The Pasadena Doubletree is an unlikely site for a conspiracy. The elegant pink structure is sumptuously landscaped and fragrant breezes circulate in the spacious courtyards even on the sultry afternoons of Southern California's Indian Summer. And the dozens of scholars from campuses all over the country who met here late last month did not look like revolutionaries. But behind closed doors of the meeting rooms, the conference on "Cultural Diversity Enhancement" had the tone of one of those "by any means necessary" conventions staged by SDS in the late 60s. The subject was how to turn American higher education inside out. It was sponsored by the Ford Foundation, whose strategy for a radical transformation of the university one critic has called "the aca-demic equivalent of an ethnic cleansing."

In an afternoon session entitled "Re-structuring the University," spokespersons summarized the thinking of the workshops that had taken place earlier that morning. Robert Steele, a Professor of Sociology at Wesleyan, noted that his group was aware that coercion would be required to change the university: "People will not be quietly assimi-lated to multiculturalism by truth through dialogue." They will have to be bought off as well as brought along. Steele described the terms of the deal: "You get research assis-tants, you give mentoring." In other words, using the largesse of Ford and other philan-thropic institutions, advocates of multiculturalism convince the hesitant to join up by paying for research assistants. These assistants, mentors of multiculturalism, must be women and people of color. "We will have changed the university when women and people of color can see themselves running the place," Steele concluded.

AN OFFER YOU CANT REFUSESteele was followed by Jonathan Lee, a Philosophy

Professor at Colorado College who began by reporting that the workshop he represented had wondered if "consensus was an appropriate goal." That is, should advocates of multiculturalism act as a popular front or a vanguard? One of Lee's prescriptions for success was to "divorce courses from instructors" — that is, conceive and institute courses without regard to those who would be doing the teaching.

Continuing in this vein, Lee reported that his group had considered the question, "Is the multicultural approach an adaptation or a revolutionary transformation?" He had come down on the side of the more radical posi-tion: "At stake in multiculturalism is a direct challenge to privatized teaching, to privatized work and to privatized life." Even science, the one area so far immune to this radical transformation, would have to change, ac-cording to Lee: "Instead of teaching science as a doctrine divorced from its social con-text, we could teach science from a histori-cal, economic perspective."

The final speaker was Eve Grossman, a Princeton dean, who said that her group had worried about tenure: "If we want to restruc-ture the university, tenure stands in the way." She said that her group was aware that pro-motion and tenure were based on "disci-pline-based" research. Therefore, "When we talk about changing things, we're really talk-ing about something no less radical than changing disciplines and the definition of research." Grossman made it clear that her group of thinkers had kept their eyes on the prize: "If we want to change the world, we have to change the students."

As the session concluded and the par-ticipants got ready to adjourn for a multicultural reception at the Asia-Pacific Center across the street from the Doubletree ("an important meeting place for the cultures of East and West"), it was hard not to feel a sense of unreality. How did the biggest foun-dation in the world get into the business of academic revolution? Why was Ford push-ing so hard for the deconstruction of Ameri-can higher education?

TURN TO PAGE 4

I N S I D E THE SISTERS GRIMPC PHILANTHROPY

GREENING OF THERED MAN

HETERO-BASHING

JENDIREITER

n Endangered Animals of the Rainforest, a new children's book by Sandra Uchitel, the crea-

tures reproach rapacious humanity. The South American jaguar says: "Our fur is gorgeous, people say/That's why they take our lives away." The ocelot say s,' 'My spotted skin/caught people' s fancy/Destroying my habitat/leaves my life chancy." This is not exactly a Greek chorus. In fact the awful dog-gerel is a tipoff: what we are dealing with in the new, progressive and en-lightened children’s literature is pro-paganda rather than art.

In the bad old days there were books of the"MatildawhoTouchedHerselfinNaughty Places and Went to Hell" variety. In fact,

however, the new, politically correct children's books now clogging the market have the same moral smugness and the same willingness to scare kids into compliance. Instead of faith and good works, the current shibboleths are environmentalism, ethnic chauvinism, and advocacy of alternative lifestyles. Those who do not are more likely to feel like aliens in the weird heaven on earth summoned up by these writers than those who do. Do six-year-olds really need to read picture books that teach about the tragedy of acid rain and the triumph of racial separat-ism.

The chances are that children will be frightened or manipulated by many of these new books, since the problems they confront are (or should be) beyond the concerns of an average youngster, and the solutions they offer "resolve" complex adult controversies with a false simplicity that is often biased as

well as well bogus.The well-publicized Just a Dream by

Chris Van Allsburg (Houghton Mifflin, 1990), for example, is about a little boy named Walter who is "not an enlightened indi-vidual" because he doesn't sort his trash. His punishment is to have politically correct dreams that all the trees are cut down to make toothpicks and that everyone gets lung dis-eases from the smokestacks of factories. He wakes up chastened, begins to sort his trash, and is redeemed. In the bad old days it might have been the savage Indian or the world, the flesh and the devil that was routed by our hero. Today it is rapacious capitalism.

What is the message of this new envi-ronmentally sensitive literature? That per-sonal evil is in symbiosis with systemic evil. The spitball thrown in class is responsible for the depletion of the rainforests; industry and

TURN TO PAGE 14

MULTICULTURAL MAFIA

I

PAGE 2 OCTOBER. 1992

E d i t o r i a l S t a f fEditors

Peter CollierDavid Horowitz

Literary Editor John Ellis

Art Director Shay Marlowe

Operations Director Judd Magilnick

Campus Editor Bill Cerveny

Editorial Assistants

Tracey BurgessCaitlin CollierLisa Maguire

Contributors

Michael Antonnuci is editor of The Right Mind

K.L. Billingsley wrote Sensitivity Police Brutality in the September issue.

Douglas Fowler is a Professor at Florida State

University.

John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson areMinneapolis attorneys. John Miller wrote Surviving PCin the

September issue. Jeff Muir is a former editor of the Michigan ReviewMarvin Olasky is the author of The Compassion

IndustryJendi Reiter is a graduate student at Harvard

Charles Sykes is the author of A Nation of Victims.

HETERODOXY is published by the Centerfor the Study of Popular Culture. The Center is

a California 501 (c) 3. Editorial: (916) 265-9306. Fax:(916) 265-3119. Subscription: 12

issues $25. Send checks to Center for the Studyof Popular Culture, 12400 Ventura Blvd.,Studio City, California 91604. Visa and

MasterCard accepted. Inquiries: 800-752-6562

Heterodoxy is distributed to newsstands and bookstoresby Bernhard B. DeBoer, 113 East Centre Street, Nutley,

NJ 07110

COMING UP

WOMEN'S STUDIES

NUCLEAR FAMILIES

STUDENT LIFE

SPIKE LEE

I was happy to receive your May issue of Heterodoxy. The reader response from the left-wing pinheads is especially amusing. You know you are on the right track when you provoke such a response. Perhaps a program of gift subscrip-tions to the politically correct would send them completely over the edge. I would be happy to participate in sponsoring such a subscription.The first issue, which I received after subscribing, is the September 1992 issue. Is there any way you could send me Nos. 1 and 3?

Michael Grant Oklahoma City

Ed: We have had a lot of requests for the first 3 issues. Unfortunately, we have only a handful left and in fact would appreciate it if readers would send us any copies of those issues they are willing to part with. We do have copies of the editorial "PC Riot," which we have prepared as a flyer, and would be happy to send that to any readers who request it.

Please cancel. We will bury you!Deborah Hovy Boulder, Colorado

Of COURSE I am in favor of spreading Political Correctness worldwide. The main problem with my aim is that the present so-called exponents of Political Correctness have it all wrong. They are blasphemers. They are spreading bovine flatulence. They don't know their masses from scrolls in the ground. Beef is good for you and good for the planet. Lean beef has the same percentage of cholesterol as lean turkey. Cattle eat stuff that you and I and most animals cannot digest; stuff that grows on land that will not grow the veggies that you and I can eat. Without the protection of mankind, beef cattle would not exist on this planet. The gasses that cattle release are good for the environment. They react with the overabundance of ozone to produce more carbon dioxide and water vapor that collect in the upper atmosphere. These in turn capture the sun's warming rays and are important in protecting the earth from the ice age that would otherwise be rapidly approaching. Meanwhile, the small percentage of sulfides in these gassesmake the earth appear from outer space as inhospitable. This protects us from alien invaders. Have you never wondered why the flying saucers have not come in force and subdued us? To them we appear to be a stinkball.

Millard Perstein Sedona, Arizona

Clerk Replies:I am gratified that you saw fit to include me in your list of traitors ("Treason of the Clerks"). It validates the course of my heretical work when my many critics on the left are joined by neo-conservatives such as Horowitz and Collier. As to your first point about the Union for Democratic Intellectuals (UDI), you are right: UDI has a few notables on its member-ship list, while most of its members have "labored in the trenches" among the "second raters." But, to paraphrase Roman Hruska's defense of Nixon's Supreme Court nomi-nee Harrold Carswell, we second raters have a right to fight for democracy, too. Our list includes a large number of people who work in the second and third rank institutions: teachers in community colleges, four year liberal arts colleges as well as students and non-academics such as writers and artists few of whom enjoys canonical status. Alas, contrary to your claim, none of us is proletarian.I appreciate your views but many biographical details about me are either misstated or dead wrong. Just to set the record straight: The quotation marks around “labor organizer” implies that I may never have been one. As a factory worker for ten years, eight of them in the steel industry in New Jersey, I was an officer of my local union. Then, for four years I was employed as an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and for three years the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers where I directed the organizing staff in the northeast region and in Puerto Rico. Antioch gives no PHD and never did. It helped start the Union Graduate School, a fully accredited degree granting institution where I earned a PHD in 1975 not on the basis of "life experience," but among other work, a thesis "Marx, Technology and Labor" which I defended before my committee and about a hundred observers.I direct the Center for Cultural Studies, not "Critical Studies". On the whole, contrary to your information, our conferences are critical of traditional knowledge, not the capitalist order. Our Center is postmodernist, not postcapitalist, but the differ-ence may be too subtle for those interested in invective rather than accuracy. You state that my "tenure was denied" at CUNY. I was never

denied tenure by any academic institution. My academic career began in 1972 as an untenured assistant professor at Staten Island Community College. After publishing two books, one of Which False Promises was widely known, I was appointed, in 1977, full professor of Social Science and Comparative Culture with tenure at UC-Irvine. In 19821 was appointed, with tenure, to CUNY Graduate School's Sociol-ogy Program. The student demonstrations in which I was involved were over budget cuts, not my tenure which I already had.Science as Power, now in its second printing, is a controver-sial book. If you have read it carefully (or at all) you would know that it does not, as you report, "advance the proposition that science is just an instrument of class oppression." This is a silly proposition that, as any knowledgeable student of Soviet ideology knows, even Stalin never clearly articulated. My book, in concurrence with the preponderance of social studies of science, most of which are Durkheimian, not Marxist, argues that scientific knowledge is subject to the social and cultural context within which it is produced and, far from enjoying status as a politically and socially neutral inquiry is intertwined with power, of which class is only one of the elements. To the crude mind this may amount to little more than theoretical hair splitting, but I assure you it is a far cry from Stalinism for which science was the salvation of humankind. Stalin's theory of history had many convolu-tions, the most consistent of which was technological deter-minism where science was equivalent to Truth and held up asthe antinomy of "ideology", a position, perhaps not far from that of most non-Marxist students of science. As for my book Crisis in Historical Materialism (1981) your insight that the preposition "of means something quite different from "in" is correct. In recent work I have concluded that most of the fundamental propositions of historical materialism are, in large measure, untenable, especially the determination of social and cultural life by the economic infrastructure. However, you are still confused: not all historical materialists are Stalinists; the phrase was coined by Engels, not Stalin and is shared by many anti-Stalinists, among them the followers of Trotsky and, indeed, Marxist-oriented demo-cratic socialists. Your confusion reminds me of the old joke: An employee is called into the boss's office: "You're fired" says the boss "for being a communist" "But I'm an anti-communist" replies the employee. "I don't care what kind of communist you are."

Stanley Aronowitz

Editors Respond:

Like many radicals, Stanley Aronowitz has no sense of humor and no ear for satire. The quotation marks around "labor organizer" were not meant to imply that Stanley was not a labor organizer, but to indicate its fatuous importance to his sense of an intellectual portfolio, as when he became labor organizer in residence at Studies on the Left and then went on to become labor organizer in residence at CUNY. On the other hand, Stanley does have the radical' s inexhaustible capacity for self-parody, as in his claim to have produced a corpus of "heretical work"—this from a man whose Church of Gender/Race/Class Oppression controls every academic "discourse" in which he operates and is credentialed, and whose "union" of intellectualoids was created in order to defend the Torquemadas of the Pc Inquisition. Like all commissars, Stanley is adept both at academic hairsplitting and brazen deception. He claims his book Science as Power shares insights with "Durkheimians" rather than Marxists. We count 4 pages of reference to Durkheim in the book and 155 to Marxism (not including the chapter devoted to the Frankfurt School). Stanley claims we mis-represent his the-sis. But it is self-described as an argument that science is "a socially constructed discourse that legitimates its power bypresenting itself as truth" and that power amounts to social (i.e., class/race/gender) oppression. This is a Stalinist propo-sition, even though Stalin had not thought of the race/gender angle before giving up the ghost. When we look back over the bleak and bloodstained landscape of Soviet totalitarianism and assess the intellectual inputs of Engels, Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin, do we really need to calibrate every nuance of their theoretical differences in rejecting their political agendas, or can we just agree that they were totalitarians first of all?Skipping over Stanley's other tedious points, we come to his punch line. Right, Stanley, we don't care what kind of a communist you are. If you were really an anti-communist you would have joined the National Association of Scholars or some other group opposing the politicization of the university.

Reader Response

PAGE 3

D I T O R S T A T M E N T

REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUMWITH MALICE AFORESKIN: The last week in September is the beginning of the High Holy Days for the Jews and the silly season for Tilckun editor Michael Lerner, who annually rewrites the two thousand year old prayers to bring them into harmony with his idea of political correctness. Lerner's versions are, needless to say, suitably liber-ated from any references to the God of the Jews Himself, closer in fact to the musings of a multicultural schmuck (or Obi Wan Kenobe's Marxist brother) than the Hebrew prophets:

"For all our sins, may the force that makes forgiveness possible forgive us... For the sins of accepting the current distribution of wealth and power as unchangeable; For the sins of feeling so worn out when we hear about oppression that we finally close our ears;For the sins of participating in a racist society and not dedicating more energy to fighting racism — or even pretending that the prob-lem had gone away until others began to burn down cities in their despair, And for the sins of allowing our society to give low priority to the fight against AIDS, cancer, Alzheimer's and other diseases, while squandering hundreds of billions of dollars on unnecessary defense expenditures; And for the sins of expecting that our leaders and activists must be perfect or far more together than the rest of us..."

WITHMALICEBEHIND-THOUGHT: The following statement was provided by the Office of Affirmative Action of the Univer-sity of Massachusetts at Amherst in response to a query from reader Louise Dewey of Littleton, Mass, about dropping its exclusion of pedophilia from the protected category "sexual orientation" in its discrimination ■ code: "The fact is that an earlier version of our Affirmative Action Statement, in dis-cussing our desire to not discriminate on the basis of what is customarily called "Sexual Orientation' went out of its way to be clear that pedophilia was not acceptable. When that version was revised it became clear that it would be impossible to spell out the various unacceptable practices (for instance, those that were illegal) and so we dropped back to using the customary brief statement which is almost universal nowadays. One or two alert and malicious characters picked up this change, and elected to interpret it as an en-dorsement of pedophilia. It was no such thing." Well, since they brought it up, why is pedophilia regarded as a "sexual orienta-tion," or, if it is, how does it differ from other "sexual orientations?" Why, unlike all those other illegal and/or unacceptable practices, was pedophilia singled out in the first place? Could it have to do, possibly, with some internal struggle among the politically cor-rect?

