Backlash Against Equallty: The 'Tyranny' of the 'Politically Correct'

McGILL LAW JOURNAL

REVUE DE DROIT DE McGILL

l
7olume 38

Montreal

1993

No I

Backlash Against Equality:

The “Tyranny” of the “Politically Correct”

Sheila McIntyre*

American and Canadian mainstream media have recently pub-
lished numerus articles sounding alarms against a so-called takeover
of college and university campuses by lhe forces ofU”poltical correct-
ness.” This anti-PC literature charges tiat leftist, feminist and anti-
racist students and scholars are using such undemocratic tactics as
indoctrination, censorship and outright intimidation to secure isti-
tional and curricular change on campus whose effect is to subvert fun-
damental wester traditions and values.

The author first examiner the social context in which the PC con-
troversy has arisen and the political mots and agenda of the anti-PC
movement in both the U.S. and Canada. She argues that this move-
-mnt is a well-fanded and well-orchestrated coalition of right-wing
interests whose object is to generate snd fuel popular fear against sub-
stantive egalitarian change not simply on North American campuses
but in society at large.

She then analyzes the rhetorical techniques used to obscure this
conservative agenda and the underlying conflict its apparently liberal
symbolism masks. Rather than being a debate about the limits of free-
dom of expression on campus or the merits of curricular change, she
argues, the controversy turns en opposing visions of the meaning and
importance of equality in liberal democracy. Stripped of rhetoric, the
onflict is between the relative merits of formal and substantive
equality.

After describing what distinguishes these two competing visions,
the author applies a substantive critique to anti-PC literature in order
to disclose the characteristic features of formalist ideology and their
function in rationalizing and perpetuating social inequality. She ilus-
trates how and why the status arguments relied upon in the formalism
revealed in anti.PC literature demonstrate that formalists do not live
up to their own stated principles and, indeed, abandon such principles
when democratic change threatens to alter the socially and legally
enforced”second-class .status of historically subordinated groups.

Da

une littlrature abondame, lea mdias amdricains et cana-
diens ont re6cmment dnoned les partisans dupolitical correctness en
le aceusant d’avoir pris le contrIle d’un certain nombre de coll ges
et d’universits. Selon ces 6-rits anti-PC, les valeurs traditionnelles
do la civilisotion ocidentale sout menacls par des prmfesseurs et
tdiants flministes; unti-rocistes et de gauche qui. an moyen de tac-
tiquer anti-ddmocratiques tels l’endoctrinement, Ia censure et mme
itmidation, essnient d’influencer lea structures institutionneles ct
lea programocs.

L’auteurc situe d’abord la controverse dans son contexte social et
examine les orighnes politiques et lea objectifs du mouvement anti-PC
au Canada et anux lats-Ums. Selon elle, i s’agit d’une reaction bien
fmancde et bien orchested par la droite en vue t’entretenir uno
.crainte envers la possibiltd d’une rforme basle sur l’dgalit6 substan-
tielle, non sealement dars les universits nord-arodricaines, mais dans
touter les couches de la socitiY.

Ele entreprend ensuite une analyse des proeddis rhdtoriques dont
so sevent les auteurs anti-PC pour dissimuler sons un verais do lib6-
mlisme les vrais enjeux et la politique conservatrice dans lenfs pro-
pos. Elie falt voir quo le vral dubat ne porte pas sor In libert d’expres-
sion dans les universits ni sur Ic contenu des programmes, man
plutbt sur des visions opposdes du seuset do l’importance de In notion
dgalit6 dans uno ddmocratie libdrale. Abstraction faire des jeux ver-
baun. ii s’agit d’un conflit entre I’6galit6 form!le et I’dgalit6 substan-
tielle.

e I

Aprs son dtude de ces deux visions, I’auteure amorce une cri-
tique substantiel
littdmture anti-PC afro d’exposer an grand
jour lea principales
caroctdistiques de l’idologie formaliste, ainsi
quo la fandont es serveat
justifier et peepidtuer lea inigalitds
sociale.
le dimonrm comment et pourquoi lea arguments anti-PC,
qui s’appuient sti des notions de statut social pour promouvoir une
vision formaliste de l’6galit, retombent sur cea qui lea utilisnt, car,
ceux-ci se montrent incapobles de respecter lent propres principes et
y renoncent compltement das qu’une rforme ddmocratique risque
d’amdliorer le sort de ceux que In loi a tonjours rldnits .t an statut
inflrieur.

* Faculty of Law, Queen’s University, )Kingston, Ontario. I am grateful to Professor Don Stuart
at Queen’s and Professor Constance Backhouse at the University of Western Ontario Faculty of
Law for making available to me their personal clipping files of articles on political correctness, to
Professor Michelle Boivin at the University of Ottawa Law School for comments on the second
draft, and to audiences at the annual meeting of the Learned Societies, and at the University of
Toronto, the University of Western Ontario, Carleton University, McGill University and the Uni-
versity of Ottawa for responses to earlier drafts. The thinking and political commitment that ani-
mate my analysis have been significantly shaped by the work of Mary Eaton, Lee Lakeman, Cath-
arine MacKinnon and Patricia Williams in ways that go far beyond those notes where I specifically
credit their ideas.
McGill Law Journal 1993
Revue de droit de McGill
To be cited as: (1993) 38 McGill LJ. 1
Mode de r~fdrence: (1993) 38 R.D. McGill 1

McGILL LAW JOURNAL

[Vol. 38

Synopsis

Prologue

I.

The Context of the Political Correctness Controversy
A. The Political Roots and Agenda of the Anti-PC Movement
B.
C. Equality Law: The Canadian Target

“Quotas”: The American Target

II. The Rhetorical Politics

A. Masking the Conservative Campaign
B. The Underlying Controversy: Conflicting Visions of Equality
C. The Liberal Middle Ground

III. A Substantive Reply

IV. Formal vs. Substantive Equality

A. Formal Equality
B. Substantive Equality: The Critique

V. Who Are the Politically Correct? The Status Argument

A. Who Poses the Threat? A Group Portrait
B. What Threat Do They Pose? Bias Revealed

VI. Privilege as Property: Whose Takeover?

Innocence (Re)Asserted
Intolerance (Re)Claimed

A.
B.
C. Omission (Re)Constructed
D. Discourse (Re)Appropriated

VII. The Anti-Democratic Face of Formalism

VIII. Epilogue

1993]

Prologue

BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

Feminist teaching, scholarship and campus activism have probably never
received as much public attention as they have in the last eighteen months’ in
the endless articles on the forces of “political correctness”2 sweeping North
American campuses. Neither have teaching, learning and writing in the univer-
sities by scholars of colour and lesbians and gay men Ironically, during a time
when the politics of difference4 have become a central concern of systemically
oppressed groups, the media, fed by prominent conservative voices, have
lumped diverse and divided communities together indistinguishably, attributing
to them a uniform politics whose means and ends are subversive of the long-
accepted mission of the university as well as the traditions that distinguish lib-
eral education and democracy. The subversion charged is the hostile takeover of
academic institutions by radicals propagating a wholesale attack on Western lib-
eral traditions and values through illiberal means: the indoctrination of students,
the censorship of dissent and the intimidation of those who would defend liberal
principles.

The alarms being sounded against the tyranny of the politically correct are
of mythic dimension. On any measure – numbers, professional status and secu-

IThis article was completed in August 1992.
2Because the so-called “political correctness” movement is a manufactured menace serving as
symbolic proxy for diverse communities engaged in social change, I have adopted the shorthand
“PC” and “anti-PC” to convey this symbolic aspect of this literature’s political rhetoric and to
reduce the alleged menace to size.
3Let it be clear from the outset that not all feminists are white and not all scholars of colour are
heterosexual. Throughout this article I use the term “heterosexist” to refer to conduct or practices
which oppress lesbians and gay men. As Mary Eaton pointed out to me, the term “homophobic”
is largely a misnomer. It is hatred, anger and contempt, rather than irrational fear, which animate
and rationalize most discrimination against lesbians and gay men. “Homophobia” does describe the
fear that “homosexuals” will force themselves sexually on anyone of their sex regardless of age,
but the stereotype attributing an indiscriminate, predatory sexuality to lesbians and gays as a class
not only is both sexist and heterosexist but serves gender and heterosexual privilege. This article
only uses the term “homosexual” when quoting others because it is not a term lesbians or gay men
choose to describe themselves, but a label coined for a medically constructed “illness” signifying
psychosexual “deviance” (see infra note 210). The term is particularly unacceptable to lesbians
because its apparent gender neutrality erases lesbian existence and politics even while its unspoken
referent is gay men and the stereotypes attributed to them and, thus, to lesbians by proxy.

4By “the politics of difference” I mean awareness that inequality is textured and often com-
pounded by multiple disadvantages grounded in sex, race, disability, class and sexual identity, and
that (in)equality theories which falsely universalize from the experience of only, say, white women
or gay men or heterosexual women of colour or that treat racial minorities as an undifferentiated
class are flawed by their erasure of situated differences. For representative writings on this topic,
see e.g. Gloria Anzaldda, ed., Making Face, Making Soul (Haciendo Caras): Creative and Critical
Perspectives by Women of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation Books, 1990), especially
the seven essays in s. 6 (“If You Would Be My Ally: In Alliance, In Solidarity”); Man Matsuda,
“When the First Quail Calls: Multiple Consciousness as Jurisprudential Method” (1989) 11
Women’s Rts. L. Rep. 7; bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South
End Press, 1981); Makeda Silvera, ed., Piece of My Heart: .A Lesbian of Colour Anthology
(Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1991); Leigh Megan Leonard, “A Missing Voice in Feminist Legal
Theory: The Heterosexual Presumption” (1990) 12 Women’s Rts. L. Rep. 39; Mary Eaton, The-
orizing Sexual Orientation (LL.M. Thesis, Queen’s University, 1991), especially c. 1, 5. See also
infra note 145.

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[Vol. 38

rity, institutional leverage – white women and people of colour, whatever their
sexuality, are far from dominant in academic institutions. Their method, hon-
estly described, is the antithesis of indoctrination. On the other hand, the impact
of more than token numbers of students and scholars traditionally excluded
from the ivory tower is proving a fundamental challenge to its traditional norms.
In particular, non-traditional perspectives, experiences, knowledge, history, ped-
agogy and reasoning, in aggregate, are increasingly testing claims central to
existing distributions of power: the disinterestedness of established knowledge
and standards of cultural and academic excellence and the universal merit of
those liberal axioms which conserve the prevailing legal and social order. To the
extent such claims cannot withstand critical challenge, new scholars and their
scholarship are indeed subversive of partial or false truths; but this outcome vin-
dicates the ideal of rational liberalism. To the extent new critical perspectives
and the institutional changes they catalyze generate a more inclusive and plural-
ist intellectual, social and political culture, they are indeed subversive of exclu-
sionary cultural practices; but this outcome vindicates the ideal of participatory
democracy.

That anti-PC literature demonizes a minority-driven vision of democratic
social change as “illiberal” speaks volumes about the demonizers and the liberal
orthodoxies they would immunize from critical dissent. This article analyzes the
political context, rhetorical framework and the form and content of the charges
levelled against so-called forces of “political correctness.” I argue that anti-PC
literature seeks to shore up the distribution of power served by the ideology of
formal equality against the challenge posed by the politics of substantive equal-
ity. I argue, further, that in promoting the partisan agenda of partisan interests
through partisan reporting while proclaiming the neutrality and universality of
each, anti-PC literature exemplifies not only the ideological method of formal
equality, but those of its characteristics most vulnerable to substantive egalitar-
ian critique.

I. The Context of the Political Correctness Controversy

A. The Political Roots and Agenda of the Anti-PC Movement

Those who have manufactured5 and then sounded the alarms about the tyr-
anny of the politically correct have emerged in a particular historic context. Iso-

5See e.g. results of a 1990 survey which asked Canadian university presidents to rank 20 con-
cerns about campus changes in the previous five years. The top three academic problems men-
tioned were that students are too preoccupied with careers, lack interest in broad intellectual issues
and are apathetic. Closed-mindedness ranked seventh as an academic concern. Alcohol abuse,
antipathy towards women activists and theft were the three top-rated non-academic concerns. Stu-
dent protests, violence and religious bigotry were ranked lowest on the list of concerns of the 66
presidents who replied to the survey (Lila Sarick, “Quest for Knowledge Low on Student Lists”
The [Toronto] Globe and Mail (12 July 1991) Al). See also Huntly Collins, “PC and the Press”
(1992) 24:1 Change 12 at 14: Surveyed by the American Council on Education whether their
schools had experienced controversy over the “political correctness” of courses, speeches or lec-
tures, less than 10% of 359 administrators who responded said yes. Even Derek Bok, who views
the imposition of political orthodoxy in uniyersities as one of the top three problems on American

1993]

BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

5

lated and localized variations on anti-PC themes have been expressed in depart-
mental and other university governing bodies since the rise of Women’s Studies
and Black Studies programs and minority recruitment in the early 1970s.6 They
surfaced periodically in the mid-1980s in the press and scholarly journals,
whenever critical minority scholars pressed (successfully or not) for systemic
institutional change rather than token inclusion at the margins of the university
organization.7

The anti-PC attack which dominated the popular press in 1991 draws on
these earlier insider battles, but has been largely orchestrated and propagated in
the United States by non-academics8 on the payroll of right-wing foundations

campuses, argues that few students have been stifled by political correctness, that conservative
views are “clearly more prominent on campus” than 20 years ago, that only “a tiny number of law
schools and a few sociology and literature departments” have experienced destructive internal
divides, and that the number of major campus controversies has been inflated by media over-
reporting and constant repetition (“Universities: Their Temptations and Tensions” (1991) 18 J.
Coll. & U. L. 1 at 8-9). Contra Steven Bahls, “Political Correctness and the American Law School”
(1991) 69 Wash. U.L.Q. 1041 at 1044 (59.8% of law students surveyed stated some professors are
intolerant of differing views).
6Canon wars and curriculum battles have a very long history. See e.g. Gerry O’Sullivan, “The
PC Police in the Mirror of History” (1992) 52:2 The Humanist 17; John Thelin, “The Curriculum
Crusades and the Conservative Backlash” (1992) 24:1 Change 17; Paul Lauter, Canons and Con-
texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) at 22. For resistance to Women’s Studies, see e.g.
Robert Bezucha, “Feminist Pedagogy as a Subversive Activity” in Margo Culley & Catherine Por-
tuges, eds., Gendered Subjects: The Dynamics of Feminist Teaching (Boston: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1985) (struggles following co-education at Amherst College in 1976); Thelma McCormack,
“Feminism, Women’s Studies and the New Academic Freedom” in Jane Gaskell & Arlene McLa-
ren, eds., Women and Education: A Canadian Perspective (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises, 1987)
289 (emergence of and opposition to Women’s Studies in Canada)- For hostility to Black Studies,
see Lauter’s critique of Allan Bloom in Canons and Contexts, ibid. at 272-86; Gary Peller, “Race
Consciousness” [1990] Duke L.J. 758 at 802-807.

7In my own institution, Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Professor David Toogood
denounced the propagation of “orthodox feminist ideology” dictating a “‘correct’ version of
women’s history” which it is unsafe to criticize due to feminists’ “monopoly” on hiring (“Recruit-
ment of Feminists Curbs Academic Freedom” Queen’s Journal (30 January 1987) 11). Shortly
thereafter, an undated open letter from unnamed “concerned lawyers, law students & law teachers”
was sent to Canadian Law Deans protesting misrepresentation and “abuse of public trust” in their
advertisements inviting “men and women with outstanding academic or professional credentials”
to apply for teaching positions. The letter claimed that there had been a takeover of law school hir-
ing processes by feminists using “strong arm tactics and outright intimidation” to exclude “the best
qualified candidates –
often male” and that critics of feminist hegemony were too afraid to speak
out (on file with author). Similar charges surfaced in the U.S. legal community against the emer-
gence of Critical Legal Studies as early as 1984. See Paul Carrington, “Of Law and the River”
(1984) 34 J. Legal Ed. 222 and responses to Carrington by Robert W. Gordon et al., “‘Of Law and
the River,’ and of Nihilism and Academic Freedom” (1985) 35 J. Legal Ed. 1. See also Jerry Frug’s
analysis of the attack on C.L.S.: “McCarthyism and Critical Legal Studies” (1987) 22 Harv.
C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 665.

8There is an academic wing to the anti-PC onslaught: the National Association of Scholars,
which claims 2,100 members in the U.S. Its objects include opposing the politicization of Amer-
ican campuses in general and PCness and affirmative action in particular, and defending traditional
academic standards and academic freedom. See D’Arcy Jenish, “A War of Words: Academics
Clash Over ‘Correctness”‘ in Maclean’s (27 May 1991) 44; Jerry Adler, “Taking Offense” in
Newsweek (24 December 1990) 48 at 49. For some of the less savory tactics of the NAS, see David
Beers, “PC? B.S.” (1991) 16:5 Mother Jones 34 at 35. The NAS began life in 1982 as the Campus

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[Vol. 38

and think tanks,9 and/or by employees”0 or politicians in the Reagan-Bush
administration” and/or by the right-wing press.'” President Bush himself has

Coalition for Democracy which held conferences and published papers as early as 1985 on the poli-
ticization of scholarship and the takeover of universities by tenured leftists. The NAS receives sig-
nificant funding from right-wing foundations and is linked by funding and personnel to the Reagan
administration, the right-wing press, right-wing campus newspapers like the Dartmouth Review.
See Scott Henson & Tom Philpott, “The Right Declares a Culture War” (1992) 52:2 The Humanist
10.

9See e.g. Beers, ibid. at 64: The National Association of Scholars is linked to the Madison Center
for Education Affairs, whose founders include neo-conservative Irving Kristol, former Republican
Treasury Secretary William Simon, former Republican Education Secretary William Bennett and
the late Allan Bloom. The Center’s Collegiate Network helps launch conservative campus papers
and urges their editors to be “quite ideologically narrow.” See also Ellen Messer-Davidow, “Doing
the Right Thing” (1992) 9:5 Women’s Rev. Books 19 (conservative “student” papers and the NAS
manufactured “incidents” and attacked faculty at universities such as Texas, Duke, Dartmouth and
Harvard, which incidents are repeated by conservative journalists such as George Will and Dorothy
Rabinowitz. Funders include Bradley, Coors, JM, Olin, Scaife and Smith Richardson Foundations.
There are 55 conservative think tanks in 22 states which, along with legal, political and economic
foundations, belong to the Madison Group).

