Inside American Education (29 page)

Professors have felt free to call conservative students “Neanderthals.” Feminist professors have felt free to call non-feminist females “Barbie dolls.”
⁷

At a more serious level, professors whose courses have deviated from “political correctness” have not only been made targets of campus smear campaigns based on innuendos, like Stephan Thernstrom at Harvard, or Reynolds Parley at Michigan,
⁸
but have sometimes even had their classrooms invaded by masses of outside students who prevented the enrolled students from hearing the professor, as has happened at Berkeley.
⁹
In all these cases, no punishment was meted out to the students—and the rights of the professors and their enrolled students were not even verbally defended by college officials, who either maintained a discreet silence or else treated the professors as being under suspicion.

While the brainwashing in colleges and universities tends to be ideological rather than psychological, echoes of the psychological and social agendas from high school days may still be heard, including an anti-parent orientation and a “sex education” approach that focuses on attitude-changing more so than biological information. In short, what is “politically correct” encompasses the social, the ideological, the educational and the administrative.

SOCIAL AGENDAS

Social agendas on campuses across the country show double standards in a number of ways. For example, they attempt to reduce parental influence over the student in the name of individual autonomy, while violating that autonomy themselves with sustained attempts at indoctrination, buttressed by punishment for those who step out of line from the officially approved attitudes. One of the areas in which colleges and universities have the most consistently one-sided set of policies is in sexual attitudes and practices, all the while affecting a “non-judgmental” posture. As with racial double standards,
those awarded preferential status based on their presumed victimhood as homosexuals respond in ways which create new polarization and hostility.

Parents

The attempt to downgrade the role of the parents of college students begins even before those students set foot on campus. High school counselors, college admissions directors, and others often try to reduce or eliminate the role of parents in influencing the decision as to which college the student chooses to apply to or to attend. Once the freshman enters college, parents are likely to hear once more how they should stay out of the student’s decisions, whether on choice of subject to major in or matters of personal lifestyle. One of the guides for parents whose children are going to college is called
Letting Go
. Cornell University President Frank Rhodes says that parents should “stand back; don’t push.”
¹⁰
The admissions director at the College of William & Mary advises parents to “overcome the protective urge.”
¹¹
“Stop meddling” is the more blunt advice of the director of admissions of New College of the University of South Florida.
¹²

Much of this kind of advice is ostensibly based on the college student’s need for autonomy and respect. Obviously, these are legitimate concerns and there is no single answer as to how far parents should go in these matters. Unfortunately, all sorts of activists with their own ideological agendas, including administrators and professors, show little or no regard for students’ autonomy or need for respect. Parents who heed the constant drumbeat of advice to get out of the picture are only making it easier for others to get into the picture, with their own special agendas.

Sex

Nothing perhaps illustrated the calibre of people promoting
avant-garde
social agendas on campus as an episode at Stanford University in 1986, when Dr. Ruth Westheimer gave a talk there. “Dr. Ruth,” famous as a free-wheeling sex counselor in
the media, is regarded as daring by many but she was not nearly radical enough for Stanford. When asked if it was all right for a girl to get undressed and engage in sexual preliminaries with a boy—and then decide to say “no,” Dr. Ruth replied:

If there is foreplay and there is passion—for somebody who does not want to engage in sexual activity, then to play like this with fire is just not fair and right.
¹³

This statement immediately set off a storm of controversy which began with a counter-attack by Alice Supton, Stanford’s Assistant Dean of Student Affairs, and which continued for a week afterwards in the pages of the college newspaper,
The Stanford Daily
. Ms. Supton criticized Dr. Ruth, both at the lecture and later in print, on grounds that women have the right to refuse “at any point along the path of sexual intimacy.”
¹⁴

Dr. Ruth was accused by a campus radical group of teaching the “acceptability of date rape.”
¹⁵
The coordinator of Stanford’s Date Rape Education Project found Dr. Ruth’s statement “infuriating”
¹⁶
and said that “Dr. Ruth is essentially denying a person the right to say no.”
¹⁷
Dr. Ruth’s view was depicted as a “blame-the-victim” mentality which “perpetuates the myth that everyone who engages in foreplay really wants to have sex,” so that “Dr. Ruth is guilty of unfairly portraying women who say ‘no’ as teases.”
¹⁸
One man who identified himself as a “proud advocate of feminist values” declared himself “outraged at Dr. Ruth’s Victorian attitude and chauvinistic advice,” which “undermines all the important gains of the feminist movement.”
¹⁹

Not everyone at Stanford shared those views. There was applause from the audience when Dr. Ruth made her statement of plain common sense—a rare commodity at Stanford. Yet the letters printed in the
Stanford Daily
were overwhelmingly those supporting the radical feminist viewpoint. One of the few letters it published on the other side, by a young woman, said: “The best way to avoid date rape is not to pray that your date is someone noble, who manages to challenge all life’s basic assumptions.”
²⁰
Another young woman pointed out the many programs of sexual incitement promoted by the university itself and the “150 to 300 unwanted pregnancies at Stanford each year.”
²¹

Assistant Dean Alice Supton has been prominent in promoting the idea of “getting in touch with your sexuality.” However, she is not alone, either at Stanford or in the academic world in general. Expressing one’s sexuality takes many forms. At Northwestern University’s Women’s Center, a picture prominently displayed in the living room is “an artistic rendering of the female genitalia.”
²²
At San Francisco State University, movies in one class showed humans having sex with animals.
²³
More organized expressions of an
avant-garde
view of sex appear in so-called “sex education” material, routinely passed out to students as part of their normal registration for courses.

