality this movement grew from years of coalition efforts among a diversity of student groups, faculty and nearby communities. These coalitions recognized the limitations of demanding the creation of academic resources to study particular ethnic and racial histories and cultures that were successful in creating Black/African-American, Chicano/a, Asian and Women’s Studies programs and centers on hundreds of campuses since the late 1960s and foresaw the need to transform the university in its entirety to serve these diverse needs for fundamental socio-political change.[2]
For the first time since the uprisings of the 1960-70s, students and faculty began to formulate plans backed by widespread direct action to transform the university as a whole working from a base of what remained of 1). previous student movement’s successes that resulted in the creation of the above mentioned ethnic, racial and gender focused academic programs and centers and 2). the entrance of many more progressives and radicals into college faculty and even (although less frequently) administrative positions. Growing out of existing “single-issue” student movement groups and working from a foundation created by the efforts of students and faculty in the 1960-70s, the “multiculturalism” movement was hardy new.
Of the existing student movements, multiculturalism has spread the farthest and has had the most explosive impact. Most importantly, it is explicitly both positive and negative in its orientation. Resistance to racism and sexism, increased “minority” recruitment, multicultural classes, and “ethnic” and Women’s Studies programs and centers all suggest a refusal of sexism and racism and other forms of hierarchy in the university. At the same time, these struggles organized changes that can potentially transform the fundamental nature of the university itself. Multiculturalism has the potential and in many cases has been able to transform the university from a social factory into a free space which students can use for their own purposes whether they be studying about their heritage and power, creating access to literature, music and people of their ethnicity and cultures, and developing renewable energy.
As a result, multiculturalism has become one of the most significant threats to the stable operation of the university. The subversive potential of
multicultural reforms is not inherent, there are plenty of cases of attempts to institutionalize it to make students better workers. However, we can “re-read” the backlash against these reforms as an indicator of the level of its current or potential threat to the university.
Since 1991, we have heard much organized opposition to the multiculturalism movement put in terms of opposition to specific “multicultural” reforms predicated upon what are perceived to be larger threats to the organization and function of the universities as we now know them. Conservative commentator Irving Kristol warned as early as 1986 that “Our universities as institutions have moved rapidly and massively to the left – and, more often than not, toward the extremities of the left.” Just months before, then Secretary of Education William Bennett made the threat explicit: “academic totalitarians are turning our universities into a kind of fortress at war with society, an arsenal whose principal talk is to raise ‘revolutionary consciousness.'”[3] Sweeping accusations of “political correctness” made by opponents to multicultural reforms can be re-read as a pejorative generalization of the organizational threat of students, faculty and community groups who sought to refocus the emphasis of the universities from serving business to serving the needs of the oppressed and exploited.
A number of questions that will be asked in the following critical case study of the repression of the multiculturalism movement at UT-Austin in view of both the radical intent of the movement and the opposition. In what ways can multiculturalism subvert or reinforce the entrepreneurial university? Has the movement developed an adequate analysis of the contemporary university in capitalism to see through its demands beyond limited curricular reforms or is it inherently cooptable?
In light of this case study, we need to analyze both the strengths and weaknesses of the movement that I find illustrated in the literature of the right wing counterattack that perceived such reforms as only the tip of an iceberg slowly pushing the university out of the grasp of capital. Yet, with numerous efforts by some sectors of business and the government to coopt multiculturalism as their own in order to better manage a diverse and antagonistic workforce, we also need to consider the inherent limitations of the movement. I do not intend to imply that all sectors of business and government institutions are any more monolithic than the multiculturalism movements. No doubt there are conflicts among the former as among the latter otherwise we would not be seeing the kinds of resistance to these reforms documented in this chapter. Such conflict only helps to confirm the persisting subversive potential of such reforms.
As with the case study of entrepreneurialization at UT-Austin, this case study of the multiculturalism movement must be viewed in light of the complexity of struggle that has resulted in not only different interpretations and analyses of multiculturalism but also different actual forms. I do not recount the creation of the ethnic, racial and gender studies programs nor the wide variety of free spaces that accompanied the increasing radicalization of the faculty. Although I summarize the historical context that serves as the foundation for the multiculturalism movement at UT-Austin, my intent is to detail and analyze the recent efforts to suppress further expansion of radical free spaces within the university and how such repression is predicated on the perceived subversion of the newly entrepreneurializing university. In other words, I ask how the multiculturalism movement can serve as a source of antagonism to new efforts to entrepreneurialize the universities.
This chapter examines the content and context in which the multiculturalism movement has been organized and how it has begun the process of transformation. The multiculturalism movement at UT-Austin offers a case study of both the rise of the movement and the emergence of a counterattack. The conflicts at UT-Austin will be looked at in light of the right wing counterattack under the banner of fighting “PC” and how this counterattack is related to the crisis of the university and the strategy of entrepreneurialization. This will allow a re-analysis of the movement and how the struggle can be further circulated to other sectors of the university in a way that will extenuate the crisis. Clearly, the growing reaction to the multiculturalism movements demonstrates its great if mostly unrealized potential to transform the university to serve the multiplicity of desires held by those who use them but to succeed the movement must articulate an understanding of how it complements other struggles both inside and outside the university.
From “Ethnic Studies” to Multiculturalism
No concise, let alone comprehensive, analysis of the rise of the ethnic studies movements in the universities in the U.S. exists.[4] What we do know about the movement is that much of the ethnic studies programs emerged from movements such as the “Third World Student Front” at San Francisco State University (SFSU) in the late 1960s that forced the creation of various programs and cultural centers for Black, Chicana/o, and Asian-American students. The Women’s Studies movement grew mostly during the l970s (as did Environmental, Cultural, Marxist, and Peace Studies), motivated by the powerful success of the ethnic studies movement in the 1960-70s and the entrance of many radicals into the universities beginning in the late 1960s.
One characteristic that distinguishes the ethnic studies movement from multiculturalism is an insistence on a self-proscribed free space for particular communities of students and faculty. This ranged from an academic center, program or degree granting program, to cultural centers or houses such as the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor’s Ujama House which are run by students and may range from providing employment preparation skills (such as UT’s Minority Information Center) or become a center for organizing struggle. Many universities that created academic programs soon found that the struggle was hardly over, as students and faculty continued battling for the university to provide the resources to attract and keep faculty to teach the classes and the students wanted access to them.
Because the movement has been organized around demands for free spaces which it could control and use as it wishes autonomous from the university as a whole, the offensive struggles that won the programs and resources were soon turned to the defensive in order to defend them. This transformation did not take long, since at the time of the movement’s greatest successes such as at SFSU, capital had already begun contemplating a disinvestment from the universities (which we’ll see in chapter 5). Because these movements were successful in carving out their own autonomous space within the universities, they became vulnerable to the pressures of austerity and later commercialization that used their isolation against them. Since many of the programs remained relatively separate from the main academic programs as a whole (there were not required classes etc.) administrations responded to their success almost immediately by using this as a justification for taking out budget cuts on them first. This increasingly became the case if these programs were resistant to the pressures of market demand for research or unable to generate large grants. While students and faculty have fought this all the way through the 1970-80s, it did signal a reversal of strategy as a result of the use of autonomy against them.
Perhaps the most significant distinguishing feature between ethnic studies and multiculturalism is that the latter offers the potential for transforming the entire university to serve the multiple needs of every student, whereas ethnic studies sought to carve out a space of its own for the purposes of specific groups. While many people have found this distinction to suggest multiculturalism is integrationist or reformist, it may actually point to an entirely different outcome. Multiculturalism has had the effect of pushing that remaining free space out from its current boundaries to incorporate the entire campus. It aims to transform all the university into a free space under the control of the faculty and students for their own needs – in a way a realization of the early ideals of the uni-versity.
The current phase of struggle has become a threat to efforts to transform the universities into overt businesses because of the movement’s ability to devise a strategy that creates rather than reacts. Instead of just defending the existing space of ethnic studies – if even that since many programs have already become institutionalized and commercialized – mu1ticulthsm is an offensive effort to recreate the university to serve the multiplicity of needs and desires of those who use it. And because many of these needs and desires are antagonistic to entrepreneurialization, multiculturalism. has come under heavy attack.
The Struggle for Multiculturalism at UT
A nice way to examine what multiculturalism is and what it can be would be to look at UT-Austin. UT-Austin opened in 1883 under a state constitutional mandate that it be segregated, free of charge and not require entrance tests to its albeit “white” students. Another university was simultaneously created to serve Black students.[5] UT remained a segregated, white only university until 1950 when the Supreme Court ordered the administration to allow Heman Sweatt to enroll in the law school becoming the first Black to attend classes in the law school. However, Sweatt was given separate facilities and did not finish. It didn’t take long for those first Black students to launch an attack on racism at UT after it began admitting Black undergraduates in 1956.
A struggle to force UT to integrate the entire campus was finally successful in May 1964 after about five years of student organizing. However, the regent’s ruling effectively outlawed minority recruitment because it mandated that “neither the University of Texas nor any of its component institutions shall discriminate either in favor of or against any person on account of his or her race creed, or color.” This violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act that was passed a month later and resulted in a decrease in minority enrollment during 1965-66 that would take eleven more years of struggle to eliminate.[6]
In only a few years the struggle for integration would evolve into a struggle for the establishment of ethnic studies programs. In May 1968, the new Afro-Americans for Black Liberation (AABL) won two new programs: a course on Afro-American culture and a lecture series on Afro-American history. In February 1969, AABL presented eleven demands to President Norman Hackerman. “The demands of the militant students included a Black studies department, affirmative action in admissions and teaching staff, dismissal of the Board of Regents, an ethnic studies center in East Austin, the removal of racist faculty and statues, memorials for King and Malcolm X.” The Mexican American Student Organization (MASO) linked up with AABL by demanding both Black and Chicano studies programs. While the administration was forced to create an ethnic studies program that was implemented in the fall of 1970, none of AABL’s other demands were acted upon, especially UT’s 1964 policy banning affirmative action, until much later. At the time there was only one Black faculty member (hired in 1964) and 1 percent of the students were Black while they composed 11 percent of the Texas population.[7]
In the fall of 1971, as a result of further demands by the Mexican-American Youth Organization (MAYO) and AABL, the Ethnic Studies Program grew, offering 14 courses in Mexican-American Studies and 15 in Afro-American Studies. Chicano studies protested a temporary closing of the Mexican-American Studies program soon after that led to its director, Americo Paredes, resigning in protest. The students presented a list of demands to President Stephen Spurr, including “1) the establishment of a degree program in both Mexican American and Afro-American Studies, 2) that the new director of the program be appointed with the approval of Chicano students and faculty, 3) that the university reinstate PEO and CLEO (provisional admissions programs which had helped many minorities enter UT) and 4) that more Mexican-American professors be hired.” Between 1972-1974, the Women’s Studies program was also started.[8]
In January 1975, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, responded to requests from MAYO and the students group The Blacks to investigate violations of the Civil Rights Act by UT. HEW found UT in violation on nine counts. Concurrently, members of MAYO, The Blacks, and the Radical Student Union formed the United Students Against Racism at Texas (USARAT) which issued 12 demands that were presented to President Lorainne Rogers. Their demands were “1). standardized tests be eliminated for minority admissions, 2). more financial aid for minorities, 3). teaching assistantships represent minority population of the state, 4). a full-time minority recruitment program, 5). more Black and Chicano faculty, 6). restructuring of Ethnic Student Services, 7). funds for minority newspapers, 8). more money for culture centers, 9). minority grievance committee be established, 10). one Black and one Chicano doctor at the Student Health Center, 11). departmental status for the Mexican-American Studies and Afro-American Studies Centers, 12). a new education building be named after Black and Chicano educators.”[9]
To push their demands, ten students took over the president’s office on March 13, 1975 while about 1000 people were rallying on the main mall in support of the demands. Although the occupiers abandoned the office for a chance to speak at the regents’ meeting the next day, which achieved very little at that meeting, that summer the regents changed the wording of the 1964 nondiscrimination rule so that UT complied with the Civil Rights Act. The phrase “Either in favor or against” was changed to “against any person on account of his race, color or sex.”[10]
The Struggle Over “Minority Recruitment”
The ethnic studies movement hardly ended with the 1975 takeover. By the late 1980s, students had begun to expand the discussion of racism beyond just increasing minority enrollment and faculty to a transformation of nothing less than the entire campus. In the process, Black and Chicano students began to articulate plans to implement multicultural reforms while expanding their existing space through Black and Chicano newspapers, a non-discrimination clause, the creation of the Minority Information Center and a battle over the reform of a required English class.
The change in strategy has paralleled a fundamental reversal of advances made in minority recruitment since the 1960-70s when student struggles forced a significant increase. In 1950, only 75,000 Blacks attended higher education institutions in the U.S., rising to 1.1 million in 1980. This rise turned into a decline according to Manning Marable when “the number of Black students in higher education decreased by about 10,000 between 1980 and 1987.”[11] The Eighth Annual Status Report on Minorities in Higher Education released by the American Council on Education’s Office of Minority Concerns reported significant drops in minority participation in higher education in 1990. Participation for low-income Black high school graduates between the ages 18 and 24 (51 percent of which are from families with incomes under $18,581) dropped from 39.8 percent in 1976 to 30.3 percent in 1988. The rate for low-income Latinos (45 percent of those attending) dropped from 50.4 percent to 35.3 percent during the same period and low-income whites only rose slightly from 36.8 to 38.8 percent. Rates for middle-income Latinos and Blacks fell even further, from 52.7 percent in 1976 to 36.2 percent in 1988 for Blacks and from 53.4 percent to 46.4 percent for Latinos.[12] This is matched by the small number of degrees earned by minority students which is facilitated by low retention rates due to little support by universities. Minority groups only earned about 11 percent of the BA degrees, 10 percent of the master’s and 9 percent of all doctorates. However, since the explosion of the multiculturalism movement in the late 1980s as millions of students begin to fight for the diversification of their campuses we have begun to see this turn around. According to the Department of Education, “minority enrollment” rose by about 10 percent from 1988-90 setting records for every group especially Black students who saw the largest gain in ten years.[13]
“Minorities” also constitute a small fraction of the full-time faculty in 3300 colleges and universities (including traditionally Black institutions and community colleges – 9.6 percent. According to the UCLA Higher Education Institute, minorities only make up 3 percent of the faculty at all public, four year institutions.[14]
UT’s progress on increasing minority enrollment is not impressive. Chart 3.1 shows the uneven changes in “minority” enrollment.
Chart 3.1 Changes in Minority Enrollments, UT-Austin, 1982, 1991[15]
Group | 1982 enrollment | 1991 enrollment |
“American Indian” | 82 | 136 |
“Black” | 1,311 | 1,808 |
“Asian American” | 859 | 3,403 |
“Hispanic” | 3,899 | 5,615 |
Total Minorities | 6,151 | 10,962 |
Total Minorities | 48,039 | 49,961 |
Over this ten year period, only the number of what are broadly and mystifyingly termed “Asian American” more than doubled. None of the other three either doubled or increased to their levels of population in Texas. Even though then President Cunningham has bragged that “UT-Austin has the largest number…of African-Americans and Hispanic students among the 50 flagship state universities” – ignoring the fact that UT has more students than most state universities except Ohio State making the percentages very small – it is still inadequate. This is a clever distortion since President Cunningham’s comparison is being made to universities the UT administration likes to compare itself to rather than to all universities. For example, in Texas alone UT-Austin has a smaller percentage of minority enrollment than Laredo State, Pan American, UT- El Paso, UT-San Antonio, and Prairie View A&M, not to mention many junior and community colleges. Although 25 percent of high school graduates are Mexican-American, they are only 12 percent of first year students at senior colleges and 60 percent of all college students attend institutions in El Paso or the Valley. In fact, not only are the increases in enrollment of Blacks, “Hispanics”, and Native Americans low but the number of students from these groups at UT-Austin is far below their percentage of the state’s population. “Based on the 1990 Census figures, 37.2 percent of the state’s 16.9 million population is Black or Hispanic. UT-Austin’s enrollment is 14.9 percent Black or Hispanic.” In addition, Black enrollment has declined from 1,866 in 1989 to 1,746 in the Spring of 1992, 11 more than spring 1991. Much of this had to do with the fact that new Black student enrollment was only 358 in 1991, the second lowest total since 1982.[16]
The other side of enrollment is retention of minority students at UT. Twenty percent of Black and Latino students leave after their first year compared to 16.6 percent of “whites” and 11.9 percent of Asian-Americans. The overall average in 1990 was 15.2 percent. Within five years, about half of both Black and “Hispanic” freshman left UT, while about 33 percent of both “whites” and Asian-Americans leave. Only 35.9 percent of Black and 41.9 percent of Latino students graduate within five years compared to 53.6 percent for all students.[17]
The administration often reiterates claims that it has extensive services available to the recruitment and retention of minority students. A look at the fact shows this not to be the case. In 1991-92, it only spent $11 million of its $666.1 million budget on related programs – less than 2 percent of the total budget. A list published by Vice President of Student Affairs claims that UT funds 137 different programs to serve this purpose. However, a 1989 Students Association study found that 46 of these were non-existent. The types of services included in the list demonstrates UT’s dedication to minority recruitment and retention: seventeen of the programs list “all students” not just minorities as its target group; eight liberal arts programs had the same contact person and four of those are listed separately but are actually the same program; one listed as “Film Series” only uses money for Spanish-speaking films for an RTF class which in fall 1990 enrolled students had to pay an additional fee; and a letter to minority parents and a roundtable luncheon are listed as recruitment and retention programs.[18] “Minority” scholarship programs amount to only $4.5 million annually, “roughly 6 percent of the University’s $66 million financial aid total. Each year, roughly 1,600 incoming students apply for the 450 new awards.” These programs only serve Black and Hispanic students since UT does not consider Asian-Americans as minorities.[19]
The breakdown of the distribution of financial aid is also indicative of UT’s emphasis on minority recruitment and retention. “In 1988, 6.6 percent of the total financial aid of $95,655,759 went to Blacks, 15.3 percent went to Hispanics, 6.5 percent went to Asians, and 71.2 percent went to whites.” In addition, only 25 of 2,340 graduate fellowships are reserved for minorities.[20]
It is also interesting to note where the emphasis is being placed on minority recruitment and retention. The Equal Opportunity in Engineering (EOE) program, created in 1970, has grown from a recruitment service to retention and scholarship programs run with four full time staff members. In 1990, EOE spent $150,345 on minority scholarships in engineering alone. This demonstrates that minority recruitment follows the process of capital investment in education. While disinvestment is taking place in areas such as liberal arts, ethnic studies and minority recruitment and retention as a whole, investment is flowing to selective minority recruitment in areas such as engineering where there is more control over the student population. However, even in engineering there is little concern for retention, since only 11 percent of EOE’s funds went to retention while 47 percent of its funds went to financial awards and 22 percent went to recruitment.[21]
With much of this information in hand, Dixon, Robinson and Marshall conclude that “there is no substantive affirmative action program here. A true affirmative action program attempts to fill the void left in history by getting minorities in the door and assuring that they do not encounter racial or sexual discrimination while they are there – thus ensuring that opportunities of mobility are unhampered. All other cross-racial and cross-sexual barriers such as qualifications and performance still exist.”[22]
The same conditions that exist for minority students are repeated for minority faculty at UT. While UT claims the number of minority faculty increased by 47 percent in the last decade, the actual real numbers are far less impressive considering that, whether for students or faculty, if the study starts with low numbers, the high percentages are meaningless.