‘0Dinesh D’Souza wrote Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (Toronto:
Collier Macmillan Canada, 1991) with $30,000 support from the Olin Foundation and while work-
ing for the National Endowment for Democracy and the American Enterprise Institute. Both were
set up by President Reagan and neither is accountable to Congress for its congressional funding.
Prior to authoring Illiberal Education, D’Souza was a domestic policy analyst for Reagan. As an
undergraduate he edited the Dartmouth Review, one of the first student papers funded by the Insti-
tute for Educational Affairs (now merged with the Madison Center), during which time the Review
stole and published private letters of gay students, published an interview with former Klan leader
David Duke, along with a staged photo of a lynched Black man on the Dartmouth campus and par-
odied affirmative action beneficiaries. He also edited Princeton’s alumnae/i review, Prospect. His
first column, calling for the abolition of Women’s Studies rather than letting it “fester and fall away
in scabs,” spoke of “perspiring feminists” who want to be men and “slatterns” who have abortions
“to prove they are liberated.” See Messer-Davidow, ibid.; Alice Jardine, “Illiberal Reporting”
(1992) 9:5 Women’s Rev. Books 27; Beers, supra note 8 at 65; Henson & Philpott, supra note 8
at 14-15. Roger Kimball, author of Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher
Education (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), published much of his book in article form while
he was managing editor of New Criterion. That periodical has received funding ranging from
$225,000 – $325,000 annually since 1984 from the Olin and Scaife Foundations (1984-88) and the
Bradley Foundation (1987-88 only) (Messer-Davidow, ibid. at 19).

t lWilliam Bennett, then Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (N.E.H.) and later
to become Secretary of Education, first raised alarms about the state of education in the humanities
in To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education (Washington, D.C.:
N.E.H., 1984). He claimed that criticism of the classic texts of Western civilization and their dis-
placement by second-class works threatened to erode the legacy of timeless truths which should
be conserved and passed on to the next generation. In 1988 and 1990, Lynne Cheney’s annual
reports as Chair of the N.E.H. attacked the “politicizing” of the humanities as a result of minorities’
demands that higher education be more inclusive of their histories. She, too, called for a return to
the classics that transcend all “accidents of class, race, and gender …” by speaking to us all. See
e.g. Joan Wallach Scott, “The Campaign Against Political Correctness: What’s Really at Stake?”
(1992) 23:6 Change 30 at 34; D’Souza, ibid. at 68-69 (Bennett deplored Stanford’s reform of its
mandatory introductory course in Western Civilization, stating that a great university has been
“brought low by the forces of ignorance, irrationality and intimidation”). See also Henry Hyde &
George Fishman, “The Collegiate Speech Protection Act of 1991: A Response to the New Intol-
erance in the Academy” (1991) 37 Wayne L. Rev. 1469 (summary of genesis and explanation of
contents of Congressman Hyde’s bill protecting student speech agiinst speech codes).

12Most notably, George Will, Irving Kristol and Midge Decter.

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

lent his voice to- the anti-PC movement.’ 3 His Office for Civil Rights and
Department of Education publicly (and erroneously) declared the designation of
scholarship funds for minority students illegal under Title VI.14 His Secretary of
Education has delayed renewal of the accreditation authority of the independent
Commission which accredits 500 colleges and universities in the Middle Atlan-
tic and Caribbean regions since the Commission withheld its approval of two
academic institutions for failing to implement their own diversity policies.’5

and it is a movement –

The anti-PC movement –

is clearly an organized
campaign arising out of the coalition of right-wing interests that currently dom-
inate American political and economic institutions. 6 This is not to argue that its
charges are per se suspect because of their right-wing origins. But it is to under-
line that the anti-PC literature is political in origin and aspiration, and that for
a4 its defence of timeless, universal truths and disinterested scholarship, its pro-
gram is grounded in very recent history and a highly partisan agenda promoting
a particular strain of democracy. As Joan Wallace Scott views this phenomenon:

We are experiencing another phase of the ongoing Reagan-Bush revolution which,
having packed the courts and privatized the economy, now seeks to neutralize the
space of ideological and cultural noncomformity by discrediting it.17

Discrediting “it” is intrinsically tied to discrediting “them.” In anti-PC writing,
the ideas and values which menace the timeless truths conservatives defend are
attributed to traditionalist society’s traditional outsiders: people of colour, fem-
inists and lesbians and gay men. Repelling the menace requires discrediting the
policies which let “them” into institutions devoted to the conservation and dis-
semination of cultural traditions in the first place.

131n his University of Michigan commencement address on May 4, 1991 President Bush stated:

Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under
assault throughout the United States. The notion of “political correctness” has ignited
controversy across the land. What began as a cause for civility has soured into a cause
of conflict and even censorship (Reported by Jenish in Maclean’s, supra note 8 at 44).

14Michael Olivas, “Federal Law and Scholarship Policy: An Essay on the Office for Civil
Rights, Title VI, and Racial Restrictions” (1991) 18 J. Coll. & U. L. 21. Olivas contests the dec-
laration from the Office for Civil Rights and the Department of Education stating that allocating
football game profits to minority scholarships violates Title VI. Indeed, the O.C.R. retreated. Oli-
vas also notes that the federal government “fraudulently backdated O.C.R. responses to make it
appear that the Department of Education had complied with court [postsecondary desegregation]
orders” (ibid. at 23).

15Ellen Schrecker, “Caught in the Crossfire” (1992) 9:5 Women’s Rev. Books 22. The delay has
significant consequences: Unless colleges and universities are accredited, they cannot receive fed-
eral aid and their students cannot receive federal student loans. See also Lillian Robinson & Linda
Brodkey, “Not Just a Matter of Course” (1992) 9:5 Women’s Rev. Books 23.

16For differing accounts of the composition of the American New Right and neo-conservative
movements, see e.g. Robyn Rowland, “Women Who Do and Women Who Don’t Join the Women’s
Movement ‘ in Renate Klein & Deborah Lynn Steinberg, eds., Radical Voices: A Decade of Resist-
ance (Toronto: Pergamon Press, 1989) 42; Sheila Ruth, “A Feminist Analysis of the New Right”
in Klein & Steinberg, eds., ibid. at 93; Zillah Eisenstein, “The Sexual Politics of the New Right:
Understanding the ‘Crisis of Liberalism’ for the 1980s” in Nannerl Keohane, Michelle Rosaldo &
Barbara Gelpi, eds., Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1982) 77.

17Scott, supra note 11 at 30. See also Schrecker, supra note 15.

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B.

“Quotas”: The American Target

Republican administrations under Presidents Reagan and Bush have sys-
tematically opposed, neutralized or cut virtually every federal civil rights or
social welfare law or program which facilitates the entry of non-privileged
white women and people of colour into the university system.”5 The Republi-
cans have been particularly aggressive in opposing affimnative action. 9

The anti-PC campaign emerged at the same time that the U.S. Congress
was debating the Civil Rights Acts of 1990 and 1991, which were an attempt to
expand protection from and damages for racial and sexual employment discrim-
ination and to override decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court eroding the permis-
sible scope of affirmative action programs and altering the burden of proof in
disparate impact litigation.2″ President Bush vetoed the 1990 legislation
because, although it expressly declared hiring quotas illegal, he claimed it
would force employers to institute quotas to pre-empt discrimination suits. The
Act ultimately approved by the President was little different from the earlier ver-
sion. Although the anti-quota clause was dropped, it remains unclear whether
sex or race-based hiring goals or quotas will now be found discriminatory.2

President Bush’s public stand against non-existent “quotas” in the name.of
preserving equal (i.e. race and sex-neutral) opportunity, is ideologically akin to
the alarms he and his administration have sounded against a non-existent “take-

18See e.g. Ronnie Steinberg, ‘The Unsubtle Revolution: Women, the State and Equal Employ-
ment” in Jane Jenson, Elisabeth Hagen & Ceallaigh Reddy, eds., Feminization of the Labor Force:
Paradoxes and Promises (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) 189; Harold Brackman,
Steven Erie & Martin Rein, “Wedded to the Welfare State: Women Against the Reaganite
Retrenchment” in Jenson, Hagen & Reddy, eds., ibid. at 214; Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State
and Welfare (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Unde-
clared War Against American Women (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991) at 259-64. See also
Patricia Williams’ analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent rulings on affirmative action in The
Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) at 104-07 (when the
Court allowed consent decrees setting hiring goals for Black firefighters to be challenged by white
firefighters, Reagan’s Assistant Attorney General remarked that the case was “a home run for white
men” (ibid. at 107)).

19See Derrick Bell, “Xerces and the Affirmative Action Mystique” (1989) 57 Geo. Wash. L. Rev.
1595. See also Charles Martin, “The Origins of Racial and Ethnic Conflict on U.S. College and
University Campuses” (1991) 37 Wayne L. Rev. 1363 at 1374 (attempts by the Attorney General
and Civil Rights branch to rescind Executive Order 11246 requiring hiring goals at 20,000 com-
panies employing 23 million Americans).
20See Civil Rights Act of 1991, Pub. L. No. 102-166, 105 Stat. 107.1. These Supreme Court deci-
sions include: City of Richmond v. JA. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469 (1989); Price Waterhouse v.
Hopkins, 490 U.S. 228 (1989); Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio, 490 U.S. 642 (1989); Martin
v. Wilks, 490 U.S. 755 (1989); Lorance v. A.T.&T Technologies, 490 U.S. 900 (1989); Patterson
v. McLean Credit Union, 491 U.S. 164 (1989).
21For a comparative analysis of the 1990 and 1991 Acts and their underlying politics, see
Andrew Dansicker, “A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing: Affirmative Action, Disparate Impact, Quotas
and the Civil Rights Act” (1991) 25 Col. J. L. & Soc. Probs. 1. For the jurisprudential history
behind the legislation, see Bruce Comly French, “A Road Map to Achieve Enhanced Cultural
Diversity in Legal Education Employment Decisions” (1991) 19 N. Carol. Cent. L.L 219; Mark
Grunewald, “Quotas, Politics, and Judicial Statesmanship: The Civil Rights Act of 1991 and
Powell’s Bakke” (1992) 49 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 53.

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over” of universities by radical propagandists in the name of preserving aca-
demic freedom and excellence. Both straw targets have been created during a
deepening economic crisis in which Republican social welfare cuts, regressive
tax policies, privatization initiatives and deficit management as well as global
restructuring have resulted in massive unemployment and a growing gap
between rich and poor.22 Republicans have not only abandoned the casualties of
Reaganomics but characterized them as undeserving, immoral or criminal.’
Simultaneously, in anti-PC literature, they have demonized those who prioritize
egalitarian change as enemies of the American way.

The redistributive impacts of anti-discrimination laws and programs in
favour of white women and people of colour in the last two decades have been
minimal by contrast with the disastrous effects on both groups of global restruc-
turing and domestic fiscal policies. But, in both cases, their dislocative impacts
have been shared by middle and working class whites, particularly men relo-
cated or displaced by the feminization of the labour market as industrial jobs are
lost and the service sector mushrooms.’ Anti-PC literature, along with other
attacks on affirmative action, offers a cheap fix for profound social and eco-
nomic problems. The message appeals to white and/or male resentments and
fears by blaming “preferential treatment” of undeserving women and minorities
for white men’s personal losses and for America’s economic decline. The appeal
is often baldly racist.’

As one of the few remaining institutional power bases generating criticism
of Republican policy while suggesting the transformative potential of real, not
phantom, affirmative action, universities are a necessary and easy target. They

22See e.g. Jenson, Hagen & Reddy, supra note 18; Martin Kilson & Clement Cottingham,
“Thinking About Race Relations: How Far Are We Still From Integration?” (Fall 1991) Dissent
520.

23See e.g. Williams, supra note 18 at 22-24, 28; Kilson & Cottingham, ibid. at 522-23.
24See Jensen, Hagen & Reddy, eds., supra note 18; Isabella Bakker, “Pay Equity and Economic
Restructuring: The Polarization of Policy?” in Judy Fudge and Patricia McDermott, eds., Just
Wages: A Feminist Assessment of Pay Equity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991) 254;
Economic Council of Canada, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: Employment in the Service Economy (Ottawa:
Supply & Services Canada, 1990). On how regimes backed by the ideology of formal equality
ensure that the redistributive impacts of egalitarian reform fall primarily on the lower classes, see
Alan Freeman, “Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review” in David Kairys, ed., The Politics of
Law: A Progressive Critique (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982) 96 at 110-14.

25One of the more disturbing reflections of this phenomenon is the popular support for the anti-
immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Japanese and anti-affirmative action themes in the “America First”
messages of past presidential hopefuls David Duke and Pat Buchanan. Former Grand Wizard of
the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, had the support of 56% of Louisiana Republicans and 55% of
white voters in the Louisiana gubernatorial campaign (David Corn, “Beltway Bandits: Every Man
a Duke” (1991) 253 The Nation 732). He claimed to have received 100,000 letters supporting hi
presidential candidacy (Mike Trickey, “Top Job Bid: Neo-Nazi Duke Challenges Bush for Repub-
lican Nomination” The Ottawa Citizen (5 December 1991) B7). Pat Buchanan, former Republican
presidential contender, also appealed to racism in the Republican primary campaigns in the U.S.
South. Leading up to the Georgia primary, he lambasted President Bush for being soft on quotas
[!] and on pornographic and obscene art funded by taxpayers. His television ad for the latter charge
featured nearly nude, leather clad, gay Black men in a performance funded by the National Endow-
ment of the Arts. See Norma Greenway, “Just a Good 01′ Candidate” The Ottawa Citizen (1 March
1992) A3.

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[Vol. 38

can be cast as the last bastion of American radicalism out of touch with or hos-
tile to ordinary Americans’ values but in control of their children’s learning and
economic future; as the breeding ground of minority discontent which proves
too much education can be a dangerous thing; and as a microcosm of the dan-
gers of genuine integration. The enemy within the gates is education for social
change.

C. Equality Law: The Canadian Target

Anti-PC literature has circulated widely in Canada, primarily via American
periodicals on Canadian news-stands, but also through reprints in Canadian
newspapers26 and a few home-grown feature stories. 7 Canadian political and
economic institutions are not so monolithically conservative as are their Amer-
ican counterparts,28 and, although our welfare state is being dismantled, 9 there

26 For instance, reprints of Richard Bernstein’s New York Times piece “‘Politically Correct’ Atti-
tudes at University” The [Kingston] Whig-Standard (30 October 1990) Al; Stephanie Schorow’s
Boston Globe piece “Political Correctness: Tyranny of the Left: Freedom-of Speech Under Fire,”
reprinted in The London Free Press (22 June 1991) El.

27See e.g. tie cover story in Maclean’s, supra note 8 at 40: “The Silencers: ‘Politically Correct’
Crusaders Are Stifling Expression and Behaviour”; the editorial by Michael Crawford, “Have Fem-
inists Gone Too Far?” (1990) 14:6 Canadian Lawyer 5; the cover story by Carol McLeod, “The
Feminist Vision” (1990) 14:6 Canadian Lawyer 10; Deborah Watson, “Is Legal Scholarship Fail-
ing?” (1991) 15:1 Canadian Lawyer 20; John Allemang, “The Rise of the New Puritanism” The
[Toronto] Globe and Mail (2 February 1991) D1. There have been countless articles, columns and
letters which use the term “political correctness” as if it were a proven, rather than an ascribed,
attribute of proponents of social change.
28There are significant differences between the types and scope of conservatism in the two coun-
tries. Canada’s federal Conservatives, backed by the business community, are pursuing economic
policies very similar to those pursued by the Republican administration, but against the backdrop
of a more highly regulatory state shaped by a three-party system in which a well-established social
democratic party has played a significant role in securing social programs and rights unmatched
in the U.S. In Canada, the anti-PC phenomenon is much less linked to defence of the American
way or a nationalism premised on pride in being the pre-eminent symbol of Western civilization.
In large measure, this may be because Canada is still in search of its distinct identity as a nation
and because part of our identity turns on not being American.

