In the modern era the virtually universal human condition of ethnocentrism has taken on a variety of political and ideological guises. The use of the phrase political correctness, historians on the subject of political correctness inform us, goes back to at least 1917 when the Bolsheviks used the phrase to describe those committed true believers of the Bolshevik cause. In the 1930s Nazis were accused by the American quality press of claiming that only to its chosen people, politically correct Aryans in this case, were correct in politics and ideology. In the 1940s socialists accused communists of the era of being characterised by the notion that they and only they were ideologically correct. Lenin and Stalin, it should be noted, did claim to be the high priests of the one and only true holy orthodox religion of communism, a notion that many Western anti-communists, somewhat ironically, bought into. In the 1970s the American New Left used the term as emblematic of a reflexive strategy to avoid any drift toward orthodoxy. In the 1980s University of Chicago English professor Alan Bloom accused the academy of being in thrall to a left wing orthodoxy.
In the wake of Bloom a number of conservative and right wing intellectuals began claiming that political correctness had become dominant in universities and colleges all across postmodern American and the Western world, using the term as a synonym for things like the intellectual attempt to expand the historical curriculum, the intellectual attempt to expand literature reading lists, and the increasingly retail like strategies of college administrators, all of which, they claimed, were liberal, left wing, socialist, and communist in origin. For these selective right wing critics there was a liberal, left wing, socialist, and communist movement or conspiracy afoot to remake the Western world in its own ideologically correct image, an image that demonised the West for its imperialism, racism, sexism, and classism.
Eventually, of course and not surprisingly--politics is a contact sport after all--conservative and right wing politicians and polemicists picked up their anti-politically correct crosses and used them, if selectively, in a politically correct way, to bash its social liberal cousins in a form. This conscious demagogic strategy, one learned from forebears like those purveyors of state propaganda and capitalist Madison Avenue propaganda, proved to be quite effective in many cases since it played, as did demagogues before them, on mass emotions like fear and anger.
Jordan Peterson, who has become a saintly martyr to many of his politically correct devotees, was not, as I noted, the first person to claim that conspiratorial and tyrannical political correctness had taken over universities in the Western world. He was not even the first to make such a claim in English Canada for in 1984 three well known and and highly respected Canadian academics, University of Calgary historian David Bercuson, University of Toronto historian Robert Bothwell, and York University historian J.L. Granatstein, argued, in their polemic The Great Brain Drain published by McClelland and Stewart, that political correctness had put, as the subtitle of the book claimed, Canadian universities on the road to ruin.
Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein continued their polemic against political correctness in Canada, along with other aspects of post-World War II Canadian universities, in their 1997 book Petrified Campus: The Crisis in Canadian Universities (Toronto: Random House Canada, 1997). Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein tell a tale that is well known in intellectual and demagogic circles by now After World War II, Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein inform us, Canada, like the US, the UK, and Australia, flush with monies (thanks, in part, to German and Japanese economic decline due to war) and returning soldiers, and convinced that universities were central to the war against tyranny, expanded their university systems in order to fight such tyranny on the political and economic-technological levels. Some on the left, of course, argue that thanks to these social and cultural contexts universities, research universities, became central cogs in the military and industrial complex of the so-called "free world".
The 1960s, Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein tell us, brought increasing numbers of baby boomers to universities. Many of these baby boomers pushed for a more "relevant" education and an expansion of the curriculum, particularly an expansion of courses on class, race, and ethnic groups, and an expansion of practical professional programmes on university campuses. Soon this utilitarianism led, particularly after the oil crisis of the 1970s and the declining support of federal and provincial support for universities, to increasing numbers of university consumers wanting and demanding an education for post graduation success, an ideology helped along by educators who preached the gospel, one that did have quantitative support, that more education equalled more financial and cultural rewards after graduation. This utilitarianism fed into even more curricular "reform" of a practical nature, a type of curricular reform that continues as I type.
With the increase in the number of educational institutions, with student numbers increasing, with many students demanding an education relevant for post university life, and with the decline in federal and provincial funding for education, pressure was put on university administrators to find a way to keep their universities afloat in an age of economic and demographic austerity. Universities responded to this crisis in a variety of ways. Tuition fees (and student and alumni fees in general) rose with provincial consent. This meant that more students equaled more monies so university administrators developed advertising campaigns to promote their universities to prospective students and developed ways to retain students already on campus or off campus in distance learning programmes. The curriculum, as a consequence, was further oriented toward a utilitarian or practical education. The Liberal Arts, the heart of traditional education, suffered. Grades inflated. Sessional faculty increased. Tenure faculty streams decreased relative to the increasing number of Ph.D's produced by both the elite and less elite universities. The physical plant expanded (particularly administrative and residential buildings and sports facilities), much of it in order to attract students to campus. And since student numbers and student retention became central to universities, student concerns became a central component of university decisions about the curriculum and the extra-curriculum.
Political correctness fed into this university in the age of austerity in a number of ways, so we are told. The rise of identity politics and the mythistories that accompanied it led to lobbying for a celebration of identity groups and their "histories" in universities. Sensitivity and therapeutic culture led to calls for an education that didn't traumatise students. The hiring of faculty in the years the universities grew, particularly those from the sixties, provided students who wanted an education that celebrated their identites and avoided traumatising them, with an ally. In the process, a new dogma, one that celebrated aspects of the increasingly diverse student population and one which was careful not to traumatise sensitised students, emerged and was institutionalised in university politics. As a result, any behaviours or teaching that challenged such doctrines, became increasingly persona non grata on university campuses and a new orthodoxy emerged.
