The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [21]
Both Leo and Will banked on the improbability that anyone would look into their examples. The courses Leo cited did not replace other courses; they were added as electives. Nor did the courses represent dubious additions to the curriculum. A well-educated student of a particular art form ought to know something about its political dimensions, and the serious study of a religion necessarily includes attention to dishonorable as well as glorious moments in its history. As for the mail-order catalogue—the company was merely trying to make an unexceptional product sound special, a common practice in direct marketing.
Success Doesn’t Come Cheap
If so many of their examples were untenable, how did conservatives engender such a successful scare? How did it come about that politically correct, a phrase hardly used in the media prior to Bush’s speech in 1991, appeared in the nation’s major newspapers and magazines more than 5,000 times a year in the mid-1900s? In 1997, the last year for which data were available, it appeared 7,200 times.31
The short but not incorrect answer is money. Behind the scenes millions of dollars were spent to generate that level of noise. Right-wing foundations such as Coors, Olin, and Bradley, along with corporate and individual contributors, provided funding for a national network of organizations: such think tanks as the Cato Institute and American Enterprise Institute; conservative college newspapers, including the Dartmouth Review, where Dinesh D’Souza got his start; magazines such as William F. Buckley’s National Review and David Horowitz’s Heterodoxy; and faculty groups, most notably the National Association of Scholars. With an annual budget in the vicinity of $1 million, the NAS had the wherewithal to provide politicians and the press with an unending supply of sound bites, anecdotes, and op-eds.32
In an article in Skeptic magazine on what he termed “the great p.c. conspiracy hoax” Brian Siano of the University of Pennsylvania compared the strategies of the NAS to a national magazine that asks its readers to send in accounts of psychic experiences or sightings of flying saucers. Such a request would inevitably produce loads of testimonials. “One might be able to debunk one or two accounts, but the rest of this database would remain ‘unchallenged,’ to be trotted out by the faithful as often as possible,” Siano suggests. “Now imagine,” he adds, “if you could spend a half dozen years and millions of dollars on such a project.”33
Siano’s comparison is apt. The NAS continually collected reports of political correctness gone amiss, packaged the best, and peddled them to the media. Anyone who dared challenge the reports quickly discovered the power of NAS’s home-court advantage. In 1996 after USA Today quoted an NAS official’s assertion that Georgetown University, as part of a general “dumbing down” of its curriculum, had decided to drop Shakespeare as a requirement for English majors, the dean at Georgetown responded that the school was doing nothing of the sort. Georgetown’s curriculum for English majors includes more, not fewer, Shakespeare classes than in the past, he pointed out. Moreover, regardless of their major, all Georgetown students must complete twelve courses of general-education requirements, including two literature courses. This factual information from the dean did not appear, though, in the news story, but only later, in a letter-to-the-editor column.34
When Robert Brustein, artistic director of the American Repertory Theater, picked up on NAS rhetoric and proclaimed that “most English departments are now held so completely hostage to fashionable political and theoretical agendas that it is unlikely Shakespeare can qualify as an appropriate author,” journalists found the quote too juicy to resist. The image appeared widely in the press of PC thugs in ivory towers forcibly evicting the Bard. But when John Wilson, a graduate student at the University