In Canada’s three-party system, voter dissatisfaction with traditional mainstream parties (con-
servative or liberal) has generated significant support for newly founded or previously moribund
parties. New right-wing, regionalist parties such as the Reform Party and Confederation of Regions
parties have growing support in the West, eastern Ontario and New Brunswick. They, along with
the separatist/nationalist Bloc Qurb6cois, are likely to alter profoundly the federal party system.
The election in 1991 of New Democratic governments in Ontario, British Columbia and Saskatch-
ewan is at least partly a backlash against the prior government and the federal Tories rather than
a popular swing to the left. And, indeed, Premiers Bob Rae, Mike Harcourt and Roy Romanow
have soft-pedalled their social democratic policies to appease the business community. Interest-
ingly, in both British Columbia and Saskatchewan, the predicted defeat of right-wing governments
by the New Democrats was accompanied by a shift of alarmed right-wing voters to the Liberals,
who had little popular support prior to the election.
29Some of these conservative economic policies include: deregulation, privatization of public
services and publicly-owned corporations, free trade, regressive tax reforms, cutbacks to or out-
right dismantling of state-funded social services, labour laws curbing unionization and facilitating
deunionization and ad hoc legislation such as wage controls or back to work laws curbing union
power, and back-pedalling on public-sector pay equity in Newfoundland and the federal govem-
ment. See e.g. Judy Fudge, “Labour Law’s Little Sister: The Employment Standards Act and the

1993]

BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

remain effective oppositional voices at the grassroots level.3″ More, in the last
decade, the Supreme Court of Canada adopted a substantive approach to equal-
ity rights, acknowledged the existence of systemic discrimination and endorsed
the imposition of hiring quotas to remedy it.3″ And notwithstanding the uneven-
ness of the Supreme Court’s fidelity to its own equality jurisprudence,32 the
Canadian Constitution explicitly legalizes affirmative action.33

Feminization of Labour” (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 1991); Jensen, Hagen
& Reddy, eds., supra note 18 at c. 1, 2, 11, 12; Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz, The Assault on
Trade Union Freedoms (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1988).
3 0See e.g. Penney Kome, The Taking of Twenty-Eight: Womnen Challenge the Constitution
(Toronto: The Women’s Press, 1983). A national grassroots women’s lobby persuaded the Prime
Minister and nine premiers to include a specific sex equality guarantee in the Constitution which
will not be subject to legislative override. See also the influence of equality-seeking groups on the
latest round of constitutional negotiations in Constitutional Conference Secretariat, Renewal of
Canada Conferences (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1992). Perhaps because oppositional voices have
had some successes in challenging unconstitutionally discriminatory federal legislation, the most
recent federal budget axed the Court Challenges Program which provided funding to research and
litigate constitutional equality challenges.
31Litigation high water marks in equality law include Ontario Human Rights Commission and
O’Malley v. Simpson-Sears Ltd., [1985] 2 S.C.R. 536,23 D.L.R. (4th) 321 (proof of intent unnec-
essary for violation of human rights legislation and employer has duty of reasonable accommoda-
tion where facially neutral rules have disparate impact on members of groups against which dis-
crimination is legislatively prohibited); Canadian National Railways Co. v. Canada (Cdn. HR.
Comm.), [1987] 1 S.C.R. 1114, (sub nom. Action Travail des Femmes v. Canadian National Rail-
way Co.) 40 D.L.R. (4th) 193 (quotas imposed by a human rights tribunal an appropriate remedy
for systemic discrimination); Brooks v. Canada Safeway Ltd., [1989] 1 S.C.R. 1219, 59 D.L.R.
(4th) 321 (pregnancy discrimination is sex discrimination); Janzen v. Platy Enterprises Ltd., [1989]
1 S.C.R. 1252, 59 D.L.R. (4th) 352 (sexual harassment is sex discrimination notwithstanding that
all women are not harassed and some men are); Andrews v. Law Society of British Columbia,
[1989] 1 S.C.R. 143, 56 D.L.R. (4th) 1 (rejection of formal equality approach to Charter equality
guarantees in favour of substantive equality approach); R. v. Keegstra, [1990] 3 S.C.R. 697, 39
C.R.R. 5 (criminal proscription of hate propaganda justifiable limit on freedom of expression); R.
v. Lavallge, [1990] 1 S.C.R. 852,55 C.C.C. (3d) 97 (expansive interpretation of self defence for
battered women who kill their abusers); Butler v. R., [1992] 1 S,C.R. 452, 70 C.C.C. (3d) 129
(harm to human dignity and to women’s equality caused by obscene materials justifies their crim-
inal proscription and resulting limit on freedom of expression).
32 0n the residual pull of formalist equality reasoning, see Diana Majury, “Equality and Discrim-
ination According to the Supreme Court of Canada” (1991) 4 CJ.W.L. 407. I am also grateful to
Mary Eaton for her observations on how the “similarly situated” test for equality entitlement con-
tinues to appear in post-Andrews caselaw. For recent cases illustrating how tenuous the current
Court’s hold on the meaning of systemic discrimination is, see R. v. Nguyen, [.1990] 2 S.C.R. 906,
6 W.W.R. 289 (statutory rape provisions); R. v. Seaboyer, [1991] 2 S.C.R. 577, 83 D.L.R. (4th) 193
(striking down exclusionary rules limiting admissibility of sexual history evidence in rape trials);
Canadian Council of Churches v. Canada (M.E.L), [1992] 1 S.C.R. 236, 88 D.L.R. (4th) 193
(rejection of equality arguments in favour of expanding the standing of public interest groups to
challenge the constitutionality of legislation). Butler v. R., ibid., articulates an equality interest in
obscenity prohibitions, but never explicitly refers to the equality guarantees of the Charter.

33S. 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms reads:

15(1) Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal
protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular,
‘without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion,
sex, age or mental or physical disability.

15(2) Subsection (1) does not preclude any law, program or’activity that has as its
object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups
including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic ori-

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[Vol. 38

In my view, anti-PC literature in Canada plays not only to the resentments.
of casualties of the current recession/depression,’ but to sexism and racism
inflamed by the last decade of landmark equality decisions which have resulted
in the visible emergence of disadvantaged individuals and groups willing to risk
the filing of human rights complaints35 or to petition government for reparations
for past violations of their civil liberties.36 That constitutional equality litigation
is rarely initiated 37 or won38 by disadvantaged groups is not well recognized.
Rather, isolated individual complaints, some culminating in legal redress, are
portrayed as a mini-revolution by minority or “special interest” groups securing
through litigation and elite networking what they have failed to gain through
established democratic processes. 39 This mythology has, I believe, been helped

gin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability [emphasis added].

(Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (U.K.), 1982, c.
11).34For structural causes of this recession, see supra note 24; Gordon Ternowetsky and Graham
Riches, “Economic Polarization and Restructuring of Labour Markets in Canada: The Way of the
Future” in Riches and Ternowetsky, eds., Unemployment and Welfare: Social Policy and the Work
of Social Work (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1990) 19. For the role of Canadian state fiscal policy,
see Marjorie Cohen, “Women and Economic Structures” (Paper presented at National Association
of Women and the Law Conference on the Feminization of Poverty, 23 February 1991) [copy on
file with author].

351 am thinking here of Sikhs willing to protest their exclusion from employment or schools due
to prohibitions on wearing turbans or khirpans (see e.g. Bhinder v. Canadian National Railway
Co., [1985] 2 S.C.R. 561, 23 D.L.R. (4th) 481; Dashminder Singh Sehdev v. Bayview Glen Junior
Schools Ltd. (1988), 9 C.H.R.R. D/4881 (Ont. H.R. Bd. Inq.) and the successful lobby to gain the
right to wear a turban as a Mountie; lesbians and gay men litigating for family benefits (see e.g.
Canada (A.G.) v. Mossop (1989), 71 D.L.R. (4th) 661, 12 C.H.R.R. D/355 (F.C.A.)); and women
litigating for protection from pregnancy discrimination and sexual harassment (see e.g. Brooks v.
Canada Safeway, supra note 31; Janzen v. Platy Enterprises, supra note 31; Robichaud v. Canada
(Treasury Board), [1987] 2 S.C.R. 84, 40 D.L.R. (4th) 577.
36Japanese Canadians subject to expropriation, forced relocation and internment during the Sec-
ond World War finally received an apology and reparations from the federal government in 1988.
For an account of this history, see K. Victor Ujimoto, “Racism, Discrimination and Internment:
Japanese in Canada” in B. Singh Bolaria & Peter S. Li, eds., Racial Oppression in Canada, 2d ed.
(Toronto: Garamond Press, 1988) 127; Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was (Toronto: McClel-
land & Stewart, 1991). Members of the Chinese-Canadian community are still campaigning for
reparations for the head taxes imposed on Chinese immigrants from 1885 (S.C. 1885, c. 71) to
1923 (S.C. 1903, c. 8).
37See Gwen Brodsky & Shelagh Day, Canadian Charter Equality Rights For Women: One Step
Forward or Two Steps Back? (Ottawa: Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, 1989).
In the first three years of equality litigation under the Charter, only 17 of 591 cases were initiated
by or on behalf of disadvantaged groups. Of the 44 sex equality claims, 35 were brought by men
on behalf of men’s or fetal rights (ibid. at 49, 118-19, 128).

38As Elizabeth Sheehy has noted, not one of the Supreme Court of Canada Charter decisions
which has advanced women’s equality has been decided under the equality guarantee (“Feminist
Argumentation Before the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Seaboyer; R. v. Gayme: The Sound
of One Hand Clapping” (1991) 18 MeIb. U. L. Rev. 450 at 451). On the other hand, there have
been some devastating rejections of s. 15 arguments, notably, R. v. Seaboyer and Canadian Council
of Churches v. Canada (M.E.L), supra note 32.
39Political scientists F.L. Morton and Rainer Knopff have recently decried the emergence of a
“Court Party,” a loose alliance of bureaucrats, lawyers, academics, media personalities and
equality-seeking groups who are pursuing political “revolution” through constitutional litigation.
(“The Supreme Court as the Vanguard of the Intelligentsia: The Charter Movement as Postmate-
rialist Politics” (Paper prepared for conference on “Two Hundred Years of Canadian Constitution-

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

along by the fact that with the notable exception of the Rushton affair,” the cam-
pus controversies which have generated the most media attention in Canada
have concerned feminism and anti-feminism in Canadian law schools.”

My expectation is that while anti-PC ideology is being used to justify
opposition to internal change within both American and Canadian universities,
in Canada it will not adversely affect state support for employment equity in
public education. Its institutional threat, rather, is to equality litigation and law
reform. By this I mean that Canadian courts will face mounting pressure to
retreat from the substantive equality jurisprudence which they pioneered in the
1980s and to adopt the conservative version of civil liberties being promoted in
American and Canadian anti-PC literature.42 Similar pressure may also chill leg-
islators from introducing statutory or constitutional changes recognizing cul-
tural diversity and group rights.43

alism,” revised January 1992 [copy on file with author]). Their alarms about the anti-democratic
means and ends of this “intelligentsia” were picked up in the national press. See Al Strachen, “The
Charter Revolution: The Hidden Opposition” The [Toronto] Globe and Mail (11 January 1992) D3.
4OProfessor Phillipe Rushton, who teaches at the University of Western Ontario, remains at the
centre of campus protest over a paper he presented in 1989 which hierarchically ranks “Orientals,”
“Caucasoids” and “Africans” according to brain size, intellectual aptitude, sexual restraint/
permissiveness and social organization. See Michael Ziegler, Fredric Weizmann, Neil Wiener &
Q. David Wiesenthal, “Phillipe Rushton .and the Growing Acceptance of ‘Race-Science'”
in
Ormond McKague, ed., Racism in Canada (Saskatoon: Fifth House Publishers, 1991) 77.

41See e.g. Sheila McIntyre, “Gender Bias Within the Law School: ‘The Memo’ and its Impact”
(1987-88) 2 C.J.W.L. 362 (Queen’s University Faculty of Law); Ann Robinson, “Th6mis retrouve
l’usage de la vue” (1989) 3 C.J.W.L. 211 (Quebec civil law schools); Bruce Feldthusen, “The Gen-
der Wars: ‘Where the Boys Are”‘ (1990) 4 C.JW.L. 66 (University of Western Ontario Faculty of
Law) and references therein to the systemic human rights complaint against Osgoode Hall Law
School at 68.
42Indeed, in oral argument at.the Supreme Court of Canada in Canadian Council of Churches
v. Canada (M.E.L), supra note 32, the Crown argued that the reason the appellant and interveners
sought expanded public interest standing for groups composed of and/or representing disadvan-
taged individuals was that they did not trust individuals to present “politically correct” equality
arguments (personal observation, 11 October 1991). Some Alberta judges have objected to gender
sensitivity education on the ground it is imposing “political correctness” on them: David Vienneau,
“Some Judges Balking at Anti-Sexism Training” The Toronto Star (10 December 1991) B1. More
recently, Mr. Justice John Sopinka of the Supreme Court of Canada delivered a public address cit-
ing the demand for “political correctness” from equality-seeking groups as one of four major
threats to freedom of expression in Canada and as a potential influence on judicial decision-
making: Michael Fitz-James, “Judges Shouldn’t Be Cowed by ‘Political Correctness’: Sopinka”
The Lawyers Weekly (1 May 1992) 2. For an American judge’s attack on the forces of political cor-
rectness, see Thomas Gibbs Gee, “‘Enemies or Allies?’: In Defence of Judges” (1988) 66 Texas
L. Rev. 1617 (crusading leftist bigotry an open scandal; faculty who teach leftist dogma not nec-
essarily protected by academic freedom).
43The defeat by popular referendum of a comprehensive package of amendments to the Cana-
dian Constitution in October 1992 has been explained by many citizens who voted “no” and by
some commentators as a rejection of the proposed Accord’s recognition of collective rights and/or
special legal treatment of “special interests.” The most prominent public denunciation of the
Accord’s departures from formal equality principles was former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau
(“Trudeau Speaks Out” Maclean’s (28 September 1992) 22 at 24-25). For articles explaining the
“no” vote as a rejection of group rights, see Barbara Amiel, “Yes to Canada, No to Group Politics”
Maclean’s (9 November 1992) 19; Mary Janigan, “No to Politics as Usual: Special-interest Groups
Suffer a Setback” Maclean’s (9 November 1992) 85.

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[Vol. 38

II. The Rhetorical Politics

A. Masking the Conservative Campaign

“political correctness” and “censorship” –

I think it is important to identify anti-PC literature as a well-orchestrated
essentially conservative campaign for two reasons. First, its conservative ani-
mus and agenda have been successfully obscured by its “bait-and-switch” rhe-
torical formula. By this I mean that the slogans which characterize this literature
and their calculated appeal to
–
freedom of expression are not traditionally conservative, but rather civil liber-
tarian icons. American conservatives have unashamedly associated their politics
with morality,44 advocated censorship,45 and engaged in red-baiting46 to
denounce civil libertarians. 7 They have also sought to shape curriculum content
and educational policy according to right-wing ideology and interests.4″

Second, notwithstanding the liberal rhetoric, the decidedly conservative
positions advanced in the anti-PC literature are offered as apolitical ideals, typ-
ically as defences of academic and cultural excellence, of rational inquiry and
debate, of classical humanism. True, the defence is built on less-than-neutral
representations 49 of the scholars and scholarship said to be undermining aca-

441n the American context, I am thinking here of the Reagan alliance with the Moral Majority,
what George Bush made of the school prayer issue in the last presidential campaign, the portrait
of the Soviet Union and later Iraq as “evil empires,” recent attempts to ban National Endowment
of the Arts grants to artists (like Robert Mapplethorpe) who portray homoeroticism or whose work
is offensive to any religious group. In Canada, .consider the “pro-family” and anti-gay and anti-
lesbian planks of the Confederation of Regions party, R.E.A.L. Women (an ultra-conservative
national women’s group) and the “family compact” caucus of the federal Conservative party. See
e,g. Karen Dubinsky, “The Real Women Behind R.E.A.L. Women” Between The Lines (20 Novem-
ber 1991) 8; Geoffrey York, “Tory Politicians Form Family Compact” The [Toronto] Globe and
Mail (4 June 1992) Al.
45See, on this point, Judith Frank, “The Attack on Political Correctness” (1991) 43:4 Amherst

14 at 19.

46 See infra notes 136, 139-40 and 232-41 and accompanying text.
47The most dramatic example was the mileage George Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign made
from branding Michael Dukakis a liberal and a card-carrying member of the American Civil Lib-
erties Union, which group had opposed school prayer and defended flag burners.
48The Family Protection Act proposed in 1979 as Senate Bill 1808, 96th Congress, 1st session,
title I would have prohibited federal funding of “educational materials or studies…which would
tend to denigrate, diminish, or deny role differences between the sexes as it [sic] has been tradi-
tionally understood in the United States.” See Margaret Andersen, “Changing the Curriculum in
Higher Education” in Elizabeth Minnich, Jean O’Barr & Rachel Rosenfeld, eds., Reconstructing
the Academy: Women’s Education and Women’s Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1988) 36 at 46. Elizabeth Schneider has documented a pattern of interference by state governments
seeking to prevent law school legal clinics from representing clients suing the government (“Polit-
ical Interference in Law School Clinical Programs: Reflections on Outside Interference and Aca-
demic Freedom” (1984) 11 J. Coll. & U. L. 179). See also Faludi, supra note 18 at 259-64,
290-300.

49The niost outrageous example can be found in Kimball, supra note 10. Kimball’s thesis is that
political radicals pursuing faddish and/or ideological goals are destroying the apolitical mission
and neutral standards of the university and dismantling the traditional curriculum of time-honoured
works whose study helps maintain civilized life (xi-xviii). I would describe the book as a sustained
sneer, characterized by smug, spiteful, sensationalist and dishonest reportage. Illustrations include:
the description of new critical scholars as champions of “liberal political pieties” combined with

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY –

demic and cultural standards. But the portrait of polarized struggles within the
universities between defenders of disinterested knowledge or time-honoured
traditions of excellence and politically motivated, second-rate scholars teaching
second-rate texts to subvert “Western civilization,” is rarely acknowledged as a
conflict between two fundamentally political visions responsive to the social
and political changes shaping the world outside as well as inside the ivory
tower.” Western civilization in this literature is a monolith; Western democracy
anything but a pluralist terrain of competing and often contradictory impulses
and principles; Western culture a synonym for that which changes nothing in
existing distributions of power.

This conservative stirring of civil libertarian impulses dressed up as the
timeless, universal truths that distinguish the Western world may be hypocriti-
cal, even cynical. But it is nonetheless strategically astute. It offers bigots
respectability51 and it offers liberals who believe reformism has gone too far a
liberal discourse for opposing further institutional change without appearing
conservative in doing so. 2

B. The Underlying Controversy: Conflicting Visions of Equality

The invocation of censorship and academic excellence are just two of the
calculated rhetorical techniques which advance a conservative agenda and con-
servative values through symbolic politics and, thereby, mask and divert atten-
tion from the specific political controversy at the heart of this one-sided debate.
This armageddon over pedagogy and course offerings at elite academic institu-
tions is proxy for the fundamental conflict between two opposing visions of the

“half-digested tenets of the latest intellectual fads” (at 7); dismissal of a Black scholar’s analysis
of the racism underlying the U.S. constitutionas an opportunity for white middle class scholars
to indulge in “ecstasies of intellectualized liberal shame” (at 20); of scholarship with which he dis-
agrees as “murky verbal paste” (at 48), “prattle” (at 63), “a tapestry of cliches” (at 120), “opaque
verbal shenanigans” (at 123), “sophistic blather” (at 139) and so on. Ad personam attacks also
‘abound, such as Kimball’s observation that Louis Althusser “succeeded rather well” in his desire
to overcome bourgeois conservatism “even if he finally fell prey to ‘contemporary humanist ideo-
logy’ when he confessed to murdering his wife in a fit of insanity” (at 65). His critique of cultural
relativism and deconstruction is that it puts Shakespeare on the same footing as Bugs Bunny (at
xii) and would preclude censure of the brutality of the Central Park rapists because all values are
relative (at 155-56).

50″Strategies of Reduction,” M.E. Bradford’s foreward to the Symposium on “The State of the
Humanities” in (1992) 34 Modern Age 98, is paradigmatic. For the author the defence of the “right-
ful” place of the “old disciplines” of the classical humanities in “the house of intellect” is defined
as a “moral” (i.e. not political) exercise, a restoration of “an inheritance to be valued not merely
because it is ancient but rather because it is clearly indispensable to civilized men and women” (at
101).

