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URBAN CRITIC Is SMU PC?

Face it: You’ve got to be political before you can be Politically Correct.
By GLENN MITCHELL |

IT HASN’T BEEN A HAPPY YEAR for the Political Correctness movement on American campuses. PCers have been ripped in Forbes, The New Republic. National Review, and Newsweek, among other national publications. They even got it in, of all places, Joe Bob Briggs’s drive-in movie column. The Politically Incorrect have collected defenders from among such usual antagonists as William F. Buckley and the ACLU.

That this has happened shouldn’t be such a surprise. What started as a concern for wider intellectual horizons and simple human courtesy got nuked, at its worst, with a fatally humorless and trendy dose of leftist, feminist, and deconstructionist radiation. The resulting monster mutated into The Thing That Stalked the Campus.

Now, at hard-core PC universities, no aspect of life, from casual conversation to the curriculum, is free from scrutiny. At their silliest. PCers publish rules making it an offense to indulge in “inappropriately directed laughter” (University of Connecticut) or repellent (but once constitutionally protected) humor. In its most insidious form, say opponents. PC consigns, on principle, centuries of Western literature and philosophy to second place in favor of women and Third World writers and pokes its nose into faculty and student behavior in a way that would have sent Joe McCarthy scurrying to the protective bosom of the nearest liberal civil rights lawyer.

But what does it mean at SMU? Have Shakespeare and Dante been chucked in favor of the great books of Nepal or Swaziland, or the Sisterhood of Womyn’s Literature? Will Peruna be forced to run the football field when either side scores, the better to eliminate the spectacle of a vulgar, Western, desensitized, male-oriented celebration at the misfortune of the other team, thus reaffirming each player’s collective personhood?

Not bloody likely. In some ways, Political Correctness still seems to be a delicate hothouse plant on (he Hilltop. To the extent that it’s fed and watered at all, the faculty, not the students, do the tending; and even where a benign form of PC has made its mark, discretion is often the better part of ushering in the millennium. Referring to the student body, one faculty member told the student newspaper. The Daily Campus, last spring, “This place isn’t even political. How can it be Politically Correct?”

How indeed? Last January, on the same day a handful of students met on the steps of Dallas Hall to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, the student senate passed a resolution authorizing $200 to buy yellow ribbons to honor American soldiers in Saudi Arabia. It took student government years to approve, last spring, a homosexual students’ organization, and only then after much weeping and renting of Polos.

“SMU is just light-years behind in some ways,” says Lynn Johnson. Johnson, who is entering her second year on the history faculty, had a chance this summer to compare how far behind when she spent time doing research at the University of California at Berkeley. “I see it’s especially true when 1 talk with Bay-area colleagues, whom I consider liberal, who talk about being shouted down by their students or having their classes disrupted for not taking the correct line on something.” She adds, “But that kind of rigidity isn’t a monopoly of the left.”

Assistant psychology professor James Pennebaker. no PC fan. says PC at SMU has a special flavor. “You can always spot the Politically Correct ones; they’re the ones with the furrowed brows.” He says an unwritten faculty code frowns on offenses as varied as driving big American cars, sporting pro-American bumper stickers, wearing a perfectly pressed three-piece suit to class. or failing to portray the U.S. as the cause of most of the world’s problems.

“Self-criticism is in,” Pennebaker says, but adds that “while people question your values, that’s as much the academy as PC. SMU has some of the most Politically Incorrect faculty in America.” Yet, among the hard-liners are those who breathe the rari-fied air of the true believer. These are the ones, Pennebaker says, “who give me shit for acknowledging that genetics even exist. They wouldn’t even consider hanging around with me.” But he regards them as notable mostly for being exceptions. “I would urge those who want to get in touch with the spirit of the times,” he adds, “to try the East Coast. We’re pretty appalling.”

Pennebaker also jokes about the way in which Political Correctness, at the faculty level, is not consistent campuswide. Radiating outward from the comparative purity at its arts and humanities core, the half-life of the SMU PC element degrades through the sciences until it breaks down completely in the business school. Pennebaker laughs and adds, “In the B-school, they drive American cars, have bumper stickers that say ’Support Our Troops,’ and they’re interested in greed.”

But if the faculty response is, as one liberal arts veteran put it, “mainly conversational, and reading about what’s happening at other places.” it’s also true that SMU has gone quietly about Correcting its curriculum in some ways. According to associate professor of English Bonnie Wheeler, the core requirements for all students were changed 10 years ago to reflect issues of race, class, and gender, not because it was Politically Correct to do so (the phrase didn’t even exist), but because it was “’intellectually responsible.” Wheeler says that the curriculum reforms have “remained one of SMU’s well-kept secrets.”

If that’s true, it’s perhaps because the requirements are modest, and because they are devoid of inflammatory packaging. There are no courses called “Jane Austen and the Glorious Age of Castration” or “20th Century American History and the Myth That This Country is Worth a Damn.” In addition. Wheeler says, the changes have not been made at the expense of the classics of western civilization, which have withstood worse than the Political Correctness debate, “I think you should be teaching The Iliad. for example, hut I certainly don’t teach it the way I did 15 years ago.” Wheeler says. “It’s too bad PC has come to stand for exposing students to third-rate as opposed to first-rate texts.”

It’s also too bad that, at some colleges.Political Correctness has come to meanthat questions about free speech can becodified into a leftist litmus test one failsat one’s peril. On the poky Hilltop, in themeantime, being Incorrect isn’t a hangingoffense yet. Reason reigns, even if the kidsdon’t know it.

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