From: kowan@ai.mit.edu (Rich Cowan) Date: Fri, 21 Oct 94 19:35:05 EDT Sender: gaynet-owner@queernet.org [Excerpted from _Guide to Uncovering the Right on Campus_, edited by Dalya Massachi and Rich Cowan. ISBN 0-945210-03-05. Reprinted from (and copyrighted 1994 by) Radical Teacher, Box 102, Cambridge, 02142 Subscription price $10 for next 3 issues ($6 low-income, $15 Canada). For the full 52-page guidebook which includes 38 graphics and 8 charts, please send $6 plus $1 postage to University Conversion Project, Box 748, Cambridge, MA 02142. Outside the USA the cost is $10. For info on memberships ($25/20/10) and a complete publications list, send e-mail to ucp@igc.apc.org or call 617-354-9363.] "Political Correctness" and the Attack on American Colleges by Paul Lauter The main news Americans were taught about colleges during the last few Bush years was that they had been infected with a galloping moral disease, "Political Correctness." Talking with academics across the country and visiting over twenty campuses in the last year, I came to think the charges of PC were fundamentally a smokescreen designed to discredit higher education. Behind that screen, conservatives have implemented a well-orchestrated and financed campaign to cut budgets, downsize universities, and thus sharply restrict access to higher education. This process particularly hurt the "new" student populations which began to arrive on campus late in the 1960s. More broadly, I think higher education in the United States is undergoing a revolution in structure and function as profound as that which, earlier in this century, converted it from the province primarily of a tiny group of white gentlemen into a broad-based institution of social inclusion. The construction of the monster PC depends upon highly partisan and often remarkably ignorant interpretations of a series of campus events. The extraordinary cut-backs in higher education can be documented in painful detail. Virtually every story in the popular press or in higher education trade journals tells some variation of a now-familiar tale: monster sections, like an 1100-student introduction to Political Science at the University of Illinois; students sitting on the steps of packed auditoriums; library hours cut back and acquisitions curtailed; students unable to get into English 101 after five terms of trying (last year 1200 San Diego State students failed to get into any of their registered classes); major requirements taught only every second or even third year; planned elimination of programs like aerospace engineering at San Diego, and threatened deep cut-backs of traditional departments like Sociology, even at Yale. SUNY/ Old Westbury tried to retrench one of the nation's few African-American music programs- at a college which is half minority and to which a significant number of students came to study music. One statistic captures the impact of this process: in 1976 it took students an average of 4.6 years to graduate with a bachelor's degree; in 1992 it takes an average of 5.5 years. At the same time funds are being cut, faculty are being told to be "more productive" - that is, to process larger and larger numbers of students by increasing class size, teaching additional sections, or shortening terms. In brief, as higher education is becoming less available and more costly to students, it is also being cheapened as a "product." Less evident is the process one might describe, in a term borrowed from industrial union contracts, as "bumping." As private institutions become increasingly expensive, large numbers of upper middle-class students not eligible for aid are turning to the flagship institutions of state systems, which remain significantly cheaper than privates. "Since there are only a limited number of slots at the flagships," Arthur M. Hauptman points out, "the wealthier kids from suburban schools with better grades and better test scores squeeze out poorer kids, who then go to a state college or a community college or the regional, private liberal arts college that will offer them $5,000 in aid. Or they don't go to college at all." That, Hauptman claims, "undermines the mission of public schools: to broaden access to higher education by subsidizing colleges with taxpayers' money." Such a "bumping" process not only limits the life-chances of many middle and working-class students, but it undermines opportunities for poor and particularly minority students even to attend college. Business Week concludes that "Middle and working-class students are being squeezed out of the nation's best, most expensive schools to compete for slots at public colleges - where prices are also rising year after year." Furthermore, as costs rise and aid packages are increasingly limited, students who do stick it out emerge from college with enormous debts. Median debt has more than doubled since 1977, from about $2,000 to $4,800, and it is not unusual for a student to complete a B.A. with a debt of $20,000 or more. Occurring here is not only the undermining of the mission of public institutions, but the privatization of the costs of attending college. For an increasing number of students, the combination of increased costs, the difficulty of getting courses they need, and the problem of finding a job that will enable them to attend college even part- time leads to a decision to drop out - indebted, discouraged, and bitter. The American education system has always, in part, been a means for stratifying society. Schools used to sort students - primarily on the basis of class characteristics - into various "tracks": college-bound, general, or commercial-or into "ability" groups. Now, colleges are made to play an increasing role in such class stratification. Since the 1970s, the proportion of students from high-income families who attend four-year colleges rose from 54 to 60 percent. Among lower-income families the proportion remained at a constant 27 percent. Among households in the upper half of income, 26 percent of students took a four-year college degree in 1979; that figure is up to 31 percent today. However, among students from the lower income half, the proportion fell from 14 percent to 13 percent. In other words, the gap between upper-income and lower-income educational levels is steadily increasing. Even these discouraging figures do not tell the full story. The University of Arizona has been relatively less affected by cuts than some; its budget was up about 1 percent in 1992. Yet its administration tried to cancel remedial math and language classes for the forty percent of incoming students who needed them. Many of these are Latino, first-generation-to-college students. The plan was to "allow" them to take such courses off campus. Such measures are often posed as desirable efforts to raise academic "standards," where costs would not be covered by financial aid packages. In this instance, the proposal was beaten back, but similar schemes are on virtually every administrative drawing board. Access can be restricted only if one can successfully argue that restriction is a function of economic forces beyond our control and if one can somehow make colleges politically suspect. Such arguments play nicely into the overall conservative agenda, which emphasizes downsizing of government (in education as in other areas), privatization (of costs as well as services), and letting the "market" operate rather than using government to level the playing field. The problem with education, according to this perspective, especially college and university education, and most particularly "liberal arts" education, is that it raises expectations far too much. It encourages workers to aspire beyond what the shrinking job market can offer, to think and imagine beyond what labor discipline must impose. An "overeducated" workforce is, to this kind of thinking, as "destabilizing" to the United States as it once was to the state of Kerala in India. The problem for conservatives then becomes, as Max Sawicky has put it, "not how to devise a better way to deliver services, but how to overcome the political obstacles to cutting public spending." The idea is not to devise means for offering more and better educational services. Rather, as Sawicky quotes right-wing maven Stuart Butler, "There is one missing ingredient in the campaign for a smaller and more efficient government sector - a political strategy that works." Enter Political Correctness. The "crisis" of the university we face may prove to be an opportunity to help renew the struggle for broadened access and to debate the question, "Access to what?" It should be an opportunity to reassert the value of diversity in curriculum, students, and staff, and to discuss how we can press for concrete measures to insure that real diversity, at every level, begins to be realized. Certainly, it is an opportunity to take up the tasks of shaping the debate, rather than being defined by other people's soundbites, like PC. Above all, it must become an opportunity to define alternative directions for college education. We can no longer assume that jobs will continue, or departments, or even institutions. Intellectuals must rethink the work we do in universities and colleges, and the work these institutions do in the rapidly underdeveloping economy of the United States. Will universities be ever more elaborate mechanisms for sorting and dividing Americans-and foreign elites as well-or can they become instruments for democratizing society and culture? The answers depend upon our imagination, energy, and willingness to organize. [Paul Lauter teaches at Trinity College in Connecticut. This article is excerpted from a longer version which will appear in the next issue of Radical Teacher.]