Chart 3.2 Changes in Minority Faculty, UT-Austin, 1982-83 and 1991-92
(UT-Austin, Office of Institutional Studies Statistical Handbook, 1991-92. p. 94)
Group | 1982-83 | 1991-1992 |
“American Indian” | 4 | 8 |
“Black” | 32 | 52 |
“Asian American” | 51 | 97 |
“Hispanic” | 60 | 82 |
TOTAL | 2,188 | 2,341 |
Of the 2,341 full faculty (including lecturers and instructors) in 1991-92, only 3.5 percent are Latino, 2.2 percent are Black, 4.1 percent are Asian-American, 0.3 percent are Native American, and 89.8 percent are “white”. It is also broken down into 73.8 percent male and 26.2 percent female. Yet, these are increases of Black faculty from 1.6 to 2.2 percent and of Hispanic faculty from 2.7 to 3.5 percent for example – hardly that great an increase. The gender split on tenured faculty inched its way up from 1,707 men and 508 women in 1986 of 2,215 faculty to 1,727 men and 614 women of 2,341 faculty in 1990-91.[23]
There are several factors to take into account when looking at these numbers. In 1987, when there were 28 Black and 56 “Hispanic” faculty, only 20 and 35 of them were tenured. While the number increased from 55 to 101 tenured minority faculty, minorities were still only 5.5 percent of tenured or tenure-track faculty. While the actual number of all ranks of Black and “Hispanic” faculty has increased due to pressures of students demanding the diversification of the campus, the number achieving tenure has not showing this increase to be temporary at best. From 1983-91, the number of tenured Black faculty only increased .4 percent and the number of “Hispanic” faculty by .9 percent. Statewide, for example, “Hispanic” faculty make up less than 4 percent of the state’s 13,120 full time faculty, few of whom are tenured. The administration also plays loose with whom they classify as a “minority,” leaving one student activist skeptical of the administrations claims to success. Then Students’ Association President Eric Dixon uncovered that of the 16 “new minority faculty [hired in 1991], at least two of the new Black faculty members on the list are not Americans at all, but foreigners…” and questioned how the administration defined “Hispanic” albeit with a touch of xenophobia. And even though the number is increasing there is still a high turnover. “They’re bragging that it’s doubling, but last year [1990] alone during the racial incidents they lost six Black faculty,” explained Dixon.[24]
Even the funding created to increase minority faculty is not being fully used. While then President Cunningham set up a fund of $400,000 a year to hire minority faculty not hired through regular department budgets, only $250,000 was spent per year. But this strategy is liable to the possible marginalization of minority faculty recruitment by separating the process from the departments, making it the president’s and not their responsibility. For example, if department recruitment committees perceive it to be the responsibility of the President’s office to recruit qualified minority as faculty, they will overlook this responsibility. In addition to other factors such as the lack of support for minority scholars, this has indirectly contributed to the rejection of some desired minority who have applied for faculty positions and the departure of those already here.[25] This is apparent in the administration’s above responses to the multiculturalism movements demand for increased minority faculty that such efforts have met success. As a result, a conflicting message emanates from the top levels of the administration that sets up a fund to hire minority faculty that goes partially unused while offering misleading statistics to demonstrate their success.
Behind this recruitment strategy lies the assumption that departments can eventually hire “enough” minority faculty with the aid of special funding. Such logic relies on the unexplicit use of quotas (such as claims that one, two or three minority faculty are “enough” for each department) and the generalization of “minorities” as interchangeable commodities whose presence grants a department particular credibility. As a result, departments that have successfully diversified their faculty with what is arbitrarily considered “enough” minorities are punished in order direct funds to favor those that haven’t.
In rare cases, a department successfully diversifies its faculty with politically outspoken “minorities” who seek to transform the department curriculum or even the university. This was certainly the case with the backlash against the English Department documented in this chapter. Minority recruitment brought in many radical scholars whose proposal for departmental level multicultural curricular reform and support for UT-wide multicultural reforms was met with defeat and the splitting up of the English department into two divisions.
This analysis of the logic of minority faculty recruitment at UT-Austin does not seem so far fetched when one examines the details of the right wing backlash against the multiculturalism movement documented later in this chapter. Without the benefit of an opinion poll, one can speculate that one of the reasons for the eventual faculty vote against the proposed reforms and the widespread ambivalence among students to the issue of racial discrimination was the common misperception that since an effort to recruit minority faculty existed it was enough and perhaps dangerously too much. Supplied with percentages instead of real numbers and locked out from the behind closed doors meetings of faculty recruitment and hiring committees, many people came to perceive of these efforts as sufficient.[26]
No doubt many faculty have worked diligently and sometimes successfully to recruit more minority faculty on local departmental and college levels. Facing great odds, it is their efforts with occasional student support that has result in success. Despite affirmative action programs, without these faculty and student efforts to push for more minority recruitment, possibly nothing would have been accomplished. Although the number of minority faculty recruited to UT-Austin during this period seems small to supporters, they are increases nonetheless, increases that can only be attributed to their struggles. To opponents and stubborn administrators, these increases have been accomplished too rapidly and even too dangerously. The danger lies in allowing student and faculty pressure to alter rigid institutional master plans that often result in the hiring of new scholars not only sympathetic to these movements but by introducing even more students to a diversity of perspectives. Armed with this new knowledge, more and more students begin questioning the organization of not only the university but society. In the process we discover that every bit of ground given in compromise to demands for change are used to make even more demands. Rather than solving the crisis, such compromises can feed the fires of rebellion.
It is not surprising that much, of the struggle for multiculturalism, as for ethnic studies before it, has focused on minority student and faculty recruitment and retention. In fact, minority recruiting policies are now being challenged in the US Supreme Court resulting the temporary dismantling of policies in California and in 1996 at UT-Austin. While these demands frequently are posed in terms of numbers for the purpose of increasing access to positions within the power structure, it frequently has opposite and even antagonistic outcomes. At many of the protests I attended and student newspapers and pamphlets I read (such as in The Griot and Tejas newspapers and the PRIDE, ONDA and QUEERS programs discussed in this chapter), increased minority recruitment and an expansion of access were not always demanded with the intention of climbing the socio-economic ladder. Rather, these demands were made with the foresight of providing access to resources at UT for others who would otherwise be excluded because of what was called “institutional racism.” By expanding access these students can contribute to the further transformation of the university into something that can serve not only their own diverse needs but those of a wide diversity of local and global communities. This is demonstrated by the ethnic studies movement’s ability to open access to other minorities, many of whom did not intend to train themselves to work but spent a lot of their time studying their own histories, cultures and power and utilized this information to make further changes from affirmative action to divestment from apartheid.
Minority recruitment is part of the uncontrollable process of the crisis: minority recruitment means letting in a never-ending flow of students and faculty who will continue to make demands for change. University of California at Berkley sociologist Troy Duster has deconstructed counterattacks against minority recruitment that are made with charges that minority students are segregationists by suggesting that these counterattackers fear less possible segregation than “the challenges that the growing numbers of Asian, Latino, and African-American students pose to the faculty once they find their ancestors’ histories and contributions largely ignored in the classroom.”[27]
While students have been winning battles over recruitment and retention, some forces within the university have been resistant out of fear that letting in more minorities will not be the end of the organized challenges. The increases in recruitment that have occurred can only be attributed to the students and faculty that have fought all along for it. But this struggle has gone much deeper than just playing a numbers game. It has never been separated from struggles against racism, sexism and homophobia and demands for the transformation of the entire education system.
Multiculturalism and Anti-Racism at UT
During the late 1980s, while UT was under heavy criticism for its poor “minority” recruitment and retention record, renewed attacks on racism, sexism and homophobia were being made by students. Through financial support from the Students Association (SA), the Minority Information Center (MIC) was opened in 1989 to serve the retention needs of Black and Chicana/o students. During the movement that would ensure in 1990, MIC became a fundamental resource for organizing. SURE Walk (Students United for Rape Elimination), also created by the SA in the mid 1980s, evolved for a while into a force for fighting sexism on campus as University NOW had been for some years, especially incidents of sexual assault that were reported in 1990 to have occurred at fraternity parties. University Lesbians successfully won an inclusion of sexual preference to UT’s non-discrimination clause in 1990. This group’s efforts were rooted in years of organizing by Gay and Lesbian students to come out of the closet, fight Gay-bashing, sponsor SA funded events and their Friday happy hours that offered a weekly free space. Disabled students have also been on the move. In 1989, ABLE (All Bodies Learning Equally) protested their lack of access to the shuttle buses by being carried on and off a couple buses during the height of campus traffic. They quickly won when UT was forced to not renew the contract with Laidlaw and chose Capital Metro that had lifts. ABLE has continued fighting for ramps and access to classroom and buildings.
In the midst of these resurging struggles, UT attempted to devise a racial harassment policy. The six month long Ad Hoc Committee on Racial Harassment, chaired by then UT Law School Dean and current Provost Mark Yudof, offered a recommendation in 1989 which was later adopted as university policy. The nine member committee had only one Black student member. Rather than addressing institutionalized racism at UT such as its poor minority recruitment and retentions, statues of Confederate Civil War politicians on the South Mall, toxic pollution of and expansion into Blackland, South African investments or “hate crimes” on campus or by students, faculty and staff, the committee and its resulting recommendation leaned toward heavy punishments for verbal harassment. In effect, because it focused on punishing individual actions – effectively censoring – such as what people can say, it faced heavy opposition from students such as the BSA (Black Student Alliance) who otherwise would have supported a harassment policy.[28] Ironically, the policy turns student challenges against racism into a means for pitting student against student by redirecting the focus to the students themselves while ignoring the organization of the university. The advocacy of a harassment policy was originally guided by an attempt to restore in loco parentis under the terms of students needs by students themselves. Unfortunately, like many other universities have done, the committee transformed it into a source of university control over even more of students’ lives and a tool for dividing students based upon the false assumption that minority students want censorship of others activities.[29]
While heated debate was taking place over the recommendations in Spring 1990, racial and sexual violence within more fraternities triggered an offensive by the movement. On April 12, 1990, more than 1000 students marched through campus, to downtown and to a fraternity house to protest two acts of fraternity racism that occurred within a three day period. On April 9, a car used by Delta Tau Delta fraternity during the Round Up parade was found outside its house smashed up and sprayed with two racist insults. The march was organized after Phi Gamma Delta (the “Fiji’s”) fraternity was found selling t-shirts with a “sambo” caricature face on basketball player Michael Jordan’s body. The fraternity used the caricature in the past as its official mascot, “Fiji Island Man.”[30]
On Friday, April 13, President Cunningham was met by about 1000 angry students as he attempted to make a press statement about the week’s events on the West Mall. Unannounced to but a few faculty and students who Cunningham invited as his entourage and the press, the students listened for a few minutes until it was clear he was not addressing popular complaints and then surrounded him. After a few minutes, Cunningham nervously retreated to the main mall where he began to give a statement to the press. However, the students soon followed and chased him into the tower. After a short rally at the main entrance, BSA President Marcus Brown opposed any further action and broke up the protest suggesting more organizing meetings that never materialized.
Outrage against President Cunningham’s press conference reverberated for a couple more weeks. He had invited two Black basketball players and minority faculty, including professor and current chair of the sociology department John Butler, to stand behind him while he made his speech. While some of the faculty were hounded by students for standing at his side, the athletes began to realized they had been used and mislead. Assuming they had been invited by Cunningham to speak, “Panama” Myers, one of the players, soon realized that “an illusion was created by my standing behind Cunningham that I agreed with what he said…I felt used.”[31] On May 2, about 100 student athletes, including the two misled to stand by Cunningham, marched through campus to a rally of more than 750 students on the West Mall. Many athletes also formed the Student Athlete Coalition to break down the division between students and athletes and endorsed BSA’s PRIDE.
PRIDE and ONDA
The following week after the racist fraternity actions, a coalition of about 15 Black student groups presented six demands to the university, four of which deal specifically with the incidents. The most significant demand was the immediate adoption of PRIDE (Proposed Reforms to Institute Diversity in Education) which had been in the works for a few years and parts of which had already been presented in the past. PRIDE is composed of six proposals from which I summarize:
- The African and Afro-American Studies Center should have independent hiring and firing of faculty and staff, have a separate budget for student sponsored projects that does not reduce the center’s budget, and the director should be chosen by faculty, students and scholars familiar with the center.
After a seven month delay by the administration in responding to PRIDE, the administration outlined its position in a report presented to BSA on November 2, 1990. These responses were not only questionable in their sincerity and the amount of time it took to generate them, but also an attempt to decentralize authority over each proposal to diffuse the efforts of the movement. The administration’s reasoning in responding to each part of PRIDE were problematic:
- Independent authority over faculty for the Center were denied claiming that “no campus unit has ‘independent authority’ to appoint and dismiss faculty and staff.” This is questionable however. Do not the Institute for Advanced Technology or Center for Electromechanics have control over which faculty and staff will work for them because they are engaged in research potentially profitable to UT? Are not faculty appointed to endowed chairs and granted tenure by a vote of their department (with final approval by the President) thus giving the department nearly “independent authority” to appoint and dismiss? An independent budget for student organized activities was also denied with the suggestion that to do so would not fulfill the center’s mission as an “interdisciplinary academic studies unit.” It also lists about a dozen general university programs (the libraries, Dean of Students, and the President’s Office for example) that sponsor Black cultural programs. None are shown to provide money for student run programs (except the Student Union, and even it requires “adult” supervision) however. Control over the selection of the director was denied. The response reiterated the structure of the selection process that includes the Dean of Liberal Arts selection of a committee of any eight faculty and five students who recommendation are subject to veto by the dean and president. The executive officers of the administration denied responsibility for the entire proposal by directing it to Liberal Arts Dean Standish Meacham.
The administration also created racial awareness workshops for some faculty and newly admitted freshman during summer orientation in the summer before it made a formal response. One of the seminars conducted for faculty and administrators is run by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, a group that fights discrimination against Jews. The choice of the ADL is questionable, since it assumes that Jews are a race and also because the issue of anti-Semitism, although prevalent and related, was not an issue of the thousands protesting and organizing against racism. No Jewish student organizations were even involved. The implementation of these workshops “conveniently excludes the very groups who originally submitted detailed proposals for the multiculturalism awareness initiative,” according to a statement of 12 faculty and student groups.[34] PRIDE‘s concern about “scholastic racism” were dismissed with a vague concern for “academic freedom” and “free speech” with the suggestion that these issues be raised before the new committees, deans and faculty groups.
While the administration attempted to delegate responsibility for implementing these proposals in an apparent attempt to dissipate and diffuse the movement the struggle had the momentum and was able to circulate the struggle throughout the university. That summer, students began to expose UT’s connections to Freeport and Gay and Lesbian students fought for inclusion in the discrimination policy. PRIDE also received support from Chicana/o students who devised their own multiculturalism plan, the University Lesbians and Asian- American students. Four new progressive faculty groups (Chicano Faculty Caucus, Black Faculty Caucus, Progressive Faculty Caucus and FACT: Fight Racism (the Faculty Ad-hoc Committee to Fight Racism)) were also organized not only to support PRIDE but to get faculty organized for some later battles in the English department and to stop the Gulf War.
Todos Unidos (TU), a coalition of Chicana/o organizations and individuals formed in 1990 and later proclaimed their support for PRIDE in April. TU members formulated a complementary proposal to PRIDE called Orientaciones Nuevas para la Diversificacion de la Academia (New Direction for the Diversification of Academia or ONDA) and began to organize around its implementation. There are 10 parts to ONDA that focus around student and faculty recruitment and retention, the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS), and curriculum reform.
ONDA has the following 10 chapters and five appendixes from which I summarize:
- Social Problems – Suggests that UT identify racism, sexism and heterosexism as social problems, conduct research on them, document “hate crimes” that occur on campus, and identify these problems in the Strategic Plan, 1992-1997. Mechanisms should also be put in place to hear and investigate complaints of discrimination.
- Admissions – Admissions criteria should be reformed. ONDA suggests norming each ethnic/racial group and selecting the highest scorers if GPA and tests scores are not replaced with unbiased criterion. Also, recruitment should be conducted with geographic criteria and culture-based reference tests. A minority affairs position is also suggested for the office of admissions to aid students at all class levels.
- Recruitment – UT should expand recruitment of Chicana/os in junior colleges and in areas with high Chicana/o concentrations. Also one minority graduate student should be included on each department’s graduate admission’s committee, minority outreach centers created on people of color communities, assist public school students to attend college, and increase minority involvement in summer orientation.
- Retention – UT should create a centralized retention program for all students and faculty. Additional new programs are suggested such as a comprehensive tutoring program for minority and low-income students using graduate students as tutors, increasing minority graduate fellowship funding from $350,000 to $1 million offering multi-year packages, reduce competition for the provisional admissions program and provide tutoring and counseling support, reopen the English Department Writing Lab, increase minority mental health counselors and increase cost free visits.
- Faculty and Staff – A Vice-President for Minority Affairs should be created. Faculty and administrators should be actively recruited at Chicana/o scholars conferences. Also, two Latina/o law faculty should be hired who teach immigration law and test case courses and faculty multicultural sensitivity workshops should be required.
- Curriculum – Every college should be required to offer at least one course on Chicana/os, except Liberal Arts which must offer one per department. Emphasis should be given to the Chicana and at least four courses a year offered on Latinos. A master plan should be developed to integrate multiculturalism into the curriculum by implementing it at the institutional rather than departmental level. The American History and Texas Government course requirements must be reevaluated to include a multicultural content. Students should be required to take a multicultural course within the US and world contexts. Also Government and History 314 classes should be expanded to each semester and English 314L (Introduction to Chicano Literature) should be substitutable for English 316K.
- University Publications – The Minority Advisory Group of TSP should be upgraded to a standing committee; funding should be increased for Tejas and Griot; and more distribution boxes should be made available for alternative publications.
- Financial Aid – The Office of Student Financial Aid should expand its hours at the start of the semester, eliminate the GPA requirement, provide alternative sources of aid for students on academic probation and create a scholarship database.
- Center for Mexican American Studies – CMAS should receive a new facility that is accessible to the disabled and has more space. Funding should be increased for a student run Chicana/o cultural center and other student programs.
- Fraternities and Sororities – A policy and means to investigate sexism, racism and heterosexism by members of the Greek system should be established under the VP for Minority Affairs. Mandatory multicultural awareness programs should also be established.
ONDA also includes further expands on these programs in the following five appendixes:
- The Excel Tutoring Program – The program would serve low income undergraduates by hiring low income graduate students as the tutors, matching up minority and female students and tutors.
Although ONDA was presented to the administration in April 1990, they did not receive a response until early December 1990 just as the semester was ending. The responses to both ONDA and PRIDE were coordinated by Lewis Wright, assistant vice president for administration. Not surprisingly, the responses are almost identical in their strategy of decentralizing responsibility for the proposals or touting current administrative programs. According to one Todos Unidos member, eight of the nine pages are spent “advertising” the current programs while using the last page to answer the proposals. For example, the vice president for minority affairs was rejected and the curriculum proposal was delegated to the University Council Committee on Multicultural Education as was PRIDE.[36]
The movement for multiculturalism is made complex by its two fundamental aspects: expanding enrollment and faculty recruitment and totally revamping the way we learn and what we learn to include a multicultural, even international, perspective. At UT, both PRIDE and ONDA place their emphasis on a massive increase of the recruitment of students and faculty and institutional support so that they continue to graduation. They have answered the attack on accessible enrollment with demands for not only increased enrollment but resources to support them, thereby confronting the issue of income used against students with austerity. The most important resource demanded is the hiring of many Black and Chicana/o faculty in every department not only in their own specialized departments.
These demands had the unintentional affect of undermining the very purpose of enrollment management: weeding out students the university doesn’t want. UT administrators were simultaneously faced with polar opposite pressures: top-down legislative mandates to reduce enrollment and bottom-up student and faculty pressures to open up enrollment for specific groups of students. Over time, this movement threatened to grow on the strength of participation from students who gained entrance and studied with the new faculty hired as a result of the movement and continued the struggle. I summize that this is why the administration took so long to respond to these proposals while attempting to cover up its own overt fraudulent inaction concerning campus racism and in the end needed a right wing backlash to slow down the movements. More worrisome is when students begin to link up with faculty, which is common in the multiculturalism movement. As the role of faculty as mediators for the administration and implementers of restructuring – as in the case of the promotions of two Black faculty to administrative positions: George Wright to Vice President and John Butler to Sociology Department Chair and endowed professor – are attacked by students, control over the faculty becomes even more tenuous. The formation of the autonomous Black and Chicana/o Faculty Caucuses since late Spring 1990, later joined by the formation of the Progressive Faculty Group and the American Association of University Professors, is evidence that when challenged faculty are capable of coordinating their struggles with students rather than serving as mediators between students and the administration.