Even where defence of the old disciplinary norms is explicitly described as “conservative,” i.e.
as belief in the “free market and free men, in constitutional government and rule of law, in indi-
vidual freedom and traditional values,” such beliefs are depoliticized, standing as “neutral” prin-
ciples counterposed to leftist orthodoxy or as the core ideas underlying the durability and moral
supremacy of Western civilization. (See Eugene B. Meyer, “Why Legal Academia Is Worse, Yet
Better Than You Thought” (1992) 34 Modern Age 112). For a thoughtful analysis of this stance,
see Lauter, supra note 6.

51See Dansicker, supra note 21 at 46. See also supra note 25.
52See infra notes 71-83 and accompanying text.

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meaning and importance of equality in liberal democracy.53 Stripped of rhetoric,
the contest is between formal and substantive equality. As defined by an anti-PC
academic, however, the battle is between “a healthy, invigorating, democratic
equality of opportunity” and “a malignant, stifling, oppressive equality of
results.”54 In anti-PC literature, the defenders of the former are a host of “emi-
nent,” “prominent” and “noted” white, male scholars in prestigious institutions
who invoke Plato, Shakespeare, Locke, Arnold and the Founding Fathers of
constitutionalism.55 The advocates of the latter are white feminist scholars, often
lesbian, and scholars of colour, often radical, who are more frequently identified
by their racial, sexual or political associations than by their professional status,56
as well as student activists depicted as fervent but immature and ill-educated.5

53″Books cannot mold a commori national purpose when, in fact, people are honestly divided
about what kind of country they want –
and are divided, moreover, for very good and practical
reasons, as they always have been. … mhat reading is being made to bear such an inappropriate
and simplistic burden speaks to the poverty both of culture and of frank political discussion in our
time” (Katha Pollitt, “Why We Read,” excerpted in (December 1991) 283: 1699 Harper’s 34 at
38.54″Discriminating in Equality’s Name” London Free Press (25 May 1991) E2. Morton and
Knopff, supra note 39, sound alarms against “radical democrats” in the “postmaterialist left” who
reject equality of opportunity in the name of equality of results and use courts, not electoral pol-
itics, to reconstruct social institutions (ibid. at 15-16, 28-32). Though not explicitly about “political
correctness,” the article by Morton and Knopff promotes the takeover thesis typical of anti-PC
writing: they claim’that a radical “Court Party” wields such power in the federal bureaucracy, the
media, the universities and scholarly funding organizations that it sets the agenda for Charter lit-
igation and interpretation.”
55The big name voices, typically, are backed up by concurrences from women or men of colour.
Lauter, supra note 6 at 133-50, makes a persuasive case that those who would preserve the old
Western civilization canon for its timeless truths, do not differ in one significant respect from many
of the white male deconstructionists they rail against. When activists of the 1960s assailed the
existing curriculum as irrelevant to its time and as complicit in reproducing racism, sexism and
imperialism, many academics sought to develop new models of inquiry to link academic work with.
social change. As radical movements disintegrated or were co-opted, imported European decons-
tructionist theories that challenged traditional cultural norms came to substitute for social activism.
Opaque and obscure rhetorical analysis became a new formalism with the result that “theory as a
mode of literary discourse … has primarily succeeded in reestablishing academic privilege … for
those who practice theory within the literary profession” (ibid. at 141). This same critique is made
by Barbara Epstein: “‘Political Correctness’ and Collective Powerlessness” (1991) 21 Socialist
Review 13 (few critics of objectivity are either radical or committed to joining politics with schol-
arship; thb moralistic strain of campus reformism is a substitute for radical politics).
56From D’Souza, supra note 10 at 7, 18, 28, 72, 151, 191, 214, 217, one finds, for instance:
“African American” genetic race theorist Leonard Jeffries; “former worker for Caesar Chavez’s
United Farm Workers,” Annette Kolodny; “former law clerk for Earl Warren,” Chancellor Ira Hey-
man; “consummate victim,” Rigoberta Menchu; “former antiwar activist,” Alexander Aleinikoff;
philosopher Martin Heidegger, who “harbored strong Nazi sympathies”; Paul de Man, author of
“pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic articles … during the early 1940s”; “former vice presidential candidate
of the U.S. Communist party,” Angela Davis; “small, demure” Dean Hilda Hemandez-Gravelle
who is a “native of Puerto Rico” whose speech conveys “ideological fervor.” See also Dinesh
D’Souza, “Illiberal Education” The Atlantic (March 1991) 51 at 64, in which English professor Eve
Sed.gwick is introduced as the author of “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” and “How to
Bring Your Kids Up Gay” and-never discussed further.
57D’Souza’s reported conversations with students frequently involve exchanges in which he
quizzes them on texts they have not read or splices their dialogue with quotes from sources which
refute their positions or traps them in what he sees as contradictions or describes their demeanour
in denigrating ways –
in short he makes them look stupid. See e.g. supra note 10 at 34-35, 75-77,

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

There is, in short, not a little playing upon bigotry and hierarchy to characterize
the “malignant” camp in the equality battles that have generated the anti-PC lit-
erature.

The inflammatory symbolic rhetoric employed in anti-PC writing is a par-
ticularly extreme form of the privileging of abstract principles over material
facts which distinguishes formalists from the substantive egalitarians and which
ensures that the former need not and, perhaps, cannot engage with the latter at
the level of substance. Because formalists idealize abstraction as methodology,
they abstract material inequality from their analysis when defining the ends of
justice. Substantivists start with material inequality in order to end the injustice
it causes.”8 Where formalists argue theoretically among themselves about the
ideal balance to be struck between the conflicting principles of liberty and
equality, those pursuing equality of results focus upon the power conflicts
between actual social groups, and examine concretely whose liberty serves to
secure whose inequality and how.59 The difference in method is a difference
about substance –

the substance of power.

Disengagement in what ought to be a serious debate is compounded by’
power differentials whose erasure by formal egalitarians and whose emphasis
by substantive egalitarians are paradigmatic of what animates and rationalizes
their distinctive approaches.

99-105, 209-10, 221-24. To be fair, his reported exchanges with faculty and administrators rely
heavily on editorial asides to suggest the weakness of their positions too: (the interviewee winced,
shifted uneasily, betrayed suppressed anxiety, stumbled, etc.). However, there is something of the
bully in using his well-financed platform, researchers and editorial power to construct named stu-
dents as ignorant, particularly insofar as at least two of these profiles have been exposed as less
than honest. See Maurice Isserman, “Travels with Dinesh” (1991) 6:5 Tikkun 81 at 83-84; Jardine,
supra note 10 at 28-29.

58See e.g. Richard Epstein, “A Common Law for Labor Relations: A Critique of the New Deal

Labor Legislation” (1983) 92 Yale L.J. 1357 at 1364:

common law rules in their ideal form make legal entitlements among strangers without
reference.to personal status. Legal rules do not refer to flesh-and-blood individuals, but
to those lifeless abstractions, A and B, about whom nothing else is known or – more
to the point –
is relevant…. Stating propositions in general form is, moreover, a pow-
erful antidote to abuse and favoritism …

By contrast, see Williams:

The rules may be colorblind, but people are not, The question remains, therefore,
whether the law can truly exist apart from the color-conscious society in which it exists,
as a skeleton devoid of flesh; or whether law is the embodiment of society, the reflec-
tion of a particular citizenry’s arranged complexity of relations. … The real issue is pre-
cisely the canonized status of any one group’s control. Black individuality is subsumed
in a social circumstance –
that pins us to the underside of this
society and keeps us there, out of sight/out of mind, out of the knowledge of mind
which is law. Blacks and women are the objects of a constitutional omission that has
been incorporated into a theory of neutrality. It is thus that omission becomes a form
of expression, as oxymoronic as that sounds: racial omission is a literal part of original
intent; it is the fixed, reiterated prophecy of the Founding Fathers (supra note 18 at
120-21).

an idea, a stereotype –

59This way of formulating what distinguishes the two approaches is Catharine MacKinnon’s. See
Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987)
at 166.

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The anti-PC literature’s refusal to engage actual distinctions between
formal and substantive equality is facilitated by the actual inequalities between
the two camps. In articulating their position, formalists have on their side tra-
dition based on and backed by power, including especially the power of law,’
and the law’s neutrality toward the power to purchase speech.6′ They can affirm
the status quo in symbolic shorthand, invoking “freedom” or “equal opportu-
nity” or “liberal democracy,” without needing to define such terms or defend
their partial availability and results.6″ By contrast, consider the definitional bur-
den always facing those who would invoke “feminism” or “systemic racism,”
and the persuasive burden on those who propose altering the uneven distribution
of actual freedom in order to advance the equality of all.6′

Actual or professed belief in the icons of formalism tends to correlate
highly with privilege because privilege correlates highly with actual enjoyment
of freedom, opportunity and political participation.’ The habits and entitle-
ments of privilege also correlate highly with the presumption that one has stand-
ing to speak about or on behalf of subjects/objects one knows little about,’ and

6See e.g. Williams, supra note 18 at 23-36, 71-74, 158-64 (rights and freedoms as bargained
purchases unavailable to ownable/disowned non-persons) and citing Christopher Stone’s article
“Should Trees Have Standing?”:

We are inclined to suppose the rightlessness of rightless ‘things’ to be a decree of
Nature, not a legal convention acting in support of some status quo…. [U]ntil the sight-
less thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of “us”
–

those who are holding rights at the time (ibid. at 160).

See also Carol Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law (London: Routledge, 1989).

6 1See J.M. Balkin, “Some Realism About Pluralism: Legal Realist Approaches to the First

Amendment” [1990] Duke L.J. 375, who argues that

free speech in a situation of radically unequal economic power is not free speech at all
because it is skewed by the preexisting distribution of property. … The long term effect
… is an unequal exposure of particular ideas, and the stifling and co-opting of more rad-
ical and imaginative ideas about politics and society (ibid. at 379).

See also Charles Lawrence, “If He Hollers Let Him Go: Regulating Racist Speech on Campus”
[1990] Duke L.J. 431 at 466-72.

62 The scope and complexity of the critique of dominant ideologies is an inherent diffi-
culty for progressive academics. Critique requires a thorough understanding of a par-
ticular ideology as well as its limitations; affirmation of the status quo requires neither.
Intellectually [progressives] do the “second shift” –
forced constantly to defend our
basic assumptions as well as do the work we’re led to because of them…. [O]ur argu-
ments tend to be complicated and historically situated. … [While] [t]he Right has sound
bites … (Lisa Kahaleole Chang Hall, ‘Trapped
in the Ivory Tower?” (1992) 9:5
Women’s Rev. Books 25).

6 30n how and why this burden of persuasion reflects and promotes white supremacy (and by

analogy, all systems of subordination), see Lawrence, supra note 61 at 472-76.

“The privileged, of course, also have a real stake in maintaining the unequal distribution of free-
dom, opportunity and participatory influence, while cultivating hope in their universal accessibil-
ity.

65As Scott stated:

Serious intellectuals have only to read the self-assured, hopelessly ill-informed, and
simply wrong descriptions of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism or any other
serious theory by the likes of D’Souza, Richard Bernstein, David Lehman, Roger
Kimball … to understand the scam. They will recognize people for whom teaching has
no real value, for whom literature is a pawn in a political argument but not a passion-

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

will deserve or be granted credibility and/or immunity from correction when
doing so.66 From the vantage point of privilege and in the interest of its ratio-
nalization, formalists can and do limit the terms of social debate. By definition67
and by necessity, those terms ignore or understate the magnitude of the systemic
social inequalities which both ground and mandate pursuit of equality of
results.6” In the context of this imbalance in real and ideological power, freedom
to dissent from formalist first principles,* and opportunity to reply to anti-PC
attacks are little more than formalist abstractions. 69 If the conflict between
formal and substantive egalitarians in the anti-PC literature has seemed so one-
sided that there have been few replies let alone a debate, this is not happen-
stance.7

C. The Liberal Middle Ground

There has always been a shifting and uncertain middle ground between the
two opposing approaches to equality, the ground occupied by the liberal and
moderately progressive centre. To date, it has stood on the sidelines in the
anti-PC wars, and not without reason- As Howard Lesnick has observed, most
moderates have followed an ad hoc and ambivalent approach to institutional
change. They believe the liberal system to be better than known alternatives
such as feudalism or totalitarianism, but they also perceive abuses of power

ate commitment to the play of language and the pleasure of reading (supra note 11 at
32).

See infra notes 139-54 and accompanying text on the objectification of critical scholars.

66See Bruce Feldthusen’s critical analysis of men’s “right not to know” and how it plays out in
his academic community, supra note 41. Immunity from challenge is a product of power in several
senses: the targets of powerholders are often their subordinates, which makes rebuttal risky; power-
holders’ names, status, wealth and contacts can purchase media coverage for their views and sup-
pression of their critics (including by veiled libel threats). Credibility is not just an incident of race,
sex, class and occupational privilege; it is relational. When your targets lack credibility by virtue
of their race, sex, class or occupation, your word is likely to be believed. Rape laws and rape trials
are the paradigm example.

67See text, supra at note 58.
61D’Souza, supra note 10 at 128, 140, claims, for instance, that “despite the supposed decay of
progressive values in Reagan’s America, the retrenchment or backlash feared by many civil rights
activists has not materialized,” and that racism “is not dead by any means, but it is truly powerful.
only in small pockets of society, and it is discredited morally and politically in all sectors of public
life.” See also, Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1987) at 91-93.

69Indeed, most of the replies to the PC literature I have read were published in campus presses,
alumni/ae journals, letters to newspaper editors and non-mainstream periodicals like Change,
Mother Jones, The Women’s Review of Books, Socialist Review, The Humanist and Tikkun. Collins,
supra note 5 at 16, argues that the one-sidedness of the mainstream media’s coverage of the PC
phenomenon may have to do with the small number of reporters who cover higher education (only
13 of 369 members of the U.S. Education Writers Association identify themselves as higher edu-
cation writers) and with confrontations within media organizations about their own continuing
under-representation of white women and people of colour.

.701 am not postulating a grand conspiracy. Rather, I am describing a well-orchestrated backlash
against change by those who stand to lose the most from equality. Michelle Boivin remarked on
reading ‘a draft of this article that this is not a debate, but “a flexing of muscles,” a “power play
by real powerholders.”

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within liberalism and consider them destabilizing.7 Once prompted, and issue
by issue, they have generally recognized the justice as well as the legitimating
impact of greater inclusiveness in admissions, hiring and curriculum content
and, therefore, have supported temporary departures from formalist norms
and/or the promotion of diversity as a continuing educational objective.’ It was
not only that so white and so male a community and core curriculum looked
bad, it was that arguments for women or racial minority role models on faculty,
for a greater diversity of perspectives in the classroom and for censure of
overtly discriminatory conduct, were consonant with affirmations of liberal tol-
erance and pluralism. The problem has always been how to appear progres-
* sively “liberal” without changing any of the foundational core of liberal insti-
tutions. The answer has tended to involve supporting inclusive reforms such as
additional courses, faculty, services, support groups, etc., without fundamentally
altering or replacing institutional structures, curricular content, concepts of aca-
demic freedom, standards of merit or* the disciplinary boundaries and hierar–
chies which reflect and shore up white male privilege.

To date, not much has been required of liberal progressives who supported
or, at least, went along with minority activists over the objections of the small
local core of outraged or doom-mongering conservatives: a few white women
hired, scholars of colour at least interviewed, the insertion of a couple of read-
ings on racism or feminism in conventional core materials, the approval of one
or two elective courses taught by non-mainstream or visiting scholars, more
effort to use gender-neutral language in the classroom, approval of or service on
ad hoc committees studying on-site bias and so on.73 And, in my experience, a
lot was expected by many moderates in return for their support: the right to be
accredited as non-sexist and non-racist –
i.e. as a different breed from most

71Howard Lesnick, “The Wellspring of Legal Responses to Inequality: A Perspective on Per-
spectives” [1991] Duke L.J. 413 at 429-30. See also Martin Redish & Gary Lippman, “Freedom
of Expression and the Civic Republican Revival in Constitutional Theory: The Ominous Implica-
tions” (1991) 79 Cal. L. Rev. 267 (although liberal democracy tolerates significant poverty and dis-
crimination, imposing a “new czar to right all moral wrongs” would be worse).
72Peller, supra note 6 at 775-79. Whether race (or sex) conscious affirmative action is approved
as a temporary exceptional measure to remedy past discrimination or as a means of institutional-
izing diversity as an autonomous value which will co-exist with merit, the prevailing liberal inte-
grationist approach assumes existing merit criteria are neutral, objective standards undistorted by
racial (or sexual) domination.

“For a description of the limits on reform, see e.g. Derrick Bell, And We Are Not Saved: The
Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1987). At 140-61 Bell discusses “The
Unspoken Limit on Affirmative Action” on minority hiring in academic institutions. See also Mary
Childers, “Women’s Studies: Sinking and Swimming in the Mainstream” (1984) 7 Women’s
Studies Int. Forum 161. For empirical measures, consider e.g. Yolanda Moses, “…but some of us
are (still) brave” (1990) 7:5 Women’s Rev. Books 31, on the representation of Black women as stu-
dents, faculty and administrators in American colleges and universities; Canadian Association of
University Teachers, Status of Women Supplement (199 1) on enrolment and faculty gender distri-
butions in 1989-90 by discipline and province; Arthur Levine & Jeanette Cureton, “The Quiet Rev-
olution: Eleven Facts About Multiculturalism and the Curriculum” (1992) 24:1 Change 25 (avail-
ability of multicultural or gender studies content, courses and programs in U.S. universities and
colleges: where curricular change is occurring, overwhelmingly it is by adding new material to
existing courses); Richard Chused, “The Hiring and Retention of Minorities and Women on Amer-
ican Law School Faculties” (1988) 137 U. Pa. L. Rev. 537.

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

men and most whites, particularly those who publicly opposed reforms; free-
dom to go about business as usual without being called on to take sides, espe-
cially against chronically abusive colleagues; and the right to be privately
tutored but not publicly confronted for their own inegalitarian comments or
practices.

The script is not playing as expected for such conditional egalitarians
because they are now being challenged from two sides to take a stand on the
politics of change. The students and faculty behind institutional change call
oppressive practices wherever they see them, particularly in business as usual
by self-appointed progressives who are more fond of appearing than being egal-
itarian.74 If one genuinely supports equality, one does not react with outraged
denial, resentment or a bruised ego when. advised.one’s conduct has been expe-
rienced as oppressive by members of a class one recognizes as oppressed; one
changes. Feel-goodism is not a politics, let alone a politics of change, and pro-
ponents of substantive equality have been prepared to say so even at the cost of
antagonizing erstwhile allies.