RED ED: Angela Y. Davis, immortalized in campus lounges and Women's Studies Cen-ters across the nation explains her recom-mendation of the Autobiography of convicted felon Assata Shakur as essential education reading in a recent issue of The Nation: "Without undervaluing the role education plays in our history and in her own life, Assata does not, for example, privilege the narratives of her encounters with the educa-tional system over those representing her experiences with the penal system." In otherwords, Shakur learned more about criminal-ity from doing time in jail than doing time in school. When someone like Angela Davis is a professor, education is a crime.

BITING THE HAND THAT FEEDS: Mary Johnson, editor of The Disability Rag, a civil rights journal, attacks Jerry Lewis for raising hundreds of millions of dollars to help disabled people. "Helping "those people' by making them be like us — normal, not dis-abled — is one thing," she sneers. "Helping them to be equal and remain disabled is something entirely different." Once again the old saw is proven: no good deed goes unpunished.

PROFESSOR EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK

IMMUNE DEFICIENT METAPHOR: Af-ter the outing of Phyllis Schlafly son, Randy Shilts, gay historian and writer (And the Band Played On, etc.) had this statement: "All these people have gay kids, and they know the line against gays is complete non-sense. It's like being the piano player in the whorehouse and pretending you don't know what's going on upstairs."

CARTOON CRIME: The locksmith of the University of Northern Arizona was recently fired by Affirmative Action police in the administration for having a newspaper car-toon on his office wall. The cartoon pictured three dogs in an alley watching a cat, tail in the air, saunter in their direction. The cap-tion: "She's looking for trouble."

AIDS ON $5 A DAY: While Gay Activists flood the nation's high schools with condoms,

PC RIOTER ARRESTED FOR MURDER: When radical activists at the University of Massachusetts staged their own riot to cel-ebrate the "liberation" of Los Angeles last spring, terrorizing the staff of the Daily Col-legian, Alex Delgado was one of their heavy hitters. (See Heterodoxy, June, 1992.) Collegian staff members remember Delgado, who was wearing a large beaded necklace, threatening violence during the negotiations if the protestors' demands weren’t' met. His beaded necklace turned

out to be the insignia of a local Latino gang called The Latin Kings. Delgado was a high-ranking member. As school term began this fall in Amherst, a teenager in nearby Springfield named Amaldo Esteras-Perez made the mistake of disparaging one of the gang's necklaces. Shortly afterwards he turned up dead, the victim of an execution-style killing, which Amherst police say was plotted by Delgado and the Kings.

MULTICULTURAL SNAG AT STANFORD: Stanford's push for multicultural correctness is slightly disori-ented this fall having lost its leader, former president Donald Kennedy, as the result of multiple money scandals. It also has lost its Multicultural Educator Greg Ricks, who went on to greener pastures, and the director of its Black Community Service Center, Keith Archuleta, who was arrested for secretly vid-eotaping women during photography ses-sions in his apartment. But then, no one said it would be easy.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION QUEENS: Harvard announced that although 171 black students were admitted to this year's fresh-man class, only 95 chose to attend. Senior Admissions officer David Evans contacted most of the black students who had declined Harvard's offer and found that the most fre-quently cited reason was Harvard's need-based financial aid policy. Other institutions, in effect, were willing to pay them to enroll to fulfill local affirmative action quotas. Ac-cording to Evans, several of the black stu-dents who chose to avoid Harvard and take advantage of full tuition race scholarships had family incomes of more than $100,000.

NUREMBERG LAWS, USA: The philan-thropic community has joined the rush to the racial future. Participants to the "Wingspread" conference, a gathering of Wisconsin foun-dations to discuss "Private Philanthropy and the Needs of Women" were sent the follow-ing request by its organizer, the Johnson Foundation: "Please list the number of Gov-erning Board Members/Board of Trustees,. Professional Staff who identify themselves as: Men, Women, African Ameri-can, Asian American, Hispanic Native Ameri-can, White, Other; please specify:..." Please also list the card carrying members of Racists of America.

KUDOS TO KAZIN: While many of the second raters in the nation's English depart-ments plow the party line, the distinguished literary critic Alfred Kazin puts political correctness in perspective: "In the name of class-race-gender equality, teachers and stu-dents all over America are now being trained in intolerance to defame and exclude those who do not follow the party line. The cultural damage seems irrevocable."

V IS

condemning anyone who doesn't sign on to their agenda as sentencing gays to death, Bob Damron's Address Book, a kind of FODOR's for homosexual travelers enters its 28th pub-lishing year. Available at large bookstore chains such as Barnes & Noble's Bookstar outlets, the guide lists gay accommodations and sights of erotic interest in all 50 states, Canada, the Virgin Islands, Costa Rica and Mexico. It includes not only sex establish-ments and businesses, but such freelance pos-

sibilities for sex with strangers as "Cruisy Areas. "Thus, for example if you are thinking of a vacation in Decatur, Alabama "Cruisy areas include: * Amtrak & Greyhound Depots (AYOR) *Beltline Mall *Delano Park nr. Picnic Tables *Point Mallard Park -Swimmin' Hole (Summers) and *"The Pumps"(AYOR). (AYOR = At Your Own Risk.) Ads in this indispensable guide include one in living color for the Leland Hotel in San Francisco featuring a prone naked male derriere with the headline: "In San Francisco, the Perfect Spot to Lodge..." In introducing the section on Mexico, editor Dan Delbex shares this tip: "Much of Mexico is very poor. Consequently, many boys may be available for the price of a cocktail..." The 1992 edition of Damron's Address Book is dedicated to the memory Delbex, who died of AIDS on October 5, 1991 at the age of 35.

LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS

PAGE 4 OCTOBER. 1992

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

From its founding in 1936 through 1991 Ford has doled out over $7 billion to over 9,000 organizations and 100,000 individuals across America and overseas. Its tax return stands a full seven inches high, three times the size of the Manhattan phonebook, and in September of 1991 its assets stood at $6.1 billion. Its staff of 574 are spread across offices in New York, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Chile, Peru, Bangladesh, Peking, New Delhi, Jakarta, Bangkok, Manila, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, Cairo, Zimbabwe and Kenya. Its program budget for 1992 and 1993 is $644.5 million, a 7.5 percent increase over the previous biennium.

Ford is America's philanthropic superpower and by far the largest and most powerful foundation in the world. But if in the past it has thought globally, it is now acting locally through an effort to mass produce political correct-ness on campus the way Henry Ford cranked out Model Ts in his Dearborn factories to acquire the billions that en-dowed this institution. Old Henry said you could have a car

FRANKLIN THOMAS

any color, as long as it was black. For the Ford Foundation, you can get a piece of the six-billion-dollar pie, as long as you sign onto the multicultural agenda.

"The Foundation is a creature of capitalism," Henry Ford II said when he resigned in disgust from the foundation that bears his family name in 1977, adding that it was hard to discern any trace of capitalism "in anything the founda-tion does. It is even more difficult to find an understanding of this in many of the institutions, particularly the universi-ties that are the beneficiaries of the Foundation's grant program." The Foundation, lamented Hank the Deuce, was ignoring the very economic system whose abundance made it and all other philanthropic foundations possible.

In talking to Henry II, former Treasury Secretary William Simon noted that by the late 1960s foundation was "engaged in a radical assault on traditional culture, under the rubric of the 'public interest' and 'systematic social change'." Simon asked Henry Ford II how such a thing could have happened. "I tried for 30 years to change it from within to no avail," said Ford.

A favorite sport of philanthropoids (as members of the philanthropic community sometimes call each other) is determining the moment at which the Ford Foundation lurched to the left. The consensus seems to be that the Rubicon was crossed during the regime of McGeorge Bundy, the Foundation's president from 1966-1979. This Camelot exile led the Foundation as if it were a government agency and launched a new style of politicized giving. Some of Bundy's largesse was parochial — in particular a grant of $ 131,000 to eight members of Robert Kennedy's staff in 1969 to help them overcome their grief after Sirhan Sirhan gunned down their boss. The grants came under the rubric of "Broadening opportunities for young men and women who might otherwise be unable to develop their abilities." Call them Bobby's kids, the waifs of Westchester, Cambridge and the Ivy League.

The politicized grants kept coming after that as the Ford Foundation, particularly during the Nixon years, came to see itself as a government in exile, an engine for the social transformation which the American people signaled their aversion to by increasingly withdrawing support from lib-eral candidates.

Ford supported the La Raza people in their attempts to organize Hispanics in the Southwest. A month after Carl Stokes announced his candidacy for mayor in Cleveland, Ford jumped in with a grant to CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) to underwrite a voter registration program that helped Stokes carry the day. In 1982 the Urban Institute was the recipient of a $3,500,000 Ford grant, which it used to produce a 26-volume critique of Reagan Administration welfare policies. Some of Ford's 1991 grantees include the ACLU Foundation ($900,000), The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund ($500,000); the Lawyer's

Committee for Civil Rights Under Law ($350,000); and film-maker Henry Hampton, who got $200,000 to make a docu-mentary on Malcolm X.

he ultimate target of all this energetic social transfor-mation, however, is America's educational system, particularly its system of higher education. By the

early 80s, Ford, whose activist staff was networked not just into the nerve centers of "progressive" politics but into the ganglia as well, saw that the university would be (that is, could be made to be) the battleground for an apocalyptic effort to force multicultural ism into the intellectual life of the nation. And this became one of the Foundation's chief ends.

It was a perfect place, the American university, for an eleemosynary institution to get a big bang for the buck. No central bureaucracy dictates what is taught; more importantly, most schools are hurting financially. Ford realized that withtheir enormous financial clout and their appearance of being above politics, foundations were the institutions best posi-tioned to change the campus climate. Stripped of all the elegant rationales and academic persiflage, it was essentially a matter of using lucrative grants to bribe administrators into making the desired changes. Of the $644.5 million it will spend in the next two years, therefore, Ford has earmarked $79.2 million for "Education and Culture." That is the division currently plan-ning and bankrolling PC on campus.

To promote its 1990 "Race Relations and Cultural Diversity Initiative," Ford hired a host of PC paladins: H. Keith Brodie, President of Duke; F. Sheldon Hackney, President of the University of Pennsylvania: Donald Kennedy, then Presi-dent of Stanford; Donna Shalala, Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin/Madison; Donald Stewart, President of the Col-lege Board; Frances D. Fergusson, President of Vassar (and a member of Ford's board of directors); Bernard W. Harleston, President of the City College of New York; Blandina Cardenas Ramirez, the American Council on Education's director of minority concerns; and Harold T. Shapiro, president of Princeton.

Ford clearly got the most qualified people for the job. Brodie, Shalala., Fergusson, and Kennedy had all fought the PC wars on their own campuses, instituting "speech codes," bas-ing Western civilization courses, and creating race-based admissions and hiring programs. According to Edgar Beckham, the 59-year-old program officer for Ford's Education and Culture effort who organized the Pasadena conference, this group "worked with the president of the Foundation to develop the conceptual framework" of the "diversity" program. Ford uses unnamed "additional advisers" on an ad hoc basis and Beckham adds that "our own grantees advise us."

The academic advisers' February 8, 1990 "Dear Col-league" letter, written on behalf of Ford, was a collector's item:

"Reports of racial and religious intolerance and sexual harassment are rising. Partly in reaction to this, some have questioned the free speech and academic freedom essential to the vitality of an academic community... Higher education's role in meeting this challenge is to embrace the rich diversity of American life in a manner that en-hances the educational experiences of all students. .. Our commitment to diversity requires colleges and universities to complete this transition by increasing substantially the numbers of people from underrepresented groups in our student bod-ies, faculties, and administrative offices. This is not only a challenge to admissions offices and faculty recruiters. It is crucial that diversity be sustained through completed student degrees and successful faculty and administrative careers. Increased nu-merical diversity alone will not end these tensions. "Reaping the full dividends of diversity may re-quire an institution to rethink certain aspects of the curriculum and other traditional commitments of the academic community. Diversity also brings changes outside the classroom affecting residen-tial life, campus services, cultural events, and student activities..."This recognition of differences has framed affir-mative action efforts in admitting students, hiring faculty and awarding financial aid . . ."

It was likely this group that Ford Foundation President Franklin Thomas, a former New York Deputy Police Commis-sioner, was thinking of when he gushed, "there is more intellectual horsepower in this place now than there has ever been." Some of the teachers and administrators who had worked with the individuals probably would have had a

different word to use with the prefix horse.Thomas wields substantial power as both President of

the Ford Foundation, an office he has held since 1979, and a member of Ford's board of directors. In his review of 1989, Thomas wrote, "It is ironic that at just the moment when the world is embracing the American ideal, here at home we seem to be retreating from America's great promise of opportu-nity." This promise he linked to the Great Society-like programs of the 1960s, which he said were trashed without the benefit of "objective assessments."

He doesn't intend to let the same thing happen to the adventures in multiculturalism Ford has begun to sponsor. In a September 12, 1990 press release, Thomas explains Ford's intent to "broaden cultural and intellectual diversity in Ameri-can higher education." The program's goal is "to ensure that college curricula and teaching keep pace with the rapid demographic and cultural changes under way in American society."

Adds Thomas: "Most of us have little understanding of the diverse culture, attitudes, and experiences that make up our own societies. Unfortunately, this ignorance about other cultures breeds insensitivity and intolerance in young and old alike!" He hermetically sealed his theory with a strong bottom line: "to reach the roots of intolerance and improve campus life, we must make the teaching of non-Western cultures a basic element of undergraduate education."

Unlike most foundations which were necessarily reac-tive, seeing their job as judging between the respective merits of proposals submitted to them, Ford had a better idea. It would take the initiative. According to its 1990 annual report, Ford "invited" 200 colleges to compete for grants of $ 100,000. But with the carrot came a big stick: any group or institution that receives any money from the Foundation must adhere to

EAMON KELLY

Ford's affirmative action guidelines.According to a recent article in the Chronicle of

Philanthropy, every grant application must include a "diver-sity table," stark as a South African passbook, which details "the number of non-whites and women involved in the project and, sometimes, at the entire institution." And in Ford's view some minorities are more equal than others. Asian-Americans maybe one of the groups suffering most discrimination in higher education, particularly in the Uni-versity of California system, but Ford does not consider them a minority eligible for hiring preferences.

Ford's ramrod in multiculturalism is its vice president Susan Berresford, whom the Chronicle describes as "dogged in her efforts." According to administrators who have dealt with Ford, Berresford often calls applicants on the carpet about their percentages to bully them into conformity. As the same time, she denies that the rules constitute a "quota system." Indeed, in the face of all Ford's efforts to engineer human souls, Berresford persists in claiming that the primary criterion to receive Ford money is "talent."

Looking at Ford's obsession with percentages of mi-norities and women at the institutions with which it does business, Michael Joyce of the Bradley Foundation says that such a draconian affirmative action program is "an amazing thing because it means they are behaving as if they were a government." Joyce adds that "None of us on the moderate or conservative side even thinks of doing anything like that. We'd be laughed out of the business if we tried to impose. Nor would we dare involve ourselves in the criteria for hiring and that sort of thing."

Joyce's point is worth pondering. Imagine if, say, the John M. Olin Foundation (which people on the left have vilified simply because it gave a small grant to Dinesh D'Souza to complete Illiberal Education) attempted to es-tablish the "Ronald Reagan Free-Market Studies Program" at Stanford and insisted that, as a condition of funding, the school hire more middle-aged, white, Austrian-American

T

and Anglo-American economists and change the base cur-riculum to include Von Mises, Hayek, Frederic Bastiat, Thomas Sowell, and Hernando de Soto. People all over the philanthropic community, with Ford no doubt leading the charge, would say that Olin was politically interfering with university structures in behalf of a fascist agenda.

ne of the schools which qualified for Ford's $100,000 "Cultural Diversity Grant" and which therefore became one of its R&D projects was Tulane University. "The amount of money is

nothing," says Tulane political science professor Paul Lewis, "it's simply an excuse to do what they wanted to do," adding that "what they would really like is one university to be a proving ground for their ideas."

The goals of Tulane's "Initiatives for Race and Gender Enrichment," were breathtaking in scope. According to the University's President Eamon Kelly, their objective was to "change, over time, the character of our university, and to bring it to the next level of social and human progress." At present, racism and sexism were "pervasive" in American society and "fundamentally present in all institutions." No one was immune because racism and sexism were "subcon-scious or at least sub-surface."