Neither the delays nor the denial of administrative responsibility stopped the movements even if they have derailed them temporarily. In fact, PRIDE triggered the circulation of the multiculturalism movement throughout the university. The Indian Progressive Action Group endorsed PRIDE, proposing a multicultural requirement that includes coverage of contributions by Blacks, Asian-Americans, Latina/os and Native Americans as well as intensified faculty and student recruitment. The Native American Student Association was formed as a support group and to expand the number of courses on Native Americans. The University Lesbians and the Gay and Lesbian Student Association also publicly supported PRIDE and efforts have even been made to establish a Gay Studies. The Korean Language Promotion Committee is attempting to establish a Korean language program in the Department of Oriental and African Languages. A group of students and faculty is attempting establish a degree granting Peace and Conflict Studies program and submitted a draft of a proposal to the Dean of Liberal Arts in 1994. Even during the Gulf War, the anti-war movement included the adoption of PRIDE and ONDA in its list of demands to end military and corporate oriented research and funding among other things.[37]
That summer, the University Lesbians won the inclusion of Gay and Lesbian students to the university’s anti-discrimination policy. In January, the law school had been requested by the Association of American Law Schools to add sexual orientation to its list of prohibited forms of discrimination as do all its member schools. When Dean Yudof petitioned President Cunningham for advice, University Lesbians sprang into action with demonstrations, blocking traffic on Guadalupe Street with a street festival and a march on the ROTC building to protest its discriminatory policies. In all, 37 campus groups endorsed the petition for inclusion in the policy. This time it took only a few months for the clause to be approved which it was in August. In 1985, President Cunningham “lost” and essentially vetoed a similar proposal.[38]
Soon after the victory, a coalition of five groups – GLSA, UL, Law Graduate Students for Gay and Lesbian Concerns, University NOW and University ACT-UP organized events during the first two weeks of classes in fall 1990 to present their plan QUEERS: Queers United in Envisioning an Egalitarian Restructuring of Society. QUEERS demands that UT acknowledge domestic partner status for Gay/Lesbian students and employees, including access to married student housing, health insurance and other benefits; sexual orientation policy apply to all off campus organizations that use UT facilities; create a Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies and recruit Gay and Lesbian faculty; fund sensitivity workshops for dorm residents and RAs; establish a multicultural panel to advise the Student Health Center; and adopt PRIDE and ONDA.[39]
Even though the new sexual orientation policy has many problems, it was only the beginning to further expanding the movement. However, while UT is now prevented from discriminating, outside organizations and corporations that use UT facilities such as ROTC, are only “encouraged” to adopt the policy. This is unlike the University of California-Los Angeles which has a mandatory anti- discrimination policy. It also only “refers to access to facilities, programs and services. It does not mention harassment,” Jessica Selinkoff of Austin ACT-UP points out. As a result, Gay and Lesbians are unable to come out about their sexual preference to outsiders on campus without a threat of discrimination.[40]
For three straight years, the Coalition for a Diversified Law School has participated in a nationwide law student strike to protest the composition of the law faculty, students and course content. By 1990, the faculty was composed of 50 “white males” (84.7 percent of the total), 6 white females (10.2 percent), 2 African-American males (3.4 percent), one Asian-American male (1.7 percent) and no Hispanics (0 percent). During the first National Law Student Strike in 1989, students at 38 law schools boycotted classes and rallied. In Berkeley, 90 percent of the students struck and 43 were arrested when they occupied the admissions office. At UT, 25 percent of the students boycotted classes and about a third showed up for a rally in 1989.
The Coalition’s demands in 1990 included four areas:
- Recruitment and Retention – disclosure of faculty hiring criteria and methods to students, increase student participation in hiring process and allow students on appointments committee to publish a report for students, and increase the number of first year classes taught by minority and female faculty.
- Recruitment and Retention of Diverse Law Student Body – makeup should reflect state demographics, and increase annual minority orientation program.
- Changes in Placement Office – Recruiters must be prohibited from discriminating based on sexual orientation.
- Suggestions – Create at least three endowed chairs for Mexican- Americans, African-Americans, and Women, create a fellowship for minority and female students planning to teach, recruit minority and women faculty to teach at UT, and hire more minority and female adjunct professors immediately.
In 1991, the Coalition, which includes 11 law student groups and a Graduate Student “Support the Boycott” Committee, stopped boycotting classes after participation declined in 1990 and turned the protest into a party to celebrate since the law school was forced to give into their demands. In 1990-91, the law school hired four women, one of them Latina, increasing the total number of women faculty to nine of 60. Only a month before, a group of law students created The Texas Journal of Women and the Law to “focus on legal, social and political issues affecting women.” The journal is not strictly focused on academic legal issues but will include first person accounts and papers delivered at symposiums.[41] At the same time, UT was being sued by “white” applicants for charges of “discrimination” in their efforts to enter the law school. In 1996, they were eventually successful in having the US Supreme Court strike down its minority recruitment policies.
Fighting for Institutionalization at the University Council
In the midst of these diverse struggles being fought around multiculturalism, PRIDE and ONDA were transformed into a recommendation by the University Council Committee on Multicultural Education which was chaired by journalism professor Wayne Danielson. After nearly a year of deliberation, the final proposal was made in the fall of 1991 and passed the University Council in October. The recommendation called for the approval of a 3 hour multicultural requirement beginning with fall 1992 and increased to 6 hours by fall 1996. Before 1996, the student may chose between a U.S. or international multiculturalism course. In 1996, this would change to one of each. Foreign language courses that are not primarily grammar oriented can be used to fulfill the requirement. The main thrust of the recommendation comes with a suggestion that currently existing multicultural courses be allowed to count as credit: “The Committee encourages each college and department to seek ways that the multicultural requirement can overlap with other course work required for graduation, thus allowing as much flexibility as possible in planning their schedules.”[42]
However, when twenty two faculty members wrote letters of protest to the University Council in October, the proposal was required to be approved by vote of the entire faculty instead of going directly to the board of regents for approval. After letters of opposition from 17 faculty members were received, the non-curricular recommendations (minority student and faculty recruitment, cohort registration, sensitivity workshops for faculty and staff and a student run cultural center) were also brought to a vote of the General Faculty (that is, all the faculty) after they were approved by the University Council. At its only meeting of the year in October 1991, the General Faculty did not achieve a quorum and was unable to vote. Although, all the non-curricular changes were approved by the Faculty Senate’s Committee on Multicultural Education and the University Council, the recommendation was sent back again to the University Council.
After a mistake on the Council’s faculty list in January, about 432 faculty members (two-thirds of whom were assistant professors and lecturers) were unable to vote by mail on the multiculturalism requirement and were asked to come to University Council Secretary Paul Kelly’s office to vote in person, which only 63 (15 percent) did. Of 2,077 faculty, 1,193 (57 percent) voted on the proposal: 434 (36 percent) voted for the proposal and 759 (64 percent) voted against it. Of the 432 who did not receive mail ballots, 30 (48 percent) voted for it and 33 (52 percent) voted against the proposal.[43] Because the margin of defeat is smaller than the number of those who did not vote in person, the vote has come under heavy fire as illegitimate.
Opposition to the plan was clearly organized by a small group of self- described ideologically conservative faculty, most associated with the National Association of Scholars (NAS) through the Texas Association of Scholars (TAS), and entrepreneurial engineering and science faculty. Although many struggles are organized by mainly a small group over a long period of time, this group differs from most activist groups since it had access to alumni and high ranking administrative officials in another effort to block the E306 reforms that we’ll see next. This small group of senior faculty were able to dislodge and block a desire for reform demanded by thousands of students in marches and protests and thousands more who voluntarily sign up for multicultural courses. In fact, a University financed survey of UT students conducted in March 1991 by a graduate journalism class found that 57 percent of all 432 students surveyed by phone said UT should require a multiculturalism course.[44]
Student and faculty opponents however attempted to recast the required course as a burden to students in an attempt to utilize popular anger against rigid course requirements that leave no space for a student to take classes in other areas of interest. While all students have little room for taking diverse courses, such a strategy was aimed especially at appealing to engineering students who have almost no allowance or time to take outside courses. Lyle Clark, one of seven engineering professor who filed letters of protest, used this strategy: “Engineers don’t have many electives anyway. If you require six hours of multicultural courses, you’re taking away the right to take music, art and some of these other things.” This was echoed by engineering professor Dale Klein.[45] Engineering Dean Herbert Woodson, who is integral to the entrepreneurialization of UT, based his opposition to the course on the claim that it may “cease being a writing course.”[46]
What is clever about this strategy is the very faculty that are imposing the rigid and overworked schedules on engineering students are the ones suggesting that diversifying their coursework would take away what little extra time they already allow them. The very faculty who are denying students free time in the structuring of their degree program opposed multiculturalism under the guise that it would do what exactly that: deny them free time. Opposition also came from other elite faculty such as Steven Weinberg, a physics professor who helped bring the later aborted Superconducting Supercollider to Texas. Weinberg and computer science professor Robert S. Boyer, stressed a lack of time and suggested requiring the “masterworks of literature” such as Greek tragedies. Classics professor Karl Galinsky also touted the virtues of “Western culture” and suggested more time to study the matter by sending the proposal to the Faculty Senate’s Committee on the Undergraduate Experience or the Educational Policy Committee – the latter of which he is a member.[47]
This attempt to justify their opposition based on multiculturalism reducing space for electives took place even though the UC recommendation specifically calls for overlapping course requirements so that even the already required foreign language courses can count doubly. Paul Woodruff, professor of philosophy, even opposed an amendment that would allow the humanities requirement to be fulfilled by humanities courses with multicultural content. Woodruff “believed that the multiculturalism courses should be courses taken in addition to not as a part of, the present requirements.”[48] Because students can already fulfill more than one requirement with a single course, multiculturalism may have had little or no impact on courseload size. Thus, there must be another explanation for opposition to the recommendation. Opponents wanted to make it appear to increase the amount of required schoolwork to generate opposition.[49] When it was clear that this may not be the case, some like Woodruff attempted to make sure that it would. Although the reasons for its defeat are unclear, the opposition’s strategy appeared orchestrated around an attempt to turn multiculturalism into more work in order to strip it of both its support and its potential antagonism to the function of the university to teach us to work. This in mind, it is hardly surprising that the most opposition came from engineering and the sciences since these disciplines are fundamental to re-imposition of control over the universities.
Even though the proposal was temporarily defeated, it has done nothing to slow the implementation of multicultural reform. Classes are still being organized and taught by students and faculty such as E376 by Elizabeth Fernea, professor of English, titled “Multicultural Approaches to Literary Studies.” Two Plan II students created a conference course titled “Views of World Cultures” that offers a series of lectures by UT professors. Students are also still fighting to increase minority faculty hiring in department such as sociology where the Sociology Graduate Student Group (SG2) did a survey of what graduate courses have been unavailable and which of these as well as others graduate students would prefer to take. Multicultural topics ranked among the top five. All the colleges except Engineering and Natural Science have established committees to evaluate multicultural reforms or have attempted to do so. The College of Communication held a faculty seminar to brainstorm on introducing multiculturalism into teaching and research, the School of Social Work has a committee that evaluates if courses are culturally diverse, the College of Business Administration attempted to require a three hour degree requirement in either a foreign language or international studies but was rejected by the University Council, the College of Fine Arts has been creating multicultural courses for several years in areas of ethno-musicology and non-Western music, and the College of Education has established a committee as well.[50] According to a guide by the Office of the Dean of Students, there were 33 multicultural courses in 1991, although six dealt with societies outside the U.S.[51] While these efforts may have accomplished little of the comprehensive demands made by students, it is impossible to charge that nothing is changing.
The movement has forced the administration to deal with student demands and has resulted not only with these decentralized efforts but also expanded minority recruitment of students and faculty, new retention programs by the Dean of Students Office, awareness seminars for the administration, and the Faculty Senate and UC’s approval of most of the important proposals included in PRIDE. Even without formal admission, the uprising has resulted in a tremendous victory in forcing an increase in the hiring of minority faculty. Between 1989 and fall 1991, the number of minority faculty was increased: women increased from 559 to 614, Blacks from 40 to 52, and “Hispanics” from 70 to 82 while “Asians” only increased from 96 to 97 and Native Americans remained at 8. In all, while the total faculty increased from 2,273 to 2,341, the number of minority and women faculty increased by 72.[52] While this is hardly the spectacular 45 percent increase the administration would have us believe – it is actually only .85 percent between 1989-91 when women are included – it would not have happened even at this level without the spring 1990 uprising and all the other facets of the multiculturalism movement that have complemented it. The uprising gave strength to the many decentralized departmental struggles for minority faculty recruitment and multicultural reform.
Paradoxically, the administrations’ diffusing of responsibility for multiculturalism has backfired against it since many departments, colleges and students have continued to quietly but powerfully transform the university without interference from a centralized power. Decentralization has resulted in some defeats, which I will discuss regarding E306, but it has also enabled students and faculty to maintain their own distinct needs in transforming their programs, something that would be difficult if something like the ONDA‘s VP for Minority Affairs (which would oversee all the changes) were created.
The Counterattack Against Multiculturalism at UT-Austin
Along with the defeat of the UC recommendations, opposition also arose over an attempt to reform English 306 and Tejas newspaper. The opposition developed as the result of organizing by the Texas Association of Scholars (TAS), Students Advocating Valid Education (SAVE), the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT) and a coalition of national backers that began in 1990 following the spring uprising and victories that began to follow with the sexual orientation clause, the attack on the UT-Freeport McMoRan connection, and the law school strike victories.
E306: A Lot of Hype About Basic English
The Lower Division English Policy Committee (LDEPC), chaired by professor Linda Brodkey, was appointed to reorganize E306 in time for fall 1990. Because AI’s were given inadequate instructions on how to organize the course and leeway in selecting texts and developing the syllabus, many AI’s had already begun diversifying the content of their E306 courses on their own.[53] LDEPC was only an attempt to begin institutionalizing what was already being done. The committee added two new features to the course which was renamed “Writing About Difference”: readings from Supreme Court decisions about civil rights and Racism and Sexism, written by Paula Rothenberg, as a main textbook.[54] After internal opposition arose from three English professors over the Rothenberg book, its assignment for the class was canceled on June 26, 1990 and parts of it selected for the reading packet. Only a small part of the book was originally intended to be used in the course.
The internal opposition came from professors Alan Gribben, James Duban and John Rusckiewicz, all of whom were members of the policy committee. Shortly after the Rothenberg book was dropped, Duban and Rusckiewicz both resigned from the committee on July 18. Only three days later, President Cunningham and Gerhard Fonken, executive vice president and provost, met with Liberal Arts Dean Standish Meacham to discuss the course. On Monday, July 23, Dean Meacham announced that the course changes would be postponed a year.
Although President Cunningham has claimed that “the dean [Meacham] made the decision” there is evidence that the decision was made from the highest levels of the administration. President Cunningham’s response to a letter received from a Dallas woman concerned about the course on July 9 bears this out. Cunningham responded in a July 11 letter that “After careful consideration, the Department has decided that the course will not be modified this fall.” This decision to postpone the course was supposedly not made for almost another two weeks. Although Cunningham has defended the letter by suggesting that it should have included the words “with the Racism and Sexism textbook” added to the end of the sentence, the letter from the Dallas woman never mentions the textbook. With this in mind, English professor Kurt Heinzelman may have been correct in concluding that Cunningham and Fonken were responsible for postponing the course. According the Heinzelman, “Before the weekend [July 20], Meacham and Kruppa were ready to start the course, and after the meetings with Fonken and Cunningham, Meacham reversed his position.”[55] Soon after, Meacham announced he would not continue as dean and was replaced by his predecessor, Robert King.
LDEPC kept working after the postponement and devised a new syllabus that still utilized Supreme Court decisions on civil rights cases and parts of the Rothenberg book. However, although the committee reviewed a 46 to 11 vote of confidence from departmental faculty and a proposal to create a oversight committee was defeated 30 to 27, the committee resigned in early February 1991 when a second syllabus was also rejected.
Cunningham was not the only one who had received a letter concerning the course. Anne Blakeney, a Dallas resident and member of the UT Liberal Arts Foundation Council (many of whom donate about $1000 a year to the College of Liberal Arts) wrote Gribben after reading his editorial in the Dallas Morning News. As one internal opponent to the E306 changes, Gribben’s response to Blakeney on July 9 indicates a sense of defeat by a powerful multiculturalism movement that could not be stopped without top level administrative intervention – that would come only 12 days later. Gribben suggested to Blakeney that:
*The English department should be placed in receivership indefinitely, with someone like Donald Foss (chairman of the Psychology department) as its director for several years; and then be governed by a new English chairman appointed directly by Gerhard Fonken, executive vice president and provost; and
*During this period of receivership the department faculty should be divided into a Department of critical Theory and Cultural Studies and a Department of Literature and Language. This division of the radical theorists from the remaining traditional scholars would give the latter the freedom to offer a true literature and writing program. Or
*Barring the accomplishment of these steps, the two University-wide required English courses (E306, E316K) should be abolished, thus ending the necessity of hiring additional English professors at the rate they have been recruited from the most radicalized (but prestigious) graduate programs across the nation.
Most vital of all will be a comprehending College of Liberal Arts dean with nerve and a determination to oversee the recruiting policies and decisions of the English department, which has lost all sense of tradition, direction, civility and academic freedom in the classroom.[56]
While there is an irrational level of paranoia and conspiratorial planning in this letter, too many people failed to take what it says seriously. Although it has not been placed in “receivership,” the English Department’s nearly twenty year old Executive Committee governance structure was soon after abolished by interim dean Robert King who returned as a “comprehending” dean to the college as Gribben had hoped. Although Fonken did not appoint a new English Department chair, he was apparently involved only twelve days latter in reversing the LDEPC decision on E306. The abolition of the executive committee by King fulfilled much of Gribben’s plan to divide the department into two departments in order to isolate the “radicals” because only senior (and most likely more conservative) faculty are members of the budget council whereas all faculty can vote in the executive committee. In May 1992, President Cunningham announced a plan to follow through on Gribben’s plan to split the department by creating a division of rhetoric and composition.[57]
Gribben’s fear of the snowballing success of the multiculturalism movement was quite explicit. The “most disturbing trend I have observed here in the past 10 years,” he wrote Blakeney, “would be the selective recruitment of the new faculty members with an expectation that they will bring with them an ideologized sense of advocacy – radical feminism, Marxist analysis, militant ‘ethnic’ studies – to influence students inside and outside the classroom.”[58] (italics in original)
Gribben’s letter and the intervention of the administration and other outsiders were reactions to the continuing successes of the movement. One possible explanation for the failure to generate support outside the department until after it was delayed may be that proponents of the reforms neglected to emphasize the strength of the movement and instead focused on the supposed power of opponents and the administration. Simply, the struggle was not circulated sufficiently to others fighting the same battles elsewhere in the university.