Business-as-usual moderates are also under considerable pressure to sup-
port formalists in the anti-PC campaign, but at a cost. The anti-PC literature
characterizes faculty moderates as unprincipled for failing to express publicly
their real reservations about campus reforms and for failing to defend liberal
education and liberal values like freedom of expression.7′ Administrators are
portrayed as chronic appeasers who cave in before protesters’ unreasonable
demands.76 According to conservatives, the reason liberals have so often capit-
ulated is their wish to appear fashionable77 and their fear of being “denounced”
as sexist, racist or heterosexist. s

The faculty and administrators so unflatteringly portrayed face a dilemma
in choosing sides. They can concede they were unprincipled because they
wanted to look good and/or were cowardly in the face of actual or threatened

74As MacKinnon speculates, “[m]aybe one reason liberalism accomplishes so little is that it is
designed to serve those who want to think or say or imagine they are doing good more than they
want to do it” (supra note 59 at 218). By way of illustration, see Parts VI and VII, below.

who back campus speech codes (supra note 10 at c. 2, 5).

75See e.g. the way D’Souza portrays faculty who support affirmative action in admissions and
76The concessionary politics of administrators is a running theme in D’Souza: “[-U]niversity offi-
cials feel physically and morally intimidated by minority activists; as a result, the activists set the
agenda and timorous administrators usually go along” (ibid. at 256-57). See also, George A. Pani-
chas, “Afterword” (1992) 34 Modern Age 165, who urges awareness of “continuing Munichs,” and
the “cumulative process of compromise and betrayal” by modem educational administrators: “We
need, surely, to be concerned with connection and continuity at a time when educationists surren-
der, indiscriminately and expediently, to disconnection and discontinuity –
and, in the end, to dis-
civilization” (ibid. at 167); Bok, supra note 5 at 7-8.
77See e.g. Kimball, supra note 10 at xiii, 7, 10-11, 29, 80, 120, 149, 157; Adler in Newsweek,
supra note 8 at 50: Professor Vince Sarich’s work linking brain size with racial intelligence is
described as “wildly unfashionable.”
78See e.g. Charles Sykes, The Hollow Men: Politics, Corruption and Higher Education (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1990) at 56; Kimball, supra note 10 at 20, 69-70; D’Souza, supra
note 10 at 6, 100, 107, 124-56,241; Jenish in Maclean’s, supra note 8 at 44-45; Adler in Newsweek,
supra note 8 at 52.

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name-calling, and then recant on reforms they previously supported, join forces
with conservatives they previously labelled reactionary and try to distance
themselves from the overt misogyny, racism, homophobia and red-baiting
endemic in the anti-PC literature.79 The embarassment of this option can be
reduced by adopting the anti-PC line that the PC lobby used coercion, intimi-
dation and storm-troop tactics to secure its initial support,s” and that being called
a racist is worse than being one. Alternately, moderates who supported institu-
tional reform can defend their integrity by defending the people and programs
under mounting attack, notwithstanding that to do so will be construed as illib-
eral and carries the risk that they will join the ranks of the vilified. This option
carries significant costs because it requires personally owning up to one’s situ-
ated power and complicity in an inegalitarian system and the privileges and
immunities one must cede if one genuinely believes in redistributive justice.”
At a minimum, this means refusing to allow a small minority of feminist and
anti-racism activists – many of them students or junior and/or untenured fac-
ulty –
to take personal hits as proxies for liberal-backed institutional change,
particularly if the institution publicly prides itself on its “diversity” initiatives.
To date, moderates have tended to be quoted deploring the excesses on both
sides, although a few have responded thoughtfully in print.8″ In American legal
circles, the response to the anti-PC campaign is located overwhelmingly on
anti-PC terrain: the debate weighs unsettled equality law against the established
authority of a formalist First Amendment and typically discovers that estab-
lished rights trump new claims. 3 This effectively replicates the one-sidedness

79See below, Parts V.A. and VI.B.
80See e.g. Jean Edward Smith, “The Dangerous New Puritans” The [Toronto] Globe and Mail

(21 October 1991) AI5. See also discussion of the New McCarthyism, infra at notes 232-40.

8t1For a brilliant analysis of the costs of this option, see Susan Hardy Aiken, Karen Anderson,
Myra Dinnerstein, Judy Lensink & Patricia MacCorquodale, “Trying Transformations: Curriculum
Integration and the Problem of Resistance” in Minnich, O’Barr & Rosenfeld, eds., supra note 48
at 104.
82See e.g. Lesnick, supra note 71; Reed Way Dasenbock, “The Multicultural West” (Fall 1991)
Dissent 550; Louis Menand, “What Are Universities.For?” (1991) 283:1699 Harper’s 47; Adam
Yarmolinsky, “Loose Canons: Multiculturalism and Humanities 101” (1992) 24:1 Change 6. 1 have
now delivered versions of this paper at six different universities, usually to 100-200 people. Each
time, I heard from numbers of white women and students or faculty of colour, some of them les-
bians, that mine was the first public response they had heard to the anti-PC literature. From this
I deduce that no one in their institutions has rushed to the defence of the critical and/or minority
scholars or the programs assailed directly or by proxy in the anti-PC campaign.
83Conservative and strict civil libertarian pieces include: William Shaun Alexander, “Regulating
Hate Speech on Campus: A Plea for Tolerance” (1991) 26 Wake Forest L. Rev. 1349; Beth
Boswell-Odum, “The Fighting Words Doctrine and Racial Speech on Campus” (1992) 33 S. Tex.
L. Rev. 261; Kingsley Browne, “Title VII as Censorship: Hostile Environment Harassment and the
First Amendment” (1991) 52 Ohio St. L.J. 481; Alan Brownstein, “Hate Speech at Public Univer-
sities: The Search for an Enforcement Model” (1991) 37 Wayne L. Rev. 1451; Alan Brownstein,
“Regulating Hate Speech at Public Universities: Are First Amendment Values Functionally Incom-
patible with Equal Protection Principles?” (1990/91) 39 Buff. L. Rev. 1; Paul Carrington, “Freedom
and Community in the Academy” (1988) 66 Texas L. Rev. 1577; Thomas Cinti, “‘Freedom is Sla-
very’: The Thought Police Have Come to America’s Campuses” (1991) 1 Seton Hall Const. L.J.
383; Hyde & Fishman, supra note 11; Robert Sedler, “Doe v. University of Michigan and the Cam-
pus Bans on ‘Racist Speech’: The View From Within” (1991) 37 Wayne L. Rev. 1325; Rodney
Smolla, “Academic Freedom, Hate Speech, and the Idea of a University” (1990) 53 Law & Con-

1993]

BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

of the formalist attack on substantive equality in anti-PC literature, albeit in far
more measured language.”

Im. A Substantive Reply

The typical style and substance of the claims made against the so-called PC
movement are often so manipulative and misrepresentative that it is tempting to
respond simply by exposing the omissions, distortions and internal contradic-
tions in this literature to discredit it. Although I think misinformation should be
corrected, to focus principally on rebuting the particulars not only locates the
conflict in terms defined by conservatives and leaves its targets in a defensive
posture, but continues to divert attention from public discussion of the compet-
ing visions of equality which fuel this debate. 5

More, I doubt such defensive rebuttals will have much impact on the public
prejudices 6 tapped by the anti-PC literature. For instance, almost all of the
anti-PC articles demonize “deconstructionist” scholars and scholarship as sub-
versive forces undermining both academic excellence and Western culture. s7 I
do not think the public, to whom media accounts of the PC phenomenon are

temp. Prob. 195; Nadine Strossen, “Regulating Racist Speech on Campus: A Modest Proposal?”
[1990] Duke L.J. 484. Less absolutist readings of the First Amendment include’ Jack Battaglia,
“Regulation of Hate Speech by Educational Institutions: A Proposed Policy” (1991) 31 Santa Clara
L. Rev. 345; Charles Jones, “Equality, Dignity and Harm: The Constitutionality of Regulating
American Campus Ethnoviolence” (1991) 37 Wayne L. Rev. 1383; Henry Saad, “The Case for Pro-
hibitions of Racial Epithets in the Classroom” (1991) 37 Wayne L. Rev. 1351. Articles endorsing
broad-reaching speech codes include J.M. Balkin, supra note 61; Richard Delgado, “Campus Anti-
racism Rules: Constitutional Narratives in Collision” (1991) 85 Northwestern U. L. Rev. 343;
Patricia Hodulik, “Racist Speech on Campus” (1991) 37 Wayne L. Rev. 1433; Charles Lawrence,
supra note 61; Mari Matsuda, “Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Victim’s Story”
(1989) 87 Mich. L. Rev. 2320; Alan Borovoy, Kathleen Mahoney, Jamie Cameron, David Gold-
berger and Mar Matsuda, “Language as Violence v. Freedom of Expression: Canadian and Amer-
ican Perspectives on Group Defamation” (1988/89) 37 Buff. L. Rev. 337-73 (presentations by
Mahoney, Cameron and Matsuda).

84Those who refer explicitly to “political correctness” in opposing speech codes can be quite

intemperate. See e.g. Alexander, Cinti, Hyde and Fishman and Sedler, ibid.

85As Lisa Kahaleole Chang Hall (supra note 62 at 25) argues:

Rather than setting the terms for a real debate about what democratized education
should consist of and how to ensure its accessibility to the largest number possible, the
academic Left as a whole has merely reacted to conservative attacks. The entire
PC/anti-PC media fest has been a straw dog distracting attention from the substance of
issues involved into an endless go-around of “I am not!” “You are too!” and all the var-
iations on “Well, sort of.”

8

6By “public” I do not mean to draw a sharp distinction between the intellectual community and
the general public. The anti-PC literature is authored by academics and journalists alike; media sto-
ries quote academics and academic journals adopt a public-spirited stance towards defending the
broad cultural values at risk when political correctness prevails. Sometimes the academic commen-
tary caters to anti-intellectualism and sometimes it portrays the new scholars it assails as third-rate
scholars eroding academic excellence. My point is that this literature is about far more than conflict
within the academy over academic standards and academic freedom. This literature makes a public
appeal to public concerns using the academic debates as proxy.

87See e.g. D’Souza, supra note 10 at 178-81, 184-85, 191-92; Kimball, supra note 10, c. 5, 6;
Sykes, supra note 78 at 29, 65; Adler in Newsweek, supra note 8 at 53; Fennell in Maclean’s, supra
note 8 at 42.

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addressed, much cares about deconstruction and will not be much swayed by a
more accurate definition of its origins, diverse strains”8 or intellectual and social
significance.8 9 The attack on deconstructionism is a fancy stand-in and set-up
for an attack on all scholarship critical of the universalist claims and idealized
abstractions associated with liberal tradition and systemic social inequality; it
manipulates very live fears, resentments and bigotry throughout society about
both, and must be addressed as such.

Similarly, although the anti-PC literature is rife with contradictions, dis-
closing its logical flaws will not touch its symbolic appeal and may be counter-
productive given the anti-intellectualism it seeks to tap.9″ Making the obvious
point, for instance, that the traditions and truths anti-PC texts present as polit-
ically neutral are actually politically partisan will persuade no one who experi-
ences the status quo as neutral or objectively good.

Finally, much of the anti-PC literature operates through guilt by associa-
tion. Distinctive scholarly communities and social groups are collectively
maligned by the caricature of a few of their members or by selective excerpting
of scholarly works for their sensational value.9 If the targeted communities seek
to defend and rehabilitate themselves by focusing only on what is misrepre-
sented or exaggerated by this technique, they directly or indirectly sell out their
radicals and their own radicalism to purchase respectability. For instance, when
anti-PC literature discusses feminist scholarship, it concentrates overwhelm-
ingly on texts concerning sexuality92 and/or on lesbians.9′ Fashioning a reply

88For diverse, critical renderings of deconstructionist jurisprudence, see e.g. Robert Gordon,
“Critical Legal Histories” (1984) 36 Stanford L. Rev. 57; Thomas Heller, “Structuralism and Cri-
.tique” (1984) 36 Stanford L. Rev. 127; Stephen Brainerd, “The Groundless Assault: A Wittgen-
steinian Look at Language, Structuralism, and Critical Legal Theory” (1985) 34 Am. U. L. Rev.
1231. For feminist accounts, see e.g. Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism:
The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory” in Minnich, O’Barr & Rosenfeld, eds., supra note 48 at
257; Judith Grbich, “The Body in Legal Theory” in At the Boundaries of Law: Feminism and Legal
Theory, Martha Fineman & Nancy Thomadsen, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1991). For criticism
of deconstructionism by women of colour, see Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory” in Anzal-
dua, ed., supra note 4 at 335; Tey Diana Rebolledo, “The Politics of Poetics: Or, What Am I, A
Critic, Doing in This Text Anyhow?” in Anzaldda, ed., ibid. at 346; Norma Alarc6n, “The The-
oretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism” in Anzaldtia,
ed., ibid. at 356.

“9The same is true about the attacks on feminist scholarship, critical race theory, tenured Marx-

ists, lesbian and gay scholars and so on.

900n the longstanding history of American anti-intellectualism, see Richard Hofstadter, Anti-

Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1966).

91Although Kimball, supra note 10 at 143, argues, “it is perfectly legitimate to ridicule ridiculous
titles – of which, as we have seen, there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply,” the same titles and
authors are ridiculed repeatedly in popular press coverage of “political correctness.”

92See e.g. the sub-section entitled “The Gender Feminists and Date Rape” by John Taylor, “Ate
You Politically Cgrrect?” New York (21 January 1991) 32 at 37-39; D’Souza’s version of “repre-
sentative” Women’s Studies teaching, supra note 10 at 208-14; and Rob Martin, “Proposed Sex
Assault Bill an Expression of Feminist Hatred” The Lawyers Weekly (31 January 1992) 9.

93The absolutely favorite target of lesbian-baiting is Professor Eve Sedgwick. Though it is not
stated that Sedgwick is a lesbian, the denigrating references to her and her work promote such a
conclusion. Kimball, supra note 10 at 145-46, tells his readers that Professor Sedgwick’s graduate
course entitled “Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Victorian Fiction” focused on “among other

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

which notes that not all feminist scholarship focuses on sexuality, that not all
feminists are lesbians or that the sensationalized excerpts misrepresent a partic-
ular text or body of scholarship as a whole, caters to the heterosexism of this
style of anti-feminism. Though such corrective responses would place the polit-
ical divide at issue on a more honest footing,94 they would also be politically
dishonest insofar as, by intent or result, they would serve to discount the cen-
trality of sexuality to feminist critiques of male domination and of lesbians to
feminist community.9”

My aim in this paper is not primarily to defend the distinctive scholarly,
political and social communities that anti-PC literature lumps together and con-
demns by correcting the record about the objectives and achievements of schol-
ars who reject the formal equality tradition. It is, rather, to affirm the merits of
a substantive equality approach by applying its insights and method to anti-PC
literature and illustrating what distinguishes the vision and political conse-
quences of formalist ideology as it is presented in anti-PC writings from the
substantive egalitarian initiatives under attack.

My stance, then, is no more neutral than that of the anti-PC lobby. Because
anti-PC literature has advanced relatively homogeneous political themes which
are substantiated by a small number of widely repeated anecdotes -drawn from
a very short period of time in the histories of a few academic institutions, I
believe it is neither’unfair, inaccurate nor inappropriate to analyze it as a distinc-
tive literature containing distinctive characteristics. Nonetheless, to mitigate the
possibility that my admittedly partisan analysis of this literature will be assumed
to be unfairly selective or misrepresentative, I have supplied several sources
and/or extensive quotations from anti-PC writings wherever I claim that a par-
ticular rhetorical technique or descriptive claim is characteristic of the literature.
My substantive reply begins by describing the concept of formal equality
and what it promises. I then outline what I consider core elements of a substan-
tive equality approach and illustrate how they fundamentally challenge the

things, ‘female and male homosocial, homosexual, homophobic, and cross-gender relations.”‘ He
does not describe what “other things” her course addresses. Rather, he observes that the above
course content is not “out of the ordinary for her,” citing a panel at the 1989 meeting of the Modem
Languages Association called “The Muse of Masturbation” where Professor Sedgwick presented
a paper titled, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.” The Austen paper is also mentioned by
Taylor, New York, ibid. at 36; Charles Truehart, “Profs, Dons and Icons” Washington Post (29
December 1989) D-1; and D’Souza, supra note 10 at 159. Elsewhere, D’Souza mentions Professor
Sedgwick’s book, Epistemology of the Closet, another of her papers, “How to Bring Your Kids Up
Gay” and her “plans to introduce a new course on lesbian literature”: supra note 56 at 62, 64. For
other lesbian-baiting, see infra note 179.
94Given the disproportionate focus on lesbians, it is telling that of 196 American colleges and
universities which responded to a survey by Change magazine in July 1991, only three (i.e. 6%)
offered any courses in lesbian and gay studies. By contrast, 40% offered courses in Women’s
Studies, 43% in African-American Studies, 37%-in Hispanic-Ameriban Studies, 35% in Asian-
American Studies and 33% in Native-American Studies. This is not to suggest that lesbian or gay
content is not included in other courses. See Levine and Cureton, supra note 73.

951 am grateful to Mary Eaton for underlining how corrections can read as denial and dissoci-
ation. For an analysis of the impact of anti-PC campaigns on newly emerging lesbian studies, see
Toni McNaron, “Life on the Faultline” (1992) 9:5 Women’s Rev. Books 29.

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political arrangements sustained by the ideology of formal equality. The basic
substantive argument is that the liberal legal order never did transcend the status
systems it succeeded, and remains premised on legalizing the unequal status of
those classes of people formally deemed legal non-persons by the founding con-
stitutional orders in Canada and the United States. Second-class legal status is
maintained, in part, by an ideology which bifurcates liberalism’s rational, self-
interested individual. Powerholders are rational and fitted to rule in a disinter-
ested way to the good of all; the disempowered are unruly, irrational, biased and
ill-fitted for full citizenship let alone rule-making. This is a fancy way to say
that formal egalitarians never did and still do not live up to their own stated
principles. They never intended all citizens to be formally, much less substan-
tively, equal. As a result, when, against all (liberal) reason, some second-class
citizens gain sufficient political power to secure some real egalitarian change,
formalists insist – with some accuracy –
that liberal democratic traditions are
imperilled. At such moments, the authoritarian and coercive face of formalism
is revealed. I refer to this as the anti-democratic face of formalism.