If the disease was a pandemic, a strain of racism and sexism resistant to such remedies as free inquiry and spirited open discussion, the cure was systematic quota hiring, with the Tulane provost empowered to intervene when enough "people of color" were not hired. The quota hirelings were to be given reduced teaching loads, higher salaries and extra stipends.

Ford's front-persons pressured departments to hold seminars on gender and racial scholarship and to integrate materials on women and "people of color" into their courses. To lift Tulane to the next level of social and human progress the school would also need tools of enforcement. Therefore, students were encouraged to report on one another as one way of providing the university "with tools to begin the process of removing racism and sexism from ourselves and our institu-tion." Department heads were ordered to report periodically

on racist and sexist attitudes among their colleagues and students. The initiatives also provided for an "Enrichment Liaison Person" in each department to act as a commissar monitoring conformity. On all counts, the Tulane experiment gave a good sense as to what Ford's PC initiative would look like in widespread practice.

"My gut feeling about this," says dissident Tulane pro-fessor Paul Lewis, "is that Kelly has been sent down as a missionary from the Ford Foundation." Indeed, Eamon Kelly was a Ford Foundation program officer in charge of social development from 1969-1974. (From 1974-79 he headed the Foundation's Program Related Investments.) Ronald Mason, Kelly' s senior vice-president at Tulane in charge of implement-ing the diversity initiative, was also a Ford transplant, as was the man Kelley installed as chancellor, who after a wave of faculty protests over the program has since departed.

For Lewis, a veteran of the civil-rights movement, the Ford initiative at Tulane was "the worst assault on academic freedom since Senator Joe McCarthy's escapades in the 1950s." In the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Lewis argued that "uni-versities cannot operate where dissent is discouraged, where inquiry is under the thumb of orthodoxy and where professors and students are spied upon and reported."

As a result of his agitation against Ford's carpet bagging at Tulane, Lewis found an ally in philosophy professor Eric Mack. Mack pointed out that the University's multicultural "Initiatives" did little to remedy the fact that Tulane "offers almost no course in Islamic, African, Near Eastern, Indian, Chinese, or Japanese history, literature, fine arts, philosophy, or religion. Nor does the document display any interest in intellectual diversity."

Throughout 1991 Lewis continued to mobilize opposi-tion to Kelly's plan. As a result, Tulane eventually dropped the declaration that diversity, rather than scholarship or teaching, was the university's highest priority. Last May, Tulane's board of administrators scrapped most of Kelly's plan. Trying to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat, Kelly claimed implau-sibly that the board's statement, far from foiling his plans, was actually an endorsement. "A liberal pragmatist would have cut his losses," Lewis says, "but Kelly is digging in. He's an ideologue."

While the Tulane battle raged, Ford was proceeding with his grand strategy elsewhere. Boston College an-nounced plans for a course on "alterity" or "otherness." Denison University announced efforts to extend its minor-ity and women's studies requirement into its Freshman studies Program. Haverford College announced plans to create or revise ten courses relating to prejudice and dis-crimination that would make up its new core requirement in social justice. The University of Rochester announced plans to expand its Freshman Ventures to include "the experience of oppressed groups and their resistance to oppression."

The fact that all these announcements were made simultaneously, and in virtually identical PC boilerplate, was no coincidence. Each of the schools had received a grant under Ford's "Race Relations and Cultural Diversity Initiative." Other schools which got grants from Ford included Bemidji State, Brandeis University, UCLA, Uni-versity of Iowa, Millsaps College, Mt. St. Mary's College, New School for Social Research, Notre Dame, Pitzer College, University of Redlands, Spring Hill College, Southwest Texas State, Virginia Commonwealth, and Wesleyan College.

The inclusion of Wesleyan, a prestigious liberal arts school in Middletown, Connecticut, was of special inter-est. Wesleyan is the alma mater of Ford's Education and Culture Director Edgar Beckham. Beckham was also a lecturer in the German department before going into administration. As a Dean of Wesleyan, Beckham cham-pioned politically correct programs. The kind of network-ing Ford can do is shown by the fact that Beckham was able to deliver Wesleyan to Ford for its pilot program and bag $100,000 for his alma mater at the same time.

In 1990 Beckham told the New York Times that he was enthusiastic about the Ford job "because of the experience I'd had on a single campus ."It was Beckham' s "strong view that if you want to get at the heart of culture, you have to engage the faculty and you have to affect the curriculum."

How has this engagement proceeded with Ford's PC dollars? Wesleyan boasts four organizations for "stu-

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PAGE 6 OCTOBER. 1992

dents of color" and supports a chapter of SOR, Society Organized against Racism. A "students of color council" meets regularly with Dean Yenina Montero and other officers, according to Montero, "to go over the agenda." One faculty member who for obvious reasons prefers not to be named says that since the Ford grant, Wesleyan's PC cadres have been pushing for race and gender based hiring and "front-loading a lot of stuff into orientation." Fresh-men must attend a "four or five day boot camp" which features "multicultural and homosexual propaganda." The Ford grant also paid for faculty to have one course-load reduction, which they were to use in the development of multicultural curricula.

Ford's initiative at Wesleyan also got a boost from President William Chace, a former Donald Kennedy crony during his days helping to dislodge Stanford's Western Civilization requirement. New vice-president Joanne Crighton took charge of minority hiring, targeting five places in each department, with special emphasis on English and History. Wesleyan became the success story that helped palliate the fiasco at Tulane.

vergreen State, in Olympia, Washington, was founded as an "alternative" school in 1970 and remains a time capsule of fuzzy leftism to this day, a

sort of public version of nearby Reed College. At Evergreen there is no classic breakdown of disciplines, only "team teaching" and "collaborative learning." The racial breakdown of students and "faculty of color" is carefully monitored and administrators can rattle off the racial percentages like the periodic tables.

As it happens, Evergreen administrator Barbara Smith also runs the Washington Center for Undergraduate Education, which owes its existence in part to a grant from Ford. The Center is the largest statewide education project in the country. Participating schools include not only Evergreen, but the University of Washington and its two branch campuses, Seattle University (a private school), and 12 community colleges for a grand total of 43 institu-tions. All of them get information from the Center, a clearing house for multiculturalism.

Barbara Smith wrote a grant proposal, sent it to Ford, and hit the jackpot. With Beckham's enthusiastic support, Ford cut Evergreen a whopping $718,400 grant for a "Cultural Pluralism Curriculum Infusion Project," a "seven-step intervention" to promote cultural pluralism and "mani-fest the point of view in new and reshaped courses." Smith didn't even have to practice grantswomanship in getting the money. "Out of the blue they [Ford] wanted to come and talk," she says. Edgar Beckham and some Ford col-leagues were soon winging their way to the Evergreen campus, where they took a hands-on approach. "There was one whole meeting where they coached us what to write," says Smith. By the time they had collaborated on a pro-posal, the grant was a foregone conclusion.

"The program wouldn't be in existence if it weren't for grant money," confesses Smith. "We had 90 people for 10 days in institutes. Seven faculty and administrators from each school." Without the grant, "we could not have had that kind of time or participation." Ford, says Smith has a "well developed idea where diversity should go, since they have a long-term agenda."

What is this long range plan? In addition to a sort of Johnny Appleseed approach to sowing multiculturalism wherever it finds fertile ground, Ford appears to be concen-trating on what Beckham calls "institutional clusters." Besides the Washington Center, Ford channels money to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education and the Associated Colleges of the Midwest. The clusters, says Beckham, "will develop programs of institutional teams, leadership teams that will undergo an educational process themselves and then return to their campuses and influence the continuing institutional change."

Ford gave $434,000 to the Western Interstate Com-mission of Higher Education to expand and streamline its Institute on Ethnic Diversity. The Commission will invite Western colleges to attend intensive seminars on making their core curricula more diverse. "Participating institu-tions," the foundation notes, "will be required to make an

explicit public commitment, endorsed by the governing board, to work toward greater campus diversity." The concept will include addressing "goals, strategies and timelines for hiring minority faculty and staff, increas-ing the enrollment and retention of minority students, establishing faculty development programs, renewing the curriculum ... and making appropriate changes in administrative policies and practices."

Along with the clusters, Ford grants continue to flow to individual schools. In Los Angeles, St. Mary's College is using a $100,000 Ford grant to hold faculty-student "development workshops led by experts on multicultural education and teaching." Northeastern Illinois will use Ford money to hold a campus-wide "University Day" with a diversity theme and workshopsfor faculty. Pitzer College is using $100,000 in Ford funds to revise traditional courses to "incorporate the perspectives of different racial, ethnic and cultural groups." Queens College will launch a Departmental Diversity Initiative that will include "re-evaluation of each department' s educational philosophy and program. . ." The University of Iowa will use a Ford grant in "a required two-semester course." (Ford is not in the busi-ness of funding electives.) Notre Dame's $91,640 Ford grant will bankroll two-week intensive workshops for faculty members in core curriculum.

e Pauw University in Greencastle Indiana, where Dan Quayle went to school, is now having financial problems but thanks to Ford

there is plenty of money for PC. De Pauw chaplain Stuart Lord holds classes in "deconstruction," the "reversal of negative and pessimistic ideas that have been embedded in people's minds." Professors send students to the video room to watch PBS fare such as "Racism 101." A multicultural tape features Gary Harper, a Purdue gradu-ate student arguing — unopposed of course — that "homosexuals have their own culture and face the same oppression" as other groups.

In his recent convocation address, De Pauw Presi-dent Robert Bottoms cited the authority of antediluvian leftist William Sloane Coffin, who had recently spoken at the school, to the effect that "freedom means building a ... just civic order." Bottoms said that De Pauw had "speeded up" the diversity process and referred to the "black perspective" and "Hispanic perspective" as though such a thing actually existed. "The administration's task," Bottoms said, "is to keep the issue of community on the institution's agenda. In fact, it may be much more important than most of what occupies our time." That line may have been the harbinger of a new direction for the school, taken with an eye to more grant money.

Last year De Pauw invited Edgar Beckham to give a convocation address, after which the Ford official asked if anything was being done in multiculturalism. Administrators knew that money was to be had and quickly submitted a proposal. Ford responded with a grant. The school used the funds to establish Ekabo House, an experiment in multicultural living.

A $100,000 Ford grant will enable the University of Redlands in Southern California to run a four-week workshop "focused on the introduction of cultural diver-sity into the curriculum." Vassar's $100,000 from Ford will set up teams of students and faculty who will "develop recommendations for revision of ten tradi-tional courses that serve as introductions to disciplines in the humanities and social sciences." Ford wrote a $326,700 check to the University of Pennsylvania for "a series of summer seminars in African-American cul-tural studies." A $300,000 Ford grant to UC Berkeley supports "faculty and student interdisciplinary research on the African diaspora," while a $180,125 Ford grant pays for a new doctoral program at Michigan State in comparative black history.

Under the Ford Plan, radical administrators, fac-ulty and foundations merge in a PC ménage a trios, backed by Ford's fathomless vault of dollars. One gets little clue about this audacious strategy, however, from

Ford's own literature. "They don't want to be too public about what they are doing," says the Bradley Foundation's Michael Joyce, "because they worry that if people with common sense understood what they are doing they would be rejected."

If Ford, as claimed, learns from its grantees, they should pay heed to Marty Strange of the Ford-funded Center for Rural Affairs, in Walthill, Nebraska. "It is a sad day when philan-thropy becomes the custodian of change," Strange recently told the Chronicle of Philanthropy, "because then when change occurs you've got a vested interest and you don't want any more change to occur. And that's exactly what a foundation ought to avoid."

By all indications Ford has thrown such caution to the winds. In fact, it is speeding up its PC production line. The Foundation plans to hire a scholar in residence to advise it on "diversity-related issues."

hen he resigned from the foundation his grandfa-ther started, Henry Ford II said that he hoped it would spend itself out of existence. But that is not

going to happen. Ford has all the money it will ever need, and is able to function as an invisible government in a field like education. It can pursue its radical goal of transforming higher education and yet avoid scrutiny. Even Edgar Beckham admits that "the foundation doesn't get opposition." The last indepen-dent book length critique of the philanthropic leviathan was Dwight MacDonald's The Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions published in 1956.

Ford is so insulated from the consequences of its acts that it never has to reckon what it has done or is doing. As Irving Kristol has noted, during the 1950s Ford pushed the behavioral sciences in the belief that they would bring about the "politics of the future" and create a better society. They didn't and couldn't. The professors groomed in that misguided project were constantly sharpening their tools but capable of no real agriculture. Ford also bankrolled the 1967 effort to decentral-ize New York City's schools, which led Kristol to comment that Ford "blithely went ahead and polarized the city, inflicting enormous damage on the public school system and on the political system of the city. And having caused the damage, it lost interest and went on to something else."

There is a phrase to describe the basis of the Ford Foundation's meddling in higher education: the arrogance of power. The architects of its assault on higher education are armchair radicals creating a revolution from above. There is no enthusiasm for the future they are plotting, no demand for the innovations they are putting into place. But like other revolu-tions this one does not think in terms of serving informed consumers weighing the pros and cons of its product, but only of imposing its whims on passive victims who must buy whether they like it or not.

CHARLES SYKES AND K.L. BILLINGSLEY

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PHILANTHROPIC CORRECTNESSMARVIN OLASKY

sk James Joseph about Jesus and he sweats. The powerful president of the Council on Foundations, trade association for major

American money-givers such as Ford, Rockefeller, and a thousand other philanthropic foundations, is cool before the television cameras as he promotes his favorite cause: the politicization of charity. Yet, sit in a small interview room with him, pop a theological opener ("What do you think of Christ?"), and the water starts to flow.

The question may be provocative but it is not irrel-evant. Before he became the Jack Valenti of the charity world ten years ago, Joseph was a man of God. Part of a black family that regularly attended a traditional church, he "grew" from those roots by matriculating at Yale Divinity School during the New Age Sixties and gaining ordination in the United Church of Christ, a Protestant denomination so socially liberal and theologically tepid that one wag said that its churches ought to have a question mark rather than a cross on their steeples. Later, Joseph found a home in the Carter Administration as a cabinet undersecretary and after that, when Reaganomics left him unemployed, a place in the philanthropic sun with the Council on Foundations.

In his new job he has pushed hundreds of big money foundations to follow the politicized path set by Ford in the 1960s when it financed black separatists in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school battle, funded Democratic Party regis-trars in the Cleveland mayoral election and sent Bobby Kennedy's staff on an international junket following his assassination. A study published by the Capital Research Center last year spelled out the bottom line of Joseph' s reign of political virtue: a reduction in over-all foundation empha-sis on traditional charities for the needy and a dramatic increase in ideologically-loaded grants, with 80% of the politicized expenditure going to left and left-of-center groups promoting "progressive" social change.

For Joseph and philanthropoids like him who grew up in a religion that emphasizes acts of charity rather than political agendas, there is probably some remembrance of beliefs past, some consequent guilt, and some...sweat.

any American foundations grew out of a Protes-tantism that was evangelical early in this century and drifted into secular humanism later on. Some

pioneer philanthropists like John Wanamaker worked hard, lived frugally, and then retired from business to devote theirtime and resources to personally helping those in need. Today, the annual conferences of the Council on Foundations are held in settings like the Chicago Hilton's Grand Ball-room, which appears to have been inspired by Versailles, with its inset murals, carvings sparkling chandeliers hanging from 34-foot-high ceilings, with 22 karat gold leaf on the walls and mirrors everywhere.

Some philanthropoids, of course, shamelessly love the splendor even as they speak of their solidarity with the poor and oppressed. "We live in a time of terrible somnolence and anesthesia... a time of broken promises," declared Columbia Professor Maxine Green in a recent example of conference oratory. Professor Green, who was protesting the "orienta-tion of this government to the military," virtually called for civil disobedience, and many audience members responded enthusiastically: "I agree. We can choose social change, we can choose justice, or we can back away from that...I try to fund civil disobedience, but I just call it leadership develop-ment.... Yes, we hold an incredible amount of power as funders."

The Council on Foundations is ostensibly an apolitical trade association for members with over $74 billion in assets. And this indeed was once its role. But the Council has metamorphosed into a vanguard organization seeking to carry the descendents and representatives of crusty entrepre-neurs toward a brave new socially progressive future.