This was especially true in the case of students. The terms of debate over E306 were about whether or not it was scholarly or was about writing but rarely whether it was what students wanted. While both sides were busy debating whether the course was ideological “brainwashing” or writing, students only entered into the discussions as presumably passive and susceptible to manipulation. This underlying assumption is paradoxical considering that it was students who initially demanded and protested for multicultural reforms. In the end, just as E306 was taken out of the hands of the English faculty, multiculturalism was taken out of the hands of students who created and demanded it. This is still the case with the movement at large whose discourse about itself remains at the level of the struggle over theory rather than the struggle over the way we live or even the university itself.[59]
Could it be coincidental that Robert King was selected to replace Dean Meacham so soon after Gribben’s letter calls out for what would soon be done not only to the English department but other programs as well? Gribben and King have crossed paths at least once before. In 1985, when King kicked students off the Freshman English Policy Committee, Gribben was “disappointed” and opposed to the students taking out an ad in the Daily Texan to publicize the action.[60]
Almost immediately, King moved to abolish the executive committee and impose a budget council over the expressed consent of the faculty due to a claim that the department had become “dysfunctional”, the only reason permitted by the UT Handbook of Operating Procedures for changing a department’s governance structure. According to professor Kurt Heinzelman, such a claim was grounded on the misperception of a crisis and antagonism perpetuated by professors Duban and Gribben. For example, Gribben claims that he was driven out of the department and UT because he lost a vote of 41 to 1 to create an MA in what he calls “Third World Studies.” The vote was made by the Graduate Studies Committee – which Gribben chaired – and he was even allowed to vote even though it is prohibited by the rules for the chair to vote. Duban has also cited “factionalism” as justification for praising King’s threat to change the governance structure, a move Duban never brought up publicly before the department faculty.[61] In fact, no evidence of the department becoming “dysfunctional” was ever presented.[62]
On February 22, 1991, the English department voted 80 to 1 to retain the ten member elected executive committee (which has five full, three associate, and two assistant professors). On June 26, King notified Kruppa that he is “inclined not to approve a continuation of the Executive Council mode of governance as the Department has proposed” and instead suggests its replacement with a budget
council consisting of “all and only the Full Professors in the Department.” On July 9, the faculty once again vote 34 to 11 to reaffirm their support of an executive committee. King never responded directly to this resolution nor to a proposal by Kruppa to set up an outside committee to study the governance question until the Executive Committee’s term expired in February.[63]
Rather than moving against disfunctionalism, King actions indicate a pattern by which he acted to undermine a governance structure that significantly increased recruitment of minority faculty, initiated E306 and began to transform the rest of the curriculum. According to Heinzelman, who resigned in September as chairman of the English Department recruitment committee, a memo from King asserts that “our recruitment practices have long troubled him.” “During our two years without King, the English Department hired women and minorities with unparalleled success, and the first action King takes when he is back in office is to suspend the departmental agency that made those appointments.” Coincidentally, the change to a budget council also excludes many of these new hires since there are only three female and two minority full professors in the department. Soon after the governance change chairman Joseph Kruppa was informed that only four of nine available faculty positions could be filled due to budget cuts. King had suspended hiring once in 1989 noting his discomfort with the increased recruitment of faculty with “non-traditional approaches to literary interpretations” according to a memo to then department chair Bill Sutherland.[64]
King continued to disrupt other academic programs for a few more years until his retirement as dean. When he replaced Meacham in June 1991, he refused to honor an agreement made between Meacham and sociology professor Susan Marshall to head the Women’s Studies program. Marshall had been offered certain support provisions including a small pay raise, a larger budget to hire its own staff, tune off for the summer and a reduced course load to carry out administrative duties. When King refused to allow these provisions, Marshall refused and King offered the position to other members of the Women’s Studies Steering Committee who turned him down. One of those candidates, Carol Mackay, an English professor, said she was offered the position “while Marshall thought she was still negotiating with Dean King.” A few months later Marshall accepted the job without a reduced course load and a promise to maintain the same low level of support (e.g. not to cut the budget).[65]
King’s relationship to the program reflects a deeper conflict between the administration and the Women’s Studies program. Women’s Studies is neither a department or a required course for any of the UT curriculum. English professor Jane Marcus (who left the university in 1990) notes that “There is a 10- to 15-year gap in funding Women’s Studies at UT compared to other comparable universities.” Even though six Women’s Studies faculty finally received Regents approval for the “Proposal for a Special Concentration in Women’s Studies” in 1987 after years of struggle, students must take 21 hours of cross-listed courses to qualify for the concentration – while most minors in other fields only require about 12 hours – and write a thesis. When they complete this, they’ll receive a handmade certificate and their concentration will not show up on their diploma. UT’s refusal to adequately fund the program is quite explicit. According to Catherine Cantieri, “Women’s Studies’ funding for printing information and an occasional lecture comes from the LAIP’s [Liberal Arts Interdisciplinary Program] $74,308 share of the more than-$600 million UT budget. And that $74,308 is shared with African-American Studies, Mexican-American Studies, and European Studies. The money allocated for Women’s Studies is so small that Marcus takes $3,000 out of her salary each year and donates it to the program.”[66]
Marcus reasons that “It appears that the opposition [to Women’s Studies] comes from above.” “Under Dean King, [1980-1989] Women’s Studies was built by volunteer faculty members who had no time off or extra pay for building the program. The only thing we got in return [for the volunteer efforts] from the university was occasionally money for speakers, but no women’s center…or meeting place… [which would] make the program comparable to [other studies at the University],” says Marcus. Even though 800-1000 students register for Women’s Studies cross-listed courses each semester, the program ranks far behind the University of Alabama, for example, which has a center and official program. When Marcus took it into her own hands to generate outside financial support for Women’s Studies by speaking at a house of a UT alumna with prior permission from King, and raised thousands of dollars, she felt the weight of opposition. According to Catherine Cantieri, “when she took the checks to King, [according to Marcus] ‘he was furious and refused to allow any more fund raising’ because such efforts were ‘earmarked for other projects…that were considered more important.”[67]
King’s handling of the selection of the new Humanities head was almost identical. King would not recognize Meacham’s offer of a small pay raise and a reduced course load to Michael Stoff to head the program. Although King gave Stoff until July 15 to accept his offer, on July 10, King notified Stoff by letter that he had already offered the position to Norman Farmer of English. Farmer is a close ally of King’s, having written a letter of support for a budget council to King just before his appointment. Farmer was also one of only seven English faculty to sign the TAS “Statement of Academic Concern” opposing E306 reforms and has publicly warned of the “politicization” of the English department.[68]
The situation concerning the replacement of Jan Manners as Director of the Middle Eastern Studies Center has also been tainted by Dean King. Although Meacham appointed Elizabeth Fernea as director, King rejected the decision and instead chose a geographer, Bob Holz, as the new director. While Fernea is a respected Middle Eastern scholar and has served as the center’s undergraduate advisor and on its executive committee, Holz has almost completely inadequate experience. Holz speaks no Middle Eastern languages and his primary area of research does not concern the Middle East. He has never served on the executive committee and has only minor involvement with the center. Although he has used his satellite mapping technology for research in the Middle East, his research interests do not appear equivalent to Fernea’s. Other reasons for King’s rejection of Fernea may have to do with her outspoken support of the E306 revisions and her membership on a committee to formulate multicultural curriculum proposals for the College of Liberal Arts appointed by Meacham and participation in the publishing of two books on the subject.[69]
As Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, King demonstrated the extremities of the backlash against not only multicultural reform proposals but institutional academic programs and established academics aligned with the multiculturalism movement. Although the attack on the E306 reforms utilized various explicit and subtle methods to defeat its implementation, King stood out in his use of swift repression.
Soon after it published a scathing cover article – “Rattle of a Very Curious Dean” – in its May 1990 issue on psychology professor and TAS president Joe Horn, indicating his race based theories of intelligence and calling for him to resign as associate dean of Liberal Arts, the Chicana/o student newspaper Tejas came under heavy fire from SAVE (which was formed by members of the YCTs) in 1990. Horn, the faculty advisor to the University Review (formerly the Texas Review), a self-described conservative newspaper funded by the Institute for Educational Affairs (which well discuss more late in the chapter) has also been a faculty mentor of SAVE and spoke at their first meeting in April 1990 and other meetings of the YCTs. SAVE was formed by members of the YCTs and College Republicans and its first president and vice president was Geoff Henley (Daily Texan editor 1992-93) and Scott Gaille of YCT.[70]
SAVE began their counterattack by writing a letter to the vice provost charging that Tejas violated state appropriations code that prohibited state agencies from using state money to bring attention to state employees or officials, in this case Horn. Although Patricia Ohlendorf, associate vice president in the office of the provost, disagreed, she cited Tejas in violation of a “UT rule banning publications the University funds, but does not control.” This is certainly no exaggeration, since UT tightly controls each of the media entities it funds through oversight by Texas Student Publications. Tejas is produced by a journalism class and is funded through the Center for Mexican American Studies. Dean Robert Jeffrey of the College of Communications endorsed Ohlendorf’s ruling to cut off Tejas‘ CMAS funding, claiming that “without this policy, any professor on campus with a political interest could gather students, offer them an independent course, and produce a newspaper expressing his political views. Obviously we can’t have 100 papers like that on campus without any University control.”[71] (emphasis added) Jeffrey is evidently aware of the kinds of reporting that can and has been done without administrative oversight.
After Ohlendorf and Jeffrey banned Tejas a barrage of national media attention on the action and support from students, faculty and Texas Senators forced them to back off. Jeffrey allowed Tejas to publish but with only enough money to print copies for each student in the class and journalism faculty – although with newsprint the cost is nearly identical since much of the expense is in set-up. Jeffrey believed that the only value in the project was in its production not its distribution. A few months later Tejas had been able to generate enough outside financial support to continue publishing regularly and distribute campus- wide.
Tejas has continued to report on a wide range of issues concerning Chicana/os and other students at UT, including stories concerning racism at The Daily Texan, the disproportionate funding of higher education in South Texas and UT’s minority recruitment policies. It has been joined by a number of other alternative student papers that have developed over the last four years. While the Griot, a Black student paper, was already in existence, Tejas, the Polemicist, The Women’s Alternative Times (no longer publishing) all began in the late 1980s. There have also been other publications formed since then or published on a sporadic basis by graduate students, environmental organizations, architecture students, and even classes. Many of these publications have devoted considerable critical attention to UT and have provided information about UT’s entrepreneurial and other activity that students cannot find elsewhere. Some like Tejas receive funds from the university and most don’t. Clearly, Tejas‘ frontal attack on one of the primary faculty member of the counterattack on multiculturalism figured significantly in a failed attempt to eliminate it. This counterattack on Tejas, unlike most of the rest of the alternative student press, was possible only because it received UT money.
Planning a Nationwide Counter-Movement
The counterattack on the multiculturalism requirement, E306 reforms, and Tejas newspapers at UT-Austin are not isolated local occurrences but only a node in a larger well-financed campaign to stop the multicultural transformation of US based universities. Many of the organizations at UT-Austin that have acted to block these reforms – the University Review, Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT), Students Advocating Valid Education (SAVE), and the Texas Association of Scholars (TAS) – are part of a network of corporate-backed organizations that have figured in the “PC” media blitz that has translated in some places such as UT to material counterattacks against the gains of the student movements. It is no coincidence that many of the financial backers of these organizations also hold significant interests in the entrepreneurialization of the universities and have come under siege for their support of Central American Death squads and contribution to toxic pollution and environmental destruction.
The connection between opponents to multiculturalism at UT and these national organizations are explicit. College of Liberal Arts Dean Robert King, at a lecture given in September 1991, elucidated his concern for a rising insurgency on campus by utilizing the code phrases of the movement’s opponents. He noted that the threat to free speech, “the pressure to conform, to not even mention certain topics, is coming down from the professors and students and not from outside the University.”[72] By claiming that such pressure is “coming down,” King reverses the source of the real power to suppress “free speech” from the higher levels of the administration and rich supporters who control the university to that of a movement that seeks to open spaces in the universities for those who have been prevented from speaking there.
King’s lecture was sponsored not only by the College of Liberal Arts and the Philosophy department (which was chaired by TAS member Daniel Bonevac), but SAVE and the University Review. Together with TAS, these student organizations have been fundamentally supported by the Madison Center for Education Affairs and the NAS, two organizations that have led the charge on multiculturalism.[73]
TAS, which sponsored placed a “Statement of Academic Concern” in The Daily Texan as a paid ad on July 18, 1990 attacking the revisions of E306 signed by 56 faculty members including Duban, Galinsky, Farmer, Gribben, Horn, King, and Rusckiewicz, is a chapter of the NAS.[74] NAS grew out of the Coalition for Democracy (CFD) which was formed with the assistance of Midge Decter, a board member of both the Heritage Foundation and Institute for Educational Affairs. CFD was chaired by Herbert London, who is closely associated with two organizations run by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, and its president was Stephen Balch, a City University of New York professor. In 1987, CFD evolved into the National Association of Scholars, chaired by London and with Balch as president. Its board of advisors include Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol and former UT Arts and Sciences Dean and Boston University President John Silber. London has written for The World and I, a large glossy monthly published by Moon. London is a member, along with former CIA official Ray Clime, of its editorial board. He has also written for the now defunct Moon-owned New York City Tribune and currently edits NAS’
journal Academic Questions. Decter, who directs the Committee for the Free World and is married to Norman Podhoretz, also publishes Commentary which featured an article by Balch and London in October 1986 that fretted about a “Marxist” take over of the universities.[75] In this article they break with the tactics of Accuracy in Academia, which has similar concerns as NAS about the internal transformation of the universities.
NAS works closely with the Madison Center for Educational Affairs which was formed in 1990. The Madison Center was the product of a merger between the Institute for Educational Affairs (IEA), formed in 1978 by former Nixon Treasury Secretary William E. Simon who was then head of the John N. Olin Foundation, and writer Irving Kristol, and the Madison Center, founded in 1988 by writer Alan Bloom and former Reagan education secretary and drug czar William Bennett. IEA began a program to fund and provide logistical support to right wing student newspapers such as the infamous Dartmouth Review. At the time, the Review‘s staff, which included then editor Dinesh D’Souza, hung a Black effigy by a tree and quoted Hitler on its front page in an issue that appeared during Yom Kippur in 1990.
The program, called the Collegiate Network, began in 1980 with five papers increasing to 61 by 1991 at a cost of $330,617. IEA was spending a total of $1 million on all its projects in 1990.[76] The Collegiate Network not only provides hands on assistance, but a toll free hotline, semesterly grants, and an advertising consortium that sells ads to businesses and requests that the papers run them for a share of the money. Some students have even been placed in internships with prestigious publications or politicians. Madison internships in 1990 “included full-year positions for MCEA editors at The New Republic and Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars. MCEA editors also interned at the Office of the Vice President of the George Bush administration, The Bradley Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, NBC News, and Policy Review, the theoretical organ of the Heritage Foundation.”[77] Some papers have gotten even more funding from other organizations – some of which also back the Madison Center and NAS. The Dartmouth Review alone received about $800,000 alone in support between 1987 and 1990 from William Buckley Jr., $150,000 of it from the Olin Foundation in 1989.[78]
Madison is involved in various projects including a reference guide of US universities for parents and students. Madison spent $120,930 to prepare the guide which is based on a 36 page questionnaire sent to NAS members in 1990. Prepared by a group of outspoken opponents to multicultural reforms including Chester Finn, former Reagan appointee to the Department of Education, Leslie Lenkowsky, Stephen Balch, and David Bernstein, editor of Diversity, the survey asks if there “are any groups on campus critical of the core curriculum? If so, which groups and why?” “Do homosexuals comprise a vocal, active interest group on campus? … What are their objectives?” “Are there minority and/or Women’s Studies centers on campus? If so, what is their role?” “Are many courses used for indoctrination?” Cast in apparent innocuous language about “partying,” tuition costs, “undergraduate education,” housing, and entertainment, the guide consistently steers back to coverage of the status of radical professors and students and multicultural programs, concluding with a recommendation of attendance based on whether the campus is wracked with conflicts. Although the information is being gathered as intelligence for use in battling the multiculturalism movement, it is not well researched and provides few concrete details to be of much use for any purpose than to scare away parents worried about “PC” from allowing their children to attend certain campuses, a veiled threat of disinvestment.[79]
Besides the member papers of the Collegiate Network, another group is also using this information to their advantage. Sponsored by the Madison Center, the Student Forum is organizing Black and “Hispanic” students to oppose multicultural reforms on their campuses. The Forum can be traced back to a group of Black students brought together by the Republican National Committee who wanted to form a student organization for Black republicans. This evolved into its present “multi-ethnic” composition of minority students who, according to its coordinator, would prefer to be treated as “individuals” and “americans” rather than Black or “Hispanic.” In conjunction with the Student Forum, Madison has begun publishing Diversity, a magazine devoted to issues of race.[80] The strategy behind this effort mirrors that of the counter-movement as a whole; they deny race is the issue with one hand while waving it around for legitimacy with the other.
Madison is continuing IEA’s support of in-depth research as well by adding a $50,000 grant to IEA’s $150,000 for D’Souza to write Illiberal Education. Early on, Kristol suggested that IEA publish “outstanding work by recent Ph.D.’s in order to give their work impact and promote their careers.” In 1980, IEA bankrolled a large study by the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) of the role of church groups in the boycott of Nestle’s promotion of its infant formula to Third World families. EPPC was formed in 1976 as a think tank that would help respond to growing criticism of corporations. Ernest Lefever laid out its purpose in a 1978 memorandum that noted “US domestic and multinational firms find themselves increasingly under siege at home and abroad…They’re accused of producing shoddy and unsafe products, fouling the environment, robbing future generations, wielding inordinate power, repressing peoples in the Third World, and generally of being insensitive to human needs.” Lefever suggested that the role of organizations like EPPC would be to provide “meticulous research and assessment [on] the attack on the multinational firms by university groups and so-called public interest lobbies.”[81]
Madison’s budget overwhelmingly favors the Collegiate Network. According to its 1990 annual report, its total budget was $1,035,457, of which it spent 32 percent on the student newspapers, 12 percent for the college guide, 7 percent to editorial internships, and 23 percent for its grants to scholars program. It carried over unspent $565,000 into 1991.
These projects would be impossible without large scale financial aid from many foundations and multinational corporations. IEA began with start-up grants of $100,000 from the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife Family Trusts, the J.M. Foundation, and the Smith-Richardson Foundation. They also established a list of primary donors that included Bechtel, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, Ford Motor Company, General Electric, K-Mart, Mobil and Nestle.[82] Madison received funding from 54 donors in 1990, including the Committee for the Free World, Adolph Coors Foundation, Dow (whose board chair is board chair of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)), Lilly Endowment Inc. (the Eli Lilly & Co. chair is also on the AEI Board), Milliken Foundation, John Olin Foundation, Olin Corporation Charitable Trust, Pfizer, Inc. (whose employee Edmund Pratt has been on the AEI board), Sarah Scaife, Smith Richardson Foundation, and Warner-Lambert Company.[83] Some of these same donors also funded the NAS, including the Olin Foundation which gave it $85,000 in 1988 and $125,000 in both 1989 and 1990. Olin also gave IEA $89,782 in 1989 for its campus journalism program and $153,000 to Madison in 1990. Many of these foundations are motivated by similar political intentions. According to Sara Diamond,
In 1989, the Olin Foundation alone dispersed nearly $15 million to about 200 different institutions, including both public and private universities and several dozen ‘independent’ think tanks. A similar array, but smaller number of organizations received a total of $4.8 million from the Smith-Richardson Foundation’s Public Policy Program in 1989. The Scaife Foundation spends about $8 million annually, mostly on private right-wing think tanks, the largest recipient being the Heritage Foundation. The Earhart Foundation disperses about $2 million per year, and makes relatively small ($10,000) donations to scores of individual professors, mostly in departments of economics, philosophy and political science. These are only some of the best known right-wing foundations. Others include Coors, J.M., Bradley, Gates, Kirby, the Lilly Endowment…[84]
Smith-Richardson has been with the NAS since at least 1984 when it was CFD. A confidential memo written by Roderic Richardson in late 1984 would establish a new tactic that would latter become fundamental to the PC counterattack. In it, he distinguishes between “deterrence activism” and “high ground articulation” in fighting the campus left. Deterrence activism, he explained, is at most an uninteresting reaction to the left, “at best it is a form of cheerleading that can focus some attention on stirring media events.” “High ground activism,” on the other hand, is “the attempt to steal one or another high ground away from the left, by…doing things like insisting on rigorous discussions and debates, setting up political unions, battling divestiture and other causes, not by calling their goals wrong…but by proposing better ways of solving the problem. Student journalism is a high ground approach. It is…an approach geared to long run success.”[85] Such as strategy can be seen in the shift of groups at UT who have attempted to turn the issue toward positive suggestions (e.g. SAVE suggested expanding the multiculturalism requirement to “Western” cultures) and alternative solutions instead of only criticizing. Although this has not always been the case, it has become noticeable.
Many individuals serve with more than one of these organizations. Some are even affiliated with the National Endowment of the Humanities such as NEH chair Lynne Cheney who writes for Newslink, the Collegiate Network’s newsletter. NEH board members Hillel Fradkin is vice-president of the Bradley Foundation, Edwin Dellatre is on the NAS Board of Advisors, Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield is on the Madison Center board and Carol Iannone, who was rejected by the Senate for the NEH board, was the NAS vice-president.[86] The connections between these corporations and foundations with Madison, IEA and the NAS extend beyond their role in attempting to block the multicultural transformation of the universities.
Smith-Richardson “has had a history of sponsoring CIA-linked media projects and leadership training programs for CIA and DOD personnel. It was also privy to some of the covert operations conducted on behalf of the Nicaraguan Contras,” says Diamond.[87] Smith Richardson’s president Leslie Lenkowsky left the foundation in 1983 to take an interim appointment as deputy director of the U.S. Information Agency which is well known for working with the CIA. Lenkowsky was denied a permanent appointment by the U.S. Senate which charged him with blacklisting liberal speakers at USIA.[88] Ideally, Lenkowsky took over IEA in 1985 and one year later expanded its support of the student newspapers with “editorial and management advice”, including the toll free hotline, clippings, story ideas, tips on selling ads and writing stories as well as holding training conferences and renamed it the Collegiate Network. He is now president of the Hudson Institute.
