Who (Ac)Counts and How

Abstract

When the PC debate burst onto the national scene in Newsweek and Time feature stories toward the end of 1990, it was only a skirmish in a wideranging attack on progressive higher education mounted by conservatives throughout the 1980s. NEH Chairmen William J. Bennett and Lynne V. Cheney had already issued annual reports on the decline of humanities teaching and research. The Heritage Foundation had published a rightwing agenda for education. Mass-market books by Allan Bloom, Charles Sykes, Page Smith, Roger Kimball, Dinesh D'Souza, and others had appeared at the impressive rate of two per year to warn the public that tenured radicals were demolishing Western culture and the universities entrusted with preserving it. The New Republic, Commentary, and Academic Questions had printed forums on this subject. George Will had fired salvos in his syndicated columns. And Rush Limbaugh's radio waves had begun to crackle with charges against femi-nazis. Responding to this attack, progressive academics made the proverbial mistakes of too little and too late. They replied to the arguments, ignoring the issue of how so many of them had suddenly appeared in print, and they focused on textual features (e.g., rhetoric, validity of claims), not realizing that by the time the attack was so widely textualized it was a fait accompli. The many publications that academics would list in a bibliography on this subject omit two dimensions of the attack: first, public criticisms voiced by conservatives in thousands of TV and radio interviews, op-ed pieces, contacts with legislators, and letters to trustees, administrators, and alumni; and second, actions taken by government officials and conservative institutions to regulate higher education. I mention criticisms and actions in order to correct the mistaken assumption that debates about higher education are the attack. The debates are only part of an attack the Right has manufactured by using an apparatus dedicated to making conservative cultural change.