Throughout the 2016 election campaigns, we heard constant references to Donald Trumpâs supposed virtue of not being âpolitically correct,â and since the election we have had many commentators tell us that part of why he won is that people were fed up with âpolitical correctness.â Mark Lilla, professor at Columbia University, is one such example. Shortly after the election, in a New York Times op-ed piece titled “The End of Identity Liberalism,” he remarked of identity politics on campus:
When young people arrive at college they are encouraged to keep this focus on themselves by student groups, faculty members and also administrators whose full-time job is to deal with â and heighten the significance of â âdiversity issues.â Fox News and other conservative media outlets make great sport of mocking the âcampus crazinessâ that surrounds such issues, and more often than not they are right to. Which only plays into the hands of populist demagogues who want to delegitimize learning in the eyes of those who have never set foot on a campus.
Well, he’s certainly right that conservative media outlets deliver their consumers a steady diet of tales from the colleges of identity politics and “political correctness” running riot. Â But are they right more often than not? Â That is debatable.
The question that I want to pose here is very simple:  What if it could be found that a leading conservative news outlet was not merely reporting incidents as they arose, but actually making sure that they had stories to report that would feed the perception that “political correctness” was running riot on campus, even if it meant indulging in some reckless non-journalism and in abject exercises in grasping at straws?  To be more specific, what if a venerable conservative magazine called the National Review were employing a reporter named Katherine Timpf to be its campus PC tracker for its online edition, and what if a fair number of her stories turned out to be complete non-incidents and some of the others turned out, at the very least, to be highly questionable?
The phenomenon I’m talking about, of course, did not start with either National Review or Katherine Timpf, and the only reason that particular magazine and that particular writer are getting the spotlight here is that for the last three years the magazine’s editors have been good enough to have Ms. Timpf write an annual year-end recap of her “political correctness in the colleges” stories. Speaking more broadly, though, the story that the conservative organs tell is that, in society at large, whites are getting systematically demonized as being racist, men as being sexist, heterosexuals as being homophobic, and on down the line. Christians, weâre also hearing, are getting persecuted for being Christians. When ostensibly âprivilegedâ persons arenât being accused of being bigots, so the story goes, they are still accusedâconstantlyâof being insensitive. Persons who are not heterosexual white males, meanwhile, supposedly get to say and do anything they want, because they are they are ones wielding the power now. What is more, the story is not just that there are incidents here and there that fit this pattern, but rather, that it is a constant state of affairs.
And, as noted up top, a popular subcategory is that of tales from the college campuses. The story being spun is that, if you are a white Christian heterosexual male student or professor at a college campus, you can expect to find yourself judged guilty of every high crime and misdemeanor in the book before youâve even woken up in the morning. This force is so all-consuming, or rather the stories are made so vivid and convincing, that people feel under siege by it regardless of whether they live or work on a college campus or, for that matter, have ever set foot on one in their lives.
To be sure, some of the stories the âPC trackersâ present are true cases that show every sign of fitting their paradigm. To cite one example, in 2007 a 58-year-old white man, Keith John Sampson, who was both a custodian and a student at Indiana University-Purdue University, was reading Todd Tuckerâs Notre Dame vs. the Klan, a scholarly book with a vivid picture of hooded Klansmen and a burning cross on its cover. A co-worker, who was African American, took offense at the sight of this picture, even though neither the book nor its reader in any way harbored pro-Klan sympathies. (The book is totally a work of civil rights history from a pro-civil rights point of view.) Sampson received a reprimand from the schoolâs affirmative action officer for poor judgment and an act of racial harassment. Sampson later received an apology and a full vindication from the schoolâs chancellor, but not before every conservative news outlet and commentator devoted to PC tracking had made him a cause cĂŠlèbre.
But does this Indiana incident represent a constant state of affairs, or is it merely an incident? Even when you string it together with some similar incidents, do they add up to any generalization other than that college administrators responding to situations on campus donât always use the best judgment? And with some of the incidents that conservatives tout as clear-cut examples of this sinister force, is it possible that a closer look at what happened would show some ambiguity as to who was right and who was wrong? Might some purported examples of âpolitical correctness run amok on campusâ be more sensibly seen as examples of how college administrators, when faced with issues involving ethnicity and identity on their campuses, have to make decisions and judgment calls that some reasonable people would agree with and others would not? (Good luck, of course, getting high ratings and selling a lot of ads when framing it that way, unfortunately.)
Another important factor needs to be mentioned. Almost invariably, the writers who proclaim that we are in an age of âpolitical correctnessâ lead off by defining it as the process by which persons who express âpolitically incorrectâ views or indulge in âpolitically incorrectâ actions receive unjust punishment or social censure. They thus present the whole thing as a freedom of speech issue and present themselves as ardent champions of the principle of free speech. If that is really the goal, one should expect them to limit their examples of âpolitical correctnessâ incidents on campuses, and elsewhere, to situations where some variation on that scenario has taken place. Do they?