The Bradley Foundation was formed in 1985 following Rockwell International’s, a multinational weapons builder, buyout of the Allen-Bradley Company which works on “fuzzy logic” (another name for computer programs based on case based “human reasoning”) among other high tech projects. The foundation provided $500,000 in seed money in 1989 to establish the Madison Center and another $93,000 in 1990. In 1989-90 IEA also received $255,000 and NAS $177,178.[89]
The Sarah Scaife Foundation’s president, Richard Mellon Scaife, provided seed money along with Joseph Coors in 1974 for the Heritage Foundation. William Bennett “joined the Scaife board this summer, just before the foundation funded his new position as ‘culture czar’ at Heritage.” Scaife worked with Joseph Coors to help found the Heritage Foundation and is still a primary backer giving it $800,000 in 1990. From 1973 to 1984, Scaife gave more than $37 million to conservative causes and institutions.[90]
Richard Mellon Scaife also ran Forum World Features in London, one of his many news services, from the late 1960s to mid 1970s. However, “Scaife shut down Forum in 1975 shortly before Time Out, a British weekly, published a purported [sic] 1968 CIA memorandum, addressed to then director Richard Helms, which described Forum as a CIA-sponsored operation providing ‘a significant means to counter Communist propaganda.’ The Forum-CIA tie, which lasted into the seventies, has been confirmed by various British and American publications.” Scaife also funds Accuracy in the Media, Freedom House, and the Committee on the Present Danger and gave NAS $50,000 in 1988 and $300,000 in 1989.[91]
Some of these associations also bear out ties to Moon and death squads in Central America. Although they differ in tactics, Accuracy in Academia (AIA), a spin-off from Reed Irvine’s Accuracy in the Media (AIM), formed in the mid 1980s to compile information of professors they called “left-wing propagandists.”[92] According to Diamond,
AIA’s president John LeBoutillier…was then [1985] a leader of the World Anti- Communist League (WACL), as were three other members of AIA’s initial advisory board. Irvine had at one time been prominent within WACL and served on its “Psychological Warfare Committee.” At the time of AIA’s founding in 1985, WACL was one of the most important coordinating bodies for death squad activities in Central America and elsewhere. While AIA was busy collecting field data on campus “subversives,” the group’s Latin American counterparts were among those blowing up schools in Nicaragua and systematically assassinating progressive students and professors in El Salvador and Guatemala.[93]
NAS and AIA cross paths through the activities of Herb London, co-founder and the first chair of both CFD and NAS, and D’Souza, who spoke on “race, gender, and class issues on campus,” at AIA’s July 6-7 1991 conference.[94] Both London and AIA have documented working relationships with various organizations established by Rev. Moon. According to Daniel Junas, who is writing a book about the Unification Church, “WACL grew out of the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League, which had been founded by Taiwan and South Korea in 1954. Two key behind-the-scenes players in WACL were Moon’s patron [Ryoichi] Sasakawa, and Ray Cline, who was CIA chief of station in Taiwan from 1958 to 1962 when plans were laid for WACL.” Moon first met Sasakawa during his first missionary trip to Japan in 1958. Sasakawa, who is known as the “godfather” of the Japanese right, had been imprisoned by the US occupation force after WWII for his explicitly fascist organizing as a suspected Class A war criminal. Sasakawa, along with another suspected war criminal whom he befriended while in prison, assisted Moon in forming the Japanese chapter of WACL, the Internal Federation for Victory Over Communism, in 1967.[95] In 1991, Sasakawa gave the UT Business School $1 million. He has also given money to a few other universities, including the University of Houston which named a space research center after him. His offer to Columbia was rejected after mass protests by students however. He plans to create $1 million endowments at 50 universities worldwide by 1996.[96]
Another of Moon’s organization, the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles (CARP) which was formed in 1962, was soon expanded to the U.S. in 1973 to counterattack the student left in the U.S. as it did in Japan. “In the early 1980s, CARP conducted a smear campaign against the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, accusing it of ‘Marxist ties.’ More importantly, CARP aided the FBI’s illegal investigation of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) by spying on the solidarity organization and providing information on CISPES’ campus activities to the Bureau. CARP is certainly not alone in its role in counterinsurgency on our campuses. Young Americans for Freedom, which was founded by William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1962, disrupted anti-war protests in the 1960s, released a pamphlet titled “List of Un-American Organizations on Our College Campuses,” in 1989 and supplied the FBI with information on CISPES. The YCTs at UT-Austin have also spied on and kept records of student activists, including academic transcripts, photos and clippings which they have provided to various state and local agencies.[97]
Olin, a huge chemical and conventional weapons builder for DOD, and partner in the Yale Research Park, has also been a primary backer of these three organizations providing an estimated $600,000 between 1988-90 alone. However, Olin has not only relied on them alone for only indirect influence over the organization of higher education, but has also intervened directly in an attempt to guide various academic programs as well as even establish the Yale Park. The foundation gave $55 million in 1988 alone to university programs, “to strengthen the economy, political and cultural institutions upon which…private enterprise is based.” Olin Foundation’s president is William Simon, a co-founder of IEA.
Many university law and economic departments get big Olin grants. Last year, the law schools at the University of Chicago, Stanford University and Harvard University each got close to $1 million and the University of Virginia, Duke University, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT receive about a half a million dollars each for their Olin “Law and Economics” programs. These programs provide rationales for right-wing policies, and promote government laissez-faire in the business realm. Most of the Foundation’s $55 million in grants, according to its 1988 report, is “intended to strengthen the economic, political, and cultural institutions upon which…private enterprise is based.” In 1985, after trying out the Olin Program in Law and Economics for one year, UCLA rejected the program because according to the law school’s curriculum committee, Olin was “taking advantage of students’ financial need to indoctrinate them with a particular ideology” according to the law school’s curriculum committee. Students recipients of the fellowships were required to attend lectures by Olin funded faculty. They were also required to attend talks by such notables as Robert Bork, who was rejected by the Senate for the Supreme Court, and current justice Antonin Scalia. However, two other professors in economics and management have accepted $1 million to establish the Olin Center for Policy at UCLA’s Graduate School of Management. Yale Law School’s George Priest takes in about $1.5 million for fellowships, lectureships, journals and other programs he administers including $464,000 for himself.[98]
The Foundation is also backing other big name conservative academics such as Allan Bloom, author of the 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, who is getting $3.6 million to run the University of Chicago’s John M. Olin Center for the Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy. Samuel Huntington is receiving $1.4 million to establish the Olin Institute of Strategic Studies at Harvard, and $618,000 for the Olin Program in National Security Affairs and another $100,000 for his own Olin Research Fellowship for a total of $2.1 million.[99] Peter Collier and David Horowitz, two sixties radicals turned right-wing, have received $200,000, and conservative Catholic theorist Michael Novak received $163,000. It gave a $75,000 fellowship to Robert Leiken to do research on the “media treatment of the conflict in Central America” at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. And Irving Kristol, and AEI board member, received $376,000 as the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor at the New York University Graduate School of Business Administration. The National Interest, edited by Kristol, also grabbed another $1 million from Olin.
Olin has been a primary financial backer of Dinesh D’Souza, giving $150,000 to the Dartmouth Review, provided D’Souza $30,000 in 1988 through a grant to IEA, and increased its support of the American Enterprise Institute in 1989 when D’Souza joined the staff.[100]
Multiculturalism: Against Entrepreneurialization and for Our Needs
While Sara Diamond has stressed the material connections between the “PC” counterattack and the war in Central America for example, she and others have neglected to explicitly demonstrate how students can capitalize on these relationships in order to circulate the struggle for multiculturalism to other movements. Much great work has been done to uncover the workings of this counterattack, but little has been done to trace out its cause and how it can be fought. Contrary to the information overload about the size and wealth of NAS, IEA and Madison’s backers, little has been said about the potential power of the multiculturalism movement and how the counterattack stems from the threat to entrepreneurialism that it poses. Charges of “PC” appear to be yet another in a long line of tactics to reimpose control over the universities in order to demonstrate a stable arena of investment.
That “PC” is a reaction to the threat the multiculturalism movement offers to entrepreneurialization is no more evident than in the words of its organizers. In his 1978 best selling book, A Time for Truth, William Simon lays out his concern for the crisis state of the universities: “Business must cease the mindless subsidizing of colleges and universities whose departments of economics, government, politics and history are hostile to capitalism and whose faculties will not hire scholars whose views are otherwise.” His greatest fear is that “in the universities of which I speak, capitalism is no longer the dominant orthodoxy” in the universities which instead are “churning out young collectivists by the legions.”[101] Simon’s declaration, hardly the rash polemic of a political outsider, appeared nearly concurrently with the first stirrings of federal policies promoting entrepreneurialization. Since its publication, Simon has headed or helped organize IEA, Olin Foundation, and Madison Center – the three central organizations behind the “PC” counterattack against the multiculturalism movement.
Frustrated that capitalism is helping to create those very forces that will destroy it: “it is through the very generosity and tolerance of capitalism that the enemies of capitalism have come to dominate our campuses today,” Simon suggested initiating a counterattack that today composes the two fundamental components of entrepreneurialization: austerity and further subservience to the market. “Now that they [the enemies of capitalism] have achieved dominance,” Simon generalizes “there is no longer any reason for capitalism to support them, and it is ridiculous for them to claim (as they loudly do) some sort of ‘entitlement’ to support from a system which they openly despise and lose no opportunity to disparage.” “Business money must flow generously to those colleges and universities which do offer their students an opportunity to become well-educated not only in collectivist theory but in conservative and Libertarian principles as well.”[102]
Roger Kimball would make similar sweeping charges about the threat to knowledge and university curriculum by a ragged bunch of Marxists, feminists, and assorted deconstructionists in his recently widely received Tenured Radicals – which he dedicated to no less than the Olin Foundation and IEA.[103] Kimball, like Simon, accurately recognizes the multitude of free spaces carved out in the universities by the student radicals of the 1960s even if he does overstate their success. Now professors and sparsely distributed administrators, these former student radicals are taking aim at fundamentally transforming the university from within:
The truth is that when the children of the sixties received their professorships and deanships they did not abandon the dream of radical cultural transformation; they set out to implement it. Now, instead of disrupting classes, they are teaching them; instead of attempting to destroy our educational institutions physically, they are subverting them from within. Thus it is what were once the political and educational ambitions of academic renegades appear as ideals on the agenda of the powers that be. Efforts to dismantle the traditional curriculum and institutionalize radical feminism, to ban politically unacceptable speech and propagate the tenents of deconstruction and similar exercises in cynical obscurantism: Directives encouraging these and other radical developments now typically issue from the dean’s office or the Faculty Senate, not from students marching in the streets. (p. 166-67)
Although he obscures the role of student movements as a power base for faculty advocates of multicultural reforms, Kimball attempts to draw attention to the subtle challenges to the corporate university. “The radical ethos of the sixties has been all too successful, achieving indirectly in the classroom, faculty meeting, and by administrative decree what it was unable to accomplish on the barricades.” (p. xv) The terrain of struggle for Kimball remains ideological and confined to the existing academic disciplines. Kimball’s emphasis on the challenge to and displacement of the literary and theoretical canons, which is resulting in the “crisis” of thought itself – now that infinite interpretations are possible so are infinite realities beyond capitalism – must be placed in context. The delegitimization of the canon (e.g. capitalist ideology), which is presumably responsible for the undocumented rise in student militancy, is taking place currently with the further entrenchment of the university onto the business track.
At this junction, the clash of entrepreneurialization and multiculturalism is the very source of the continuing crisis of higher education. This is where I part company with the right. If this is one of the sources of the continuing conflict, it needs to be made explicit among radical students and faculty and used to our advantage in order to accomplish the fundamental transformation of the universities we advocate. Unfortunately, this is not presently the case. For example, in Debating P.C., a volume of writings from the left and the right concerning multiculturalism and “PC” not one contribution is from a student.[104] Moreover, not one article discusses the participation of students let alone the fact that the multiculturalism movement sprang from student mobilization.
No doubt, the relationship between the growth of Gay and Lesbian, Black, women, and other forms of multicultural student activism has been the motivating factor behind Madison’s survey and student guide and Student Forum which is attempting to use the right skin color to legitimize it politics. The rhetoric of a rising left control over the universities is a reaction to the growing power of students and faculty with diverse interests and desires who are further deepening of the crisis by carving out spaces on the campuses in order to concentrate on them.
The real fear shrouded behind rhetoric of a “New McCarthyism” is no more than a fear of a university being rapidly transformed by students to serve the desires of students. John Taylor’s “Are You Politically Correct,” in New York magazine demonstrates the fundamental transformation of the universities taking place.
There is an experiment of sorts taking place in American colleges: directed at changing the consciousness of this entire generation of university students. The goal is to eliminate prejudice, not just the petty sort that shows up on sophomore dorm walls, but the grand prejudice that has ruled American universities since their founding: that the intellectual tradition of Western Europe occupies the central place in the history of civilization. In this context it would not be enough for a student to refrain from insulting homosexuals or other minorities. He or she would be expected to ‘affirm’ their presence on campus and to study their literature and culture alongside that of Plato, Shakespeare and Locke. This agenda is broadly shared by most organizations of minority students, feminists and Gays. It is also the program of a generation of campus radicals who grew up in the ’60s and are now achieving positions of academic influence.[105]
While Taylor is resorting to some hyperbole (not everyone would require that these literatures and cultures be studied but to at least recognize their place and contributions in the U.S. and the world and allow those who wish the freedom to do so without repression) the thrust of his argument is clear: it is students, followed by radical professors, who are changing the universities as we know them. However this was not clear enough for Michael Berube who sought to deny students any role in the struggle and crisis of the universities by suggesting that Taylor’s article “provides us with a rogue’s gallery of intolerant students, muddle-headed administrators, misguided activists, and the occasional ‘extremist’ (i.e. ‘Afrocentrist’), but it really winds with very little to say about the academic teachers and critics its purports to attack.”[106] Berube, like others, dismisses students as the source of tension and conflict that has given rise to the “PC” counterattack and media charges of McCarthyism.
As D’Souza accurately charges in his 1991 Atlantic Monthly article “Illiberal Education” that the debate “has so far been passionately superficial, posing false dichotomies…and missing the underlying principles that are shaping the dramatic changes in universities.”[107] While D’Souza is far from innocent of his own charges, he has identified a fundamental pattern among the whole debate: while the right mystifies a threat to the universities as we know them as “a revolution from the top down,”[108] the left has persisted with its own mystification denying any threat exists whatsoever.
Like William Simon, D’Souza not only recognizes the threat he is quite explicit about what capital should do about it. “An academic and cultural revolution has overtaken most of our 3,535 colleges and universities. It’s a revolution to which most Americans have paid little attention…It amounts, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Donna Shalala, to ‘a basic transformation of American higher education in the name of multiculturalism and diversity,” he writes. D’Souza attributes this “academic and cultural revolution” in the university to both students and faculty. “It should come as no surprise that many sensitive young Americans reject the system that has nurtured them,” he says almost mimicking Simon. Universities in the US are no less than “the birthplace and testing ground for the enterprise of social transformation.”[109]
These students who are demanding and winning “redoubled preferential recruitment of minority students and faculty, funding for a new Third World or Afro-American center, mandatory sensitivity education for whites, and so on,” are doing so in their own autonomously organized groups and “theme houses,” as D’Souza writes, from which they launch their attack. D’Souza’s fear of this autonomous base of organizing scares him so he attributes it to the creation of “a kind of academic apartheid” while ignoring that which already exists.
However, what makes these students even more powerful is for the first time, they have a large number, rather than a scattered few, of faculty behind them, faculty who having fought in the 1960s with few faculty on their side, know the strategic importance of their alliances with students – the same students who fought to get and keep them there. D’Souza clearly recognizes and fears this strategic alliance. He cites an English professor who explains that “After the Vietnam War, a lot of us [students] didn’t just crawl back into our library cubicles. We stepped into academic positions…Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the university has begun in earnest.”[110]
This alliance also provides historical continuity between struggles of the 1960s and today, something students did not have during the 1960s since there were few radical faculty to draw the connections with the 1930s. As Asian- American scholar Shirley Hune points out, “multicultural education has grown from a demand in the late ’60s for separate programs to today’s emphasis on ‘mainstreaming’ or ‘balancing the curriculum,’ with readings and courses on the formerly excluded.” (p. 63) This strikes at the very nature of the university since the original demands for a free space – that have frequently been isolated and attacked – have developed into demands for the transformation of all of the university into a free space quite similar to the view of university “autonomy” in Mexico and Argentina now under attack as well.
Much like Simon, D’Souza does not hesitate to demonstrate the threat to capitalism posed by the radical wing of the multiculturalism movement, asking if “the new policies in academia [will] improve, or damage, the prospects for American political and economic competitiveness in the world?” (p. 15) Unlike Simon, Kimball, Bennett and Kristol, D’Souza emphasizes the mutual threat from both radical academics and student activists whose actions have stimulated formal multicultural reform plans some of which were successful in part at more than 27 major public and private research universities. (p. 16-17) Although D’Souza has been one of the primary contributors of outright lies, distorted historical facts, unsubstantiated evidence and vague sources, and mystifications concerning multiculturalism not to mention denials of discrimination in the universities,[111] he has repeatedly emphasized that student radicals (with whom he battled while a student himself at Dartmouth) compose the actual base of power upon which radical academics rely in their attempts to institutionalize multicultural reforms.[112]
The shortcomings of separate “ethnic” programs has been fundamental to PRIDE and ONDA‘s recommendations which request student and faculty from ethnic studies control over appointments and the functions of the centers. Black students have charged that the ethnic studies centers have strayed from their original goals. Former UT-Austin student activist Toni Luckett explained that “the centers, which came out of student movements in the late ’60s and early ’70s were to do research like African-American culture. But it was also a center to support students who came here. Those centers have now become dedicated to complete research,” making the same simplistic dichotomy between teaching and research. Yet, her point reflects a larger criticism raised by other students that the centers are focused too narrowly on academic issues rather than the struggles that created them. PRIDE proposes student and faculty control over appointments as a way to redirect the center back to the needs of students. “Because the University’s Afro-American studies field is not a department, professors who come to the university to teach classes for the center must be hired by another discipline. Furthermore all tenure decisions are made by the department in which the professor is hired.”[113] Although PRIDE proposes the creation of a student run cultural center, it would take place in conjunction with the imposition of student control over the centers and the transformation of the core curriculum as a whole. In other words, PRIDE and ONDA, as have other student proposals on other campuses, take advantage of what current space remains from victories of the ethnic studies movement in order to launch a broader foray into the university as a whole.
While multiculturalism grew out of the struggles to create Black and other special departments of study, it goes beyond them. Chicana/o students have critiqued CMAS as a strictly research oriented institute outside of the control of students and cut off from the campus and community struggles. Where some in the movement during the 1960s-70s saw the need for separate departments and research as part of active organized struggle, they were mostly conceived as autonomous free spaces within the university. Those universities that were forced to concede to these demands turned this space against them by forcibly cutting them from the rest of the campus. Recognizing this development, students are demanding faculty and student control over CMAS not as a free space but as a means for transforming the rest of the university and society. “The Center for Mexican American Studies should serve as a focal point for Chicana/o student, staff and faculty activism…[and] should help facilitate the full integration of Chicanos and Chicanas into the university community.”[114] ONDA demands that Chicano faculty be placed throughout the university with a role in CMAS and answerable to students. Winning these departments and programs gives the movement the strength to demand a total transformation. Their resulting institutionalization as research centers required that students demand nothing less than the total reorganization of the university.
Demanding the integration of a multiplicity of perspectives into the curriculum can be more than reforming the curriculum, it could mean the reorganization of not only the university but of society as a whole. Hune is very explicit about this:
Asian American studies is part of an effort to change education in all its facets, with an emphasis on making it more equitable, inclusive, and open to alternative perspective…It is transformative in that Asian American studies looks to both a restructuring of education and an expansion of knowledge…their teaching and research will play a role in countering the cultural domination of the existing Euro-American knowledge base taught in American colleges; they hope to produce the kind of scholarship and students capable of resolving injustices and creating a more equitable society.[115]
Hune’s strategic connection between the ethnic studies movement and multiculturalism is a source of dispute among radical faculty. Carlos Munoz, a Chicano student activist in the 1960s and now a professor at UC-Berkeley, not only denies the existence of an evolutionary connection but that they are even complementary. “I see it as a continuation of the 1960s, although at that time we didn’t call our goal ‘cultural diversity.’ We demanded Chicano studies, ethnic studies programs, and the admission of students of color not for ‘diversity’ but for empowerment…. We didn’t even talk about ‘affirmative action’ – we talked about power, taking over things. Now, 20 years later, the struggle for cultural diversity appears to be reformist, at best….” He has “no optimism that the cultures requirement or the diversity movement is going to result in any kind of radical change. If cultural diversity or affirmative action is going to work, there has to be access to the corridors of power where they decide who gets hired and fired,” he explains, retaining an orthodox perception of power and change residing in formal existing institutions. Ignoring the radical origins of the movement in the student movement, Munoz sees multiculturalism as a one-sided top down imposed policy: “Berkeley, along with other university centers, has made it clear that ‘cultural diversity’ shall be a capitalist-approved substitute for dealing with the ugly realities of racism.”[116]
Nonetheless, the parallels are stilt significant. Today, as during the 1960- 70s, the multiculturalism movement has the university administrations off balance and on the defensive. Winifred Wandersee, who has documented the rise of Women’s Studies during the 1970s, explains that “the demand for reform that characterized the politics of education in the decade after 1965 undermined the authority of schools and universities to control their own affairs. Educational administrators found themselves embroiled in power struggles with students, the courts and civil rights agencies, faculty and teachers’ unions, and political action and special interest groups.”[117] With the authority of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in hand, these groups forced the federal government into the role of enforcing antidiscrimination laws by threatening to withdraw funding. “Since federal funding for education at all levels expanded rapidly after 1965, the threatened cutoff of these funds was an impressive weapon,” Wandersee suggests. Perhaps, it is a fear of a similar process taking place that has stimulated the fierce counterattack against multiculturalism.