There are, of course, a number of problems with this picture. Yes, universities grew and prospered thanks particularly to governmental monies. Yes, universities came under financial pressure after the oil crisis of the 1970s and had to find other ways, thanks to a decline in governmental funding, to stay financially afloat. Yes, educational practise became increasingly tied to career and financial "success". For far too many a medical degree, for instance, meany you could consume more than it meant helping others. Yes, the Liberal Arts declined in popularity and relevance while professional and career oriented education has increased in popularity. Yes, grades have inflated since the 1970s (and all college personnel know this) and if you are a faculty member, particularly a sessonial faculty member or an adjunct, who doesn't get with the brave new modern grade inflation programme, you can be made redundant. Yes, far too few students are even willing to read one book these days compared to the bad old its too hard days when I, for instance, had to read thirteen books in a semester length introductory level Greek history class and four books a week for a postgraduate seminar. Yes, far too many young people today are coddled thanks to the attempt of so many to turn the core nation world into a Disney movie. Yes, universities became more demographically diverse after the 1960s. Yes, student numbers increased leading to a situation where too many people are taking undergraduate and graduate degrees increasingly trivialising them in the process. Yes, far too many of the far too many going to college require, particularly on the undergraduate level, are in need of remediation. Yes, for far too many of those students in need of remediation there is not much media to re even should colleges and universities adequately fund remeadiation programmes. I had several students at a second division American research university who did not grasp the concept that 20 points is 20% and vice versa on a 100 grade scale. Yes, universites today rely too much on sessional lecturers. Yes, many American colleges and universities are little more than glorified high schools these days consisting of grade 13 and beyond. Yes there is far too much segmentation of labour in the academic cultural marketplace. That segmentation of labour, however, parallels that in the economy in general because both segmentation in the univerities and segmentation in the economy are, of course, the products of a modernity characterised by "rational" and "efficient" bureaucracies staffed, at the upper and middle levels of the pyramid, with managers engaged in specialised segmentied labour. Yes, far too many academic books are opaque. Academia does not have a monopoly on opacity and the targeting of specific narrow demographics, however. And yes, far too many universities are increasingly characterised by an environment of correctness and with practises that undermine university freedom of speech and academic freedom. However, it is not political and ideological correctness, in the way it is too often understood these days, that is undermining higher education in the age of neoliberal austerity. It is the need for student bodies, for customers.
The need for student bodies has led, along, admittedly, with federal and provincial mandates, to increases in administrative staff. One study found a significant increase in upper level and middle level bureaucrats at one American university, something that can clearly be generalised to other universities in the United States, Canada, and Australia (as can the increase in financial remuneration for academic bureaucrats). Part of the mandate of these university bureaucrats is to recruit and retain students, something that has led to the rise of a retail model of education, a model in which, oftentimes, the customer, the student, is right. It is this retail model of higher education (a model that seens to once again reared its head in the recent firing of an NYU organic chemistry adjunct) that is behind the sensitivity to the concerns of a number of students who have already socialised before they came to university. Yes, some faculty, particularly in the social sciences and humanities (something Bercuson, Bothwell, and Grantstein are aware of), are favourably disposed to this retail model of academica to some extent. Like students, however, these more "radical" faculty--those in engineering, the hard sciences, most of the professional schools are not likely to man these barricades anytime anytime soon--reflect what is happening in fractured postmodern Canada in general.
So what to do? Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein recommend greater interdisciplinarity, less emphasis on publish or perish, and the elimination of tenure. They recommend that universities be given greater administrative autonomy. They recommend more targeted governmental subsidies that recognise the differences in university and scholarly quality and writing and research quality. They recommend the recognition of the differences between universities that no eqalitarian rhetoric will paper over. They recommend the establishment of a national university so that Canada, for the first time in its history, can have an Australian National University of its own.
I am actually sympathetic with many of these recommendations. However, as is almost always the case some of these recommendations are easier to say and more difficult to do. While, for instance, Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein argue that tenure is no longer necessary since all or most universities are dedicated to freedom of inquiry and is a hindrance to quality the reality is that a number of people and groups, many of them on the political and ideological right, have as their goal limiting freedom of inquiry on university campuses since they prefer their education to be mythic in orientation rather than empirical just like their nationalist forebears. Do they have influence? Just ask the universities in Wisconsin and Florida.
There are several other problems I have with Petrified Campus. Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein claim that Canadian universities are not the equal of great American state universities. Both the University of Toronto and McGill (the Big Two?), however, are members of the elite Association of American Universities (and have been so since 1926) suggesting that Canada already has the equal of the great American state universities like Berkeley, Michigan, Indiana, North Carolina, or Texas, which are likewise members of the AAU. Administrative autonomy, which Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein argue for more of, is likely to lead to more not less retail education. Eliminating some universities or downsizing selective universities, both of which Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein suggest, is problematic given that they are economically important to the communities they serve (something Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein recognise). But most of all, and Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein don't seem to grasp this fully, universities are reflections of the society and culture in which they exist. This suggests that if you want to change universities you first have to change the broader society and culture that they are situated in and impact them. This, however, is unlikely to happen since it means that one would have to change aspects of the relevant economic (Canada's economies of scale can never match that of the US), political, cultural, demographic, and geographic factors that have given rise to postmodernity in the core parts of the world, one of the dominant types of society and culture of Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, and Japan at the moment, and the societal form that "traditionalist" modernism sees as the enemy. Good luck with that.
As to why Peterson became a pop star while Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein did not, good question. Perhaps it is because they are less sensational and stridently polemical and as a consequence less partisan and dogmatic. Perhaps it is because of the brave new digital revolution and the internet and the celebrities it creates. Perhaps it is because of the increasing prominence of political cults centred around charismatic bureaucrats in the brave new digital world. UofT tutorial time perhaps?
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