It is a change that would have the foundation fathers, many of whom were practical skinflints, rolling in their graves. S.S. Kresge, builder of a chain of stores, scrimped for a lifetime, endowed a foundation, and did not want to waste any of its $350 million of assets: "I've never spent more then 30 cents a day for lunch in my life and it hasn't killed me." James Duke told his estate's trustees exactly where his

money should be spent: 32% to hospitals ("If [people] ain't healthy they can't work, and if they don't work they ain't healthy"), and the rest to schools, churches, retired ministers and their widows, and orphanages.

These founders emphasized direct help, not cosmic causes. Now, however, steering committees for the Council on Foundations conferences seem to be made up of people who have spent too much time watching Ted Turner's Cap-tain Planet and the Planeteers. Rainforests and the ozone layer

JAMES JOSEPH

are foundation heroes for the nineties, and the business leaders whose creative efforts made the foundations possible are its ubiquitous villains.

How did this happen? In some ways the Council is one more institutional victim of the Sixties and its afterlife. Wilmer Shields Rich, its executive director from 1957 through 1967, opposed politicization, saw no need for a large national organization, and tried to "hold overhead to a minimum." But she was succeeded by David Freeman, a Ford and Rockefeller veteran. Freeman knew how to think big, and during his decade as president the Council became a large national organization with 835 members and an influential voice in Washington.

Freeman also emphasized "adult education" for foun-dation trustees and staffers. When I first interviewed him in 1984, he recalled his "feeling that the Council ought to become more of a spokesman about the [foundation] field, not necessarily/or its members, but to its members." One piece of advice was to turn away from the philosophy of entrepreneur-ship and private enterprise that characterized the careers and lives of most of the founding donors, and towards the idea of government "partnership" with the specific goal of influenc-ing various government policies. Freeman and the Council's chairman, former Princeton University president Robert Goheen, stressed the need for "private-public collaboration," with "governments and foundations working alongside one another."

For some, the idea of partnership had a radical twist. Thus David Freedman of the Ford Foundation told the Council's annual conference in 1974, "We need to look at all the laws on the books and change them." At the same conference, the radical environmentalist Barry Commoner elaborated: "We are all children of private enterprise. We're getting ready to bite the hand that feeds us."

A Boston Globe reporter excitedly described the scene at this conference, which in retrospect proved to be a water-shed event: "At a convention of the heads of foundations set up by the Ford, the Rockefellers, the Pews, the Carnegies, the Kresges, the Mellons and other malefactors of great wealth' for the purpose of giving away $2.5 billion to $3 billion of the profits of private enterprise every year, the message seems as much a departure as would be, say, a paean to capitalism by Chairman Mao..."

Conference time was not the only time for political propagandizing. Council leaders also used Foundation News, the organizations' bimonthly magazine, to praise foundations that funded—in their words —"anti-imperialism, corporate respon-sibility, access to media, and the rights of tenants, GIs, prisoners, workers, third-world communities and women." This particular politically correct message even offered an apology and justifica-tion in advance for any inconvenience its radical objectives might cause: the need to' 'be protective of the physical, social and mental well-being of mankind...will result in some limitations of our

freedom as entrepreneurs, but the cost benefits to us as human beings will gainsay all of these."

Throughout the 1970s Foundation News extended its agitation in behalf of radical agendas to the familial realm as well. Council members were told that "our marriage and family system is undergoing a major transition from the traditional pattern of the past—rigid, legal, hierarchical and based on the performance of closely defined roles — to the new companionship pattern — fluid, flexible and based on loving and creative interpersonal relationships." There might be some resistance to these changes, but foundations could help to "get couples everywhere involved in a massive, well-organized retraining program....the importance of which no serious and responsible citizen is likely to question."

y 1982 the Council had laid the groundwork for establishing its social gospel in the foundation com-munity. It was time to spread the word. "The role of

a prophet is a good one for Joseph," said William Dietel of the Rockefeller Foundation, a member of the search commit-tee instrumental in choosing him from among 200 appli-cants. At his first annual conference as president, Joseph began by saying he would follow the pattern of "what a famed circuit rider named Paul used to do when he returned from the provinces of Rome."

Indeed, that inaugural address was full of good news: "Everywhere I have been there is a feeling that this is a new era for philanthropy, one of those moments of time which transcend other moments of time, proclaiming a special message and calling us to a special mission." Joseph said he had detected "a new enthusiasm, a liberated spirit, even an audacity to be provocative." Mixing theological metaphors (and religious messages), he compared conference partici-pants to "Prometheus chained to the rocks, yet defying the gods and raging openly..." It was no accident that Joseph had invoked Karl Marx's favorite myth: "Rarely in human history," he continued, "has there been so intense a discus-sion of the nature of the social contract between a society and its people." It was a time when the philanthropoids were getting acquainted with the marxoids.

The specifics of Joseph's gospel became clearer in statements throughout the 1980s that built on his animosity toward private enterprise and showed no awareness of socialism's failure around the globe. For instance, Joseph told a Yale University audience that decisions about invest-ments of private pension funds should be made by "officials accountable to a public constituency." Their goal should be "to build a secure and just economy" rather than just a secure retirement.

During a speech to students at Stanford University in 1984, he amplified the revolutionary note: "It is the peculiar destiny of this generation to live between two worlds — an old order which is dying but not yet dead, and a new order which is conceived but not yet born." The idea of being between two worlds may have been Matthew Arnold's but the twist Joseph gave it had a decidedly Jacobin ring. "For two hundred years this system [of American democracy] worked quite well," he went on to explain; but now the "communications revolution" should enable us to put into practice "what we are now learning from the new forms of direct democracy emerging."

Joseph was aware that the radical nature of the agenda he was advancing, not only for American society but for tax-exempt foundations he was encouraging to become the spearhead of his "new order" revolution, could inspire political opposition. In the Fifties, Congressional investiga-tors had targeted foundations engaged in what they regarded as subversive and partisan activities. Even a public wary of Congressional investigations might become alarmed at the prospect of billions of dollars administered by self-ap-pointed, self-perpetuating and unaccountable bureaucracies with radical political agendas.

The problem, Joseph realized, would surface if foun-dations openly united behind any single cause, or if founda-tion executives were too explicit about their agendas. Such problems could be avoided, on the other hand, if Council members were discreet, not to say Machiavellian in the way they packaged their schemes: "We must find ways to trans-

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THE GREENING OF THEhomas Jefferson called them the "merciless Indian savages on our Western frontier" whose "known Rule of Warfare is an undis-

tinguished Destruction of all Ages, Sexes, and Conditions." And this not in an obscure document, but in the Declaration of Independence — the incitement of the "merciless savages" to depreda-tions against American colonists being one of the Declaration of Independence's major grievances against the British.

But frontier Indians, now portrayed as gentle, peaceful bucolic, at one with the universe and with nature, have after 200 years made it to the other end of Washington's Constitution Mall from the Jefferson Monument to the National Gallery of Art, up to now a bastion of "high culture." A handsomely lit and laid out new exhibition, "Art of the American Indian Frontier," all earthenware and buffalo robes and moccasins, con-taining not the slightest hint that these are relics of what was a warlike, predatory people (war bonnets are called "feather bonnets"), marks the first time that America's regnant art establishment has seen fit to exhibit such handicraft cheek and jowl with its Rembrandts and El Grecos. The catalogue and texts affixed to the walls of the exhibition mention that some of the Indians' buck-skin jackets are decorated with "human hair," but the visitor would be hard put to guess that this human hair was a trophy cut from the heads of adversaries whom the wearer of the jacket had gently scalped or, as was the general practice whenever circumstances allowed, gen-tly tortured to death for the entertainment of friends and family.

The father of modern anthropology, Franz Boas, wrote in his classic study on Primitive Art:

"Opinions energetically propagated and spurious facts diligently disseminated color the thinking of people, and not only uneducated people. The intellectual is deceived as easily as the untutored by sanctimonious professions that conform to the moral code of time and place and flatter the feeling of self-righteousness."

Writing in 1927 for a civilized world that still felt it had little to learn from "primitives" (a word Boas would be ill-advised to use now, much as Jefferson would be ill-advised to use "savages"), Boas would be startled to observe that the spurious facts diligently disseminated today are all running in the opposite direc-tion. Taking comfort in his perception of gullibility on the part of intellectuals and his sense that a key element for the believer is self-righteousness, Boas would cer-tainly be impressed by the virtues now attributed to his Indians by correct thinking modern-day Americans, from the aesthetes of the National Gallery to the moral-ists of Beverly Hills and Malibu. He could not, of course, be expected to foresee that the Harriet Beecher Stowe of the Indian revisionist movement would be a marketing major from Cal State-Fullerton named Kevin Costner, or that the movement's Uncle Tom's Cabin would be a cinematographic fairy tale in which an officer of the Union Army defects from his own people to the Sioux (Commanche in the original novel) because he finds them more pacific, environmentally responsible, and sweeter smelling. The hero of Dances With Wolves has no precedent in history, of course, in that no officer of the Union Army ever defected to the Sioux, who in the middle of the Civil War unleashed a nightmare of fire and death on the western frontier, causing President Lincoln to withdraw sorely needed troops from the struggle with the Confederacy to fight them off. But that's the way it is with fairy tales. Nor, since the Indians often dressed their hair in rotting bear grease, did con-temporaries find the Sioux, or Commanche, or other warrior tribes of the frontier, very sweet smelling.

RICHARD GRENIER

Teddy Roosevelt was a great admirer of Indians for qualities that they truly did possess: prodigious bravery and stoical resistance to pain — military virtues — and a large contingent of Indians was included in his Rough Riders, who stormed up Cuba's San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War. But these are not virtues ad-mired today by refined members of the entertainment elite. And indeed Hollywood, following Dances With

Wolves, its sanctimony reinforced by a sincere desire to make money, is ablaze with projects for movies about peace-loving Indians — or at least sorely aggrieved Indians. The first post-Wolves films to make it to the nation's screens are Thunderheart with Val Kilmer (The Doors), Robert Redford's Incident at Ogalala and, an HBO original, The Last of His Tribe with Jon Voight. As I write, James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, recipient of an Academy Award for My Left Foot, is in post-production. But judging by the commercial fizzle of Thunderheart and Ogalala, Hollywood executives might now be having second thoughts about the durability of this great Indian craze, the raging conflagration perhaps turning out to be a mere brushfire. For, unlike American universities, where as a tenured professor Kevin Costner could go on lecturing hapless students about Saint Francis-like Ameri-can Indians forever, when moviegoers tire of daydreams about what fun it would be to ride bareback over the plains, or wear buffalo robes, or never take another bath, Hollywood's great new Indian daydream will have come to end.

The daydream shows signs of greater durability in publishing and above all the education industry—where young minds are more malleable and students, unlike moviegoers, cannot easily take their money and go else-

where. An autobiographical tale of the childhood of a Cherokee orphan, The Education of Little Tree, said by critics to be "filled with love and respect for the Indian way of life," was on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list for weeks before it was discovered to have been written by no Indian at all but by a onetime KKK activist named Asa Earl Carter. And an even more inspiring phenomenon is the cult that has grown up

around "Chief Seattle," who represents the purity of the state of Washington before such modern abominations as Speaker Tom Foley arid the House Bank. Chief Seattle was said to have written in an 1854 letter to President Franklin Pierce, "I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairies left by the white man who shot them from a passing train." Now this is very impressive, in that there wasn't a single buffalo within 600 miles of Chief Seattle on Puget Sound and the first railroad didn't cross the plains anywhere near those parts until a good 15 years later. When these details were revealed, the Earth Day people, who've been boosting Chief Seattle as a kind of environmental prophet, toned down his "letter" to Presi-dent Pierce, dropping the railroad, blurring the buffalo reference, and changing it to read: "What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires?" But Chief Seattle didn't write this to President Pierce either. The lines were composed by a screenwriter and great user of talking wires named Ted Perry, who wrote them for a 1971 fictional film on ecology named Home, broadcast on the talking airwaves of network television. But this didn't stop Dial Books from shamelessly publishing Perry's words in an illus-trated child's version of the alleged speech by Chief Seattle entitled Brother Eagle, Sister Sky: A Message

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MERCILESS RED MANfrom Chief Seattle. The book has sold over 250,000 copies since its publication in 1991 and it, also, re-mained for weeks on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list until a spat with the paper's news department brought about its removal. In point of fact, there is no historical record of Chief Seattle having demonstrated any concern for the environment whatever. He is known to have written absolutely nothing and to have made in his life exactly one speech, 117 years before his hidden posthumous conversion to environmentalism in a 1971 film. A Victorian account of the speech — the only one we have — mentions nothing at all about the environment. But the Earth Day people and Dial Books are stuck with their environmental version, an afterward to Brother Eagle, Sister Sky now stating that the origin of Chief Seattle's words are "partly obscured by the mists of time." Since time has not accumulated much mist since the 1971 television movie, what is obscuring Chief Seattle's real words is not the mists of time at all, it is brazen deceit on the part of the Earth Day organization and Dial Books.

Peter Matthiessen 's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse is deceit of a different color. Also a bestseller, it is an enraged account of injustices — largely imaginary — done to the American Indian, particularly since the radical Indian occupation in 1973 of Wounded Knee, a place completely unknown to the general public before Dee Brown's wildly tendentious Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee of three years before. (The Stephen Vincent Benet poem, from which Brown took his title, not about Indians at all but about "American Names," and includes a line about "a blue gum nigger to sing me e blues," which I don't expect to see as a book title any time soon.) The major focus of Matthiessen's book, also the basis for Robert Redford's Incident at Oglala, is the Peltier Affair." In June, 1975, two young FBI agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, were killed on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Although Matthiessen calls the incident a "shoot-out," the word "ambush" seems more appropriate as an appeals court found that over 125 bullet holes were discovered in the agents' cars, while only 5 cartridge casings from the agents' guns were ever located at the scene. After the first fusillade, the two agents were lying helpless and a member of the radical American Indian Movement watched organization leader Leonard Peltier walk down a slope and, firing point blank a high-velocity AR-15, blow their heads off. Peltier has had five lawyers, including William Kunstler, all chosen by himself. His attorneys were allowed to question the jury, a practice rare in federal court. He got almost double the number of peremptory challenges normally given. And, thus far, Peltier's case is been heard by twelve jurors, one U.S. magistrate, 'o U.S. District Court judges, five U.S. Court of appeals judges, and, on two separate occasions, by nine embers of the U.S. Supreme Court. All have found Peltier guilty of murder. But this is not enough for Peter Matthiessen, for Robert Redford, nor for CBS's West 7th (now defunct) and 60 Minutes, both television programs having done segments lionizing Peltier. Although the daydream of the Arcadian Indian uncorrupted our civilization might have a fairly short life span as entertainment, portrayals of the Indian as "victim," as part of moralistic publishing and journalism, will probably be with us for some time.

At the end of 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, who recorded it all in Democracy in America, happened to witness near Memphis the crossing of the Mississippi by large band of Choctaw, one of the five "civilized nations" that Andrew Jackson was moving westward in s forced deportation of nearly the entire Indian population of the Southeast. The tragic episode prompted in Tocqueville a discourse

on military conquest in which he reflected that, historically, conquest has been happiest when the conquerors were superior only militarily and were thus absorbed by the higher civilization they had destroyed by force of arms. But when, as was the case with these unfortunate Indians, their American conquer-

THE EUROPEAN INTRO-DUCTION OF THE HORSE DID WONDERS FOR THE INDIANS' MOBILITY AND SPEED IN ATTACK, BUT NOTHING TO DECREASE THEIR TASTE FOR WAR, WHICH, ALONG WITH HUNTING, THEYCONSID-ERED THE ONLY ACTIVI-TIES WORTHY OF A MAN. WOMEN, VIRTUAL SLAVES, DID ALL OTHER WORK.

ors were superior in every respect, representing a more advanced, higher civilization not only militarily but in every other way as well, Tocqueville felt that the sub-merging of their indigenous culture was "irremediable." He wrote, tragic though it may be, that the inferior culture must "retreat or be destroyed."