I attempt here to illustrate this substantive critique of formal equality by
reference to the characteristic content and rhetorical methods of anti-PC litera-
ture: its reliance on status arguments, its hierarchy of dualisms, its anti-
democratic bottom line. It is always a difficult choice whether to divert political
energy into responding to the propaganda of backlash or simply to proceed with
the work of egalitarian change. My hope is that this analysis does both in a way
that reminds those who pursue redistributive justice that we are not and need not
be answerable to powerholders whose interests lie in discrediting and undermin-
ing our project. We are answerable to those whom liberalism systematically dis-
empowers96 and then banishes from the conceptual framework of what distin-
guishes the “Western civilization” invoked in anti-PC literature. We are
answerable to those legally contained outside the framework of rights that lib-
eral legalism is said to advance.97 Remembering whom we serve is urgent
because, whoever is winning in the elite world of the universities, there is no
doubt who is losing in society at large.

IV. Formal vs. Substantive Equality

A. Formal Equality

The political coalition behind the anti-PC campaign champions the princi-
ple of formal equality –
the conception of the polity as a community of indi-
vidual citizens who do or should stand as formal equals in the assignment and

96The dozens of women who participated in consultations before and after the tabling of Bill
C-49, An Act to Amend the Sexual Assault Provisions of the Criminal Code, Criminal Code, R.S.C.
1985, c. C-46, as am. by S.C. 1992, c. 38, honoured the spirit of this accountability in the collective
enterprise of conceiving rape legislation to serve those women most vulnerable to abuse and least
contemplated as worthy of the law’s protection. In this regard, the leadership of Lee Lakeman was
indispensable and extraordinary.

97For eloquent elaborations on this point, see e.g. Catharine MacKinnon, “Reflections On Sex
Equality Under Law” (1991) 100 Yale L.J. 1281; Williams, supra note 18; Bell, supra note 73.

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

exercise of the political and legal rights and freedoms of citizenship. In this
vision, rights and freedoms attach to individuals, not groups, and may not be
legally defined or socially ascribed by immutable personal characteristics such
as race, national origin or sex or by social status, caste or other group affilia-
tion.98 The formalist’s working conception of the individual citizen is idealized
and, hence, abstract: the citizen is possessed of rational freewill and, because
formally equal to all, is entitled to self-determination in pursuing his or her
rationally determined self-interest but is responsible for the rational choices she
or he makes.” Although the basic unit part of this worldview, then, is the indi-
vidual, his or her constitution is universalized, conceptually stripped of partic-
ularity. The only formal constraint on individual self-determination is the duty
to respect and not to interfere with the rights to security of the person and prop-
erty of other self-determining, self-interested equals. The tension between lib-
erty and security is understood as the basic contradiction in a liberal order.

Because, within this conception, it is inevitable that self-serving individu-
als will come into conflict, institutional mechanisms are necessary to maximize
freedom of choice and minimize interference from others in each individual’s
pursuit of self-interest. The role of the state is to establish formal, written rules
of universal application impartially and equally applied to all citizens so that
they may know with some certainty the boundaries of their individual freedom
of choice. The ultimate rule, the rule of law,” is the legal expression of formal
equality: every citizen is equal before and under the law; no one is above the
law; and the law must be applied without fear or favour by an impartial judi-
ciary.01 This is not to say that law cannot draw distinctions, but that distinctions

9 For a conservative formalist’s account of these core principles, see Bloom, supra note 68 at
109-12, 157-72. For a feminist critique, see Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1988). For an analysis of their operation in integrationist approaches to racial
justice, see Peller, supra note 6. For a description and critique by a critical legal historian, see Rob-
ert Gordon, supra note 88, especially at 59-67. In the anti-PC context, the implication of a formalist
approach is that “victim” status should not define rights any more than economic, sexual and/or
racial privilege. Books should not be assigned or excluded on the basis of the race or sex of their
authors; hiring should be race- and sex-neutral, etc.

9 9For an elegant synopsis of what distinguishes formalists and feminists on “choice,” see
Lucinda Finley, “Choice and Freedom: Elusive Issues in the Search for Gender Justice” (1987) 96
Yale L.J. 914-.

1For a sense of the range of ideals and meanings seen in the rule of law, see Allan Hutchinson
& Patrick Monahan, eds., The Rule of Law: Ideal or Ideology (Toronto: Carswell, 1987). In the
academic context, universal standards for student admission and evaluation, faculty hiring and pro-
motion, and for determination of works worthy of being taught, perform the same function as uni-
versal legal rules of general application. “By applying the same standard to everyone, natural talent
and hard work are permitted and expected to distinguish individuals on the plane of achievement”
(D’Souza, supra note 10 at 55).

1″Judith Shklar has argued that, in response to the Cold War and post-colonial challenges to the
European world, the rule of law has come to stand as the core and unique identifying feature of
“the West” in its defence against competing ideological traditions. She also argues that the rigid
insistence on the rule of law as a singular Western political tradition (or, indeed, on any single tra-
dition as Western) is a historical untruth which expresses “the nostalgia of a liberalism that has
ceased to look to the future and which seeks to maintain itself not as a hope but as an ancient.pos-
session, to be valued more for its familiarity and age than for its intrinsic merits” (Legalism (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1964) especially at 20-23). In the anti-PC literature it is the

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must be rationally drawn such that likes must be treated alike. Because by def-
inition, the rule-makers themselves are also individuals motivated by self-
interest, legal orders defined by the rule of law are governed by constitutional
checks and balances on those who make laws and those who interpret them to
ensure they govern according to positive public law and not private self-
interest. 02

The state’s proper function is facilitative, not prescriptive: it exists to pro-
tect and promote individual freedom of choice, not to dictate how or to what end
choice may be exercised. 3 A rational electorate will ensure the state’s neutral-
ity in preserving public order according to the rule of law and towards a simple
end: creating and maintaining equality of opportunity in and for the exercise of
private freedom of choice by individual rights holders. Rules do not presume
equal endowment of, for instance, intelligence, motivation, means, industrious-
ness, talent or virtue, and hence do not anticipate that the outcomes of individual
choice will be equal; they do presume that respect for the individual autonomy
and formal equality of all mandates rules ensuring equality of opportunity, and
project that such rules besf spur individual achievement to the benefit of society
as a whole.”

Individuals are credited with the rational capacity to weigh the costs and
benefits of compefing options and to choose what best serves their self-defined
self-interest in light of their individual circumstances. It is here that the ideal-

canon of Western classics and neutral admissions and hiring standards under and before which all
are equal, and scholars who perform the disinterested role of the judiciary. See e.g. D’Souza, ibid.
at 50-55; Kimball, supra note 10 at 61, 74; Sykes, supra note 78 at 137-38, 181-82.

12Anglo-American legal systems have quite different mechanisms of checks and balances. For
my purposes, these constraints on legal power fall into three types: rules concerning the constitu-
tional division of legal powers within the polity; constitutional authority in an independent judi-
ciary to review the legality of the exercise of power by the various divisions of government; and
mechanisms to ensure accountability of powerholders to those who elected or appointed them. See
John Whyte, “Legality and Legitimacy: The Problem of Judicial Review of Legislation” (1987) 12
Queen’s L.J. 1.

103This principle is central to charges against the so-called proponents of political correctness:
PCers seek to impose their vision of The Good (substantive equality) on others. As George Will
puts it, political correctness amounts to “a war of aggression against the Western tradition and the
ideas that animate it. The aggressors, having been trounced in the real-world politics of the larger
society, are attempting to make campuses into mini-states that do what the Western tradition inhib-
its real states from doing: imposing othodoxies” (“Curdled Politics on Campus” Newsweek (6 May
1991) 72). The problem with this claim is that Will and other conservatives seek to elevate the
Good of free expression or equal opportunity over the good of redressing social inequality. Will
opposes a multicultural curriculum because the Western classics ought “to affirm this fact: America
is predominantly a product of Western tradition and is predominantly good because that tradition
is good,” (quoted in Janet McNew, “Whose Politics? Media Distortions of Academic Controver-
sies” (1992) 68:1 Virg. Q. Rev. I at 5). Calling a value judgment a “fact” does not overcome the
contradiction. “Value relativism supports liberalism at one level because it undercuts any claim to
absolute or divine preference for any one value system. The corresponding problem is that it under-
cuts any such claim for ‘liberal’ values as well. That is why the value choices have to be hidden,
why liberal rationalism must always seem to be invoking only reason, or values like ‘liberty,’
‘equality,’ or ‘tolerance,’ that seem so uncontroversial because they are so vague” (Philip Johnson,
“Do You Sincerely Want To Be Radical?” (1984) 36 Stan. L. Rev. 247 at 278).

104D’Souza, supra note 10 at 250.

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

ized free marketplace functions as a compelling metaphor: ideas, goods and
opportunities are offered to free and equal individuals; their merits are rationally
weighed and the best available choices are selected. Flawed goods will be ratio-
nally rejected in favour of superior products; lack of superior products will spur
private enterprise to supply rationally identified gaps in market supply, just as
lack of personal fortune will spur individual achievement.’ Supply and demand
determine merit in the political arena, in the realm of ideas and in commerce.
The measure of merit is the demand by rational and formally equal choosers, so
long as the supply of competing goods is not illegitimately restricted.” Longev-
ity of demand confirms objective merit.’ 7

Now, although the marketplace ideal presumes the survival of the fittest,
formal egalitarians categorically reject the claim that fitness is determined by
social, economic or political power.’ On the contrary, fitness is determined by
rationality, by the rational persuasiveness of competing options to self-
interested individuals. If you credit individuals equally with rational freewill,
you should credit the rational merit of their choices. From inside this worldview,
claiming that such choices are coerced rather than freely consensual sounds like
elitist sour grapes because it discounts the rationality of individual citizens and
the merits of their rational choices.

B. Substantive Equality: The Critique

Thinkers in the substantive equality camp’ 9 do not start with the formal
equality of citizens in the abstract but with the material conditions which con-
struct and constrain individual choice, merit and freedom, and which channel
their outcomes. This method discloses whose inequality is systemically
enforced in whose interest by a state whose primary function is enforcement of
formal equality.”0 It also demonstrates how situated power shapes individual
perspective and, in particular, how the perspectives of the powerful define and
shape individual and cultural definitions of value in a way which rationalizes
existing unequal distributions of power.”‘ Both projects collapse the distinction

‘0STo conservatives, “[a]dversity and deprivation are goads to achievement; protection is an

inducement to lassitude” (Lesnick, supra note 71 at 421).

‘l”Reason cannot accommodate the claims of any kind of power whatever, and democratic soci-
ety cannot accept any principle of achievement other than merit” (Bloom, supra note 68 at 96).
1Virtually all defenders of traditional liberal education invoke expressions like “enduring,”
“lasting” or “timeless” truths and values, “time-honoured” classics, works which have “withstood
the test of time,” etc. The texts and the scholarship they impugn are “ephemeral attractions,”
“fads,” “au courant,” “fashionable,” “trendy,” etc.

1 SWilliamn Pfaff, “Universities Burdened with Pressures of Changing Values” London Free
Press (28 May 1991) A7: “The equation of power with value is … fascist.” See aIsoRedish and
Lippman, supra note 71.

’09I again wish to acknowledge the diversity of perspectives, strategies and priorities among

substantivists even while generalizing what distinguishes the formal and substantive positions.

lm0Critical race scholars “do not claim a privileged status for our experience. Instead, we offer
an essential rejoinder to the ‘false universalism’ prevalent in the myth of equality of opportunity”
(Robin Barnes, “Race Consciousness: The Thematic Content of Racial Distinctiveness in Critical
Race Scholarship” (1990) 103 Harv. L. Rev. 1864 at 1865).

‘”There are many renderings of this insight. Some of my favorites are: Catharine MacKinnon,
Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) especially at

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between public and private, political and personal by revealing the degree to
which what counts as rationality depends on and serves the interests of those
who have power. Law rationalizes power. In the words of Catharine MacKin-
non:

Objectivity is liberal legalism’s conception of itself. It legitimates itself by reflect-
ing its view of society, a society it helps make by so seeing it, and calling that
view, and that relation, rationality. Since rationality is measured by point-of-
viewlessness, what counts as reason is that which corresponds to the way things
are … Objectivist epistemology … ensures that the law will most reinforce existing
distributions of power when it most closely adheres to its own ideal of fairness.”

The critique of the ideology, practice and outcomes of formal equality
adopted in this article addresses three related substantive concerns: formal egal-
itarians violate their own first principles by presuming and enforcing the
unequal status of citizens; they rationalize the resulting inequality through false,
status-based dichotomies; and, when seriously challenged, they rely on author-
itarianism to stifle democratic social change.

The liberalism defended by formal egalitarians has always constructed
laws on the basis of status, not on the basis of the civil equality of all citizens.”‘
Before liberal law balances the competing claims of formally equal citizens, it
has first to recognize the legal personhood that is a precondition to citizenship.
Liberal law long denied legal personhood to many individuals on the basis of
class, race, sex and nationality –
4 Even when overt
violations of formal equality such as disenfranchisement were repealed, positive
law continued to allocate and balance entitlements by status.”5 Meanwhile, the

i.e. on the basis of status.

106-25, 237-46; Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980) 5
Signs 631; Williams, supra note 18 especially at 55-79.

212MacKinnon, ibid. at 162-63.
130n the “culture of constitutionalism” by which the inegalitanian classical republicanism of the
Framers of the U.S. Constitution secured property and individual liberty righis over equality rights,
and largely immunized the conservative bias of the constitution from popular challenge, see Joyce
Appleby, “The American Heritage: The Heirs and the Disinherited” (1987) 74 J. Am. Hist. 798.
See also Jennifer Nedelsky, “Law, Boundaries, and the Bounded Self’ (1990) 30 Representations
162; Elizabeth Mensch, “The History of Mainstream Legal Thought” in Kairys, ed., supra note 24,
18 at 19-26.

“4The most obvious public rights of legal citizenship, the right to vote, hold public office, prac-
tise or adjudicate law, and even sit on juries were long restricted to white, propertied men. The per-
sonhood to own enforceable private legal rights was also restricted to white, propertied men. See
e.g. Bell, supra note 73, especially c. I (ten clauses in the U.S. Constitution protecting slavery) and
c. 3 (continuing limits on Black vote); Pateman, supra note 98 (omission of women from social
contract theory and women’s civil slavery); Bolaria & Li, eds., supra note 36 (slavery, indenture
and/or disenfranchisement of First Nations people, and of Chinese, Japanese and East Indian immi-
grants in Canada); Bruce Ryder, “Racism and the Constitution: The Constitutional Fate of British
Columbia Anti-Asian Immigration Legislation, 1884-1909” (1991) 29 Osgoode Hall L.J. 619 (over
100 provincial statutes enacted between 1872 and 1922 discriminating against people of Chinese
or Japanese race); Mary Jane Mossman, “Feminism and Legal Method: The Difference It Makes”
in Fineman & Thomadsen, eds., supra note 88 at 283 (women not “persons” admissible to bar);
Ngaire Naffine, Law and the Sexes: Explorations in Feminist Jurisprudence (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1990) (legal “person” is a middle class man evincing middle-class style of masculinity).
” 5See e.g. Bell, ibid. on legal obstacles to the exercise of voting rights and school segregation;
MacKinnon, supra note Ill, especially at 123, 168-69, 172-83, 209-11 (laws legitimating violence

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

social inequalities generated by now-repealed exclusionary laws have continued
to accrue both materially and in socio-cultural devaluations that rationalize the
present inequality of groups the law formally subordinated.”6 Similarly, the
privilege accumulated through benefit of unequal laws also accrues.’ 7

The accrual of substantive inequality in a regime of formal equality works
this way. If pursuit of rational self-interest drives the liberal society, those with
the power to make law create laws which reflect their rational self-interest. This
is no conspiracy, it is merely interested rationalism at work. Powerholders view,
name and order the world according to their perspective. This perspective,
because it makes sense of their world and because they have the power to
impose it on their world, appears rational and natural, particularly in the absence
of competition. When they perceive individual members of a class of people as
less than fully human, the laws they establish and interpret (re)construct such
classes as less than fully human. Such laws justify and rationalize unequal treat-
ment on the basis of the second-class legal status they so construct.”8 Accord-
ingly, for instance, unequal pay for women and men performing formally iden-
tical work can appear just because the actual workers are considered unequal –
i.e. women as women are considered worth less than men. The work women do
is also devalued because women do it, while the work men do is more highly
valued because women don’t do it. By the same logic, manual or dirty work
overwhelmingly done by immigrants and people of colour merits lower pay
than intellectual or managerial work overwhelmingly monopolized by white
men.

And when the powerholders who thus construct social inequality then
entrench a legal order whose merit turns on disregarding social status by
decreeing as its first principle that individuals should be treated abstractly as
formal equals responsible for the choices they make, it can then attribute to
women, immigrant hen and men of colour responsibility for choosing low-paid
work and responsibility for driving wages down by clustering i. job ghettoes,” 9

against women and/or discounting women’s credibility). Consider, inter alia, laws that still form-
ally bar women from some combat roles and bar “practising” lesbians and gays from all military
service, and laws that restrict immigration on the basis of disability and employment on the basis
of age.

” 6 See Williams, supra note 18 at c. 4, 10, on “spirit murder” and “disownedness” –

i.e. the
subservience of self to other without reciprocity – which are the legacy of legal non-personhood.
See also dissenting judgment in R. v. Seaboyer, supra note 32, on the relation between women’s
subordinated status and rape myths which undercut reporting and prosecution of rape.

” 7 Sheila McIntyre, “Equality and Accountability in Education” (Closing Address, Conference
of Employment Equity School Board Provincial Network, February 1989) [unpublished, on file
with author].

118See MacKinnon, “Difference and Dominance: On Sex Discrimination” in Feminism Unmo-

dified, supra note 59 at 32.

119 For examples of this reasoning, see Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Sears,
Roebuck & Co., 628 F.Supp. 1264 (N.D. Il. 1986), aff’d 839 F.2d 302 (7th Cir. 1988); Stephen
Peitchinis, Women at Work: Discrimination and Response (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989).
For two of the many feminist critiques of this approach, see Alice Kessler-Harris, “The Just Price,
the Free Market, and the Value of Women” in Karen Hansen & Irene Philipson, eds., Women,
Class, and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist Feminist Reader (Philadelphia: Temple Univer-
sity Press, 1990) 476; Ronnie Steinberg, “Radical Challenges in a Liberal World: The Mixed Suc-
cesses of Comparable Worth” in Hansen & Philipson, eds., ibid. at 508.