Far from aiding the implementation of multicultural reforms, federal intervention has come to the aid of those against such reforms. Hune points out that the resistance to multiculturalism as a means of liberation has come from those, such as the National Association of Scholars and then US Secretary of Education William Bennett, who Hune explains value education as an “instrument of social control to perpetuate the culture and produce the next generation of citizens and workers.” (p. 62) Because multiculturalism is an extension of the struggles that launched the crisis of the university in the late 1960s, it too has come under attack.
Recognizing the power of this revolution in the universities, D’Souza makes a valiant stab at attempting to divide and conquer: student against faculty, radicals against concerned but hounded moderates, and liberal arts against science students. For instance, although he clearly attributes the threat to both students and faculty struggles, he uses a rhetorical sleight of hand: “Who is behind this academic revolution, this connived multiculturalism?,”[118] a question he answers with the above quote about radical faculty reshaping the university. This enables him to demonize the faculty, committing his own self-described sin of “false dichotomies” and superficiality.
Likewise, D’Souza posits these multicultural reforms as “imposed upon” students who have mostly liberal views about race. He cleverly tries to turn a real problem that the movement has been unable to admit exists into a solid example of divide and conquer, a strategy that lay behind the entire “PC” hype: “These liberal attitudes are sorely tried by the demands of the new orthodoxy: Many undergraduates are beginning to rebel against what they perceive as a culture of preferential treatment and double standards actively fostered by university policies.”
Finally, D’Souza sees to it that the interests of science students are antagonistic to that of liberal arts students – a tactic we saw repeated at UT- Austin:
Yet, a student can still get an excellent education – among the best in the world – in computer technology and the hard sciences at American universities. But liberal arts students, including those attending Ivy League schools, are very likely to be exposed to an attempted brainwashing that deprecates Western learning and exalts a neo-Marxist ideology promoted in the name of multiculturalism. Even students who choose hard sciences must often take required courses in the humanities, where they are almost certain to be inundated with anti-Western, anti-capitalist view of the world. (sic, p. 86)
Certainly, it appears that multiculturalism threatens the one sphere of the university that capital maintains relative control over: the hard sciences. The overwhelming resistance from engineering and the sciences to E306 reforms at UT demonstrates the very threat multiculturalism poses to entrepreneurialization. Multicultural reforms offer to open up the horizons of students otherwise being narrowly tracked into long lives of specialized technical work.
This threat to entrepreneurialization lies at the heart of Simon’s, D’Souza’s and others counterattack against multiculturalism. Simon and D’Souza concur on both the source of the threat and what should be done to defeat it. D’Souza skips right over trying to rally students or forcing campus administrations to resist the transformation. Apparently recognizing the growing financial dependence of the university upon market activity due to growing government cutbacks and austerity, he suggests continued disinvestment. Calling upon parents, alumni, corporations, foundations, and state legislators to backup the “outgunned campus resistance to the academic revolution” that “sorely needs outside reinforcements,” he recommends that “the best way to encourage reform is to communicate in no uncertain terms to university leadership and, if necessary to use financial incentives to assure your voice is heard.”
There is little doubt that they [campus administrators] would pay keen attention to the views of donors on whom they depend. By threatening to suspend donations if universities continue harmful policies, friends of liberal learning can do a lot…. The illiberal revolution can be reversed only if the people who foot the bills stop being passive observers. Don’t just write a check to your alma matter; that’s an abrogation of responsibility. Keep abreast of what is going on and don’t be afraid to raise your voice and even to close your wallet in protest. Our Western, free-market culture need not provide the rope to hang itself. (p. 86)
It is no coincidence that many corporations who are entering into entrepreneurial relationships with the universities are also bankrolling resistance to multiculturalism. FMC (Ford Motor Company), Pfizer, Olin, Mobil, Werner-Lambert, Lilly, and other corporations are replaying their moves when their investments are threatened abroad by class warfare: they are bankrolling a counterinsurgency apparatus to fight class struggle inside the universities. Olin is a prime example. Expecting a return on its investment in Yale Research Park and its military contracts, it is in its interest to finance those forces that can defend these investments. The same can be said for Bechtel, whom as we’ve seen has come under tremendous fire for its many activities and is currently allied with IC2 in the technopolis program that requires the reimposition of control in the universities. D’Souza has been useful to capital because he recognizes the role disinvestment can play in disciplining student struggles which is why he suggests his own benefactors use it to protect themselves.
Robin Templeton of the National Coalition of Universities in the Public Interest (NCUPI) suggests that “we must recognize this attack [on so-called political correctness] for what it is: propaganda for the military/corporate drive for campus control, and a clearly successful attempt to shift the terms of the educational debate away from the central, material question of who controls and benefits from the universities.” However, what is being played out with PC is much more concrete than a propaganda ploy to control the debate over education. Rather, it is capital’s attempt to save education itself; to maintain its usefulness in disciplining and managing us. A more useful interpretation of what lies beneath the PC counterattack is a battle “for the image of the university as a stable arena for investment,” as two writers interpret Alan Gribben’s corporate strategy to request outside intervention into the English department so that it can be reorganized to provide a promising return on investment.[119] Such an analogy touches the heart of education as part of the process of capital accumulation and its pending destruction in the face of class struggle.
D’Souza’s analysis should suggest to us that the movement is yet another chapter in more than two decades of struggles that have thrown the universities into a crisis that capital has failed to bring under control even through austerity and entrepreneurialization. The strength of multiculturalism then is integrally tied up with each of the other struggles taking place inside the universities that also seek to transform it by subordinating it to the wide-ranging needs of those who use them. What it requires then is intensified efforts to understand how each of our struggles can complement each other while respecting our own distinct needs for autonomy and to circulate these struggles. The multifaceted connections of those opposing multiculturalism to entrepreneurialization, racism, sexism, toxic pollution, the war in Central America, the CIA and a host of other struggles offers a tremendous opportunity to make these connections and strengthen our ability to transcend not only the present university but the way in which we live as well.
These connections can help block the goal of the counterattack to preserve the university – and its commercial activities, military production, intelligence, biotech, high tech research, and environmental destruction – against articulate demands of students that it be subordinate to their many diverse projects and desires.
Two questions arise regarding the so-called “PC” counterattack. First, do the charges of “PC” have any existence in reality? And second, how can the movement respond in a manner that would not only defend its ground but also allow it to expand its space by circulating the struggle to other areas of the university and society?
There have been three types of denials in responses to charges of “PC”. As I’ve already briefly noted, some responses have been restricted to analyzing the academic activity of the faculty while ignoring, and thus disempowering, the role of students. By omission, many intellectuals and academics deny students are even involved. Second, many responses deny that any radical change is even occurring inside the universities. Although this is frequently used as an answer to hysterical charges of a “leftist takeover” of the universities, at the heart of the response is a denial any change whatsoever is even occurring. Lastly, an equally self-destructive response has been to outwardly deny the existence of what is commonly referred to as “PC” activity.
The second denial, that any struggles are taking place in the universities, ignores the wide range of movements – environmentalism, graduate student unionization and anti-austerity – that currently exist in the universities. While such a claim may be a purposeful exaggeration in order to refute charges of a leftist takeover, it too has the effect of disempowering those who have been fighting to transform the university and subverts efforts to circulate the struggle to others. Only one of many examples is a piece written by UT English professor Evan Carton in mid 1991. Carton makes a fascinating analogy between the Gulf War and the PC War: “While they obviously differ in innumerable respects,” writes Carton, “Operation Desert Storm and, if you will, Operation Campus Storm both respond to internal challenges to the traditional character of the American union and the ostensible unity of the American self in the 1990s.”[120] Yet, Carton who was a fundamental member of the E306 battle denies that the struggle has accomplished anything at all: “Operation Campus Storm pillories a veritable juggernaut, a takeover of the academy by minorities, leftist professors, and PC courses. The truth, though, is that universities have undergone no radical change, and that administrative power still resides elsewhere.” Thus, we are hit with a triple whammy by those who are a part of the movement: students play only a minor role, nothing has changed, and control over the university is external. With an attitude like this who would want to participate? Presumably the strategy appears to be to deny much struggle exists and that little has been accomplished in order to answer undocumented and hysterical charges that a McCarthyite takeover is occurring. In the process, Carton and other likeminded “defenders” overlook the point that the interests of the power elite are being protected because they are under attack.
This strategy, applied to charges of threats to free speech, has also been self-destructive. What is clear from the rhetoric surrounding the PC counterattack is an attempt to use occasional examples of authoritarian activity on the part of the student and faculty left so as to taint and delegitimize all the activity of the student and faculty movements.[121] Yet, denying that any of this activity exists only feeds their charges since many people who has participated in student movement activities have experienced one form or another of authoritarian relationships.[122]
There are innumerable cases of one group of students attempting to impose their interests over another group of students. It may be that so-called “white” students attempt to speak for everyone on campus (which many did during the anti-apartheid and anti-CIA movement) or even Black and female students fighting a similar related battle. Since the 1960s, this attempt to subordinate the interests of others to one’s own has been fought by autonomous organizing by Black, ethnic, female, graduate and all types of students. The success of a movement has often depended on figuring out ways for many of these groups to work in ways that both complements and retains their own autonomy. At UT-Austin, this took place with the election of Toni Luckett to the symbolic position of Students’ Association president in 1990 by a wide range of student groups. Although nothing came out of her presidency (and nothing should have been expected to since it would only subordinate a multiplicity of interests through one hierarchic organization and one person) it established a means for these groups to continue working together for another six months on a few other issues.
However, far too often attempts by a group or groups to “lead” or represent many other diverse people still occurs. This has been true of many diverse types of student movements but it has become an especially troubling problem over the last five years. For example, many students who worked to elect Luckett believed that as a “Black Lesbian,” she is somehow more legitimately radical and should lead all students who wanted change.[123] Such hierarchicalization of exploited groups is common among the U.S. left, as we’ll see in chapter 5. When this did not materialize, those like Henson and Philpott, co-editors of The Polemicist, who were part of the initial small group who put her up to running (Henson had run the previous year), later remorsed that it was her fault but not a result of the refusal of students to be spoken for by one student. Many times, “white” students attribute a special character to minority or female students and abdicate control to them whether they want it or not.
Ami Chen Mills, an anti-CIA organizer in the Progressive Student Network, summarized the ideas of much of the “white” student activists in the US: “Oppressed groups often resist working with male, white and/or more privileged activists because they don’t see these activists confronting oppression at home, nor do they see a willingness on the part of white activists to give up leadership or establish a multicultural or tolerant atmosphere within their organizations.”[124] In other words, while she has a legitimate concern for whether groups make the connection to home about their own or others racism, she generalizes all “white” students as presumably privileged, ignoring entirely the role of the university in capitalism, and abdicates her own autonomy to another who she perceives as more oppressed and/or less privileged and thus more capable of speaking for her.
Sometimes, minority students welcome the authority and power granted by white activists. Trayce Matthews, an anti-racism activist at Michigan State who works with the Ella Baker-Nelson Mandela Center for Anti-Racist Education, suggests that “whites have to be willing to accept leadership from people of color…”[125] While she is correct to demand that they work with people of color from the beginning rather than as an afterthought, she still assumes a priority for groups of what she refers to as predominantly “whites” to subordinate their needs to the issue of racism. Barbara Ransby, an organizer at the University of Michigan, explains that “the second major obstacle to forming lasting multiracial coalitions is the refusal of many whites, especially men, to accept leadership from Blacks and other people of color,” an apparent contradiction since it would hardly be a multiracial coalition if certain groups – white or Black – are running it. However, Ransby’s point is succinct and often ignored: rather than “white” activists taking over a movement of students of color and imposing their priorities, they need to understand “how racism relates to ‘their’ concerns” and use it as a basis for circulating the struggle to autonomous movements already being organized by students of color.[126]
For some reason, a glaring double standard persists within the student movements: after decades of struggles the autonomy of people of color, women and Gay/Lesbians are now accepted as valid demands but the autonomy of everyone else is denied. For example, at the second Students Against War (SAW) meeting shortly before the bombing of Iraq began, a small group of activists wrote an agenda in private that began with a mandatory self-criticism section on racism and sexism in the movement – an antiwar movement that did not yet even exist. In another instance, Luckett and three other women – all but one of whom had never even been to a meeting – showed up an hour into a SAW meeting late in the spring and interrupted the meeting to chastise the group for being almost all “white” and the male members for talking too much and talking over the women. After the chastisement, they immediately walked out without allowing any discussion about their criticisms and only one returned a few minutes later. Although their criticisms were legitimate, the manner in which they presented them violated SAW’s own autonomy. Certainly, three men or “whites” could not walk into a Black Student Alliance meeting and chastise them for something without it being immediately obvious that they had been authoritarian and insulting. In the same way, Luckett’s entourage, three of whom had never participated or even discussed these matters with those in the room prior to that meeting, was illegitimate in its action. Did they assume that they were the authorities on racism and sexism? Where they there to give orders or to discuss and work out the relationship between the anti-war and anti-racism and anti- sexism movements? In addition, they insulted the desire of those people of color who may have chosen to work against the war in their own organizations, as had Todos Unidos, a Chicano student organization. Even some women members reported feeling insulted that the entourage had failed to note the women’s own responsibility for speaking up for themselves and instead disempowered them by blaming it all on the men.[127]
In other words, actions like these suggest that some “white” and minority activists believe there is one way to organize and one set of issues and needs. While demanding their own autonomy, that of others who may be working on different but related issues are denied. Rather than struggling to find ways to relate to each other and discover the ways in which many diverse struggles may complement each other while maintaining each’s autonomy, sometimes activists attempt to impose a totalization of struggle that subsumes the needs and desires of many to that of a few – whether “white” or otherwise.
This is hardly standard operating procedure among student radicals. In fact, as D’Souza keenly observes in an attempt to pit students against each other, many students will not put up with this kind of muscling for long and drop out of the movements; one of the sources of what is often blamed for the high “turnover” of student activism.[128] Paradoxically, this is exactly what the “PC” counterattack assumes: students whose needs have been run over by authoritarianism on the left will either drop out or turn against them. While there are no documented cases of students coming out on the right after being involved in student activism, no doubt many become disgusted by the authoritarianism and lose interest. A Jumpcut editorial recognizes this as well: “It’s not surprising then that many students today are profoundly skeptical of and sometimes hostile to the rhetoric of progressive movements from the past. Though our causes are still just and our grievances still active, we have lost much mass support.”[129] However, without admitting that this problem even exists – which the editorial fails to do – we can only fail to grasp the root of the problem, leaving us open to ingenious ploys by those like D’Souza who attempts to not only divide and conquer but block any possibility of circulating the struggle.
The “PC” hype has been a well planned and well financed attempt to capitalize upon a sense of frustration and disillusionment by student and faculty with leftist forms of organizing and struggle. Charges of PC is a twisting of student alienation from movements that have far too often subverted their own autonomous multiplicity of desires and needs in favor of the desires of those presumed to be more “exploited” or “less privileged.” In many cases, autonomy is subverted by essentializing people as “white”, “Gay” etc. while ignoring their own diverse needs and identities. The essentializing of Blacks or Gays, for example, as “the most oppressed,” which presumably qualifies them to lead everyone else, in effect also denies these Black and Gays students their own autonomous diverse identities. “‘Radicals’ seem to think that all homos experience oppression in the same way,” writes Derek Robert a UT student who participated in ACT-UP. “Refusing to associate homos with anything bad, ‘radical’ homos privilege all homo men and women as being above greed, racism, sexism and homophobia; after all, straight people are responsible for everything bad. ‘Radical’ homos seem unwilling to fight homophobia or other forms of oppression without essentialist notions of ‘what it means to be Black, Woman, or Gay/Lesbian.’ Instead of starting with a desire for a movement against racism, sexism, homophobia and class exploitation, they insist that identity comes first.”[130]
Thus what we have not outwardly recognized is that “PC” capitalizes on the existence of a very real debilitating problem among the student movements and exaggerates it geometrically in a way as to delegitimize every struggle. It is up to those involved in these struggles to face up to the existence of these forms of authoritarianism that undermine the very foundation of multiculturalism: a recognition of the autonomous existence and innumerable experiences of every person and social group.
This requires that we not only recognize the multiplicity of non-western and non-“white” peoples but that we also acknowledge the multiplicity of what is too often dismissed as simply “white” or “Eurocentric”.[131] As Christine Stansell fascinatingly points out,
To use “Eurocentric” as a term of derision, as earnestly rightminded students too often do, cedes much of the territory radical scholars have worked hard to claim in the last twenty years. The Europe that radical scholarship has revealed is one of Jews as well as Christians, peasants as well as lords, laundresses as well as ladies, the slave trade and imperial conquest along with constitutionalism and popular sovereignty. “Eurocentrism” as slogan seals off “Europe” in its own category and plays into the conservatives’ ideologically driven, untruthful depiction of Western civilization as a tidy island of Christian prosperity, cantatas, and cathedral building, interrupted only periodically by acts of God and national conflicts orchestrated from above.[132]
If multiculturalism is to mean recognition of diversity it must apply that same standards to all social groups in a search of histories, desires, and identities that have been mystified, smothered, repressed, distorted and exploited no matter what its origin. By looking at even Europe as a terrain of conflict and diversity as Stansell suggests, we can strive to uncover a different Europe and thus dismiss a misrepresentation that has harmed peoples of Europe as much as peoples of Africa. Two members of the UT department of Germanic languages demonstrate this in the case of Franz Kafka, who while writing in Germany originally came from Prague and had a strong interest in the Yiddish language and its theater.[133]
Their article can be seen as much a demystification of the goals of multiculturalism as a retort to those who have their own class or other interests placed above another’s. Sometimes the dominance of a perceived monocultural west is swapped for its African twin. They continue: “The use of Eurocentrism has also bred a troubling version of what a non-Eurocentric curriculum might look like: ‘Afro-centrism,’ for example, with a celebratory emphasis on the dynasties of Africa, especially the male dynasties, as if the triumphs of African monarchs rather than the heroic struggles of common people – African peasants and Afro-American farmers and laborers – provided the most salient history for young Black people.”
Rather than pitting “privileged” against “oppressed” and “western” against “non-western” we need to slice through the mystifications of the multiplicity of existence and experience and forms of oppression that characterize each of them in different, yet inherently related ways. Instead of accepting the distinctions given to us we need to try to establish relationships between us that cross and conflict with these racial and cultural distinctions while acknowledging the autonomy of those covered by them. For students, that means not dismissing students or “whites” as “privileged”, but struggling to understand that they too have needs and desires to eliminate the exploitation they suffer and create new ways of living as do others. It is this dire need to trace the relationships of the struggles of “people of color” and “whites” and students and non-students that has motivated my research. We have come over the last two decades to acknowledge this for people of color, women, Gays and Lesbians and others but this accomplishment is hollow without recognizing this for all.
Multiculturalism has the potential for circulating the struggle to those “left out,” either because they do not think they are part of a multicultural society or feel mistakenly threatened or confused. Those in the movement who have yet to understand how multiculturalism is addressed to their own communities, whether as “whites,” or of European ethnic ancestry, need to articulate it in a way that brings out the fact that the university serves the needs of neither those who want to learn about themselves and others who don’t. Since students do not control the university they are unable to study the cultures, societies or whatever else we would like. Likewise, those who may have no interest in this are also suffering from increasing tuition and fees, class shortages, weeding mechanisms, etc. because they have no say over how education serves their needs. They’re channeled into boring classes, with inattentive and overworked faculty, and are hounded by grades, tests, and second and third jobs. Education means nothing more to them than jumping through hoops without catching the ring and having a nervous breakdown or even committing suicide. The relationship between overworked engineering students who are denied the opportunity to study renewable energy and maybe how other societies have used it instead of nuclear power and students seeking a multicultural education become complementary struggles as both come to understand how the organization of the university conflicts with their own desires.