Plain talk such as this is very much out of fashion today, people of refined sensibility in our society being very reluctant to attribute inferiority to anyone. The world collapse of Socialism has greatly heightened the need to find other social systems equal (at least) to ours. The "moral equivalence" of yesterday held that, give or take a bit here or there, the social, political, and eco-nomic system of the Soviet Union was every bit the equal of ours. Given the ferocious condemnations of the former Soviet system now emanating from Moscow, this has become a somewhat embarrassing position to defend — hence the mad impulsion underway to find new worlds to be equal to. The prime beneficiaries of this impulsion for the moment are Third World and plainly primitive societies, such as our own dear Indi-ans, who have only recently been endowed with this Sierra Club-Wilderness Society attitude toward nature, plus a Quaker-like love of peace and their fellow man, neither of which they in fact possessed.

Few people in history have dedicated themselves to war as did the Plains Indians, and the most warlike of all were the Sioux. Before the arrival of Europeans, aboriginal American Indians were a stone-age people who knew neither writing, nor metals of any kind, nor textiles, nor even the wheel. The European introduction of the horse did wonders for the Indians' mobility and speed in attack, but nothing to decrease their taste for war, which, along with hunting, they considered the only activities worthy of a man. Women, virtual slaves, did all other work. Thousands and thousands of ac-counts, some from observers in many ways sympathetic to Indians, describe the celebrated Plains tribes as being absolutely merciless, raiding and scalping and murder-ing and torturing captives for entertainment — at war with their fellow Indians far more than with whites. True, they were not racist. A child carried off in his early years by a band of Indians was considered one of their own, and Indians cried bitterly when a child, if white, was taken from them. But they treated adult Indians from alien tribes and all other outsiders with no more

feeling than if they were insects.The great American historian Francis Parkman

wrote of the Sioux, with whom he lodged in their glory days, "War is the breath of their nostrils," while Martha Royce Blaine, former chief curator of museums of the Oklahoma Historical Society and wife of Pawnee head chief Garland J. Blaine, writes in Pawnee Passage that the Pawnee, who had a particularly bitter relationship with the Sioux, called them Tsu-ra-rat, or "Throat Cut-ters." The Brule Sioux pattern of warfare, she writes, included bringing back heads, feet, hands, and other body parts to their camp, where they were "carried impaled on sticks, and the scalped heads were dragged through the village amidst cries of triumph and finally pounded with rocks and shot at by young boys." Mrs. Blaine writes that the Sioux's slaughter of Pawnee women, "who were population and economic produc-ers," took a terrible toll, with the overall Pawnee popu-lation falling in a period of 45 years (1830 to 1875) from 12,000 to slightly over 2,000. This helps explain why the Pawnee should have been only too happy to serve as highly effective scouts for the U.S. Cavalry against the Sioux. In Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves, of course, the Pawnee, allies of the white man, are black-hearted villains.

We are at a bizarre moment in history when genteel Americans preserve a far less realistic picture of the warrior way of life of the great Indian tribes of the American West than does, however vulgarly, our popu-lar culture — a subject that keeps bobbing up, as in recent protests at use of the "Tomahawk Chop" by supporters of the Atlanta Braves. Since the time when the Duke of Wellington said the Battle of Waterloo was won "on the playing fields of Eton," the parallel between war and the more aggressive sports has been a banality, and sporting teams have continually named themselves after dangerous animals (Bears, Tigers, Lions, Bulls) or bellicose human groups (Raiders, Pirates, Vikings). Inevitably, Indians — in American popular memory fear-inspiring warriors—have come in for their share of names: with Atlanta Braves, Washington Redskins, Kansas City Chiefs and, most controversially, the Dartmouth Indians. The Braves, Redskins, and Chiefs, all professional teams, are holding onto their traditional names (and Americans of Scandinavian descent have not been heard to complain of any ethnic vilification of their predatory ancestors carried by the name "Vi-kings"). But when the charge of racism was leveled at a great liberal university, Dartmouth of course groveled in apology, and the Dartmouth Indian is no more.

In 1984 the Dartmouth Review conducted a survey of the leaders of every single Indian tribe throughout the country to discover their opinion on the "Indian" contro-versy, and the results were stunning. What did they think of the Dartmouth Indian? "A compliment," "fine," "great," "a tribute"—this last from the vice-chairman of the Tribal Council of South Dakota's Lower Brule Sioux. One tribal leader wrote, "The people who are against the symbol are misinformed." Another wrote, "I think most of the people who object to the Indian symbol are not Indians. They are probably envious." The final tally: Total Chiefs Expressing No Opinion: 15. Total Chiefs Opposing the Indian Symbol: 11. Total Chiefs Favoring the Indian Symbol: 125. Again and again came the reply, to Dartmouth: "BRING BACK THE IN-DIAN." But the opinion of one's genteel peers is more important than that of any lowdown Indians, and Dartmouth, even at Indian request, would not bring back the Indian.

PAGE 10 OCTOBER, 1992

CAMPUSJEFF MUIR

rake's eatery, operating since 1937 on North University Street in Ann Arbor, and featuring hundreds of varieties of

imported teas and hard candies is a fixture in the campus community. Its owner, Truman Tibbals, a white-haired, legally blind octogenarian is famous among students for his crusty enforcement of Drake's Rule Number One: Order Something to Eat or Leave. So it was no surprise to most of the patrons one spring day when the old-timer lit into a group of loungers who were pre-empting valu-able table space.

If Tibbals had been less blind, he might have thought twice before reacting, for the group of leather-jacketed, customers appeared at first glance to have stepped out of The Wild Ones, Marlon Brando's 1950s hoodlum classic. Or he might have noticed the nose-rings they sported and checked his first impression.

But Tibbals saw nothing but table space gone to waste. "Look," he said in his characteristic growl. "You're gonna hafta order something to eat or leave the premises." "We did order something," retorted one of the group; "we're all sharing this bag of candy..." Tibbals would have none of it. "I'm not fooling around," he barked. "You boys are gonna hafta order, or skidaddle!"

"What did you call us?" asked the leader of the pack in a tone of menacing incredulity. "Did you call us boys?"

"Ok, I've had enough," responded Tibbals. "Get out of my restaurant now, or I'm calling the cops."

"Did you hear what he called me?" the leader shouted back. "That'sdiscrimination.'Hejust called me avboy'! That is known as heterosexism, Mister, and if you throw us out you'll regret it!" By this time, several of the Drake employ-ees had gathered and now escorted the five lesbians, who were shouting threats of protests and boycotts, out the door.

The next day the campus kiosks and lampposts were covered with posters calling on students to "Defend the 'Drake's Five' against Homophobia!" and to "Boycott Drake's Until Our demands Are Met." These "demands" were that old man Tibbals compose a public letter of apol-ogy, that he refund the money the Drake's five claimed to have spent on candy, and that he donate $ 100 to the Univer-sity Lesbian and Gay Male Programs Office to promote "homophobia education."

he Lesbian and Gay Male Programs Office is part of a fleet of radical groups, officially recognized and funded by the university, focusing on homosexual issues at Michigan. Others include the Lesbian and

Gay Rights Organizing Committee, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP), Queer Nation, and the Ella Baker-Nelson Mandela Center for Anti-Racist Education and its political arm, the United Coalition against Racism (UCAR). The Baker-Mandela Center and UCAR, while ostensibly concerned with issues of race, injects itself into any and all leftist issues on campus, including those concern-ing "homophobia" and "heterosexism." For example, Baker-Mandela representatives once came into a biology class I was taking to give a lecture on "the politics of homophobia." (The course, was taught by Professor John Vandermeer, an outspoken Sandinista supporter who also treated us to films allegedly documenting the drug ties of the contras and the Reagan Administration.) The university authorities have given the Baker-Mandela activists a spacious office on campus at no charge, and the left-controlled student govern-ment has allocated $25,000 a year in student funds for their political agendas, no questions asked. (By contrast, to my knowledge the most the student government has given to any conservative group is $500.)

The Lesbian and Gay Male Programs Office is actu-ally an office of the university itself, a combination dating service and coordination center for the seminars and work-shops to promote "awareness and education" on issues important to the homosexual left. Among other things, it

publishes a "lavender calendar" announcing gay events like the "Lesbian Barn Dance." Once a year, the Lesbian and Gay Male Programs Office proclaims a "Blue Jeans Day" on which students are urged to wear jeans to show their support for gay rights. The transparency of the ploy — jeans are the college uniform of choice — inspires many students to select the "Day" as the one occasion during the year they don corduroys. Among the other groups, Queer Nation occasionally

passes out flavored condoms — mint, cherry, etc. — on the Diag (Michigan's version of the Quad) as part of its contribu-tion to "awareness" programs. It also organizes "ZAP!" days at which students are urged to zap the University President's office with political messages, using electronic mail, fax and phones.

ACT-UP administers what it calls "Dis-Orientation" for new students. These are also university-funded sessions during which stress is laid on the "oppression" of gays and lesbians within the University of Michigan community. The Lesbian and Gay Rights Organizing Committee, on the other hand, focuses on pressure tactics to change existing University policies. Thus the oppressive university pays for its own opposition.

hile the tactical assignments of these organiza-tions differ, their personnel are interchangeable, as are their causes. A year before the Tibbals incident I noticed that flyers had been posted all

over campus advertising an ACT-UP protest at City Hall. There was no apparent connection, however, between the issues to be protested and "AIDS awareness." Thus the list included demands for publicly funded abortions, for abortions to be performed by the university itself, and denunciations of the "homophobic" policies of Reagan and Bush. (I never have figured out how groups like ACT-UP can denounce government AIDS policies as "homophobic" while strenuously claiming that AIDS is "not a gay disease."

In any case I started my own one-man counter protest under the made-up banner "Students for a Traditional Lifestyle." My target was not homosexuality as such but the irresponsible promiscuity that had led to the spread of AIDS. As soon as the demonstrators became aware of my presence, they forgot all about the injustices of the University of Michigan, the City of Ann Arbor, the Reagan and Bush administrations and western civilization, and began to protest me. Surrounding me, they began screaming vile epithets, tearing the flyers I had prepared out of my hands and destroy-ing them on the spot. The police had to rescue me, and escort me from the scene. It was my first experience of what campus fascism feels like up close.

Because the variety of these activist organizations seems to have little more justification than to provide multiple vehicles for extracting student tuition fees from the university budget, I was immediately suspicious of the Drake's Five demand that Tibbals donate $ 100 to the Lesbian and Gay Male Program Office. Was this demand an attempt to strike a disinterested blow for gay rights or was it simple self-dealing? Were any of the Drake's Five connected to the Lesbian and Gay Male Programs Office? Did LGMPO provide funds or other support to get the Drake's protest rolling? Was LGMPO taking an official stand on this issue?

I sent electronic messages to both LGMPO and Univer-sity president James Duderstadt in which I asked those ques-tions, adding that if I found out that LGMPO was involved in the Drake's Five persecution of Tibbals, I would work to see that LGMPO's University funding was eliminated. I also wrote about the whole affair in one of my regular columns in

year after the Tibbals incident, which itself had reached ; kind of resolution when a protest march organized by th< Drake's Five backfired, and more people showed up ii support of Tibbals than to protest.

During this period, the national press had discovered the phenomenon of political correctness, which it character-ized as "fascist," and identified as a force hostile to the spirit of civilized dialogue and free inquiry that the university is supposed to be about. The campus left was caught com-pletely off guard. Stung by the attacks, its amore proprt visibly wounded, the activists regrouped and struck back. It was the usual combination of aggressive counter-attack and self-pitying alibi. According to the tenured spokesmen of the radical cause, the "pc" phenomenon was an invention of right-wingers, the product of a sinister conspiracy of Oliver Stone dimensions to persecute and stifle the campus left.

The University of Michigan, which had pioneered draconian speech codes and other vanguard innovations of the pc movement, became the launch-pad of the counter-attack. A three-day national conference was organized on campus, utilizing funds from 14 different university pro-grams that radicals controlled. The very title of the confer-ence was an agitprop message: "The PC Frame Up—What's Behind the Attack?" Panels featured leading pc activists and apologists like Houston Baker of the University of Pennsyl-vania and Todd Gitlin of UC Berkeley, sprinkled together with an isolated critic here and there, like NY Times reporter Richard Bernstein who had written the original article on pc. Bernstein's presence gave his panel the appearance of an academic endeavor, while providing a target for the stalwarts to attack. The core audience of four hundred students was guaranteed by a faculty organizer, who made attendance a third of the grade requirement for his undergraduate commu-nications course.

The featured session was a Saturday evening panel on "Hate Speech" attended by 800 people and featuring Michi-gan Law Professor Catharine MacKinnon. MacKinnon im-mediately laid into the conspiracy at hand, denying that oppressed minorities or their vanguards could, by definition, oppress anyone, while justifying the regulation of expression and speech as a necessary protection for society's victims. She proposed locking up the works of Kipling and Mencken to protect women and people of color from having their feelings hurt. Access to these banished authors, she reassured her academic audience, would be provided to scholars on a selective basis. In other words, pc fascism didn't exist, but it was necessary nonetheless to protect the helpless.

On this panel, the token opposition was represented by John Miller, student editor of The Review. As an example of actually existing pc on campus, Miller referred to a recent memo signed by the Executive Director for University Relations Walter Harrison and Director of the Office of Affirmative Action Zaida Giraldo, which was sent to all university administrators. The memo instructed university employees that the term "sexual orientation" should be used in all official university communications rather than "sexual preference" when referring to homosexuality. This, Miller observed, seemed a rather obvious attempt to control dis-course. (His point received unsolicited confirmation, during

the Michigan Review, the campus conservative paper. (AC1 UP's brownshirts responded by burning a copy of the Reviewon the steps of the Student Union.)

never received any answers to my questions, but m inquiry led to my second and most traumatic encoun-ter with the radical hate squad. This occurred aboutI

"THAT IS KNOWN AS HETEROSEXISM, MISTER"

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VICTIMSthe question period, when a blonde woman, sitting among the large contingent of campus lesbians who had come to support MacKinnon, singled him out as the editor of The Review and accused him in a voice quivering with emotion: "Your words oppress me!")

The issue of the administrative memo seemed momen-tarily to disorient MacKinnon, as she groped for a way to introduce a division in the pc ranks over which orthodoxy to impose. She was not completely happy with the memo. Among lesbians, she pointed out, "sexual preference" rather than "orientation" is the preferred term, because it valorizes “act of women loving women."

This was a self-admission that the whole pc agenda was about something other than...well, political correctness. Power is clearly the agenda for MacKinnon and .her supporters. The mood of the hall, demonstrably hostile to all white, heterosexual males present and not present was sufficient evidence of that. In any case, it was my turn.

A thin, intense man, also shaking with emotion, now rose and identified himself as Jim Toy. He said he was a staffer at the Lesbian and Gay Male Programs Office and that he had been the victim of a new and insidious form of bigotry, namely "electronic hate speech," which needed to be curbed.

According to Toy, his office had received a threaten-g, anonymous, electronic message during the height of the Drake's Five episode. The anonymous sender of the message had threatened to de-fund the Lesbian and Gay Male Programs Office if the Office was found to be connected to the Drake's Five protest. Since the message was an effort to squelch an "anti-homophobic protest," it was clearly hate speech.

Toy claimed that he was so worried about the anony-mous, homophobic message, that he had contacted the Ethics and Use Department of the university's Information and Technology Division to discover who had sent it. Then, pausing dramatically, while 800 sympathetic listeners waited for the punch-line, he said: "I have discovered that Jeff Muir :of the Michigan Review sent that message!"

