Inside American Education (30 page)

He did not return from the holidays. He committed suicide.
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Being “politically correct” means deciding issues not on the basis of the evidence or the merits, but on the basis of what group those involved belong to or what ideology they profess. Many colleges and universities have become blind partisans with no sense of proportion, or principle, or of fairness. Objections to the special privileges which are created for some groups in the name of equal rights are treated as betraying malign attitudes toward those groups—“racism” or “homophobia,” for example—which are to be rooted out by “re-education” campaigns and punished severely where brainwashing fails.

As regards homosexuals, almost never is the issue one of whether they should be left in peace to live as they wish. Much more often, the issue is whether others must be subjected to a steady drumbeat of strident propaganda by gay activists. As a group of students at the University of Massachusetts said in a jointly signed statement in the student newspaper:

I am not homophobic and I do not endorse homosexuality but I accept it. I am just tired of having the issue continually in my classrooms, in my paper, in my building, on my campus.
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A Wesleyan University student reported a similar situation there:

It is nearly impossible to enter the campus center without being inundated by propaganda about gay men, lesbian women, and bisexuals.
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“Re-education” is a common punishment for those judged guilty of such ideological crimes as “homophobia.” At the University of Vermont, a fraternity which rescinded an invitation to a pledge when they learned that he was homosexual, had among its punishments attendance at workshops and lectures against “homophobia.”
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Homosexuals are only one of a number of special groups about whom students are no longer free to have their own opinions, nor are free to choose not to associate,
even though such groups remain free to be as separatist and exclusive as they wish.

When one of the ordinary frictions of human life happens to involve a member of one of these special groups, such incidents are immediately inflated into a
cause célèbre
, even when there is no clear or present danger of any larger problem on campus. A homosexual student at Amherst College admitted to the student newspaper “that he had not experienced any other forms of hostility while at Amherst beyond ‘a look that said stay away from me.’”
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Yet he expressed fear of homophobic violence because one student had written anti-homosexual words on the door of two other gay students. Both the administration and the campus gay organization made a public issue about this one incident and the student newspaper made it a front page story.

This hypersensitivity to their own interests has not led homosexual activists to be at all sensitive as to the rights or feelings of others. On the contrary, intolerance by vocal activists has become as common among homosexuals as among other groups given special privileges on campus. Lesbians at Mount Holyoke College objected to a campus lecture by James Meredith, the first black man to attend the University of Mississippi, because he was promoting the traditional family.
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As with other intolerant people, disagreement did not imply debate but suppression. For themselves, however, Mount Holyoke’s organized lesbians claimed not only freedom but license, chalking up the sidewalks with slogans like “lesbians make great lovers” and “try it—you’ll like it.”
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At Cornell likewise, homosexuals have chalked up the sidewalks with slogans like “Sodomy sucks but we can lick the problem” and have removed the American flag from a university building, replacing it with a flag containing a pink triangle, the symbol of homosexuality. Although campus security people were present, the chalkers were neither stopped nor punished.
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At Harvard, pictures of individuals engaged in homosexual acts were posted all around campus by a homosexual organization.
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Disregard of the feelings of others extends far beyond words or pictures. Students who use the men’s toilets on some campuses encounter sexual solicitations from homosexuals, or become unwilling witnesses to the homosexual activities of others. College toilets have become sites for homosexual activities
to such an extent that a book of favorite places around the country for such gay encounters has been published and updated annually. It lists three buildings at Georgetown University, for example, as well as libraries at Howard University, the University of Maryland, and Catholic University, and the student center at George Washington University. Homosexuals from off-campus can often gain access to these places to meet young male students.
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At the University of Florida, middle-aged gay men from as far as 40 miles away are among those who gather in a college library toilet for “oral, anal or hand sex.” So-called “glory holes” have been drilled in the panels between toilet stalls there, to facilitate anonymous homosexual acts. Maintenance workers have had to line these panels with stainless steel to prevent these holes from being drilled again after they have been closed up.
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Dartmouth, Georgetown, and the University of California at San Diego have also had to seal up “glory holes” drilled in the panels separating toilet stalls.
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Numerous complaints about homosexuals soliciting sex in the men’s toilet at a library at San Jose State University led to the arrest of two men—one of whom was a professor at the university.
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While some academic institutions take some precautions against the worst excesses of homosexuals’ publicly forcing their activities into the lives of other people, other institutions actually promote the introduction of homosexuality as a subject to be brought to the attention of students. At Stanford, the university has explicitly advertised for homosexuals for the job of resident advisers in the student dormitories.
The Stanford Daily
of March 7, 1990 carried an advertisement from the Office of Residential Education which said: “Because a residence staff which includes lesbian and gay RAs helps to raise discussions about sexuality and sexual orientation and works to combat homophobia at Stanford, gay and lesbian students are encouraged to consider applying for RA positions”.
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These “discussions,” incidentally, can hardly be free exchanges of ideas, since those who oppose homosexuality are subject to punishment under restrictions against “harassment”—very loosely interpreted. In short, dormitories are to become “re-education” camps.

While mere words of criticism of homosexuality are enough to put students in jeopardy of punishment at Stanford—and
at many other institutions—outright threats against the conservative
Stanford Review
by a homosexual university employee not only went unpunished but even un-investigated, even though the editors of that publication supplied the name and university phone number of the employee in question.
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Homosexuality is clearly one of those issues on which double standards are “politically correct.”