In college as in the public schools, so-called “sex education” is not so much a matter of conveying biological or medical information as it is a matter of
changing attitudes
toward sex—in an avant-garde direction. Stanford’s sex education kit, for example, contains a booklet entitled “
SAFE SEX EXPLORER’S ACTION PACKED STARTER KIT HANDBOOK
,” which says: “
MUTUAL MASTURBATION IS GREAT
—but watch out for cuts on hands or raw genitals.”
²⁴
Among its other advice:

USE CONDOMS FOR FUCKING
: with several partners,
ALWAYS CLEAN UP AND CHANGE RUBBERS BEFORE GOING FROM ONE PERSON TO ANOTHER
!
²⁵

These so-called “sex education” kits are passed out routinely to young students, away from home for the first time. It conveys not merely biological or medical information but a whole set of attitudes, fundamentally in conflict with the values with which many, if not most, of these students have been raised. Further challenges to these values are made through such things as Stanford’s annual condom-testing contests, where students are urged to use various brands of condoms—supplied free—and then vote on which brands and types they found most enjoyable. An accompanying booklet says: “Try out the condoms by yourself, with a partner, or partners. Be creative! Have fun! Enjoy!”
²⁶
Included is a ballot on which various brands and types of condoms are to be rated for various characteristics, including taste and smell. Condoms weeks are also common events on other campuses, such as Berkeley, San Jose State, Virginia Tech, and the universities of Iowa and North Carolina.
²⁷

Like Stanford’s sex-education kit, condoms are routinely
distributed to students—in this case, by The Stanford AIDS Education Project. To the outside world, the name suggests an organization trying to fight a deadly disease. In reality it is an attitude-shaping effort, under a lofty title, and whether it is likely to increase or decrease the incidence of AIDS is very problematical. Nor is Stanford unique in using AIDS-prevention as a cover for attitude-changing material. At the University of Puget Sound, the Northwest AIDS Foundation took out a full page ad in the student newspaper, showing two cartoon individuals, with little hearts around them, and the message:

WHEN IT CAME TO SAFE SEX, I THOUGHT HE’D BE LIKE ALL THE REST…..QUICK, BORING AND THEN LONG GONE. HOW COULD I HAVE KNOWN THAT HE HAD BEEN TO THE WORKSHOP? HOW COULD I HAVE KNOWN HE WAS ABOUT TO GIVE ME THE MOST SEARINGLY ROMANTIC NIGHT OF MY LIFE? AND HOW COULD I HAVE KNOWN HE WOULD WANT TO STAY? HE GAVE ME….A DOZEN RED CONDOMS
.
²⁸

Dartmouth’s sex education kit has an accompanying form letter, saying that its booklet is “educational,” that it “is not intended to moralize or be judgemental,” but the actual contents of the booklet are in fact promotional, in the sense of favoring a particular set of attitudes, very much like those promoted in high school “sex education” courses. For example, sex is a matter of “how you feel” and it is a decision “too important and personal” to let “someone else” decide for you. It is all a matter of “your feelings and expectations” and sexual relationships “can be heterosexual or they can be homosexual.” You might “clarify your feelings by talking to friends,” but parents are not included in the list of people who have any clarification to contribute.
²⁹
Only after a sexual relationship turns out to be “devastating,” are parents included among those to whom one might turn for emotional support.
³⁰

Any “negative” attention to homosexuality can only be due to “prejudice and hostility,” according to this Dartmouth pamphlet. Any “derogatory terms” are to be avoided and the “acceptable name” of “gay” used. Although homosexuality was once considered an illness, “the American Psychological Association no longer considers it a mental disorder.”
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This last statement is misleading because it neglects to mention that this change did not result from any new scientific evidence, but from a threat by homosexuals to disrupt the American
Psychological Association’s meetings, when they were held in San Francisco.
³²
But whatever the merits or demerits of the pamphlet’s reasoning or conclusions, it is clearly a brief in favor of a particular attitude—despite its “non-judgemental” claims.

Being non-judgmental in one direction is part of the double standards surrounding the “politically correct” social agenda on many campuses. For example, homosexuals are free to publicly proclaim the merits of their lifestyle, as they see it, but anyone who publicly proclaims the demerits of that lifestyle, as he sees it, is subject to serious punishment. At Yale University, for example, “Gay and Lesbian Awareness Days” have been an annual event celebrating homosexuality. A sophomore with different views put up posters parodying the homosexuals’ posters. For this alone, he was suspended for two years. The dean of Yale’s own law school called the decision “outrageous.”
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In the face of this and other outcries, Yale reduced the punishment to probation—with a warning that anything like this again would mean expulsion.

At Harvard, a freshman named Samuel Burke inadvertently got into trouble in December 1985, merely trying to help some strangers find a table on which to eat lunch in a crowded dining room. Spotting an empty table, he removed a sign that read: “Reserved HRGLSA,” and invited them to sit there. It turned out that those initials stood for the Harvard Radcliffe Gay and Lesbian Students Association—which made this an ideological offense against one of the “in” groups. Sam Burke was taken to the Freshman Dean’s Office. According to the
Harvard Salient
, a student publication:

Sam offered to apologize publicly to the GLSA for his thoughtless act. But according to friends, he was nonetheless pushed to the brink of tears by the official inquisitors who questioned his motives at every turn and threatened him with severe punishment.

Heavy pressure on this young man, at an institution where deliberate disruption and even violence have repeatedly gone unpunished, was all the more remarkable because the Freshman Dean’s Office knew that Samuel Burke was already burdened with personal problems. A high school football star, he had just been told by a physician that he could not play football in college. Moreover, his father had recently been killed in an
automobile accident. But no humane considerations tempered the zeal of those determined to do the politically correct thing. Sam Burke was hit with disciplinary probation just before the Christmas holidays.