An audible gasp issued from the audience. People sitting near, with looks of alarm flashing in my direction, asked if the story were true. I probably should have stood up and said something to defend myself, but I had no microphone and 800 hostile faces was an intimidating prospect, thankfully, my colleague John Miller attempted to defend me from the platform. He pointed out that I was an outspoken

defender of gay rights at The Review. Just a few weeks earlier I had argued in the Student Assembly in favor of resolutions supporting Ann Arbor's recently passed "Do-mestic Partnership Ordinance, which called on the univer-

"I AM ASHAMEDAND

EMBARRASSED TO BE CALLED A

LESBIAN AFTERTHIS INCIDENT..."

sity to allow same-sex couples to have access to the university's married housing units. This information al-lowed the discussion to move on. But I couldn't help wondering what might have happened if it had been some other conservative, who was not quite so politically correct. Still the innuendo about the electronic message lingered. Later I was able to deal with this, in an article in The Review. The fact that the computer message I had sent was traceable, indicated that it was not intended to be anony-mous (an envelope under the door or a phone call would have been the way to do that). My name had not appeared along with the message simply because I had inadvertently made an incorrect registration in the "User Directory" when I logged into the system.

n the end, my experiences with Michigan's radical homosexual activists were instructive in ways I could not have foreseen. The activists missed a great opportunity with me. I was an identified conservative

who was outspoken in my opinion that homosexuals should be treated with the same tolerance and respect accorded to any minority. I stated publicly more times than I can

remember that I was not opposed to guaranteeing the Consti-tutional rights of Americans who, for whatever reason, identi-fied themselves as homosexuals. I was steadfastly opposed, however, to granting any group special rights based on a sense of historical victim hood or societal oppression.

This sentiment was shared by many homosexuals who, because they abhor the tactics of ACT-UP and the agendas of radical homosexual groups, are seldom heard from. "I'm not asking for any special rights," Rich Tafel, President of the Log Cabin Federation — a group of gay Republicans — told the Michigan Review. "I'm not asking for money. And I'm not asking for affirmative action. I just want the same rights as every other tax paying citizen."

Many homosexuals on campus felt that the actions of the radical groups generally, and the Drake's Five in particular, were unrepresentative of the gay community and were embar-rassing besides. "I am ashamed and embarrassed to be called a lesbian after this incident," Karen Businsky told the campus newspaper during the Drake's Five affair. "Mr. Tibbals kicks people out of his restaurant all the time. The man is 83 years old. All he wants to do is maintain business so he can go home at night and pay the bills."

Had the university activists been concerned with build-ing broad coalitions of people to ensure the rights of gays and other minorities, they would have found allies in conservatives like me. There were more than a few of us at the University of Michigan who, as a matter of principle, felt that all individuals' rights should be protected. Instead of joining forces or showing any awareness that 1ibertarians even existed, ACT-UP, LGMPO, Queer Nation and UCAR just lumped us with the hell fire and damnation religious right and actual gay-hating bigots.

While catastrophic in terms of building broad coalitions or defusing the campus atmosphere on this issue, this strategy was productive on some level. By attacking everybody who didn't swallow their agenda whole as red-necked racists, they were able to isolate themselves as an embattled minority and convince the university and student government to give them legitimacy and lots of money. Creating enemies and posing as victims is a time-worn tactic of political fund-raising off campus as well.

Being taken under the wing of the university bureau-cracy, and its apparatus of control, by no means ensures public acceptance of the radicals and their agendas. In fact, it probably guarantees that they'll continue to be a despised (and feared) minority. And that's probably exactly the way they want it.

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ONE MILLION B.S.ur culture finds it appealing for males to have centrality, for them to control fe-males and paternity," says Adrienne

Zihlman, a Professor of Physical Anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "I don't believe there's true objectivity when dealing with evolution."

Our cultural ear has been assaulted with words such as these so regularly in the last few years that it has lost the ability to distinguish what is serious from what is radical boilerplate.In fact, however, Adrienne Zihlman is not just another activist in the politicized university. She stands in the forefront of a feminist surge in the field of human evolution and is disseminating ideas which, if they are not yet main-stream, have earned her a cover story in Discover, a popular science magazine. She is, moreover, an avatar in the next stage of the Great Debate which will move the political correctness issue into the sciences. Is there a feminist sci-ence?

The whole storm about disinterested research as it applies to feminist paleoanthropology began in 1971, when Sally Linton Slocum argued that of men were up to no good in the sciences. "Anthropology, as an academic discipline, has been developed primarily by white Western males, during a specific period in history," she wrote in a landmark paper. "Our questions are shaped by the particulars of our historical situation, and by unconscious cultural assump-tions."

It was one of the first appearances of the mantra of "white Western males" which would soon be chanted by growing numbers of the faithful. Slocum's ideas may seem trite today but at the time she fired them off they reverberated throughout the academic community.

Most of the models which sought to explain unique aspects of human evolution, such as bipedalism, had until that point concentrated upon male features. Charles Darwin popularized the tendency with his hypothesis of "man the hunter" — a term which inspires visions of early man roaming about the savanna like a noble savage in search of prey. When subsequent research unearthed the likelihood that these human ancestors were more often the hunted than the hunters, other ideas began to circulate.

Owen Lovejoy codified many of the suggestions that so provoked Slocum. He argued that male provisioning —that is, active males supplying immobile females with food—led to the advent of bipedalism. Lovejoy said that humansevolved a reproductive strategy which allowed for overlapping offspring, a trait which marks the species even today.Females, in short, developed the ability to take care of severalinfants and youngsters of different ages at once. With theseadded responsibilities came reduced mobility, and womenrelied upon males as auxiliary food sources. To provide thisfood, males developed an upright walk, freeing their arms tocarry supplies. Lovejoy further claimed that early humansformed monogamous relationships with each other in orderto facilitate their new social arrangements. Females, in thisscheme, gained a breadwinner; males knew they put food inthe mouths of their own brood. Although Lovejoy's ideas donot currently hold much weight among paleoanthropologists—they do not explain, for example, how females came towalk on two feet — notions similar to his, though lessdeveloped, once had much credibility. It all had the feel of aWard and June Cleaver prototype.

To Sally Slocum, it was all undeniably sexist. "There is a strong male bias in the questions asked, and the interpre-tations given," she wrote in her influential paper. Slocum openly sneered at the claims of monogamous pair-bonding among early humans and "the 'ideal' modern Western pattern of one male supporting a dependent wife and minor children." The problem was that anthropologists were all-too-often male, she claimed, and they viewed the field through the distorted lenses of maleness.

Other women were galvanized by Slocum's thoughts.” We’ve really been ass-backwards in trying to understand the primate social organization by looking only at males," Sarah Blaffer Hrdy told Newsweek in 1981.

JOHN MILLERFeminist paleoanthropologists point to the related

work of primatologists like Hrdy and others as having contributed mightily to their own feminist resurgence. Through the 1960s and much of the 1970s, the prevalent view of primate social behavior held that aggressive males dominated their social groups. Females had little impact upon the rigid hierarchies that controlled reproduction, and were subsequently relegated to a secondary status among researchers. Hrdy, however, detected specific female repro-ductive strategies which were anything but complacent. Female monkeys and apes, for instance, will often mate with more than one male to insure that their offspring will survive the tumultuous battles that determine social standing. Since paleoanthropologists often rely upon contemporary studies of primate behavior to assist in their reconstructions of the past, Hrdy's research has cast doubts upon the ideas of the monogamous pair-bond among ancient human ancestors. If our closest relatives in the wild are indeed highly promiscu-ous, the argument goes, then how can we legitimately describe our ancestors' sexual behavior as radically op-posed?

Hrdy's work has lent new tools to the field, but at times some of her conclusions appear to have gone over-board. She points out that only females (human and other-wise) have an organ devoted specifically to sexual pleasure (the clitoris), which to her suggests that human females are destined for something other than monogamy. Moreover, the female ability to have repeated orgasms close together in time (contrasted with the masculine inability), hints that women are best equipped for something other than a place in the nuclear family. Hrdy goes on to claim that various cultural institutions like purdah, claustration, infibulation, and clitoridectomy are all inspired biologically in males to keep adventurous women in tow.

The feminist paleoanthropologists believe that what kept these revelations undiscovered, as Slocum originally noted, was the innate sexism of research.If men were doing it, it must be political. If it was political, it must victimize women. Anne Fausto-Sterling argues in her book Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men that when considering the topic of sex differences, "it is inher-ently impossible for any individual to do unbiased re-search." This inability to transcend gender, to her, makes all science political and the politics of male science she believes can be seen in many studies of menstruation and menopause which "express deep hatred and fear of women." The introduction of the word "rape" into the vocabulary of academic sociobiology, Fausto-Sterling proclaims, was "at the very least a non-conscious attempt to establish rape as a widespread natural phenomenon and thus deflect and depoliticize a subject of intense and specific importance to women."

Adrienne Zihlman, too, thinks that the language of science has been politicized. "When discussing reproduc-tive strategies, females are called 'promiscuous' when the males at simply 'competitive,'" she said.

This all fits rather comfortably into the larger topic of feminist science. Feminists who have studied the links between gender and scientific theory often conclude that a traditionally male perspective surfaces in the attempt to describe natural events in terms of mastery — an active or "male" agent controls a passive or "female" agent. Scott Gilbert, a professor of biology at Swarthmore College, says that ideas about social behavior infect science even at the level of the molecule. "The stories told of the nucleus and the cytoplasm are stories of a male controller of a female body," he told the New York Times in 1985. "What one has is a masculine model of our biology. If we are not aware of it, it can become extremely oppressive."

The oppression apparently became too extreme for a group of feminist paleoanthropologists in 1990. Zihlman and Mary Ellen Morbeck, a professor at the University of Arizona, sponsored an academic conference entitled "Women Scientists Look at Evolution: Female Biology and Life History." No men were invited because, several remarked, men only tend to get in the way of progress. Silvana Borgognini Tarli of the University of Pisa, for example, told Science magazine about the conference's near-utopian en-

vironment: "The atmosphere was almost perfect, the sort of atmosphere that should be present at all conferences, which are, after all, for communication. No one was searching in others' work for feeble points to attack. We had discussion without victory or defeat." Morbeck joined in the praise: " At the end of the first day, we were where we' d be after three days of other conferences. At the end of two and a half days we were miles ahead."

Yet as University of Wisconsin primatologist Frans de Waal noted, male researchers in the sexist 1950s conducted the first detailed work on female kinship among primates and laid the foundations that later students, even feminists, would build upon. Nonetheless, the feminists felt that they needed the seclusion of an all-female enclave. "It was necessary that the participants be all female since [the conference] had to do with female life history strategies," said Tarli. "Males cannot find out what is important in female reproduction. They've never experienced it. How can they judge, value, or label things they have never experienced themselves?"

Vincent Sarich, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, argues that it is perfectly possible for researchers to conduct objective research. "Can you recognize reality? I have no problem with that notion," he said. And although Sarich respects the contributions of scientists like Hardy, he views skeptically the claims of widespread sexism in the study of female reproductive strategy. "Do people need to be convinced that females have reproductive strategies?" he asked. "What world have they been living in? Anybody who has gone through puberty knows the truth."

The truth, however, is hard to sort out when the debate devolves into a little wargame over whether the male or the female gender has offered more to the species by way of tool invention, tool use, hunting, gathering, and serving as a cent* to the social network. Zihlman, for instance, claims that the research concerns of male paleoanthropologists "are a re-sponse to male anxiety generated by our recent battle of the sexes." This battle, Zihlman knows, has been both divisive and pervasive. She understands that the "context for research especially the political climate, will... exact an influence" of scientific activity. She acknowledges her own personal debt to political feminism: the "more recent questions asked about human origins have been influenced by the consciousness raising activities of the women's movement, as much as new evidence pouring forth from studies since the 1960s."

In a 1985 address to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, Zihlman began her remarks by calling "the role of women in society" the fourth most important crisis facing the life on earth (win, place, and show went to pollution, overpopulation, and corrupt governments). Then as a segue into the body of her speech, entitled, "Sex, Sexes and Sexism in Human Origins," she announced elegiacally that "our role was also a crisis millions of years ago."

Placing herself on the ramparts of the battle for feminist science, Zihlman has done hand to hand combat with male colleagues. She is perhaps became best known for the public spat with Donald C. Johanson, the discoverer of the famous three-million-year-old "Lucy" skeleton in Ethiopia and current president of the Institute for Human Origins in Berkeley, California. Zihlman disputes Johanson's insistence that Lucy was female and says that Johanson prevented him from examining the fossils when they were under his auspice at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. She accused him of censorship.

Johanson says that he actually invited Zihlman to examine the specimens, that she never accepted the invitation, and that his request to review any paper she chose to publish prier to the release of his own preliminary findings are not remarkable. "There's always a major publication delay until after the primary researchers [in this case, Johanson and several others] had published," he said. "Many times visitors are not even welcome to investigate specimens. We came to an acceptable procedure to allow for that."

Zihlman, however, still holds a grudge, which Johanson calls inexplicable. He suggests that she might have tampered with the anonymous peer review system of the National Science Foundation to create grant difficulties for Johanson, but admits he can provide no real evidence and levels no accusations. Zihlman, in the Discover magazine cover story on

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her work, offered to defend her controversial views of the Lucy skeleton in an open forum.

Encounters like these are what led to Zihlman's co-sponsorship of the all-female conference. They also demonsrate the infantile reductionism at the core of arguments for feminist science. If a man and a woman fight over an idea and the man appears to prevail, the result does not always reveal sexism. Yet those who allow their feminist politics to taint their scientific lives often see ideas that lose out in the •Darwinian competition for prominence has having been victimized by male skullduggery. Much of their "work" is concocting elaborate theories that "prove" the destructive nature of imagined male biases.

Donna Haraway, for instance, discusses sexual and scientific politics in her book Primate Visions: Gender, ace and the Nature of World Science. She provides a chic, quasi-deconstructive analysis in the heady, obfuscating

jargon of the lit crit industry: "In a sense, science itself is a kind of gender. For the realms of both nature and culture, "science' is the key authorizing subject, the chief sign of rationality and order. Sex is categorically opposed to order; it is what must be ordered; woman remains the sex; woman the scientist becomes the trope figuring bias; man is simply scientist; his gender is unmarked, unremarkable, not a problem, resting easily within the genre (gender) of science. His gender does not seem in danger of becoming the semiotic order to science, namely, a politics." What she tries to say here, in very many words, is that male scientists —members of an exclusive world order created and main-tained by men—view women as threats to their profession. The fatuousness of ideas such as these are actually a smokescreen for the stakes of the battle being waged in science, a battle that will grow in intensity and consequence

in the years ahead. Those who pursue objectivity in re-search lost the humanities long ago. Now science, previ-ously impermeable to questions of value judgments and political propagandizing, finds itself assaulted by suppos-edly marginalized scholars who see value in nothing and politics in everything. For them, science is to be won over or conquered, as it were simply a matter of elections and coups.

Politicians, of course, have often used science as a tool. They have proven "theories" about racial and ethnic inferiority that have led to holocaust; about health and disease which have led to misery in daily life. Those who would now produce a feminized science may think that they are merely creating a space for affirmative action in our notion of the truth, but the results of such experiments are always more destructive than they can imagine.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 7

late what we know into the policy options our public officials are debating; and we must do so without appearing to be either partisan or political."

By the end of the 1980s, the means for advancing policies without appearing to be political were well-established: use Council on Philanthropy conferences, publications, and training to change attitudes among key board members at foundations that remained conservative. Or better still, ease them out altogether. Foundation News described this last technique in a fictional article which detailed how a new board member learns ways to pressure senior members to leave so that philanthropic correctness can be introduced into the foundation's programs. The article amounted to advice on how to subvert a foundation's board: "Introduce a discussion of rotating terms...gather an advisory committee...use some of the foundation's administrative funds to hire consultants.. .bring on younger members •f the family to counter-balance the calcification...[Suggest hat those] who have been serving for years should move on •y moving off."

The changes were subtle at first. A foundation staffer hired here, a trustee eased out there, a more radical project funded here. But in 1991 the years of proselytizing and agitation bore truly dramatic fruit. Joseph's Foundation Jews reported that the Pew Trusts, worth $3.8 billion, had eliminated almost all of their right-wing grantmaking" and engaged an activist, socially liberal executive director..."

The heroine of the Foundation News story was 37-'ear-old Rebecca W. Rimel, a nurse turned administrator who'd risen through Pew's ranks to become a vice president or programs. Although Rimel, after seizing power, "push[ed] Hit most of the senior staff, a degree of bloodletting seldom seen in the foundation world," there was no need to worry: her fast-talking, almost breezy public persona masks the heart of a dedicated manager." Not only did Foundation News endorse the coup, but it crowed over the stark disre-gard of donors' wishes. Joking that the move probably sent the late J. Howard Pew and Joseph N. Pew Jr. spinning in the family crypt, the article concluded with a fanciful possibil-ity: "J. Howard and Joe Jr. stopped spinning—and smiled."

