The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [20]
For faculty members in the meantime, to be openly gay or lesbian at many colleges was to risk being denied tenure, promotion, and opportunities to move into administrative positions, research showed.27
Smoke Trumps Fire
The PC scare demonstrates how an orchestrated harangue can drown out a chorus of genuine concern. Faculty and students would raise questions about inequities at their schools only to find themselves made into causes célèbres of anti-PC fear mongering.
Imagine how surprised people must have been at Chico State University in 1996 and 1997, when just about every prominent conservative commentator took out after them. “Totalitarianism didn’t disappear with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s alive and well on many American college campuses today,” wrote Linda Chavez in a column in USA Today in reaction to an event at the previously unnoticed California school. Her comment was typical of the commentary by conservative essayists. Reading them, you would have thought that Chico State was under some sort of military occupation. The conservatives in fact were reacting to a one-word alteration in a help-wanted ad. “We are seeking a dynamic classroom teacher ... ,” the draft of an advertisement for a philosophy teacher had read. When a member of the university committee that reviews job ads questioned whether dynamic was the best word to describe the kind of teacher the program was actually seeking, the word was replaced by excellent. Some highly effective teachers do not have dynamic personal styles, the English professor had observed, and vice versa, some high-spirited teachers do not actually have much worthwhile knowledge. In addition, she suggested, the term dynamic may unintentionally discriminate against candidates from certain Asian and Hispanic backgrounds in which personal styles tend to be more unassuming.28
Just about everyone involved at Chico State had concurred with the editorial revision, yet in the months that followed the editing of the ad conservatives took every opportunity to assail the modification as PC degeneracy. “This episode typifies the sorry state of higher education today: Academes are so afraid of offending people that they’re afraid to ask for strong teachers,” Debra Saunders, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, blasted without bothering to explain her assumption that excellent teachers are not strong. In San Francisco’s other paper, the Examiner, Paul Roberts of the Cato Institute suggested that the secret plan at Chico was to exclude white men from faculty positions. “All qualifications are restrictive, which explains their de-emphasis and the plight of overrepresented white males in our brave new world of equal outcomes,” Roberts wrote.29
By this point in the PC scare sense and sensibility had become optional. Once a pseudodanger becomes so familiar it ends up in the dictionary (not to say the title of a popular TV show hosted by comedian Bill Maher), argument and evidence are dispensable. Indeed, in the late 1990s some of the best-known conservative columnists, no longer feeling obliged to diagnose particular incidents of political correctness in any depth, simply threw out bunches of ostensible examples. George Will, in a piece disparaging what he called “sensitivity-soaked Chico,” went on to complain about an entry in a mail-order catalogue for kindling wood “felled by lightning or other natural causes.” Even mail-order companies have to act PC, Will bemoaned, “lest the friends of trees have their feelings hurt.” John Leo, of U.S. News & World Report, likewise included Chico in a laundry list of what he dubbed “p.c. crimes and misdemeanors.” His sardonic subhead—“Wanted: Lethargic New Teacher”—was rather mild compared to some others in the same column. Beneath the heading “Tired of Education? Try Gender Courses” Leo warned that “p.c. folk” have been “working to replace useful college courses with dubious ones.” He cited as