The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the
Closing of the Liberal Mind
By Bruce Bawer
(Broadside Books, 378 pages, $25.99)
As college and university tuitions rise stratospherically,
reaching levels that equal the annual earnings of a working family,
economically stressed parents are expected to continue to foot the
bills for what is an increasingly deficient product—an education
too often consisting of courses taught by con men, perverts,
misfits, masters of gibberish, and malcontents who hate our
country, our society, and the institutions that reward them
handsomely for minimal effort.
And for those students sufficiently naïve to be influenced, the
results can be educations that equip them to do nothing. Rather
than being taught to think, they’re taught to express grievances.
Instead of being exposed to the best that’s been thought and said,
they’re taught that all we treasure as a society—our whole system
of values—is based on racism, sexism, imperialism, or any number of
a huge subset of -isms.
How pervasive are these programs on individual campuses? Are
they an integral part of the curricula? Or are they fringe
offerings, primarily a form of tribute paid by the nervous
politically correct managers who run the institutions to appease
various militant groups and governmental bureaucratic educationists
enforcing the unspoken quota systems that carry with them federal
funding?
As our economy tightens, as people retrench and the theme
becomes back-to-basics, they’re taking a hard look at the luxuries
in which we’ve been indulging. This reexamination is happening
across the board and includes the extraordinary and insufficiently
explained expenses associated with higher education, as our
colleges and universities, among them some of the most prestigious,
increasingly charge more for less.
Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept, a hard-eyed
examination of the Islamic fundamentalism that feasts on the soft
underbelly of European welfare states, turns that hard eye on our
centers of higher learning and the identity politics that since the
great fl ourishing of the New Left in the ’60s and ’70s, have come,
like cuckoos, to push the old liberal arts curricula out of the
academic nests and replace them with victim-centric programs like
black studies, women’s studies, Chicano studies, and a
proliferation of sub-studies.
Bawer devotes four chapters to the primary identity areas, as
well as a separate chapter to sub-studies. He builds each chapter
by reading extensively the frequently semi-literate and jargonistic
books, papers, and journals issued by the various identity groups;
attending their meetings, conferences, and seminars here and in
Europe; interviewing people involved with the groups and their
critics; and through it all, for the most part, resisting the
impulse to satirize and caricature, allowing the words and actions
of the people involved to carry the message.
In his chapter on black studies, Bawer talks with Shelby Steele,
now a fellow at the Hoover Institution, whose 1991 book The
Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America won
the National Book Critics Award. “I was one of those who were in on
the founding of black studies programs,” he tells Bawer, although
he later came to believe that to be taken seriously, black subjects
had to be offered by established departments. He believes African
American literature, for instance, to be “a full, rich subject…but
it had to be taught under the auspices of an English department,
where the formal conventions of criticism were applied
rigorously.”
In the early days, however, he tells Bawer, many of his fellow
black studies advocates couldn’t care less about academic
legitimacy, but rather wanted the power and money that autonomous
departments would give them—power that guilty white academics were
eager to confer. As Steele puts it, “We’d talk to the
administrators, and talk them into having black studies
programs…there was so much white guilt that you could just go into
these places and they’d give you everything you wanted.…It was just
a joke from the very beginning.”
He tells Bawer that he also became aware that “Black Studies
attracted ‘obvious hustlers,’” not real educators. The
proliferation of black studies programs in the 1970s, says Steele,
provided “an avenue for minorities to gain the economic security of
the university professorship.They had no real credentials, so their
argument became ‘You have to hire me to do this because I’m black.’
So your blackness itself became your primary credential.”
Bawer discusses the development of the black studies/Black Power
movement, with examples of the twists and turns of the dialectics
of blackness and profi les of the most successful hustlers, among
them Cornel West, who left his splendid sinecure at Harvard in a
huff when the politically incorrect Larry Summers, who apparently
didn’t get the diversity memo, called him on the carpet for giving
easy grades and passing off rapping as a scholarly activity.
Among others still running their cons is Leonard Jeffries, who,
despite his highly publicized antiwhite and anti-Semitic rants and
nonsensical distinctions between “sun people” and “ice people,” is
still a professor at the City College of New York, where he
previously ran the black studies program. Another identity
professor is Ron Karenga, who ran the black studies program at
California State University-Long Beach and authored
Introduction to Black Studies, considered the class of the
field.
Among other things, Karenga asserts that when Columbus landed in
America, “he found Blacks had already preceded him.” He also
“claims for modern blacks not only the legacy of ancient Egypt but
also that of Muhammad’s Muslim empire.” (Needless to say, this is
not a popular view in Egypt and the Middle East.) “The Moorish
empire in Spain represents not only a golden age in Islamic
civilization,” Karenga wrote, “but also a golden age of
civilization for Africa, Europe and ultimately the world.”