But why would they smile? J. Howard Pew, a devout Presbyterian, supported Christian causes and charitable activity in his hometown of Philadelphia. Pew disliked big government programs, thought the Ivy League colleges were too liberal, and disliked publicity. For years, the Pew Trusts gave to causes and charities that reflected these ideas. Pew founded the conservative Gordon-Conwell Theologi-cal Seminary and backed such traditional charities as the Edith R. Rudolphy Residence for the Blind and the Adoption Center of the Delaware Valley. Now Pew is funding the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides in Eugene, Oregon, and a host of other liberal research groups and environmental organizations.

Would Pew smile now that control of his foundation

rests with professional grantmakers whose loyalty is to plots hatched by the Council on Foundations, rather than to the Pew vision? Those local charities that directly provide services to the needy no longer fit new Pew guidelines for giving, but Ivy League colleges are in. Although J. Howard Pew hated government welfare programs, the Pew Trusts now operate in partnership with government programs on homelessness, AIDS, health policy and a variety of social and scientific programs.

Could there be two, three many Pews? Could others among the small number of conservative foundations slither left as older board members leave, as bloodlettings occur, and as power-seeking executives encounter board members will-ing to be dominated?

Already, a majority of foundation officials — accord-ing to a Capital Research Center study — believe that the American private enterprise system is unfair to working people, that families and other basic institutions cause alien-ation, and that a systemic restructuring of American society is necessary. Already foundations are putting their money where the Council's mouth is: over one billion dollars in leftwing grants have been made during the past five years, with the big winners including the American Civil Liberties Union, the NOW Legal Defense Fund and the Environmental Defense Fund. Already, big leftist philanthropies such as the John D. and Catharine T. MacArthur Foundation, the J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation, the Public Welfare Foun-dation, the New World Foundation and the George Gund Foundation, make over twice as many grants to leftwing organizations as their counterparts on the right make to conservatives. But even this disparity is not enough for the Council: it demands unconditional surrender.

James Joseph seen ten fat years since his elevation to the Council presidency. His staffers are on call to answer questions on topics such as computer systems and foundation investments. They offer tips on management to foundation boards and to donors interested in starting a foundation. The Council's annual survey of salaries helps foundation execu-tives who hope for raises above the $ 100,000 per year level. It is the best of all possible worlds.

t their 1992 gathering in Miami Beach, Council on Philanthropy conference attendees sat on the floor of the Fontainebleau Hilton ballroom, put on hats

bearing the names of Third World countries and pretended to be starving while others ate lunch. But in the evening, safe behind barricades that kept cars four blocks away from Miami Beach's Lincoln Road, they had their own private feast of clams, steak fajitas, chocolate mousse, and other fine dishes offered at feeding stations every few yards.

There was occasional unpleasantness — I saw two black children turned away from this groaning board — but one retired New York cabbie knew enough to trail the name-

badged elite and ask them to fill plates, then pass them over: on-the-spot grantmaking!

The conference goers did lots of complaining in Mi-ami, as tropical sunlight fell softly on the carved rosewood and antique bronze of the Fontainebleau Hilton. Ted Turner, who now has a foundation of his own, complained that "we have 10 million, I don't know, different species, and one species uses up half the resources of the planet." Peter Goldmark, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, com-plained that "a lot of us, a lot of my friends, feel isolated," and the goal now should be government-guaranteed jobs and nationalized health care. Melanne Verveer of People for the American Way argued that any federal de-funding of pornog-raphy was "government censorship" through use of the purse. Mark Rosenman of the Union Institute complained that any restriction on use of non-profit postal rates for advocacy mailings is a plot "to deny the sector its full capacity to speak forcefully in the public interest." Summing up, Council on Foundations board member Ira Hirschfield declared that many money-givers need the Council to "create vision, grab them, and motivate them."

Over the past two decades the Council on Philanthropy seems to have been successful in its task of grabbing and re_educating, but there's always room for innovation. For much of two days the Council placed 66 conference attendees in a closed room where they received instruction in New Age visualization techniques and then used crayons and construc-tion paper to portray what they had learned concerning the purpose of their lives and dollars. The Dream Catchers initially were led by Peter Russell, who studied with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and argues that if humanity were to evolve into a healthy, integrated, social super-organism, this transformation could signal the maturation and awakening of the global nervous system... .Gaia would become a conscious, thinking, perceiving being."

The short-term material remnants after the Dream Catchers' closing session were unimpressive: some crumpled-up drawings, an empty box of Carr's Assorted Biscuits for cheese, and one brown crayon. But the stage is now set for the contest of the 1990s and the 21st century: Environmental pantheism vs. the religious theism that laid the base for American philanthropy. James Joseph has abandoned that vision. He concluded one of his speeches to Council members with the ringing proclamation, "We are the revolution. We are the future."

It make look like smooth sailing to Joseph and his brethren, but one of these days these self aggrandizing liberation philanthropists will find themselves colliding with the people whose destiny they arrogantly try to direct.

The author is * senior fellow >i the CapitalResearch Center, Washington D.C.

A

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the profit motive represent spitball-throwing writ large; the evil represented by "the system" can be miraculously thwarted if you just remember to sort your old newspapers. Thus is the circle of guilt closed tight.

If environmentalism is one chic subject in the pre-teen reading room, another are certain books designed especially to "empower" (the dreadful jargon of pc does not spare the young) black children. The goal may be laudable, but all too often the results are marred by shoddy research and the rhetoric of inter-racial compe-tition.

Two books from Chicago's African-American Press exemplify this new racial "sensitivity." The first is a black history paperback for elementary school chil-dren, Lessons from History: A Celebration in Blackness by Jawanza Kunjufu, which begins with a picture show-ing an outline of the African continent surrounding a smaller North America, with the caption, "Africa is three times bigger than America, but maps show them as the same size." Big deal. Greenland is a lot smaller than America, but maps show it as the same size too. This doesn't mean there's a pro-Greenland conspiracy, any more than there is the anti-Africa conspiracy that this book dins in the ears of young readers from page one.

The second book, Carla and Annie by Susan K. Smith, is about a little African-American girl whose white playmate makes fun of her because she's black. Though they make some offhand statements about ap-preciating diversity, Carla's parents spend most of the book (which does not end with a reconciliation scene between the children) telling Carla to be proud of all the reasons why her African heritage and black skin make her superior. This is the literature of separate and angry.

Malcolm X by Arbold Adoff (Harper Books), for kids aged 7-10, tells how Malcolm and his family suffered from racism and the KKK, and how he sold drugs, was arrested at age 20, and while in prison read about how "black people had great societies in Africa long before America was discovered." (Nothing about how these societies sold their own people into slavery, of course.) Malcolm also found out about the Nation of Islam, and Elijah Muhammad, who "called white people vdevils' because they had always tried to enslave blacks. [Actually, according to Mr. Muhammad, white people are "born" devils, the products of an experiment by a mad scientist named Jakub.] Malcolm felt from his own experiences and from his reading that Elijah Muhammad told the truth." Becoming a leader of the black people, he did not condemn whites themselves, just "their deeds." Though martyred he lives on in every black person. Each time you see black people with pride, the book con-cludes, remember that they owe it to Malcolm X. This is the same vision of St. Malcolm — denounced and ostracized by Martin Luther King and the black civil rights leadership when he was alive — about to be propounded by Spike Lee.

Similarly, Father Gander Nursery Rhymes (Santa Barbara: Advocacy Press), are intended to "empower" children by purging their lives of sexism. The author achieves this through a form of literary affirmativeaction, adding a male character to every female-domi-nated rhyme and vice versa. Thus the fine lady at Banbury Cross is followed by a fine gentleman, and Little Jack Homer shares his pie with Little Nell Horner. Biology is destiny here. Little Bo Peep can't cope with her sheep without Little Joe Peep's help.

The really absurd thing about this book, though, is the way it adds didactic verses to time-honored rhymes to teach kids about "issues." Jack and Mrs. Spratt are warned to beware of cholesterol. And the venerable "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" has a new ending:

"If the sky stays pure and clean, We will see your twinkle bright But smoke, exhaust, and acid rain All will cloud your flickering light."

What's next? Will the old lady in the shoe become a rent-control activist? Will Solomon Grundy die of AIDS?

This sort of rewriting of the classics is reminiscent of the 18th century's revisions of Shakespeare's plays to make them more "moral." (Cordelia surviving in King Lear, etc.) Updating these children's tales to make them politically correct only deprives children of their fantasy world and reduces their world to the narrow range of adult's contemporary problems. This is self defeating—deadening the emotions, not "empowering" them. The greatness of children's literature, as figures as diverse as Maurice Sendak and Bruno Bettelheim have shown, is their refusal to conform to the kinds of orthodoxies the adult world always wants to impose on children. As Alison Lurie contends in her book Don't Tell the Grownups, the children's literature that is truly empow-ering is the kind that enables kids to subvert or escape from adult problems and power structures, rather than the kind that tries to make them compliant citizens from pre-school onward.

Still another concerted attempt to promote correct thinking for children can be seen in a book about gay life.

THE PROBLEM ISTHAT THESE BOOKSON HOMOSEXUALITYSEEM TO HAVE BEENWRITTEN BY SOCIAL

SCIENTISTS ONLITHIUM

Most of these books have plots that can be summed up bya composite title: "Little Johnny Has Two Daddies" and "That's Okay."

The problem is that these books on homosexuality are almost never creative and imaginatively liberating. They seem to have been written by social scientists on lithium and have a banal adult vision in their ideological baggage. In Lester Newman's Gloria Goes to Gay Pride (Boston: Alyson Wonderland Books), for instance, the child narrator calls her parents Mama Rose and Mama Grace. The book opens with her talking about all the holidays they celebrate, like Valentine's Day and Chanukah. Then she says, "But today is a special holiday. Today is Gay Pride Day, and I get to be in a parade!" During the march, many of the dual mamas' friends wave. "But right next to the park, some people aren't singing or clapping. They stand very quietly on the sidewalk next to a sign." It says GAYS GO AWAY. Gloria's dog, the PC Pet of the Year, growls at them, but Mama Rose patiently explains that though love is the best thing in the world, some people think she and Mama Grace shouldn't love each other.

Concern for the homeless is another issue that might conceivably be relevant to children, since the homeless are a fact of life in most cities. But what is the proper attitude to strike? That the homeless are likeeveryone else except temporarily down on their luck? That there are dangerous lunatics mixed in with the luckless homeless population? One of the most popular books on this subject is Leonara O' Grady, a collection of verse which depicts the heroine bag lady as a whimsical eccentric whose cart has a "bouquet of rags" and other "Treasures you won't find inside the museum/So why doesn't everyone come and see them?" Adults' failure to appreciate Leonara is mere prejudice. The book makes sleeping on a park bench sound like a mystical encounter with nature. "The dew is her blanket/The clouds are her pillow." The charming pastel colors of the illustrations make it all seem very benign. While it is no doubt true that the homeless are people too, children should probably be wary of thinking of bag ladies as counter-culture fairy godmothers.

Perhaps as depressing as the attempts to train children as leftists from the cradle is the desire to intro-

duce them to every social problem in the adult world at the age of 5. Authors of "relevant" children's literature seem intent only on prematurely robbing young readers of that loss of innocence which in prior times would come through personal exploration and the collision of a young-ster with the intractable adult world. What does it say about our society that books for five-year-olds titled What are Drugs? and You Can Say No to Drugs sit on the store shelf next to The Very Hungry Caterpillar?

Publishers and librarians have mixed feelings to-wards these didactic picture books: some are enthusiastic about the fact that it's now acceptable to educate children about these issues, while others fear that the quality of the child's reading experience will suffer if editors value virtuous political messages over good stories. WalterLorraine, children's book editor at Houghton Mifflin, is one publisher who objects to the politicization of children's books. Despite pressure from various activist groups, he tries to publish books on the basis of literary quality and not political content. ("I do not think of what I do as intending to teach or train anyone. I am presenting an original idea of an author.") Though Lorraine personally supports gay rights, he resents ideological coercion such as the list of guidelines he has received from a gay-rights group describing how many and what sort of books about homosexuality should be published by Houghton Mifflin.

Some other major trade publishers are less willing to discuss their interactions with literary activists in the children's' literature field. Dianne Hess, children's book editor at Scholastic, commented that her company looks for good literature, not ethnic boosterism, but admits that the changing demographics of the country have created a need for more multicultural books and for books about issues like AIDS. As for the danger that children's litera-ture will be taken over by boring "message" books, she contends that good literature will endure no matter what the topic or political slant. This sort of "natural selection" philosophy was common among publishers I interviewed.

Judy Wilson, the editor in charge of all eight im-prints of children's books at Macmillan, had a more nuanced view of the problems facing a publisher today. Though social changes require that certain issues be addressed, she feels many of these issues are out of place in picture books and should be saved for the 12-and-up books or "problem novels." Books on gay parents, for example, "would be inappropriate" for the very young. Like most other trade publishers, she primarily "tries to publish books of universal interest because "these other things are for such a small group, and little kids aren't interested in other people's problems."

Wilson added that many alternative presses have arisen to publish these sorts of didactic special-interest books. She mentioned Just Us, a company that only publishes black books. "They decided to start publishing because they didn't think regular publishers were doing enough for the black community. I found that offensive because Macmillan and other trade publishers do make an effort to print more multicultural books: it's just that it's not as noticeable because they publish so many other types of books as well." She resents the implication that trade publishers deliberately maintain a white cultural hegemony.

But while most mainstream publishers and librar-ians are not eager to see traditional kids' literature disap-pear and while the movement to indoctrinate children with social activism is at present more of a trend than aconspiracy, there is still a reason to worry. Children are the one "minority group" in our society which must have its literature written for it and much of the time read to it as well. They are the one group unable to evaluate the psychological message they are being given, the one group wholly at the mercy of propagandists. They are also the one group most in need of works that excite the imagination and promote creative ways of looking at the world. If children are taught from nursery school onward that race, class, sexual orientation, and, of course, recycling are the lines which divide the saved from the damned, the next generation will acquire perversities that will make Matilda touching herself in the wrong place; seem very benign indeed.

PAGE 15

Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America by Ellen Chesler (Simon & Schuster) 639pp $27.50

MICHAEL ANTONUCCI

any once revered figures of the American past have become targets of academic revisionists. Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln are

among those who have been vilified as racists and architects of genocide by he new histories reflecting current academic fashions. Operating along a predictable bias, the revisionists, not surprisingly, have overlooked more obvious targets, closer to home.

One of the most revered icons of campus feminists, for example, is Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, who coined the term "birth control" in 1914. From her first lays of political activism to her death in 1966, Sanger was honored, feted and acclaimed by progressives all over the world. She received a medal from the American Woman's Association along with a citation which read: "She has opened the door of knowledge and given light, freedom and happiness TO thousands in the tragic meshes of ignorance. She is remaking the world." Sanger's most recent biographer, Ellen Chesler, states: "Every woman in the world today who takes her sexual and reproductive harmony for granted should venerate Margaret Sanger." If that were not encomium enough, Madeline Gray, another biographer, wrote: "Indeed, this woman did more for women than any woman who ever lived."

The basis for this praise was Sanger's advocacy, promo-tion and sale of birth control information and devices at a time when the dissemination of such information through the mails was illegal. There can be no denying that it was largely due to Sanger's efforts that birth control became a public issue. What has almost completely disappeared from the accounts of Sanger's career, however, are the motives that inspired her to launch the birth control movement. In The Principles and Aims of the American Birth Control League, for example, she wrote: "Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to the maintenance of those who should never have been born."

Who are "those who should never have been born"? Sanger was never reticent about listing them: "Modem studies indicate that insanity, epilepsy, criminality, prostitu-tion, pauperism and mental defect, are all organically bound up together and that the least intelligent and the thoroughly degenerate classes in every community are the most pro-lific."