It is time now to turn to Katherine Timpf’s annual roundup in the online edition of National Review. Here is the 2016 roundup. (For those interested in seeing more, here’s her 2015 edition, and here’s what she delivered at the close of 2014.) Each item in the roundup corresponds to a story that she wrote earlier in the year. She provides the link in each instance, and in each original story there is at least one link to an online source.
I was originally planning to deal with all 16 items in her 2016 roundup in the present blog post, but I have now decided to split it, for two reasons: (1) the post would be way too long (and it’s pretty long even now), and (2) several of the items have enough ambiguity that I think I should do a little inquiring of my own (which I’m not clear on whether Ms. Timpf did). I do plan to say something about every item in her 2016 list, and at least to glance broadly at the two previous ones as well.
Ms. Timpf opens her year-end article by declaring:
Everyone always talks about “political correctness on college campuses” these days, but is it really that bad? Yes. Yes, it is. And if you don’t believe me, here, in no particular order, are the 16 most ridiculously PC moments on college campuses this year.
Among those so-called “most ridiculously PC moments,” Ms. Timpf includes a number of items that represented no larger event than someone, somewhere on a campus, expressing an opinion. She may well consider it an outrageous opinion but, speaking for myself, when I’m told that there’s a sinister force stalking the land and when I’m given a list of the 16 biggest examples of it, quite frankly, I’m going to be looking for 16 incidents where something happened, and I cannot fathom treating the mere fact that somebody expressed an opinion as constituting, by any stretch of the imagination, an incident. With that in mind, the walk-through will now begin.
Item 3. âAn academic article claimed that ski slopes are sexist.â
KT’s linked source, which has a link to this page (which Timpf also provides)
Now really, from her headline sentence alone, one really should ask by what stretch of the imagination the publication of an academic journal article constitutes a newsworthy story of âpolitical correctnessâ on campus.  When you search out the actual article, one of the first things that grabs you is that it was published in 2010! The only thing that happened in 2016 was that blogger Steven Hayward found out about it and mentioned it on his blog.
And what, exactly, was the article? Written by sociologist Mark CJ Stoddart of Memorial University of Newfoundland, published in an obscure academic journal called the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, titled âConstructing Masculinized Sportscapes: Skiing, Gender and Nature in British Columbia, Canada,â the article makes the case that ideas of masculinity have had an influence over the design of ski slopes and the atmosphere at ski resorts. It draws heavily on social theory, and the target audience is a scholarly community–of professors and graduate students, that is–that deals in highly specialized, abstract theory and that applies such theory studying gender in terms of aspects of masculinity as well as femininity. Nowhere in the article does the word âsexistâ appear. Some scholars will agree with it, others will disagree, but it is questionable whether more than a dozen graduate students on college campuses in 2016, or more than zero undergraduates that same year, sat down and read it. Thus, if it is an example of campus life being affected by âpolitical correctnessâ in 2016, it happened without a single student noticing.
Steven Hayward says in his blog that the article costs $36 to purchase online. True enough, but itâs also available for free if you go to a library with extensive databases (like the New York Public Library) and search it out through Google Scholar. I have the PDF; for any interested readers who email me, Iâll be glad toâŚshall we say, share a few further insights into how to obtain it.
Item 5. âThe best and the brightest: A Harvard kid declared benches to be a racial issue.â
Item 6. âPrivilege-checking became problematic.â
Each of these two items concerns itself with an editorial piece written by a student in a student newspaper. In neither instance does she suggest that anybody got silenced or persecuted for disagreeing with it; the complete event is, again, that somebody expressed an opinion. In the case of item 5, what she is talking about is an op-ed piece in the Harvard Crimson written by student Ted G. Waechter, titled âEverything Is About Race.â In that short piece, Waechter explains that, when he flies to the campus, he looks down and sees farmland that was taken by force from the indigenous population and then made profitably with slavery; when he rides into Cambridge, he sees a turnpike and a neighborhood that were constructed by displacing the earlier residents of Chinatown; and when he takes the subway through Boston he sees areas where low-income black and Latino residents were also forced out in earlier decades. Presently, he mentions the benches in the subway stations, and makes the point that they are designed to prevent homeless persons, many of whom are non-white, from lying down. The only piece of information that comes from this is that, whether rightly or wrongly, some students at Harvard regard America as a country that was built on racial oppression and where everything is about race. Now, a key question that needs to be asked: is she objecting to the willingness of the editors of the Harvard Crimson to print that piece? If they had refused it, would that not have been an incident of political correctness, with Mr. Waechter as its victim? That is not her point, however; her point seems to be that the fact that anybody would express such an opinion shows that a sinister force is at work on the campuses.