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as well as biological propensity for work which is menial or is deemed menial
because white men do not do it. 2 The neutral market of supply and demand,
not the constructed worth-less-ness of white women, immigrants and people of
colour, is then responsible for wage inequality.

Formalists do not deny that liberal political and legal history is marred by
violations of its first principles; they simply discount the significance of past
wrongs to present rights. Indeed, in their view, liberalism is not discredited by
past wrongs, but affirmed because the eventual recognition of irrational, status-
based prejudices followed by the repeal of discriminatory laws and the prohibi-
tion of discriminatory practices rooted in false stereotypes demonstrates the
progress of reason over irrationality, the triumph of truth over superstitious bias,
the extension of universal standards over arbitrary distinctions.’ 2′ Deviations
from principle and underinclusivity can and have been corrected. The principles
remain the measure of civilization.

i.e. unequal –

The problem with this posture is that the principles so affirmed foreclose
redress for their violation. In a formalist regime, only likes must be treated alike
such that difference, even if manufactured by discriminatory laws, justifies dif-
ferent –
treatment. 22 At the same time, once status-based group
distinctions based on race, religion, sex and so on are legally designated irra-
tional or invidious, group remedies to redress actual inequalities imposed by
devalued status become impermissible. Time stands still for a moment. Form-
alist principle thereafter mandates that the actual inequalities that define wrong-
fully imposed social status be abstracted from consciousness before legal equal-
ity can operate. Asymmetrical power relations between groups are thus
converted ideologically to false symmetries between abstract individuals such
that status-based distinctions are discriminatory whether they operate to favour
law’s historically favoured groups or to reverse history’s disfavour.”z Discrim-
ination becomes an idea which levels dominator and dominated conceptually.
Actual social inequality remains, but the idea of social inequality is gloriously
transcended along with the idea of social accountability for unjustly secured sta-
tus and resources. 24

Substantive egalitarians perceive another inconsistency between formalist
claims and practice. Although the formalist world is constructed around a uni-

20For judicial reliance on gender essentialism to defeat sex discrimination suits on the basis that
women prefer traditionally “feminine” jobs and show a lack of interest in non-traditional, high paid
(“male”) jobs, see Vicki Schultz, “Women ‘Before’ the Law: Judicial Stories about Women, Work,
and Sex Segregation on the Job” in Judith Butler & Joan Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Polit-
ical (New York: Routledge, 1992) 297.

21Peller, supra note 6 at 768-69.
122MacKinnon, supra note 59.
‘”Peller, supra note 6 at 771-75.
124The law’s hostility to systemic remedies underlines the degree to which it treats privilege as
a vested property right. See Kimberle Crenshaw, “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transforma-
tion and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law” (1988) 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331; Freeman, supra
note 24; Williams, supra note 18 at 216-36 (“On Being the Object of Property”). Hence, the law’s
hostility to the concept of reparations should be no surprise. See e.g. Tyron Sheppard & Richard
Nevins, “Constitutional Equality – Reparations at Last” (1991) 22 U.W.L.A. L. Rev. 105; Roger
Daniels, “Afterword: The Struggle for Redress,” in Adachi, supra note 36 at 371.

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versal individual motivated by rational self-interest, the self-referential perspec-
tive of the powerful is actually construed as rational and neutral, not self-
interested and partial, while the perspective of the disempowered is character-
ized as self-interested, biased and irrational.”z This ideological dynamic ensures
that even if one’s constructed second-class status per se does not preclude one’s
opportunity or perceived standing to speak,’ 26 the bias attributed to those with
second-class standing will undercut the credibility of what one says. Hence,
when women name conduct sexist, they are considered inobjective rather than
qualified to speak; and the men who so discount women’s determinations of
what counts as sexism presume (or, at least assert) their own disinterestedness
and their authority to judge. Similarly, when scholars of colour seek to altr sys-
temically racist standards of merit, their self-interest in such reform, though
utterly rational, is seen to discredit the project instead of illustrating liberal
enterprise at work. And, tellingly, those substantive egalitarians whom the
anti-PC literature lumps together are routinely labelled “nihilists”: to challenge
traditional “truths” and expose their partiality is deemed the end of reason and
ordered civilization.12 7

What is at work here is a series of dichotomies endemic to Western philos-
ophy and liberal law: rational/irrational; objective/subjective; logical/emotional;
abstract/personal; predictable/arbitrary; order/chaos; civilized/primitive; law/
politics etc., whose positive pole has long distinguished the’dominant from
those they subordinate, and the dominant regime from alternatives more hospi-
table to substantive equality. a12 In this scheme, stereotypes attached to the sub-
ordinated and rationalizing their subordination typically suggest inherently
defective reason and/or excessive emotionality and sexuality. Hence, the inter-

125As MacKinnon has written:

This defines the task of feminism not only because male dominance is perhaps the most
pervasive and tenacious system of power in history, but because it is metaphysically
nearly perfect. Its point of view is the standard for point-of-viewlessness, its particu-
larity the meaning of universality. Its force is exercised as consent, its authority as par-
ticipation, its supremacy as the paradigm of order, its control as the definition of legit-
imacy (supra note 111 at 116-17).

See also Williams, supra note 18 at 221: in the fragmenting and fragmented worldview of the bour-
geoisie and of white culture, “will” personifies the burgermeister, “purity” of will –
i.e. wisdom,
control and aesthetic beauty –
signify the whole white personality and irrationality, lack of control
and ugliness signify the whole slave personality.

1261 am thinking here of the bitter observation that when a white woman or person of colour
makes a point it isn’t taken up but when the same point is subsequently made by a white man (or
the boss), then, and only then, does it get serious credit.

‘ 27For the nihilism charge, see e.g. Kimball, supra note 10 at xii, 40, 74, 164; Sykes, supra note
78 at 5, 25, 65, 138; Bloom, supra note 68 at 155; D’Souza, supra note 10 at 190; Carrington,
supra note 7 at 226-27.

12See e.g. Mary O’Brien & Sheila McIntyre, “Patriarchal Hegemony and Legal Education”
(1986) 2 C.J.W.L. 69 at 80-81; Sandra Harding, “Is Gender a Variable in Conceptions of Rational-
ity? A Survey of Issues” in Carol Gould, ed., Beyond Domination: New Perspectives on Women
and Philosophy (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanhead, 1983) 43 (especially on relation between
racism and sexism in male models of rationality); Caroline Whitbeck, “A Different Reality: Fem-
inist Ontology” in Gould, ed., ibid. at 64; MacKinnon, supra note 111; Peller, supra note 6 at
768-69, 774, 803-07.

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related labels negatively defining female, aboriginal, Black, Latin, lesbian and
gay deviations from the rational norm: sentimental, hysterical, intuitive, instinc-
tive, moody, unpredictable, unstable, unreliable, shiftless, feckless, fickle, pro-
miscuous, rash, wanton, hotblooded, flamboyant, intemperate, disorderly, naYve,
childlike, primitive, apelike.

Against this backdrop it is no great leap to defend the disinterestedness of
traditional scholarship, the timeless authority of Western classics and the neu-
trality of law simply by labelling campus reformers irrational, critical scholars
propagandists, student activists immature and students or faculty of colour
incompetent. These, too, are status arguments structured around the rational-
ity of domination. 9 Put another way, the ideology of dominance is entirely
circular. It is not so much inconsistent as self-referential. It meets the chal-
lenge of difference through the othemess it has imposed, viewing the different
as inferior and irrational. It finds resistance to its order unaccountable because
subordinates are not conforming to the logic of dominance. Having con-
ceptually as well as legally de-selfed the other, dominators reconstruct that
resistance which arises from self-respect as evidence of dangerous irrational-
ity.130

Finally, critics of formal equality note that when, against all odds, those
substantively disempowered by law and its social consequences, and discredited
by the powerful as biased and irrational, secure through democratic processes
not only the right to formal equality but substantive egalitarian reform, power-
holders cry foul. Substantive equality is dynamic. It, too, accrues. At this junc-
ture, which is the juncture generating anti-PC literature, the myth of formal
equality is most baldly revealed. When the dominant lose the power to dominate
those they have subordinated, they protest that The System –
i.e. their system
is not working. And, of course, this is true. What is telling, however, is the
–
way they illustrate the failure of The System/their system. Minority hiring per
se equals a failure of the merit system;31 the high demand for a scarce supply
of Black scholars reflects a skewing of the market system; 32 critical skepticism
toward established “truths” subverts the university’s intellectual mission; 33
describing someone or something as racist undermines the marketplace of

129As Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, speaking of sexual oppression, puts it, “Male rationality … has
been supplying reasons –
for the oppression of women; why emulate it?” (“The
Education of Women as Philosophers” in Minnich, O’Barr & Rosenfeld, eds., supra note 48, 9 at
13). The same rationality has supplied reasons for white supremacy, heterosexism and economic
inequality.

for centuries –

130As Lawrence remarks (supra note 61 at 454, note 93), part of the culture of domination is
the paradoxical expectation that members of subordinated groups will accept insult from the dom-
inant group (because they are inferior and at a power disadvantage) and will commit violence
unprovoked (because they are less rationally self-governing).
‘ 31For a further discussion of the formalists’ rejection of affirmative action, see infra notes
132See D’Souza, supra note 56 at 69-70 (“frenzied competition for the tiny group of new Black
1330n formalists’ anti-intellectualism, see Scott, supra note 11 at 33.

Ph.D.s …” has led to a “so-called black market”).

155-59, 170-86 and accompanying text.

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

ideas13 and cannot be cured through a right of reply;’3 minority dissent coerces
the powerful while democratically secured reforms amount to totalitarianism; 136
holding liberal society to its stated ideals 137 subverts Western culture, and so on.
Most of these claims reduce to status arguments and the anti-PC camp uses
them with a vengeance. These claims explicitly concede that power shapes what
is accepted as cultural “truth” and value. All the complaints about “silencing,”
“thought control” and “censorship,” whether defined as a product of dominant
fashion or of domineering “victim” classes, concede that the marketplace of
ideas cannot ensure that truth will prevail if words are backed by social or polit-
ical power. But this is what the substantive equality camp has been saying all
along, for instance, in supporting the criminalization of hate propaganda’38 and
in tracking how rights are unequally established, distributed, exercised and
enforced.

V. Who Are the Politically Correct? The Status Argument

A. Who Poses the Threat? A Group Portrait

Critics of so-called political correctness take the position that freedom of
expression should not be curbed, particularly within the university, even in the
cause of equality; that true scholarship is not and. should not be political; that
academic and cultural standards emerge from objectively determinable values
or transcendent universal truths; and that to centre liberal education on the study
of the greatest artists, thinkers and statesmen of Western 6ulture is not to pro-
mote a political agenda but to educate students in the best that (the best) civi-
lization has to offer.

It is difficult to summarize where those they censure stand on each issue
because the anti-PC literature sweeps up and conflates three distinct critical
scholarly communities in its attack. The first target group is “former 60s radi-
cals” who now have tenure.3 9 They are generally labelled “Marxists” or “left-
ists,” even though the term is often more emotive than descriptively accurate. 40

13′”It is significant that professors feel that they can’t talk about [racist exam hypotheticals]
without interfering with the first-amendment rights or the academic freedom of their colleagues”
(Williams, supra note 18 at 90).

135See Stanley Ingber, “The Marketplace of Ideas: A Legitimizing Myth” [1984] Duke L.J. 1

especially at 36-49.

136 “‘The campaign against multiculturalism … is actually a campaign against policies that have
allowed the previously speechless to speak. It is in effect a crusade to suppress a conversation
about the social order. Because they cannot stop the conversation, opponents of multiculturalism
have caricatured it as an attempt to destroy the foundations of Western civilization” (Betty Jean
Craige, “The Old Order Changeth” (1992) 9:5 Women’s Rev. Books 14 at 15).

137For instance, tolerance of diversity, cultural pluralism, civil equality, equal protection of the

laws, etc.

138See remarks of Kathleen Mahoney and Man Matsuda in Borovoy, Mahoney, Cameron, Gold-

berger & Matsuda, “Language as Violence v. Freedom of Expression,” supra note 83.

139Roger Kimball has adopted this tag for his book’s title: Tenured Radicals, supra note 10.
14To be fair, I have noticed that Americans tend to use the term “leftist” very loosely as a syn-

onym for “progressive” or “anti-establishment” groups.

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By definition, the radical left .seeks to subvert the West and liberal values,
including liberal education. The second group, “deconstructionists” and/or
“postmodemists,” appears to contain any scholar who explores the social con-
struction and hence the contingency of such “realities” as cultural or scholarly
standards of excellence.’ 41 The insistence on cultural relativism and the relation
of power to the definition of value is seen to be not only subversive of the
deserved pre-eminence of liberal cultural and academic traditions but of values
as such. 142

The third contains three sub-groups who are the primary targets of the
anti-PC literature: feminists, scholars of colour and lesbian and gay scholars.
They are generally mentioned in an incantatory string, and directly or indirectly
portrayed as the underqualified beneficiaries of affirmative action. 43 Because
affirmative action is understood as a violation of the formal ideal of objective
merit determined independently of race, sex or class, their presence personifies
the subversion of scholarly excellence, while their research and institutional
activism illustrate the dangers of relativism in practice: these second-rate schol-
ars study, teach and demand inclusion of second-rate works selected “simply
because of’ the race, sex or sexual preference of the author'” –
rather than
because of the intellectual or cultural merit of the work.

Although individual scholars can and do fall into more than one of these
scholarly camps, and although there are intellectual no less than political affi-
nities among leftists, deconstructionists and feminist and/or racial minority
and/or gay and lesbian scholars, it is equally true that there are significant dif-
ferences within and between each community 45 which are often, but not always,

141See supra note 88.
42In decrying the displacement of some Western classics from the canon, Ron Grossman argues,
1
“the saint and Hitler, Sophocles and a peasant’s songs, all fade together against the gray back-
ground of nihilism where good and evil, truth and falsity, are no longer considered the kinds of
issues that students ought to grapple with” (quoted in Sykes, supra note 78 at 65).
143See supra note 3. Although the formalists’ rejection of affirmative action typically includes
paternalistic concern for the truly qualified minority scholar who meets regular merit criteria but
who is stigmatized by others’ assumptions that s/he received preferential treatment, no feminist/
non-white/lesbian or gay scholar singled out as a PCer is ever described as credentialed.

144See e.g. Bloom, supra note 68 at 94, who argues that the Black Studies movement gave uni-
versities a way out of the “dilemma” created by affirmative action –
i.e. failing or passing unqual-
ified and unprepared Black students –
either of which meant “blacks would be recognizably
second-class citizens.” By arguing that universities only teach the myths necessary to support the
system of domination, Bloom reasons, Black activists could claim “Black students are second-class
not because they are academically poor but because they are being forced to imitate white culture.
Relativism and Marxism made some of this claim believable.” I hope it is clear that the “simply-
because-of” claim implies that those who assign such texts (no less than those who criticize their
assignment) do not consider them great works in their own right, or cannot distinguish genuine cul-
tural and scholarly excellence from mediocre work.

145There is now a substantial literature on the politics of difference criticizing equality theories
which falsely universalize problems of subordination by ignoring or erasing the compound and/or
distinctive character of intersecting inequities of race, gender, class and sexual identity. White les-
bians have challenged both the heterosexism of feminists and the sexism of gay men; women of
colour have criticized generalizations about “race,” the sexism of men of colour, the erasure of les-
bians of colour, and the racism of white lesbian separatists. More positively, see the sheer range

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

erased in the anti-PC literature. 146

including hiring and promotion committees –

The conflation of the three targeted groups allows for extremely effective
guilt by association. Fear-mongering that leftists now are poised to dominate
university administrations –
lends visceral force to claims that minority scholars are ousting the Western
classics by undemocratic means. The revelation that feminist scholars endorse
openly “political” teaching and writing, the content of which is rarely
described, 47 suggests that the “politics” in question are leftist, dogmatic and
propagandistic. Caricatures of individual scholars said to be “typical” of their
discipline blur with similarly sensational exposds about others, linking all crit-
ical scholars according to common faults: relentless propagandizing, far-fetched
interpretations of great works, exaggerated grievances and preoccupation with
sexuality. The refusal to individuate the distinctive constituencies said to com-
pose the PC movement permits readers to draw on negative cultural stereotypes
about women, feminists, lesbians, Blacks, Marxists and so on, such that the
indicia of non-personhood attached to each form the patchwork deviance of all.
Equally, trivialization of the claims of one group diminishes the distinctive
harms to all. Consider John Taylor’s sneer:

In fact, the politically correct have concluded that virtually anyone with any sort
of trait, anxiety, flaw, impediment or unusual sexual preference qualifies for mem-
bership in an oppressed group. 148

This kind of put-down is a running theme in anti-PC literature, most com-
monly in derisive references to the so-called “victim’s revolution” composed of
losers who concoct grand conspiracy theories about the oppressiveness of lib-
eralism to excuse their own inadequacies.1 49 This characterization of campus
ferment makes quite clear Marxists and deconstructionists are not the real focus
of anti-PC alarms. For anti-PCers, Marxists are simply reflexively championing
the new underdogs now that Communism has failed as a political system else-
where, 50 and deconstructionism dignifies victimology with a theory and dis-
course. The real belly-dread, hence the primary target, is a changing world in

of perspectives, strategies, pedagogies and participants in Women’s Studies by reference to Min-
nich, O’Barr & Rosenfeld, eds., supra note 48; Gaskell & McLaren, eds., supra note 6. Similarly,
on the diversity of perspectives, writings and politics of women of colour, see Anzaldda, ed., supra
note 4. For an equally diverse sampler of writings by lesbians of colour, see Silvera, ed., supra note
4.
146jerry Frug has made the same point about attacks on Critical Legal Scholars of the mid-1980s

(supra note 7 at 676-77, 680).