Colleges and universities have often proclaimed that they are no longer in the business of regulating sexual behavior, or of acting in
loco parentis
in general. This is a half-truth, at best. Many of the colleges which have abandoned any control over the sexual activities of their students nevertheless require their students to live in the dormitories, regardless of how individual students or their parents feel about the behavior or atmosphere in those dormitories, and regardless of whether an eighteen-year-old away from home for the first time wants to sleep in a room with a stranger who has sexual interests in people like themselves, or in a room where other people are having sex. Moreover, colleges are actively promoting a particular set of attitudes toward sex.

One of the dormitories at Stanford University has a coed shower, for example, and
the Stanford Daily
of October 18, 1990, featured a front page photograph of four people of differing sex having a shower together. The resident assistant in another dormitory promoted a swap of room mates, so that male and female students could become room mates for a week, in order to demonstrate that people of opposite sex could share a room in a platonic relationship.
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Another front page photograph, on the
Stanford Daily
of December 5, 1990, showed a male student holding a plastic model of a penis while a female student was putting a condom on it. They were fulfilling a requirement in a psychology course.
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Whatever the merits or demerits of any of these activities, they represent behavior actively promoted by institutional policy and institutional personnel. In short, many colleges are not following the hands-off policy they claim to be following. They are being permissive in one direction, and even inciting in one direction, but they are not permitting students who do not want to be part of the avant-garde scene to live in a single-sex dormitory, to live off-campus, or to refuse to sleep in a room with
someone who is sexually attracted to people like themselves. Penn State University, for example, has made explicit what is only implicit on some other campuses—that objections to being housed with homosexual room mates will not result in room changes.
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Georgetown University has punished a student for not attending what was billed as an “AIDS awareness” session in the dormitory, but which also included promotion of avant-garde sexual attitudes.
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The claim is that colleges are treating students as adults, when in fact they are treating them as guinea pigs. Moreover, it is precisely because students are so young, so inexperienced, and so vulnerable that they attract the attentions of brain-washers.

The vision of a brave new world of ultra-rational attitudes toward sex, which is promoted by advocates of the sexual revolution, is in painful contrast with soaring pregnancy and abortion statistics on many campuses across the country. At Brown University, for example, the campus health service reports about 40 to 50 pregnancies per academic year—slightly more than one a week—and virtually all of these end in abortions.
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This rate is characterized as similar to the rate at comparable institutions “like the Ivies and other coeducational, non-religious schools,” Stanford University has had more than a hundred positive tests for pregnancy annually, Auburn University two hundred and Indiana University several hundred. Moreover, not all pregnant students are tested on campus, so the total numbers of pregnancies may be even higher. U.C.L.A. and the University of Maryland are among the institutions reporting that at least 90 percent of their pregnancies end in abortion. Altogether, nearly one-third of all abortions in the country are performed on women in schools.
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Because pregnancies and abortions are so widespread on so many college campuses does not mean that they have little impact on the individuals involved. A young woman at Indiana State University, who became pregnant soon after she arrived as a freshman, recalled:

I knew I had to tell my boyfriend. When I told him, he just started crying. We both cried.

After she had an abortion, the two of them split up:

—couldn’t take it. I can’t say that I blame him. He carried a lot of guilt, and my state of mind didn’t help much. He needed to try to forgive himself and have me forgive him, but I couldn’t even forgive myself. All I could do was cry about it.
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At this stage, those activists who promote the adventurous spirit of the sexual revolution are seldom involved anymore.

IDEOLOGICAL AGENDAS

The mere fact that professors, administrators, or students may have their own individual ideologies, or even that a particular ideology may be dominant in any or all of these groups, does not in itself mean that an institution has an ideological agenda or “politically correct” double standards. One of the early arguments for academic freedom was that what professors believed or did as private individuals should not be a basis for firing them, so long as they did their jobs competently, and did not use the classroom to indoctrinate students. Today, not only the classroom but also the dormitories, administrative committees, and the platform for invited speakers are all used to express the prevailing ideologies and to stifle opposing views. An editorial in the student newspaper at the University of Virginia complained of “being force-fed an endless stream of so-called ‘awareness days’ that emphasize differences rather than commonality.”
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Often the ideological agenda includes not only propaganda barrages but also double standards when dealing with those who agree and those who disagree.

Campus Discipline

Ideological double standards in punishing students or faculty for violations of campus rules are apparent not only in individual instances of injustice, or even in the pattern of such injustices, but also in the very nature of the rules themselves. Orwellian use of the word “harassment” to cover situations in which no one approached, addressed, or even noticed the supposed
target of this “harassment” has enabled colleges and universities to punish behavior to which the only real objection is ideological. At Tufts University, for example, a young man who wore a T-shirt listing “15 Reasons Why Beer is Better than Women at Tufts” was punished for
harassing
women by the mere wearing of such a T-shirt.
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But nothing that feminists (or racial or ethnic minorities) put on a T-shirt is likely to get them punished for harassment, either at Tufts or elsewhere. At Northwestern University, for example, a T-shirt being sold in a campus cafeteria showed a gun-wielding black militant and the caption: “By Any Means Necessary.” The back of the T-shirt read: “It’s a Black Thing. You wouldn’t Understand.”
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