The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [19]
Conservatives told, for instance, of a mob of 200 at the State University of New York at Binghamton who, armed with sticks and canes, invaded a lecture hall and threatened an elderly man who was giving a talk. According to pieces in the Wall StreetJournal(one of them titled “The Return of the Storm Troopers”), the university’s president did nothing about the hooligans because college presidents “live in terror of being politically incorrect.”23
Then there was the story of a class at Harvard on feminist theory taught by Alice Jardine, a professor of French. According to Dinesh D’Souza, who sat in on the class one day, a student delivered “ribald one-liners about a man who lost his penis ... and brought loud and un-embarrassed laughter from the professor and other students.”24
Almost invariably, after such stories came out witnesses to the actual events debunked them. Participants at the Binghamton event, as well as a campus police investigator and one of the speakers, reported there had been no violence. The entire incident consisted, they said, of a single student who engaged in disruptive behavior for about four minutes, for which the university placed him on probation. About the class at Harvard, Alice Jardine subsequently explained that the discussion of the missing penis was actually about the myth of Osiris, a deity whose body parts were scattered throughout Egypt. Osiris’s wife, Isis, buried each part as she found them. The phallus was never recovered; images of it, which are used in festivals, can be bought at tourist shops in Egypt.25
Yet information correcting the faulty reports came out mostly in academic books and journals, not in the mass media. The general public was left with a highly inaccurate image of white men being mercilessly jeered and muzzled at America’s public and private universities.
Granted, activists from the political left sometimes behaved with impudence or intolerance. Speakers were shouted down on occasion if they were perceived as racist, sexist, or antigay. The sum of those occurrences did not support, however, a claim that “the delegitimization, even demonization, of the white male has reached extreme lengths,” as Paul Craig Roberts of the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, put it in an op-ed in the San Francisco Examiner in 1996. Guilefully trading on the memory of the Holocaust, Roberts went on to assert that affronts to white males on college campuses are “comparable to ... the denunciation of Jewry by anti-Semites.”26
Exaggerated assertions of that kind received more public notice than did the true patterns of discrimination and exclusion on U.S. campuses. Perhaps editors despaired of being called PC themselves if they ran the story, but there was an important story to be told. The data were rather shocking: on the eve of the twenty-first century women, blacks, and Hispanics, far from displacing white males in the professorate, mostly hold jobs at lower ranks and with lower pay. At the height of the PC scare, in the early and mid-1990s, women made up less than one-third of full-time faculty at American colleges and universities, a figure just slightly higher than in 1920, when women won the right to vote. Only about one in twenty professors was Hispanic or African American.
Research on students documented additional disturbing trends. Women and students of color often received less attention and encouragement in classrooms than did their white male counterparts, and outside of class they were the targets of tens of thousands of verbal and physical attacks each year. Gay and lesbian students likewise faced assaults, bigotry, and death threats. Even at famously liberal colleges gays and lesbians experienced prejudice. In a survey at Yale almost all gay and lesbian students said they had overheard antigay remarks, and one in four had been threatened.