By the time Sanger became politically active, the birth rate of American women had actually been falling steadily since 1820. As people became richer, they tended to have fewer children (a trend which continues to this day). The immigrant birth rate, however, was some 70-80% higher than the native birth rate. So, in the early stages of her career, Sanger targeted the lower classes for her message.

Another inspiration for her crusade was her antipathy for the market system. She was greatly influenced by the Socialist leader Eugene Debs (whom she knew personally) as well as anarchist Emma Goldman and wrote that working women should not "produce children who will become slaves to feed, fight, and toil for the enemy — Capitalism." Her first publication, The Woman Rebel, had promised to give contraceptive information, but instead editorialized on the evils of the Rockefellers, religion and marriage. "The marriage bed," she wrote, "is the most degenerating influ-ence in the social order."

Sanger's view of the perfect social order is eye-opening. She proposed "a system of bonuses to unfit parents, paying them to refrain from further parenthood, and continu-ing to pay them while they controlled their procreative faculties, this would be not only a profitable investment, but the salvation of American civilization." She called for public school classes to be divided into six groups: Gifted, Bright, Average, Dull, Normal, and Defective. She felt the practice of putting all classes of children of the same age together "produced only a dull leveling to mediocrity." She suggested that "every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period." In a speech in

Hartford, Connecticut in 1923, she recommended a plan which would require parents to "apply" to have babies, in the same manner that immigrants apply for visas. When Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes of New York pointed out that

within each of the "unfit" lived "an immortal soul to be saved and glorified for all eternity among the blessed in heaven", Sanger replied, "The idealism of such an utterance appears crude and cruel."

How do Sanger's supporters explain these statements? Madeline Gray dismisses them in a sentence: "...she had to use the kind of lectures that would curry favor with people of wealth, those who could donate the much-needed cash to her cause as well as supply the expertise they had learned in their long battle for woman suffrage." Chesler takes the same stance, reasoning that Sanger needed "to blunt the attacks of religious conservatives against her." In other words, we are to ignore Sanger's talk of the "unfit" as merely pandering to the prejudices of the rich in exchange for funding. And I have a bridge to sell you.

By 1929 Sanger had shifted the focus of her message to the middle class, once it became clear that the lower classes were not clamoring for birth control. She changed the motto of her publication, Birth Control Review from the original motto "To Breed a Race of Thoroughbreds" to the still-in-use "Babies by Choice, Not Chance."

The birth control movement soon grew beyond Sanger's exclusive province. Her American Birth Control League merged with another organization and eventually changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Sanger was named honorary president and remained a figure-head until her death in 1966. To the end, she held a great deal of bitterness for her opponents and was convinced that the Catholic Church had established a prison in northern Utah for priests who agreed with her views on birth control.

Sanger felt that birth control would "produce a terres-trial paradise." Those who share her political views have seen fit to reconstruct her founding of the birth control movement as a compassionate crusade for poor and destitute women. In fact, Sanger was crusading to free society from the burdens of the "unfit, "a position which, if espoused today would quickly bring denunciations from her hagiographers and disciples.

America: What Went Wrong! by Donald Barlett and James Steele (Andrews and McNeel), 235 pp, $6.95

JOHN H. HINDERAKER AND SCOTT W. JOHNSON

he most rapidly metastasizing if not the most notable newspaper series of the past year is Donald Barlett and James Steele's "America: What Went Wrong?"

Mixing tendentious anecdotes with statistical sleight-of-hand, Barlett and Steele argue that the decade of the 1980's was a feast for the rich at the expense of the middle class and an unrelenting story of American decline. Barlett and Steele conjure a phantasmagoria of predictable bogeymen to which they" attribute this decline: corporate takeovers and restructurings (criticized for causing job losses), foreign trade (criticized for "exporting jobs"), deregulation (criticized for causing job losses and increasing prices), and redistribution of the tax burden from corporations and the wealthy to the middle class.

While Barlett and Steele describe themselves as supply-ing "detailed information" that their readers "can get nowhere else," they have produced instead a compendium of confabu-lation.

They argue, for example, that the economy of the 1980's resulted in "the dismantling of the middle class." Although their book does not dispute the fact that nearly nineteen million new jobs were created during the Reagan years, the authors insist that job growth was centered in the retail trade and services sectors which pay the lowest wages. This point has been repeated so often, that it has rapidly become a cliché. But according to data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 82% of the increase in employment during the 1980's was in the higher paying occupations (categorized by the Bureau as technical, precision production and manage-rial and professional). Only 12% of the increase in employ-ment occurred in the lower paid, low-skilled service occupa-tions. And of course, other equally significant yardsticks, such as growth in income, demonstrate that all segments of Ameri-can society substantially improved their lot during the 1980's.

Can Barlett and Steele possibly be unaware, for example, that median family income (measured in constant 1980 dollars) rose from $28,727 in 1982 to $32,191 in 1988, reversing the downward trend caused by the stagflation of the Carter years? Their book fails to mention, let alone account for, this funda-mental and well-known fact.

Indeed, two recent studies of income dramatically give the lie to Barlett and Steele's portrait of a vanishing middle class punished by a contracting economy. A Treasury Depart-ment study of 14,351 taxpayers between 1979 and 1988 dramatically demonstrates both the explosive income growth of poorer taxpayers during this period as well as the changing identity of "rich and "poor" taxpayers. According to the Treasury Department study, 85.8% of those taxpayers in the bottom quintile or poorest one-fifth of the sample taxpayers moved up at least one quintile by 1988, while 14.7% actually rose to the top quintile. Only 14.2% of those in the bottom quintile remained mired there, making statistically more likely that the "poor" taxpayer of 1979 had become "rich" by 1988 than that he had stayed poor, hi the third or middle quintile, 47.3% had moved to a higher quintile by 1988, while 33% remained in the middle and 19.7 % fell into a lower quintile. Of the much-maligned "rich" in the top 1% of 1979 taxpayers, over half had fallen out of that category by 1988. A recent Urban Institute study by Mark Condon and Isabel Sawhill demonstrates similarly dramatic income mobility, particu-larly among the poor, over the period 1976-86.

Instead of coming to terms with such basic economic data, Barlett and Steele assemble a cascade of slanted anec-dotes to support their thesis without presenting even one account of any ordinary person who improved his lot during the 1980's, or of any American industry that prospered on account of praiseworthy accomplishments during the 1980's. At times, these anecdotes personalize economic issues in a manner that verges on the ludicrous. Barlett and Steele note, for example, that for "Christopher E. Neiman of Fort Smith, Arkansas, deregulation meant the loss of health insurance as he was battling cancer." Such anecdotes obviously could be adduced to criticize any economic policy.

The level of economic incomprehension conveyed in

these pages is staggering. Barlett and Steele denounce the tax exemption accorded interest paid on municipal bonds, for instance, claiming that it benefits only "the rich." They are apparently unaware that the purpose of the exemption is to reduce the cost to municipalities of raising money through bonds. If the tax exemption were removed, municipalities would be forced to pay market interest rates. The returns to investors would be virtually identical, but the increased inter-est expenses would be borne by taxpayers.

In other instances the authors' lack of economic literacy leads to inconsistencies that are almost comic. Thus in one chapter Barlett and Steele criticize corporate restructurings for leading to asset sales that create job losses; in a subsequent chapter they criticize the reformed bankruptcy law of 1978 for facilitating corporate reorganizations rather than forcing cor-porate liquidations, i.e., asset sales.

Taking the Great Depression as their model, Barlett and Steele propose remedies for America's alleged decline that are reminiscent of the New Deal: "comprehensive changes in [i.e., additions to] government laws and regulations on a scale of the sweeping legislative revision of the 1930's. But it is obviously not economic revival that is true object of Barlett and Steele's desires. It is restraint on the dynamism of freeeconomy.

Barlett and Steele positively radiate terror in the face of economic change. They portray every change in corporate ownership as destructive, all middle class job mobility as downward, and every gain for the wealthy as coming at the expense of the middle class. Barlett and Steele's proposed remedies are profoundly reactionary; they look to government to assert control over the forces of change and to impose stasis. It is easy to imagine them writing at the turn of the century, relating tales of unemployed harness markers and demanding government restrictions on automobiles. If their book serves no other purpose, it definitively highlights a central fact of contemporary politics: when people the world over are choos-ing freedom and rejecting state control, "reformers" in America are promulgating a tired leftism that has been thoroughly discredited by experience.

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THE HUMANITIES IN THE MISSIONARY POSITIONnecdotal horror stories from today's politically correct campus are legion, and the

cases are endlessly absurd. But the darker aspect of the vast, Vichy-like capitulation of the academy lies in the cowardice and opportunism revealed. For the most shocking aspect of the transformation of higher education really is that it was not resisted, but welcomed. There's an Us and Them, all right, and We were not so much conquered as sold out. Why?

Camille Paglia speaks of the "old" New Criticism in literature in terms of a vulnerabil-ity inherent in it. (This, in an op-ed commen-tary in the Times Literary Supplement on what she calls, with chilling accuracy, "The Nurs-ery-school Campus"). This vulnerability came to be exploited by its successor, that bizarre congeries of Continental imports and domes-tic hybrids — deconstruction, the New His-toricism, Critical Legal Studies, feminism, the multicultural impulse—currently presid-ing over the academic curriculum.

Paglia indicts only one aspect of the New Criticism that arose in the two decades prior to the Second World War and against which the new doctrines developed: "The New Criticism, casting off the old historicism of German Philology, produced a generation of academics trained to think of literature as largely detached from historical context," she writes. "This was ideal breeding ground for French theory...a useful defensive strategy for well-positioned, pedantic professors actively resisting the ethnic and cultural revolution of that subversive decade (of the 1960's)..."

In other words, Paglia holds that the disease which now afflicts the American acad-emy (for it is really only the American cam-puses which have turned out to be sero-posi-tive) was a more-or-less inevitable result of intellectual choices taken in good faith by minds of great power and sincerity, but which reactionary epigones were easily able to ex-ploit. This is not quite a correct explanation, in my opinion, and a closer look suggests deeper and more troubling sources for the capitula-tion of American campus intellectuals to the academic left.

Defensive pedantry implicitly grants at least a passionate basis of belief to its practi-tioner. But the reigning humanities establish-ment studs (or whatever you call them: we're speaking of all three sexes here) are not crusty old mossbacked scholars who cannot bear to see their fiefdoms defiled by the muddy wooden shoes of intruders from reality. The

bizarre realm John Ellis calls Radical Liter-ary Theory is not founded on an elaborate, beautiful, but wholly preposterous vision of things, like the Ptolemaic universe or the Lamarckian biosphere or geology still in the emprise of the Book of Genesis. Radical Literary Theory is a great deal more cynical that, and its animating energy is not anti-quarian rear-guard defensiveness.

The New Criticism of Eliot and Ran-som did not fail because it contained within its DNA a rogue gene, like hemophilia in the Romanovs. Radical Literary Theory replaced the New Criticism because it is much, much easier to advance one's career with jargon and bluff than to demonstrate a penetrating truth achieved with mother wit and what one might call the Higher Com-mon Sense — criticism, after all, is nothing if not practical.

he core difficulty of the New Critical approach (and I use this term as a shorthand caption for an entire

broad style of intellectual activity) is of course the fact that real practicality — use-ful simplification (always the best first step in explaining anything), relevant generality, the ability to describe a planet complete with its own chemistry and physics and artist has constructed over yonder—is not a gift very many critics possess. Better to have com-mand of "ovarian hermeneutics," "valorized clitoral imagery" and a spray can or two of anti--phallologocentric sensitivities on hand, and one can sound very profound indeed without the embarrassment of revealing the triviality of your insights (incidentally, doesn't hermeneutics always sound like a good name for the latest L.A. rap group?). When, in a famous critical passage on Hamlet, T.S. Eliot could describe the core of his poetic procedure as a search for "an 'objective correlative'...a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion," at least two generations of intelligent readers could see for themselves (no jargon, no bluff) the intention and the technique be-hind, say, J. Alfred Prufrock's inner reality — how it was brought before us as images, not rhetoric, how that mutilated, endlessly aware innerreality was preciselyrepresented by an image of astonishing desolation and self-loathing: / should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Eliot, the critic, told us how to read every creative imagination of the first order, himself included. In a few sentences of his

critical prose, he had given us, once and for all, a means of comprehending the method by which one personality might attempt to offer some fractional equivalent of a real experi-ence in verse. It is not necessary to set down any sort of testimonial as to how much some-thing like this might "mean" to one — in a very real sense, the insight was priceless.

But also, of course, rare — there have not been very many minds like Eliot's or Ransom's or George Orwell's, critics of great intelligence whose efforts as commentators was to make things of the imagination com-prehensible. And there have not really been so very many sensibilities that responded as readers to the clues those critics could ad-vance. Real simplicity is as difficult as it is valuable. It is also, in this instance and in many others, the very definition of Art For Art's Sake, an experience in essence private, exquisite, unquantifiable, untranslatable. And these aspects of the experience have never squared very well with the emotional structure underpinning a mass democracy.

Allan Bloom is perfectly accurate in perceiving the appeal of Radical Literary Theory for the faculties at prestigious univer-sities, where the very style of Art for Art's Sake condemned the activity of literary-ar-tistic perception to an ectoplasmic realm of preciousness and irrelevancy. Bloom points out that radical French Left ideas were hap-pily received at Cornell in the late 1960's because they seemed to promise to reanimate the tired old books over which the professors had been watching like "eunuchs guarding a harem of aging and now unattractive courte-sans."

ut this does not quite explain the entrenchment of the style as late as 1992, and under vastly altered po-

litical circumstances (Marxist theory now as eerily dead as last week's nightmare), and why it continues to prosper as a pose. After all, one of the most disheartening facets of the radical entrenchment has been the capitula-tion to it of the American university estab-lishment — like the recent savings and loan catastrophe or the Dutch elm disease on these shores, the conquest from without was really effected by resonant weakness from within. American academe must have been poised to fall even before the unhappy lesbians and show-offy junior professors began huffing and puffing at the ivory door, but it was the administrator in his tassled loafers and Sears doubleknit suit who actually invited them in —welcomed them in.

The university administrators, the Fac-ulty Senate power-groupies, the "chairper-

sons" who aspire to deanship, the staffs of university press and radio and television divi-sions, the theater crowd, some specialized alumni groups—are all emotionally involved in an enormous and difficult hypocrisy. Be-neath the level of the score or so highly endowed and highly motivated American universities where the life of the mind is really taken seriously and significant research is carried out, the American university "sys-tem" is a gigantic, expensive Potemkin Vil-lage.

There are almost 2000 B.A. granting institutions in the U.S. and about a million students a year graduating from them. Most of these institutions do not exist because the great scientific-cultural project of the West is hurtling forward into the final frontier of knowledge like the starship Enterprise (nei-ther students nor faculty really care very much about all that). They exist because in a mass democracy the only acceptable means of sift-ing mid-upper-middle from mid-lower-middle is attendance at college. The university is a social sorter, not a knowledge machine. Since this hypocrisy cannot be comfortably admit-ted (especially given the enormous expense of the thing), the "mission" of the American university has to be re-contrived and aggres-sively re-sold.

And so for the humanities, which offer no justification to parallel the advancement of self-evident "hard" science, radical re-theo-rizing every aspect of the cultural endow-ment, has been a godsend. It turned out you could take everything great and small from Shakespeare down to the humblest plastic ephemera of rock 'n' roll and send it back into the grinder. Nothing had to be proved to common sense, as perceptions did in the case of the New Criticism or other daylight modes.

The beautiful part was that the product of this mutilation could be made to look like it had a high-minded moral dimension: the radical stud was revealing at last the hidden implication of the vast, ancient conspiracy of dead white males that is Western culture, and who would not approve of that? As for the ambitious administrator (in psychology, habit, and style so emphatically distinct from the stud), he/she at last had both the quantitative stats which would justify the great expense of the system and the messianic justification for the project — the moral reform of America was suddenly the obligation of its humanities faculties. On the politically correct campus these days the atmosphere is blanched of subtlety and as fraught with reflexive prudery as a summer Bible school. To effect a counter-revolution is the task that lies ahead of us. Or. really, Us.

DOUGLAS FOWLER

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