Item 6 can be disposed of in much the same manner: the event of it is merely that the student newspaper at the University of California at Berkeley printed an opinion piece, this one by Efe Atli. (Ms. Timpf spells his name wrong, and is not much more conscientious in her reading of the editorial’s substance.) The piece is about a practice called “privilege checking.” In some spots, Mr. Atli’s point seems to be that it is overdone and can at times have more to do with reinforcing inequality than with fighting it. The examples he gives, though seem to be more about how the idea gets misapplied. For instance, he legitimately critiques a friend of his for posting a picture on Facebook of an apparently down-and-out African American man sleeping in a subway train and captioning it as an example of male privilege for taking up too much space. (I’m not sure whether that’s an instance of privilege checking or privilege accusing. If I were reading over Mr. Atli’s editorial to offer him suggestions, I might suggest ways that his main point could be made clearer, but that’s a side note.) Under other circumstances–for example, if it were the friend’s Facebook post itself that Ms. Timpf were looking at–I think Ms. Timpf might well agree with Mr. Atli’s reaction to it. There is actually, moreover, nothing in the editorial that identifies Mr. Atli as in the catetory of “social justice warriors” that Ms. Timpf wants to make objects of ridicule.
Ms. Timpf concludes her original article on the Atli piece by saying, “But what do I know? After all, I’m just an evil straight white person who wants nothing more than to feel superior and know that I can have things better while other people are suffering.” There is nothing in Mr. Atli’s editorial (here is the link to it again) that implies any such attitude on his part. I would thus call that remark of Ms. Timpf’s an extremely vicious insult to Mr. Atli. More pertinent for purposes of this blog, I find it to be a recklessly inaccurate depiction of any kind of prevailing attitude on college campuses today, an act of pandering to readers determined to believe that today’s college campuses persecute people for being straight and white. This is not, in my view, harmless behavior on the part of the National Review‘s editors.
Item 8. “A professor worried that her school’s hawk mascot was so scary-looking that it might be making students incredibly emotionally distressed.”
Resmiye Oral, a professor of pediatric medicine at the University of Iowa in August of 2016, wrote an email to the universityâs athletic department expressing concern that the harsh facial expression of the mascot Herky the Tigerhawk might be intimidating to incoming students. âAs we strive to tackle depression, suicide, violence and behavioral challenges and help our students succeed, I plead with you to allow Herky to be like one of us, sometimes sad, sometimes happy, sometimes angry, sometimes concentrated,â the clinical instructor is quoted as saying.
Is this an example of a sinister force that people should feel under siege by, or is it an example of a faculty member at a university–a health care professional as well as an educator–who is in close touch with students’ emotional struggles, and who has given attention to the role that visual stimuli on campus play in affecting students’ moods, making a suggestion for how the visual environment might be made more conducive to students’ well-being? Now, I am not suggesting that everyone should agree with Professor Oralâs opinion. I would expect some professionals to agree with her, others not. I, for one, do not consider myself knowledgeable enough to weigh in on the matter, and I doubt Ms. Timpf’s expertise exceeds my own. That notwithstanding, my main point is this: yet another of Katherine Timpfâs purported examples of out-of-control campus PC is a mere instance in which someone expressed an opinion. (However, Ms. Timpf is correct about one thing: 2016 really is the year when that opinion got expressed.)
Item 7. “Students at a university considered removing a Martin Luther King Jr. quote from a wall because it wasn’t inclusive enough.”
In the Erb Memorial Union at the University of Oregon, an excerpt from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.âs famous 1963 âI Have a Dreamâ speech, calling for a world in which his four little children will not be judged by the color of their skin, has been on display since 1986, and continues to be on display now. But during the past year, the question came up at a meeting of the Student Union Board as to whether it should be replaced, or at least supplemented, with a quotation that advocated other kinds of inclusiveness besides racial. In the world of Katherine Timpf and her readers, the fact that a question came up and received serious debate is enough to prove that lunacy reigns on the campuses.
On the college campuses, there are many issues and sources of tension. There is also much that can be explored and written about whether “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” “privilege checking,” and other devices really accomplish the good that is claimed. There is loads that can be said about whether, in some instances, hetersexual white males are unfairly made to feel like villains. But for a journalist to do justice to any such issues, the prime prerequisite is a willingness to deal in ambiguity. The antithesis of such awareness of ambiguity is the snarky, dismissive tone that Ms. Timpf employs all throughout these items that I have linked. And there’s more to come; I’m just checking a few particulars before I deal with the other items on her list.
Let me make clear, though, that my point is not even really about Katherine Timpf, but rather, the editors of the online edition of National Review. The fact that these pieces of Ms. Timpf’s are running under their imprimatur gives the clear impression that the editors want to pander to a readership that wants to feel charged up in righteous indignation over this sinister force that they feel is dominating their society, to feel victimized by it, and to feel a sense of near-biblical struggle to stave it off. The fact that the editors are so determined to have 16 examples of PC incidents on campus that they do not mind having some of them be non-incidents, including one non-incident that dates back to 2010, and that they do not even seem to have asked their writer how carefully she has read certain scholarly or editorial pieces that she is excoriating, pretty much proves that feeding an appetite matters more than anything resembling journalistic integrity.
But I have never been of the view that demagogues, either as editors or as politicians, lead their followers anywhere that their followers do not want to be led. Their consumers play just as much a part in all this as they do. It is a symbiotic relationship between demagoguery and its receptive audience. Such a symbiotic relationship sells subscriptions and advertisements for outlets like the National Review and, I contend, goes far to explain why we are currently being graced with Donald J. Trump for a president.
To be continued.