We need to speak to the fact that the university serves to process and prepare each member of all groups for a lifetime of work. This means entrepreneurialization occurs at the expense of Black students learning about their own communities as poor students who cannot afford school and have to get second and third jobs to pay increasing costs and combinations of both. Making this connection means linking together how these various struggles are complementary. And through this complementarity, express how others not interested in or afraid and confused by multiculturalism are a part of it and can grow from it. This means organizing our own communities in struggles that can be mutually complementary with, if not eventually one part of, a struggle for multiculturalism that radically transforms higher education but all of society.
Which Way for Multiculturalism?
The question has inevitably been asked whether multiculturalism is simply a minor adjustment, a reform, or whether it has the potential to contribute to a larger transformation of the university and maybe beyond. Too often a false dichotomy is drawn between “reform” or “revolution” that precludes one from the other. This has generated debate for decades which is unnecessary to replicate here. However, suffice it to say that reform cannot contribute to a greater transformation, a reconstitution of the way we live, if it is an end in itself. Reform is revolutionary if it sets a groundwork for further reform and classwide insurgency. One other factor comes into play as well. If we perceive revolution as catastrophic or apocalyptic, in which it happens at one definable moment, then reform is precluded from being revolutionary. However, if we understand the transformation as revolutionary, then reform, if it is not used to block further reform, can be a vehicle of revolution.[134] These are the questions we must ask about multiculturalism.
I have attempted to demonstrate how multiculturalism has expanded the disruption of the university’s role in the accumulation of capital by subordinating its function to the diverse needs of students. By reading through the rhetoric of the PC counterattack this appears to be a primary concern of its corporate and elite organizers. However, there are measures being taken and internal contradictions that may turn multiculturalism into more work for students, dead- end reforms turned upon those who made the original demands for change.
Numerous views of what multiculturalism is within the movement exist making it almost undefinable – perhaps a positive attribute. Within the movement, much of the reason for these conflicts can be attributed to significant class differences that are still being fought. For example, upper class Mexican-Americans frequently want multiculturalism in order to climb the ladder, while Chicana/os want it to transform society, although admittedly even this is not so clear cut. For Todos Unidos member Catarino Felan, this is all part of the class antagonisms that cross racial (and gender and sexual orientation) lines: “when class lines are drawn, racial equality falters and dies.”[135] As a result, one of the main thrusts of the movement has been to increase enrollment and retention. Sometimes it is made as part of the struggle to transform society by helping to bring in other potential student allies. Other times, it is an explicit demand for inclusion into the ranks of capital’s management elite or the creation of a separate racial capital.
Some business executives and educational planners have visualized multiculturalism as a mechanism for learning to cope with an increasing diversity of the labor force and turning it to their advantage for generating more productivity and efficiency from their workers. Frank Newman is the author of the famed Newman Report and president of the Educational Commission of the States. Newman recognizes a need for a more “educated” and “flexible” workforce which must be accomplished “while facing, as a country, this massive effort of learning to deal with cultural diversity.”[136] Opponents have resisted, recognizing that giving a little space will only lead to demands for more and deepen the crisis.
A significant conflict in tactics has arisen around the primary demand of most sectors of the movement, such as at Stanford where it was successful, to require one or more classes from a multicultural perspective for all students. This tactic has been met with opposition or mostly indifference by students who are not necessarily opposed to multiculturalizing the university but resist multiculturalism that, once in the university’s hands, becomes yet another course with more imposed schoolwork to struggle through. This, as we’ve seen has been used to divide students. Recognizing students’ resistance to school/work, the countermovement has gone to great lengths to taint multiculturalism as creating more work. They are mostly right since turning it into a required course makes it just more schoolwork for many students. Demands for required courses reproduces the organizational structure of education by reducing multiculturalism to work which will inevitably be despised and resisted by students who might otherwise want to participate in efforts to transform society. Even though the UT-Austin Faculty Senate and University Council framed the requirement in a very flexible way so as to allow existing courses to overlap in credit, thus making it almost meaningless, science and engineering faculty ignored this and continued to demonize the reform as more work that would distract their students from what they wanted them to learn in preparation for waged jobs.
Requiring classes is only one tactic of many but it is becoming the most successful with courses required at a number of universities. This success needs to be thoroughly reevaluated. Of all the PRIDE proposals why did the required course come closest to being realized? Probably because that proposal follows the logic of higher education that divides our experiences into courses, grades and grade points, manageable segments of information. As multiculturalism increasingly becomes limited to being required, another hoop for us to jump through, it will become increasingly stripped of its subversive potential. Changing the content without transforming the form cannot help but reproduce the existing organization of the university. It is not enough to learn something different but to learn it differently as well. If we continue to define education as capitalist, racist, etc. by what rather than how we learn instead of both, then we have not progressed anywhere. Requiring multiculturalism is the 1990s version of the left’s strategy for dealing with the universities, as we’ll see in chapter 5; “after the revolution” the content is changed but the university remains.
The limits inherent in requiring multiculturalism courses are being turned against those who are fighting for it and those who can use it. If multiculturalism only means more work then we have not realized our goal of further making the universities a space for studying ourselves and the ways in which we’ve lived, loved and fought. It becomes something more to do to raise one’s future income.
Corporations and educational planners have begun to recognize this new institutionalized role as well. Companies are increasingly turning towards it for understanding diverse parts of society and the world that they have not been able to in the past. As the birthrate of “white” workers declines and their refusal of work increases, businesses are becoming increasingly vulnerable to their reliance on workers who it does not understand and cannot control. “Companies like Kochman Communications use the ‘management of diversity’ catchphrase to promote their high fee services. According to Kochman’s brochure, ‘If you don’t recognize varying cultural differences then you run the risk of underutilizing employees.’ Like a growing number of others, this company offers help in changing employees’ bad attitudes toward authority; developing flexible disciplinary styles and diversity management. Profit provides motivation for understanding others, promoting cultural knowledge as a management tool.”[137] Although multicultural education can teach many antagonistic groups to struggle together it can also be used to make them work together and to train Black and brown managers who can control a rapidly increasing Black and brown workforce. The American Institute for Managing Diversity Inc. based at Morehouse College is taking the lead in offering such services.[138]
The supreme nightmare may be that multiculturalism could also become a means for regaining control over the universities. Carmen Valera draws the connection to UT-Austin: “as recently racially motivated events on campus demonstrate, universities may prove harder to govern.” To do so, UT brought in the Anti-Defamation League, who opposes affirmative action, to give racial sensitivity workshops to administrators. The question that must be asked is whether multiculturalism will be presented in such a way that it can be easily assimilatable as just more schoolwork and a mechanism of reimposing control or whether it is part of a broader struggle to reorganize the campus and society.
Whether or not the multiculturalism movement is successful depends on whether it can produce reforms that can strengthen student struggles to subordinate the university to their needs or can be used against them. This turns upon apparent inconsistencies in how schoolwork relates to multiculturalism. Is multiculturalism only another type of schoolwork, with tests, grades and a degree? Are students resisting schoolwork that processes them as homogeneous workers only to demand more that will train them as “diverse” workers? Is multiculturalism no more than an extension of the left’s claim that more studying creates a more class conscious worker who will then begin to struggle? Or is multiculturalism a coalescence of the long resistance to school as a disciplining for work and the struggle to reorganize society so that embraces a multiplicity of ways of living?
One way to resolve these apparent conflicts is to address the expected role of students in capitalism, which is only beginning to be done. We have seen how multiculturalism can be used to manage. What is the connection between multiculturalism and student income and austerity? ONDA addresses, along with demands for more faculty and student enrollment, the difficulty of working class and “minority” youth to afford higher education by proposing the creation of paid tutor/mentor positions for Chicano students to assist other Chicano students. The connection between the hardships of being an unwaged student, loan debt, disinvestment of the universities and the demand for multiculturalism is made quite brilliantly: “the insufficient number of TA, RA, and grader positions force many such graduate students [with little support other than loans] to register only part-time and some to drop out. The creation of a tutoring program can meet these needs by paying low-income graduate students to tutor low-income undergraduate students.”[139] By implication, it seeks to make the university pay for helping “politicize” new students: “these tutors will also serve as role models and assist in the socialization process of undergraduate students into university life.”
Besides demanding more fellowships, scholarships and financial opportunities for “minority” and other working class students, ONDA connects financial aid to access. It recommends that UT “eliminate the GPA requirement to receive financial aid. Students ‘at risk’ are among those who would be least burdened with the responsibility of having to work while simultaneously raising their GPA’s. The university should provide alternative financial aid for all students on academic probation.” (p. 12)
These demands impressively call for breaking the relationship between how much work one does – measured by ones’ grades, progress and wage – in the form of financial aid. The connection between schoolwork and subsistence would be severed by replacing “aid” with a guaranteed income or wage that is not measured by how much work one does. By demanding more grants and scholarships, while the latter is still on a competitive basis, there is an expressed refusal of debt and the extra work it requires. We have here the seed of a new analysis of income missing from student struggles and coincidentally how cutbacks have worked to force us out of the university faster or prematurely, turned us into cheap labor while in school, and divided the movement. While a similar analysis has been articulated by Black students it needs to be fleshed out and circulated throughout the campus.
ONDA‘s connection between income and multiculturalism suggests one manner in which efforts to institutionalize the movement can be headed off. Multiculturalism is more than just learning about Black or brown cultures but, as ONDA would seem to indicate, a means for allowing broad access to the resources and social spaces of the university which can be used for many diverse purposes. Perhaps this may be further served by an explicit demand for wages for schoolwork, which I will examine in the last chapter, that would give students an autonomous resource to confront the use of money to keep them out.
Not the Conclusion
I have attempted to reexamine the motivations for the PC counterattack in terms of the crisis of the university and the use of entrepreneurialization and austerity as a mechanism to reimpose control. This is evident in D’Souza’s analysis as I have demonstrated above who suggested disinvestment as a weapon against multiculturalism. Likewise, it is implicit in the UT-Austin based University Review‘s (a Collegiate Network member) attempt to explain multiculturalism in terms of a cut in student’s standard of living: “The cost of the extra tuition [for the multiculturalism requirement] – and in most cases, the extra semester in which to take the courses – is more than the average student can handle in today’s hard times.”[140] Such an analysis attempts to portray multiculturalism as a cost rather than a change that can be used to serve needs that are being blocked from realization. It is a similar tactic utilized by UT-Austin faculty who played upon student dissatisfaction with degree programs that allow them little time to pursue other academic interests.
Deep down multiculturalism isn’t about required courses, awareness seminars, and recruitment and retention as much it is a question of what students do in and with the university, what the university is and its role in the broader global society. If we recognize that being a student is to be trained to accept work as an interchangeable mass part in the machine of accumulation, then multiculturalism is an expression for multiplicity and refusal to be reduced to just being students. Just as Harry Cleaver has suggested that “most workers have struggled to cease being defined as workers as they have sought a richer, more multilateral existence,” so have students struggled against being defined as students trained to spend their lives working and have sought, through demands for multiculturalism, new ways of living.[141]
Because it has served as an experimentation with new ways of living and learning, multiculturalism offers an element of “self-valorization” to the other struggles against entrepreneurialization, environmental destruction and militarism on the campuses. Combined, these struggles have rattled the operation of the social factory and have played with new social formations. In this sense, each of the movements I have examined are complementary. It is for this reason that a well planned and financed campaign to defeat the multiculturalism movement is in operation. It is no coincidence that the same corporations that have participated in the reorganization of the universities to make them more subservient to the interests of capital accumulation have pinpointed multiculturalism as its greatest threat. Students have begun to look directly at the universities and themselves and have decided its time for a change.
The crisis of the universities that the multiculturalism movement threatens to extend is being reproduced throughout all of capitalist society. Then UT- Austin Dean of Liberal Arts Robert King laid out his own opposition to multiculturalism as a local expression of larger socio-political crises in capitalist society:
The problem today – and this is society’s problem as much as it is the university’s problem – is that no one can agree on the common good. Everywhere factionalism rages like a mad, insatiable beast of prey. All the horses are pulling in opposite directions. Think of your local school board. Think of the terrible disagreements about theology that have factionalized religion in this country and throughout the world. Think of the irresolvable disputes about the environment. Think of the battlelines that are drawn in the legislature at the beginning of the biennium. Think of our own university, where a great noble entity – The University – has to an ever sadder degree been replaced by competition among great and powerful fiefdoms…Too few people want to pull together. That’s why multiculturalism causes such problems: nobody trusts anybody; there’s too little spirit of compromise.[142]
The crisis of the universities and of society as a whole demonstrates a grave danger to the existence of the current dialectical organization of life which is temporarily determined by the accumulation of capital. For Michel Foucault, this crisis was reflected in thought itself which has undergone an explosion of multiplicity evading all efforts at a totalized and unified logic.[143] This rupturing of the dialectic is coming about because of the multiple forms of struggle that are taking place international against work, the international debt, development, environmental destruction, and most importantly in our case, against education, concurrently with the pursuit of the infinite desires and needs of life and existence. Whether a new dialectic will be imposed or we can break away into an infinite forms of social organization cannot yet be determined but if the struggle around multiculturalism is any indication, we are right now taking part in the organizing of multiple futures in the present.
Bibliography
[1] Philip Altbach and Robert Cohen, “American Student Activism: The Post-Sixties Transformation,” in Philip Altbach (ed.), Political Student Activism: An International Reference Handbook, NY: Greenwood Press, 1989, p. 457.
[2] Although I only discuss these four academic areas in this chapter, I consider multiculturalism to be broader than the study of different social groups. Rather, if we consider multiculturalism to be an attempt to diversify the curriculum to include previously excluded topics of social concern then we must also include programs such as peace studies, gay studies, environmental studies, etc.
[3] Irving Kristol quote from the Wall Street Journal, June 17, 1986; and William Bennett quote from May 14. 1986 speech to the American Jewish Committee, cited in John Trumpbour, “Introducing Harvard: A Social, Philosophical, and Political Profile,” p. 9, in Trumpbour (ed.), How Harvard Rules: Reason in the Service of Empire, Boston: South End Press, 1989, p. 3-31.
[4] I will use “ethnic studies” to represent a broad array of struggles – women’s, Black/African- American, Chicano/a, Puerto Rican, Latin American, Jewish, Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual, Asian- American (of all types) and Native American – that have no sufficient word to represent them, and probably shouldn’t. I do not mean to imply a theory of “ethnicity” by its use as if to suggest race should be understood as ethnicity. It is only a shortcut and as such is limited. For a detailed historical analysis of the Chicano studies movement see Carlos Munoz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement, London: Verso, 1989; for the women’s studies movement see Winifred, “Scholars and Activists: The Gender Factor in Education,” ch. 6 in On the Move: American Women in the 1970s, Boston: Twayne, 1988, p. 102-126; and for the current queer studies movement, see Linda Garber (ed.), Tilting the Tower, NY: Routledge, 1994.
[5] Ronnie Dugger, Our Invaded Universities: A Nonfiction Play for Five Stages, New York: Norton & Co., 1974, p. 6.
Burr, p. 14. Thirty years later, events have come back around in full circle with the University and federal government ironically on opposite sides. In the summer of 1996, the Supreme Court ruled the UT-Austin School of Law’s minority recruitment policy unconstitutional putting the future of the University’s entire policy into question.
7] Ibid., p. 34.
[8] p. 51 and 54.
[9] p. 55; capitalization is repeated from cited text.
[10] p. 55.
[11] Anthony Shadid, “Racism on Campus: Students Fight Back,” Guardian, April 5, 1989, p. 10.
[12] The Daily Texan, “Study finds dramatic drop in minority college students,” January 15, 1990, p. 1.
[13] U, “Minority enrollment figures set record highs,’ March 1992, p. 6.
[14] Manuel Justiz, “Population trends challenge national educators,” On Campus, December 3, 1990, p. 2; and A. Phillips Brooks, “Diversity key recruiting factor,” Austin-American Statesman, February 27, 1992, p. A8.
[15] From The University of Texas at Austin, Office of Institutional Studies, Statistical Handbook, 1991-1992, p. 6, table S 4. There is no explanation of how “Hispanic” or “Asian American” are defined, leaving this open to further analysis of discrepancies in representation by the diverse types of communities that are generalized under these totalizing labels.
[16] Brooks, p. A8; and Cheryl Fields, “Hard-times budgets for universities in Southern Texas perpetuate historic discrimination, Hispanics charge, The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2, 1988, p. A18
[17] A. Phillips Brooks, “Despite progress, minorities still find a rough road at UT,” Austin American Statesman, February 27, 1992, p. A 8; and Office of Institutional Studies, p. 29, Table S 24 (2).
[18] Candice Driver, “Minority story evokes anger: Student leaders blame UT for ‘sugarcoating’ issues,” The Daily Texan, June 29, 1990, p. 1; and Eric Dixon, Shuronda Robinson and Wayne Marshall, “Affirmative action critics distort facts,” The Daily Texan, September 10, 1991, p. 4.
[19] Tini Tran, “Why the furor over minority scholarships?,” Tejas, May 1992, p. 7.
[20] Dixon, Robinson and Marshall; and Brooks, p. A8.
[21] Robert Tindol, “Retention programs bolster success,” On Campus, February 18, 1991, p. 3.
[22] Dixon, the SA attorney general, Robinson, director of the Minority Information Center, and Marshall, President of the Cabinet of College Councils, wrote this editorial as a thorough critique of the Young Conservative of Texas’ claim that affirmative action is widespread and allows “unqualified” minorities to take spots at UT from “whites” and “Asians”.
[23] Douglas Hok, “Texas lacking Hispanic professors,” The San Antonio Light, May 17, 1991.
[24] Brooks, p. A8; Adam Hersh, “Minority faculty numbers rising: Further steps remain in dispute,” The Daily Texan, September 3, 1991, p. 1; and Deborah Shoop, “Minority faculty percent doubled from ’83 to ’91,” The Daily Texan, April 27, 1992, p. 5.
[25] UT-Austin has a national reputation for not only being a site of overt racism but also a poor record of hiring and supporting minority faculty. For example, since the late 1980s a number of not only minority but also progressive faculty have left UT-Austin for other campuses in part for better financial offers but also the repressive political climate. Professors Wahneema Lubiano and Velma Garcia left promising positions in the English and Government departments for these reasons.
[26] This is apparent from a reading of articles, editorials and letters to the editor of The Daily Texan, The Austin-American Statesman, and observations of rallies in support of these reforms which dwindled to non-existence even as the proposals faced fraudulent balloting and eventual defeat.
I would like to reiterate how I conducted my analysis of “textual” sources. Because it is difficult to impute intention to someones writings, it is important to test the validity of my interpretation against their actions which are either observed firsthand or documented in one or more journalistic accounts, written memos, letters and reports garnered by Open Record Requests. Following the old adage: “actions speak louder than words,” I flowcharted a person’s actions until the repetition of their actions indicated a close fit with their written comments.
[27] Troy Duster, “Understanding self-segregation on the campus,’ The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 25, 1991, p. B 1-B2.
[28] Dane Schiller, “BSA unhappy with harassment policy,” The Daily Texan, December 4, 1989, p. 5. Also, Schiller, “Harassment task force proposes racial policy,” The Daily Texan, November 29, 1989, p. 1-2, outlines the main facets of the recommendation. Based on a definition of racial harassment as “extreme or outrageous acts or Communications that are intended to harass, intimidate, or humiliate a student or students on account of race, color or national origin that reasonably cause them to suffer severe emotional distress,” the policy is clearly aimed at individual actions. In order to handle complaints, a Race Relations Counselor was created in the Office of the Dean of Students which devises the punishments.
[29] James Szablewicz and Annette Gibbs, “Colleges’ Increasing Exposure to Liability: The New In Loco Parentis,” Journal of Law and Education, Vol. 16, No. 4, Fall 1987 is an interesting discussion of the return of in loco parentis due to harassment, rape, anti-discrimination, and other policies as well as university responsibility for protection from rape and other crime. They recognize that “What distinguished the in loco parentis of the 1980s is that it is limited to protection of student safety. Missing is the complementary power of colleges to police and control students’ morals…” This represents a growing power of students: “…the student-college relationship may not be so one-sided in favor of the college after all. When students rejected college supervision and protection, the courts responded. And now when students ask for protection, but not supervision, the courts are responding again. Thus students may be able to shape the student-college relationship through the judicial system.” (p. 465)
But what they do not recognize is the distinction from in loco parentis that was crushed by student resistance that began as early as the 1950s, is that today these policies are being dictated and imposed upon the universities by students themselves to serve their own needs. In response, the universities are desperately attempting to use them in ways antagonistic to their original intent, such as UT has done with the harassment issue. However, a fundamental limitation of these demands is that they give responsibility to the university rather than students empowering themselves to take control. This is the case, for example, with resistance to sexual harassment: “By according too little value to student-run efforts and too much to university resources, these feminists [fighting sexual harassment] have obtained narrow reforms at the cost of extending university control over students lives – empowering the institution, not women.” (L.A. Kaufman, How Political is the Personal,” The Nation, March 26, 1988, p. 419-20).