Few Europeans would accept Karenga’s view. Nor is it universally
popular among other identity groups in which the celebration of
Islamic civilization is muted. And in women’s studies, it can cause
vituperative arguments about how to apply fashion-able “feminist
post-colonial theory” to patriarchal countries where women are
forced to cover themselves with unsightly black bags, denied the
simplest of freedoms such as driving a car, and can be stoned to
death for imagined breaches of decorum.
IN OTHER IDENTITY areas there are interesting intersections.
There are PhD programs in disability studies, for instance, and
presentations on the subject “are increasingly common at a range of
identity studies gatherings.” At times, disability studies overlaps
with queer studies. Bawer, who is himself gay, attends one such
conference, where on a panel on “Queer Body Politics,” a presenter,
speaking of similarities between “crips,” as she calls them, and
“queers,” asks the question: “Are crip bodies queer bodies, and can
we say that queer bodies are crip bodies?” In the course of her
presentation, she singles out Queers on Wheels, an organization for
gays in wheelchairs, which “tries an intervention in the hegemonic
way of seeing from bodily difference.”
Then there is a whole discipline of men’s studies, taught at
“about a hundred North American colleges and universities.” Bawer
quotes Lionel Tiger, who calls men’s studies “‘a wholly owned
branch of women’s studies,’ examining maleness through a feminist
and social constructionist prism.” Or, as professor David Clemens
of Monterey Peninsula College puts it, men’s studies is a
“‘camouflage version of Women’s Studies’ in which the ‘operative
question’ is, ‘Why are men so awful?’”
There is even whiteness studies. “Just as men’s studies isn’t
really about maleness but patriarchal oppression, so whiteness
studies isn’t really about whiteness but racial oppression.” Bawer
quotes David Horowitz: “Black studies celebrates Blackness, Chicano
studies celebrates Chicanos, Women’s studies celebrates women, and
white studies attacks white people as evil.”
Then there is fat studies, “to a large extent, a sub-division of
Women’s Studies.” At a National Women’s Studies Association meeting
in Denver, he attends a session titled “Advancing Fat Feminism,”
where one of the participants, a professor who describes herself as
“a self-identified queer, fat, vegan,” waxes eloquent on the cow.
She refuses to drink milk, not for vegan health reasons, but for
feminist principles. “Dairy is a feminist issue. Milk comes from a
grieving mother….no human can be free while other species are
oppressed.”
But amid all this silliness, Bawer does see a ray of hope. He
cites an article appearing in the Daily Beast, in which
the author, discussing the rise of fat studies, seems to worry that
“identity studies are becoming so far removed from any hint of
academic or intellectual legitimacy that even teachers of more
established and only moderately asinine disciplines are reacting to
the far more extreme asininity of the newer ones.” Perhaps. And it
may be that in the end, it’s just a matter of rediscovering some
very simple and basic truths. Before diversity became the
watchword, we called it the melting pot; E Pluribus Unum,
not Ex Uno Plures, was the motto.
In his discussion of Chicano studies, which he characterizes as
“a locus for Marxist propaganda”— “Briefly put: Castro and Chavez
good; America evil”—he cites Francisco H. Vasquez, the editor of “a
major anthology in the field,” who tries to explain why there’s a
need for a discipline called Chicano studies, but “not, say, a
German-American or an Italian-American Studies.” Says Vasquez:
“[T]he U.S. Italian, Irish, and German populations…have in due time
become accepted as ‘real’ Americans. They do not need their own
ethnic studies at the university.” “
It doesn’t seem to occur to Vasquez,” writes Bawer, “that one
reason why those groups have been so successfully integrated is
that they didn’t have ‘their own ethnic studies at the
university.’ Italian, Irish and German Americans…studied what
everybody else studied. They didn’t go to college to be ‘taught’
about the one thing you could be sure they knew something
about.…They went to college to learn about things beyond their own
experience and to do something useful with that knowledge.”
Bawer sums it up:
We stand on….the shoulders of pioneers and soldiers,
entrepreneurs and inventors, factory laborers and farmers,
who…transformed a wilderness continent into the freest, most
dynamic, and most prosperous nation in the history of the human
race [so that] by the late twentieth century virtually every young
person in America had the opportunity to acquire a real higher
education.…
[T]his noblest of goals was met in America before it was met
anywhere else. And it is why the replacement of a true education…by
identity studies is a betrayal, in the profoundest sense, of the
promise of America.
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Photo © Jorge
Royan