[30] In 1989, three Phi Gamma Delta were arrested after along with three other men assaulted a Latino family resting in a van outside a Congress Avenue bank building where there were janitors. Matthew Canton, “TU [Todos Unidos] angered by assault,” The Daily Texan, November 21, 1990, p. 5.
[31] Quoted in Shaun Jordan (a UT swim team member), letter, “Tokenism on podium,” The Daily Texan, April 20, 1990, p. 4.
[32] This comes from “PRIDE Update is presented to students by administration,” On Campus, November 5, 1990, p. 1, 4, and 6. The administrations’ responses to PRIDE that follows also appears here.
[33] “Minority Faculty Hiring/Retention and Its Connection to Student Retention: What is at Stake?,” June 1989, flyer. Although no author is credited it was handed out at an event organized by the Black Student Alliance.
[34] Chris Barton, “Multiculturalism to be taught by outsiders,” The Daily Texan, July 27, 1990, p. 1.
[35] Todos Unidos, Orientaciones Nuevas para la Diversificacion de la Academia, 1990.
[36] Matthew Canton, “Todos Unidos faults administration for slow response,” The Daily Texan, December 10, 1990, p. 1.
[37] Heather Wayment, “Native Americans adjust to UT life: Underrepresented minority fights to learn strange customs, culture,” The Daily Texan, December 10, 1990, p. 6; David Miller, “GLSA supports BSA plan,” letter, The Daily Texan, May 2, 1990, p. 4; and Indian Progressive Action Group, “Indian Group supports PRIDE,” letter, The Daily Texan, April 24, 1990, p. 4.
[38] Candice Driver, “Cunningham’s inaction echoes ’85 reply to anti-bias plan,” The Daily Texan, July 23, 1990, p. 1.
[39] Dinica Quesada, “QUEERS plans programs on gay, lesbian concerns,” The Daily Texan, August 28, 1990, p. A6.
[40] Matthew Canton, “Students air concerns at meeting,” The Daily Texan, date unknown; Deanna Roy, “For UT homosexuals, the fight against discrimination continues,” The Daily Texan, October 18, 1990, p. 1.
[41] Coalition for a Diversified Law School, “Protest the Lack of Diversity at the UT Law School; Support the Boycott of Classes at the UT Law School,” April 1990, flyer, Madhawi Kuckreja, “Law school students take affirmative action,” Guardian, April 19, 1989, p. 5; Michael Margolis, “200 attend rally at UT law school: Turnout low compared with ’89,” The Daily Texan, April 6, 1990, p.1; Aaron DaMommio, “Diversity rally takes lighter vein,” April 5, 1991, p. 1; and Fabienne Labourey, “Students create law journal for women,” The Daily Texan, March 20, 1991, p. 6.
[42] Paul Kelly, “University Council approves multicultural proposals,” On Campus, October 28, 1991, p. 2-3, italics mine. This is the minutes of the debate during the UC meeting.
[43] Jeff Rhoads, “UT faculty rejects multiculturalism proposal,” March 3, 1992, p. 1.
[44] Erica Shaffer, “UT survey shows students support multiculturalism,” The Daily Texan, September 5, 1991, p. 6.
[45] Brian Anderson, “Faculty concerned about multicultural proposal,” The Daily Texan, December 4, 1991, p. 5.
[46] Katherine Mangan, “University of Texas’ Postponement of Controversial Writing Course Kindles Debate Over Role of Outsiders in Academic Policy,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 20, 1991, p. A18.
[47] Kelly, p. 2-3 and Robert S. Boyer, “Western ideas transcultural,” The Daily Texan, December 4, 1991, p.4; and Karl Galinsky, “Committee’s report flawed,” The Daily Texan, November 7, 1991, p.4. Galinsky is a member of NAS.
[48] Ibid., p. 3, italics mine. It is surprising that Woodruff was chair of the faculty Senate’s Committee on Multicultural Education.
[49] This was the strategy even weeks after the UC had approved the overlapping. For example, Daniel Bonevac, chairman of philosophy and TAS member, was still arguing that “if students do not combine requirements, time will be added to already overburdened programs.” Holly Wayment, “Multicultural requirements hit new snag,” The Daily Texan, November 14, 1991, p. 1.
[50] Jenny Huang, “Schools’ multicultural plans vary,” The Daily Texan, June 13, 1990, p. 5.
[51] Office of the Dean of Students, A Multicultural University Resource Guide, 1991, p. 5.
[52] Holly Wayment, “Official: Number of minority faculty at University has increased,” The Daily Texan, November 12, 1991. p. 6.
[53] Margot Fitzgerald, “Students, AIs deserve changes in E306,” The Daily Texan, August 8, 1990, p. 4 and Susan Dauer, “E306 opponents should learn how to support arguments,” The Daily Texan, October 4, 1990, p. 4. Fitzgerald and Dauer as well as the 19 other cosigners of Dauer’s editorial are English AIs.
[54] Paula Rothenberg, Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study, NY, 1988.
[55] Christopher Anderson, “E306 questions go unanswered: Cunningham dodges inquiries,” The Daily Texan, September 18, 1990, p. 1. The letter was uncovered by the Polemicist.
[56] Gribben’s letter was printed in entirety by The Daily Texan, August 6, 1990, p. 4. Professor Donald Foss has denied knowing or ever meeting Gribben. Soon after this letter was published, Gribben resigned to take a position at Auburn University.
[57] This was suggested in the report of the Committee on Undergraduate Education chaired by sociology professor Frank Bean, which was the third committee appointed by President Cunningham to examine undergraduate education. Since the recommendations of the first two were ignored it seems Bean’s committee figured out that it needed to say what Cunningham already planned to do. (Kevin Williamson, “English department could be redesigned,” The Daily Texan, June 10, 1992, p. 1.)
[58] Gribben’s letter, italics in original.
[59] This is the case in many of the pieces I have already cited but especially Linda Brodkey and John Slatin, “New E306 keeps commitment to writing,” The Daily Texan, September 4, 1990, p. 4 which accepts the terms of debate over whether it is a writing course; Brodkey and Shelli Fowler, “Political Suspects,” Village Voice, April 23, 1991, p. 3-4; and various other editorials by faculty, AIs and the Polemicist that so rarely even mention anything about students – who are required to take the course. Only professor Robert Solomon of philosophy is keen enough to recognize that “UT students seem remarkably immune to indoctrination, especially in required courses. If anything, they develop an immunity…toward the subject matter forced upon them.” (“Recruiting diverse faculty requires long-term commitment,” The Daily Texan, June 5, 1990, p. 4. This inadequacy of discussion about the movement can be further seen later in the chapter during discussions about the nature of the movement itself and the counterattack.
[60] Kevin McHargue, “Recomposition: Confusion reigns in the world according to Gribben,” The Daily Texan, July 20, 1990, p. 4.
[61] Kurt Heinzelman, “Cries of factionalism in English Dept. come from sore losers,” The Daily Texan, July 30, 1991, p. 4.
[62] A July 24, 1991 letter from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to Dean King, suggested that “Absent compelling reasons for not providing…approval, such as evidence that a department has become dysfunctional in its operations, generally accepted principles of collegial government would call upon the administration to respect the decision of members of the department to continue the mode of governance under which they have been operating.” (in Scott Henson and Tom Philpott, “On the Attack: Bob King opposes autonomy, collegiality in Liberal Arts,” Polemicist, September 1991, p. 3).
[63] Scott Hanson and Mary McGlynn, ‘The facts tone down the English Department ‘soap opera”, The Daily Texan, October 29, 1991, p. 5
[64] Francine Bosco, “Dean King’s ‘threat’ cited in resignation,” The Daily Texan, September 9, 1991, p. 1-2; and Hanson and McGlynn.
[65] Shai Tsur, “Compromise sees new head of women’s studies program,” The Daily Texan, July 25, 1991, p. 1.
[66] Catherine Cantieri, “We’ve still got a long way to go,” Utmost, Winter, 1990, p. 8-9.
[67] Ibid., p. 8-9.
[68] Henson and Philpott, p. 16.
[69] Henson and Philpott, p. 16.
[70] Some YCT members attempted to register for the Tejas production class but failed when it caused an overload and delayed registration. (Henson and Philpott, “Tejas: The Attack on Diverse Press,” Polemicist, September 1990, p. 5, cite an August 1, 1990 article regarding this failed attempt to take over the class). The YCTs have collected information and infiltrated other groups in the past and continue to do so. According to a YCT agenda, they have an “intelligence” branch of the organization, “YCT’s equivalent to the CIA intelligence members monitor other campus groups and professors by attending meetings and classes and infiltrating groups.” (Christopher Anderson, “Infiltrating’ meetings part of YCT agenda,” The Daily Texan, October 5, 1990, p. 1.)
[71] Candice Driver, “UT policy halts funding for ‘Tejas”‘, The Daily Texan, June 7, 1990, p.1, italics mine.
[72] Jenny Lin, “Political correctness assailed by UT dean,” The Daily Texan, September 23, 1991, p. 1.
[73] Scott Henson and Tom Philpott, “E306: Chronicle of a Smear Campaign: How the New Right Attacks Diversity,” Polemicist, September 1990, p. 4.
[74] Although TAS collected the money and wrote the check for the ad, its name does not appear anywhere on it. In fact, “When contacted later, the majority of the faculty we [Henson and Philpott] talked to who signed the ad weren’t associated with TAS, and non-members weren’t told that TAS had coordinated the effort.” (Scott Henson and Tom Philpott, “E306: Chronicle of a Smear Campaign: How the New Right Attacks Diversity,” Polemicist, September 1990, p. 4.)
[75] Stephen Balch and Herb London, “The Tenured Left,” Commentary, vol. 82, October 1986, p. 41-51.
[76] Diamond, “Corporate interference: Endowing the right-wing academic agenda,” Covert Action Information Bulletin (CAIB), Number 38, Fall 1991, p. 47; and the Madison Center’s, Annual Report, 1990.
[77] Henson, “Circle the Volvos: Building a ‘Grassroots’ Political Newspaper,” Polemicist, July 1991, p. 10.
[78] Henson and Philpott, “Charge of the right brigade against multicultural education,” Guardian, October 16, 1991, p.7; Henson, July 1991, p. 4; and Theresa Bergen, “PC windmills: Right wing money on campus,” NLNS, packet 2.1, September 3, 1991, p. 5.
[79] The Common Sense Guide to American Colleges 1991-1992, Charles Homer, Executive Editor, Charles Homer, Madison Center: Lanham, 1991. Interestingly, although the information was provided by a large number of students and faculty, few are given credit.
[80] Sara Diamond, “Madison Ctr. tries affirmative action,” Polemicist, May 1991, p. 3.
[81] Diamond, CAIB, p. 46-47; Institute for Educational Affairs, Annual Report, 1980; and Ernest Lefever, “The Corporation Project,” unpublished memorandum dated July 18, 1978.
[82] Diamond, CAIB, p.46; IEA; Annual Report, 1980.
[83] Henson, July 1991, p. 4; Madison Center, Annual Report, 1990.
[84] Diamond, CAIB, p. 47-8; Olin Foundation’s, Annual Report, 1989; Smith-Richardson, Annual Report 1989; and Sarah Scaife Foundation’s IRS Form 990-PF, 1987 and Earhart Foundation’s IRS Form 990-PF 1988. See also Henson and Philpott, p. 9. Bergen cites the John Olin Foundation 1988 annual report’s figure of $55 million in grants. (p. 5)
[85] Ibid., citing Inter-Department Memo, December 20, 1984, “The Report on the Universities”. This tactic has also been explicitly discussed elsewhere. At a 1982 conference sponsored by IEA, Madison, and The American Spectator to help students start their own newspaper, a speaker suggested “if someone accuses you of being a racist or a sexist, accuse them back of McCarthy tactics.”
[86] Mark Hager, “The real orthodoxy network,” Z, April 1992, p. 59-60.
[87] Ibid., p. 48.
[89] Henson and Philpott, p. 9.
[90] Louis Wolf, “Accuracy in media rewrites the news,” Covert Action Information Bulletin, number 32, Summer 1989, p. 20.
[91] Henson and Philpott, p. 9.
[92] Although AIM is not immediately involved, it is supported by many of the same forces including William Simon who has served on its advisory board, the Scaife Foundation which has given it about $433,000 from 1977 to 1984, Mobil which gave it about $40,000, and Texaco, Exxon, Chevron, Getty and Phillips. (Louis Wolf, p. 20.)
[93] Diamond, CAIB, p. 48.
[94] D’Souza’s speech is noted by Scott Henson, “Dinesh D’Souza,” New Liberation News Service, packet 2.1, September 3, 1991, p. 12.
[95] Daniel Junas, “Rev. Moon goes to college,” Covert Action Information Bulletin, number 38, Fall 1991, p. 22-3.
[96] James Allen, “UT accepts controversial grant,” The Daily Texan, June 11, 1991, p. 1-2.
[97] Ibid., p. 25. See Theresa Bergen concerning YAF (p. 6) and Christopher Anderson. I was one of the students the YCTs were discovered to have a file on in 1987.
[98] Bergen, p. 5; and Jon Weiner, “The Olin money tree: Dollars for neocon scholars,” The Nation, January 1, 1990, p. 12-13.
[99] Jon Weiner, p. 12.
[100] Scott Henson, New Liberation News Service, p. 11-12; and Mark Hager, “The real orthodoxy network,” Z, April 1992, p. 59.
[101] William E. Simon, A Time for Truth: A Distinguished Conservative Dissects the Economic and Political Policies that Threaten Our Liberty – And Points the Way to an American Renaissance, NY: Reader’s Digest Press, 1978, p. 231-232.
[102] Ibid. p. 231-232.
[103] Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, NY: Harper & Row, 1990.
[104] Paul Berman (ed.), Debating p.C.: The Controversy Over Political Correctness on College Campuses, NY: Dell, 1992.
[105] John Taylor, “Are You Politically Correct?”, New York, January 21, 1991, p. 32-40.
[106] Michael Berube, “Public image limited: Political Correctness and the media’s big lie,” Village Voice, June 18, 1991, p. 35.
[107] Dinesh D’Souza., “Illiberal Education,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1991, p. 51-79.
[108] Donald Kagan, dean of arts and sciences at Yale, quoted without citation in Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, NY: Free Press, 1991, p. 15.
[109] Ibid., p. 13.
[110] Dinesh D’Souza, “The visigoths in tweed,” Forbes, April 1, 1991, p. 84.
[111] While too many to list and analyze here, one of D’Souza’s most glaring lies and distortions concerns Stanford’s multicultural course requirement. In the text of his book, D’Souza lists supposed topic categories and authors from which the syllabus must draw, warning that “this is not a mandated list.” However, buried deep in the footnotes is the harsh truth that this list was developed prior to the actual initiation of the course with the disclaimer that “it is fairly typical of the texts actually assigned so far.” (p. 70 and 274)
[112] Examples of radical student actions resulting in partial multicultural reforms mostly concerning the curriculum abound in his book. For examples, see D’Souza, 1991, p. 136-37.
[113] David Lay, “Panel decries multicultural efforts,” The Daily Texan, October 5, 1990, p. 1; Scott Stanford, “Butler Did It: Multiculturalism has a long way to go,” The Daily Texan, June 22, 1990, p. 4.
[114] ONDA, p. 20.
[115] Shirley Hune, “Opening the American mind and body: The rote of Asian American studies,” Change, November/December 1989, p. 59.
[116] Elizabeth Martinez, “A Chicano Left Perspective on Berkeley – An Interview With Carlos Munoz,” Z, July-August, 1990, p. 39-40. Since Munoz wrote a book about how the Chicano Studies movement was a project of the Chicano student movement of the 1960s, it is ironic that Munoz would ignore the conflict between the radical projects of the student movements that created the multiculturalism movement and later watered down trace elements formally proposed as university policy.
[117] Wandersee, 1988, p. 103.
[118] Dinesh D’Souza, “The visigoths in tweed,” Forbes, April 1, 1991, p. 81-86.
[119] Robin Templeton, “The war on campus,” Education for the People, Volume 2, Number 1, fall 1991, p. 1-2; and Liz Henry and Kathy Mitchell, “Gribben, colleagues make English department a battlefield,” The Daily Texan, August 13, 1990, p. 4.
[120] Evan Carton, “The self besieged: American identity on campus and in the Gulf,” Tikkun, July-August, 1991, p. 40, italics mine.
[121] Berube provides an excellent critique of many of the mainstream press coverage of PC by demonstrating that they almost completely lack evidence to make their case. He finds that they rely on a handful of examples such as the teaching of Rigoberta Menchu’s I Rigoberta Menchu and another professor’s viewing of The Godfather in class to demonstrate the immorality of capitalism. This is certainly a blessing, since the right has hardly discovered many worse examples of authoritarian behavior that do exist.
[122] I found this to be the case among many of the students I interviewed since 1990.
[123] Although never put into print, this argument was made to me by three student activists at the time.
[124] Ami Cheri Mills, CIA Off Campus: Building the Movement Against Agency Recruitment and Research, South End Press: Boston, 1991, p. 54-55.
[125] Cited in Barbara Ransby, “Black students fight back,” The Nation, March 26, 1988, p. 412.
[126] Ibid.
[127] This came up in the discussion that followed the appearance of Luckett’s entourage and my later interviews of three women members of SAW.
[128] Philip Altbach, “Perspectives on Student Political Activism,” in Philip Altbach (ed.), “American Student Activism: The Post-Sixties Transformation, “in Philip Altbach (ed.), Political Student Activism: An International Reference Handbook, NY: Greenwood Press, 1989, p. 3-4.
[129] John Hess, Chuck Kleinhans, and Julia Lesage, “p.C.’ hysteria,” Jump Cut, number 36, p. 127.
[130] Derek Robert, “Homo essence is sexual, not political,” The Daily Texan, January 28, 1991, p.4.
[131] This the reason that I have placed quotation marks around the word “white” each time it appears and why I do not capitalize “black”, Latino” etc. By not doing so I believe I prevent the totalization of these groups that capitalized words and labels often entail.
[132] Christine Stansell, “Liberated loutishness,” Tikkun, July-August, 1991, p. 53.
[133] Kit Belgum and Irene Kacandes, “Tales of German monoculture ring false,” The Daily Texan, April 29, 1991, p. 4. They note that Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari are examining Kafka’s “linguistic synthesis as a multicultural project.”
[134] This was the very concern of Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution?, NY: Pathfinder, 1970, her analysis of social democracy in pre-WWI Germany, and Toni Negri in Marx Beyond Marx. Lessons on the Grundrisse, translated by Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano, edited by Jim Fleming, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey, 1984.
[135] Catarino Felan III, “Hispanic decade,” Tejas, December 1990, p. 6.
[136] Quoted in Richard Bonnin, “Newman urges education reform for U.S., Soviets,” On Campus, November 19, 1990, p. 10.
[137] Carmen Valera, “Multiculturalism: Big business in small souls,” Tejas, December 1990, p. 2.
[138] Julie Nicklin, “Helping to Manage Diversity in the Workforce,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 30, 1992, p. A5.
[139] ONDA, p. 15.
[140] The University Review Editorial Board, “An appeal to University of Texas faculty members, from the University Review of Texas,” University Review, February 1992, p. 11.
[141] Harry Cleaver, “Notes on the Argentine Gauchos and the nature of the working class: from a letter to George Rawick,” Common Sense, number 10, May, 1991, p. 59. Cleaver continues: “From this point of view, to call such workers part of the ‘working class’ is almost insulting, it implies their failure to avoid having their lives reduced to work. To be a worker, for such a person, is to be a loser. Who wants to be a worker?” I plan to expand further on this theme in the last chapter.
[142] Robert King, “Community and factionalism,” The Texas Observer, November 29, 1991, p. 14, italics mine. This appeared as a paid ad by American Income Life Insurance Co. whose Chairman of the Board and CEO is current UT Regent Bernard Rapoport.
[143] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discourse and Language, NY: Pantheon, 1972.