147By contrast, most anti-PC literature at least purports to define deconstruction.
148Taylor in New York, supra note 92 at 37.
149D’Souza’s introductory chapter is entitled “The Victim’s Revolution” (supra note 10 at 1).
See also Taylor in New York, ibid. at 38 (feminist “eagerness to see all women as victims”); Adler
in Newsweek, supra note 8 at 52 (derision of a course as “Oppression Studies”); Sykes, supra note
78 at 4 (the “burgeoning field of victim studies”); Kimball, supra note 10 at xv-xvi (“officially des-
ignated victims” secure protection against “speech or action deemed offensive”).
150See e.g. D’Souza, supra note 10 at 79, 214; “Politically Correct?” Wall Street Journal (26
November 1990) A10; Adler in Newsweek, ibid. at 53; George Carey, “Political Science: A Split
Personality” (1992) 34 Modern Age 102 at 107.

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lesbian’52 and feminist scholars (in that order)’53
which Black and Hispanic,’
not only gain influence over white, heterosexual children, but also power to dis-
place white, heterosexual men. From this vantage point, it does not matter that
there are deep theoretical, material and tactical divisions within feminism,
between white or heterosexual feminists and women and men of colour, lesbian
and gay. All that matters is that the inferior classes seek to change male dom-
inance and Eurocentrism.

B. What Threat Do They Pose? Bias Revealed

Notwithstanding the headlines about censorship, the clear demon in
anti-PC literature is affirmative action in admissions and hiring practices, and,
therefore, in curricular design. Most anti-PC writers claim that quotas are in
place without either describing what they mean by quotas or acknowledging the
exclusionary admissions and hiring practices which led to affirmative action.”5
They sound typical alarms about erosion of academic excellence and accepted
criteria of merit and reverse discrimination.’55 Previously, these arguments
baldly equated active recruitment of women and -minority scholars per se with
lowering standards and displacing more qualified whites and men. That claim

151Although aboriginal students and scholars are occasionally mentioned in enrolment statistics,
they are not featured as targets of critique. And although Asians (lumpenly) are mentioned, it is
generally in the context of their over-exclusion from prestigious universities by virtue of quota sys-
tems which set aside places for less qualified Blacks and Hispanics.

’52Although this literature refers often to “homosexuals,” the only named “homosexual” schol-
ars tend to be lesbians. There is about an even split between white lesbians and lesbians of col-
our.

153See e.g. Taylor in New York, supra note 92 at 39, who states “[f]or all their fury, the gen-
der feminists are surpassed in ideological rage by an even more extreme wing of the politically cor-
rect: the Afrocentrists.” Similarly, although D’Souza’s book is sub-titled “The Politics of Race
and Sex on Campus,” he focuses overwhelmingly on admissions, hiring and curriculum policies
benefiting Black and Hispanic students and faculty. His conclusion portrays feminists and “homo-
sexuals” as jumping on the anti-racism bandwagon to advance their own interests (supra note 10
at 235-36).

154D’Souza uses Duke University as a case study. Duke’s Committee on Black Faculty devel-
oped a hiring resolution modelled on a court order imposed on the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill that would require each of 56 “hiring units” to hire one Black scholar during the
next five years. If successful, the plan would have raised the Black faculty complement from 31
out of 1400 to 87. If departments failed to comply, the only consequence was that they would have
to show why. The compromise proposal adopted by the faculty council only provided “incentives”
for minority recruitment. The University President defended the compromise arguing that a depart-
ment might be moved to hire unqualified applicants who “may not be motivated to carry out the
research activity … required for a tenure appointment” and then the university would “run into the
awkward situation of not granting them tenure.” The Committee on Black Faculty then resigned
en masse, 2,500 students signed a petition demanding the faculty council reconsider the
“compulsory-hiring” proposal, and at a small protest rally, President Brodie apologized for his
remarks and signed the petition. The original resolution was passed 35-19. This is not described
as a democratic process, but as an illustration of the ascendancy of politically correct coercive tac-
tics. (D’Souza, supra note 56 at 64-67).

1555ee especially D’Souza, supra note 10. Tom Fennell in Maclean’s, supra note 8 at 43, reports
that “some male academics claim that hiring quotas are destroying merit as the principal basis for
hiring and promotion. As a result, about 200 Ontario academics signed a petition asking Premier
Bob Rae’s NDP government not to include Ontario universities in its employment-equity pro-
gram.”

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

is still made, but with carefully selected statistical backup.’56 In addition,
anti-PC literature seeks to demonstrate-the unworthiness of the new scholars by
denigrating the content of their scholarship.

There are two related grievances about the new scholarship. First, it ques-
tions the possibility of objective knowledge, methodology, teaching and criteria
of academic or cultural excellence, by exploring the social construction of all
values and of the people, including white men, who express them. Second, it
documents, analyzes and criticizes the patterns and dynamics of systemic ine-
quality which both construct Eurocentrism and white, male supremacy and
rationalize their perpetuation. Academic research on the relativity and contin-
gency of knowledge and standards, standing alone, can reduce to a matter of
esoteric verbal and theoretical wordplay – which is disrespectful and poten-
tially disruptive of the scholarly approaches of an earlier generation, but which
hardly warrants the outcry against deconstruction in the anti-PC literature. How-
ever, deconstruction of objectivist claims and their links to distribution of race,
gender and economic power in the Western tradition can be profoundly disrup-
tive of power relations throughout society. Once accepted history, tradition and
social-wisdom are placed alongside forgotten or marginalized players, voices,
historic texts and political debates, reconstruction becomes possible, perhaps
inevitable, absent wilful blindness to the meaning of omission. This prospect
would seem to account for the hyperbolic rhetoric and weaponry of the form-
alist contingent.

The formalist response to critiques of objectivity actually substantiates the
critique. The logic is utterly circular and self-referential: objectivity is asserted
by proclaiming its challengers to be defective in rational detachment; their irra-
tionality is implied by departure from white, male norms. Because those mount-
ing the challenge are or represent white women and racial minorities, they are
partisan; because their critique of objectivity seeks to expose sex and race bias
in order to end it, it is political, not disinterested; because it is not disinterested,
it is subversive of the university’s mission. By contrast, it is no reflection on
their detachment that a white, male intellectual elite so adamantly defends as
timeless, universal truths what is to be found in study of Western civilization’s
greatest thinkers, artists, law-makers and political figures, or that those greats
just happen to be white men whose greatness has been declared, studied and
taught by white men. The authority of great works lies “not in any class or race
or sex, but in a tradition before which all are equal.”.57 Taking the high, imper-
sonal line then, the defence of disembodied knowledge and disinterested inquiry

156See D’Souza, ibid. at c. 2 where Berkeley is examined. Compare the selectivity of his statis-
tics with those cited by Troy Duster, “They’re Taking Over! And Other Myths About Race on
Campus” (1991) 16:5 Mother Jones 30 at 31-33.

157Kimball, supra note 10 at 61. Or as D’Souza puts it:

It seems unlikely that being white and male are the reasons for anyone’s greatness of
thought; rather, those are features, historically accidental, that happened to coincide
with great minds … [I]nstead of denouncing the classics, minorities and women might
do a lot better to challenge the proprietorship of books which are not white male prop-
erty but the common heritage of civilization (ibid. at 85-86).

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is a defence of the formalist’s version of what distinguishes Western thought and
civilization.’58

The wilfully blind moment in anti-PC literature appears when those who
challenge the objectivity of dominant traditions are convicted of asserting the
impossibility of any standards at all.’59 This “without us, nothing” posture is a
telling instance of the self-referentiality of dominance. From a liberal point of
view, revealing the self-interest behind the mask of objectivity offers an opening
for pluralism in the classroom, as in democratic institutions. From the substan-
tivist camp, it offers the possibility of transformative egalitarian change. Both
positions promote values; both are consistent with genuine democracy. The sub-
stantive position may even be wildly optimistic about the power of ideas over
the power available to the powerful to suppress liberatory ideas. Yet formalists
consistently equate egalitarian critiques of disinterested knowledge and of the
enduring truths celebrated by conservatives as the route to nihilism,”6 whose
end product is private “bribery and intimidation”’61 and malignant political
fanaticism.’62 Dinesh D’Souza writes:

The new critics go beyond the assertion of contingent knowledge to suggest that
the very ideal of objectivity is a mirage, and that it is therefore perfectly legitimate.
for teachers to cast aside pretensions of impartiality and to impose their politically
preferred ideas on students. When the traditional norms of scholarship no longer
rein in the instinct for activism, license is given for uninhibited ideological pros-
elytizing.

63

It is not, of course, the “ideal” of objectivity which is most besieged by the
new critics, but the actual objectivity of scholars, scholarship, curricular designs
and criteria of academic excellence self-defined as impartial. By reducing schol-
arship which anatomizes white, male supremacy to “preferred ideas,” and the
scholars who study and teach such “ideas” to proselytizing activists, anti-PC
voices also reduce the existence of systemic racism and sexism to the personal
opinions of anti-intellectuals: “Central to PC-ness … is the view that Western

’58D’Souza, supra note 56 at 79.
159For claims that the new scholarship means “anything goes,” see e.g. D’Souza, ibid. at 58;

Bloom, supra note 68 at 30, 32-33, 38, 55-56, 64-65, 143; Kimball, supra note 10 at 155-57.

16See sources listed above, supra note 127. See also Robdrt Gordon’s response to the nihilism
charge in “Letter to Dean Carrington” (1985) 35 L Legal Ed. 13 at 14-16 (bizarreness of attributing
nihilism and the teaching of cynicism and corruption to “the only people around who have any
hope the situation can be changed and the commitment to changing it”).

16’Carrington, supra note 7 at 227 (“nihilist teachers are more likely to train crooks than rad-
icals”). See also William Frank, “Controversy in the Philosopher’s Academy” (1992) 34 Modern
Age 155 at 162 (the anarchic trends prevailing in the academy will culminate in denial of “the jus-
tice of all differentiation between the hero and the pervert”); E. Christian Kopff, “The Classics and
the Traditional Liberal Arts Curriculum” (1992) 34 Modern Age 136 (scientific training devoid of
education in Latin and Greek and the humanist traditions they founded is “directly related to the
massive amounts of fraud which now typify scientific publication” in the U.S.).
‘ 62D’Souza, supra note 56 at 78-79; Kimball, supra note 10 at 40; Smith, supra note 80; kenish
in Maclean’s, supra note 8 at 44, in which Glenn Ricketts, research director of the National Asso-
ciation of Scholars states “[t]he politically correct people want to change the entire curriculum.
Race and gender have to be integral to every subject. The movement is sinister because of its flat-
out totalitarianism.”

1631bid. at 76.

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society has for centuries been dominated by what is often called ‘the white male
power structure’ or ‘patriarchal hegemony’… [and] the view that Western civi-
lization is inherently unfair to minorities, women and homosexuals …… ‘4 And,
as Newsweek describes the “experiments” at hundreds of U.S. universities, the
opinions being foisted on students are preposterous:

The goal is to eliminate prejudice, not just of the petty sort that shows up on soph-
omore dorm walls, but the grand prejudice that has ruled American universities
since their founding: that the intellectual tradition of Western Europe occupies the
central place in the history of civilization. In this context it would not be enough
for a student to refrain from insulting homosexuals or other minorities. He or she
would be expected to “affirm” their presence on campus and to study their liter-
ature and culture alongside that of Plato, Shakespeare and Locke.16 ”
In this rendering, the only men at risk from campus activism are long dead
and the worst they have to fear is coexistence in the same syllabus as Audre
Lorde or Alice Walker.6 6 The living white men who must study alongside self-
affirming white women or racial minority scholars, including lesbians and gay
men, and who have long benefited from both Eurocentrism and male supremacy
can purport to take an entirely disinterested scholarly approach’to the canon
debate, by defending, not their stake in the politics of (in)equality, but time-
the principles of liberal education,”67 the
honoured apparently neutral values –
pre-eminence of the great works of Western civilization 68 and liberal democ-
racy itself.1 69

What draws particular fire, then, are academic institutions which have
replaced some traditional classics with “Third World,” “minority” and/or

za, supra note 10 at 60 (“Protest against alleged Western exclusiveness in the classroom .,.”).

164Bemstein, The [Kingston] Whig-Standard, supra note 26 [emphasis added]. See also D’Sou-
165Supra note 8 at 48.
166The late Audre Lorde, a Black lesbian feminist and author of thirteen books, taught English
at Hunter College in New York. Alice Walker is a prolific Black feminist author whose novel The
,Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award for Fiction. Both are American
born. Their inclusion in the new curriculum is presented as problematic. See e.g. D’Souza, supra
note 10 at 62, 68, 70, 185.

167See e.g. Bok, supra note 5 at 2. Bok writes that “[a] genuine commitment to education and
research also means that universities accept a common set of standards in evaluating the academic
work of faculty and students.” New ideas must be tested “by accepted standards of logic, internal
consistency, clarity of expression, and correspondence to known facts.” Scholars must “gather evi-
dence with care, take account of opposing arguments and facts, and present their case clearly, per-
suasively, and insofar as the nature of the work permits, objectively.” Bok’s article conveys that
many new scholars cannot meet this standard. See also Kimball, supra note 10 at 74-75, 164;
Sykes, supra note 78 at 24, 138,209.
1681t is notable that in anti-PC literature, the term “non-Western” is often associated with works
by Black Americans such as Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston, lesbians of colour such as Glo-
ria Anzaldda; Pat Parker and Audre Lorde, and the politics of Marxist and/or feminists and/or les-
bian and/or critical race scholars. See e.g. D’Souza, supra note 10 at 59-93 (Chapter 3), 147,
172-73, 207-10; Sykes, ibid. at 50, 64-65, 207-11.

169See e.g. President Bush’s comments, supra note 13. The final paragraph of Allan Bloom’s
defence of the civilizing force of classical learning begins: “This is the American moment in world
history, the one for which we shall be forever judged. Just as in politics the responsibility for the
fate of freedom in the world has devolved upon our regime, so the fate of philosophy in the world
has devolved upon our universities, and the two are related as they have never been before” (supra
note 68 at 382).

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women authors. 7 Some anti-PC voices insist that they have no serious objec-
tions to adding the “classics” of other cultures to the curriculum so long as such
texts do not “dilute” the intellectual quality of the curriculum or “displace” the
best of Western culture in the interest of politics. 7′ The overt arguments against
an inclusive curriculum, in short, are identical to those against affirmative action
in admissions and hiring:” erosion of excellence; reverse discrimination
against white, male texts; and politicization of traditionally neutral education.
The unstated argument is antimiscegenationist: protect the sexial and racial
purity of the curriculum to prevent its mongrelization; and supremacist: change
is fine so long as the top remains top.

But, of course, a simple adding on of token minority teachers or a sprin-
kling of non-Western texts leaving systemic inequality unaltered falls far short
of meeting the critiques of objectivity and Eurocentrism. It is half-truths, partial
history, the ignorance of privilege and the privilege of ignorance which are dis-
placed when old truths share the-pages with what and who have been erased.’
The aggressive self-defence provoked by such displacement consists of patho-
logizing substantive egalitarians as deviants or malcontents: they have a
“hatred” for Western traditions and works, 174 and are bent on exposing Western
traditions as “hopelessly bigoted and oppressive in every way.”‘ 75 This is an old
ploy; it resembles the longstanding reduction of women’s pursuit of sexual
equality to evidence of “man-hating,” and the vindictive desire to make all men
look bad. The point of unmasking inequality, however, is neither to vent private
animosity nor to pursue revenge.’76 It is to identify the structures, rhetoric and

1701 think Judith Frank gets it right when she unpacks conservatives’ animosity about the canon
wars. She writes “[tihe very act of analyzing [Western classics] somehow, curiously, brings deval-
uation with it. Perhaps fthe] logic is that ‘Western’ books might be devalued, just as your property
might, by contact with black hands” (supra note 45 at 16).
1710n Stanford’s changes to its Western Civilization course to encourage greater inclusiveness
of non-Western cultures and civilization as well as at least one text each quarter to address race,
gender or class, Kimball observes, “it is not said whether any of the [new] works must address
issues of literary merit, aesthetic excellence, philosophical sophistication, or historical importance”
(supra note 10 at 27-28). See also, D’Souza, supra note 10 at 68-75; Sykes, supra note 78 at 64-65,
particularly for the metaphors of dilution and displacement.
172Indeed, opponents of substantive curricular change explicitly decry this as “affirmative

action” in text selection. See e.g. D’Souza, ibid. at 60, 65.

173For illuminating accounts of the ways teaching a racially inclusive anthology of American lit-
erature enriches and tranforms learning, see Paula Bennett, “Canons to the right of them …” (1991)
8:12 Women’s Rev. Books 15; Lauter, supra note 6 at 48-113. For a brilliant and complex account
of race-conscious legal education and its full reply to critics of “political correctness,” see Frances
Lee Ansley, “Race and the Core Curriculum in Legal Education” (1991) 79 Cal. L. Rev. 1511. For
multi-disciplinary readings on the dynamics and transformative impact of feminist teaching, see
Culley & Portuges, eds., supra note 6.
174See e.g. Adler in Newsweek, supra note 8 at 53; Fennell in Maclean’s, supra note 8 at 43.
175See D’Souza, supra note 56 at 52.
176See e.g. Ray Conlogue, “PCness and the Roots of Rage” The [Toronto] Globe and Mail (27

June 991) Cl who writes:

Women, gays and blacks have been systematically scapegoated in our culture for cen-
turies. But like the girls of Salem [who fingered innocent women as witches] they
know that one doesn’t get far by itemizing the rotten deal one has had. Far better, and
more satisfying, to demonize the privileged. This will not only get you your share of
the pie, but it also takes care of the (unacknowledged) need for revenge.

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dynamics of inequality in order to change them.”

The anti-PC literature attacks those who would “dilute” Western traditions
and displace Western classics by scare-mongering about the faddish (as opposed
to timeless) topics being taught and the bizarre sub-cultures (rather than Cul-
ture) being promoted. The method of choice is to cite provocative snippets pri-
marily from feminist, Black and/or lesbian writings to sound alarms about the
texts being substituted for civilized scholarship. Sometimes sensational pas-
sages are quoted. 7 But a more typical approach is simply to list the titles of
articles considered damning in themselves. All of the essays which use authors’
titles to put new scholarship down include at least one explicitly sexual title and
one lesbian or gay title. 179 At least three anti-PC essays mention a paper entitled
“Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl”‘8 without further comment. In aggre-
gate, the impression fomented is that minority scholars are anything but
detached, dispassionate intellectuals. Women academics in particular are appar-
ently preoccupied with sexuality and, worse, the sexuality in question is asso-
ciated with that great heterosexist dread: recruitment and conversion of the
young by their “homosexual” teachers.’

177A substantive equality approach “allows critique of the social partiality of standards as well

as opportunity to live up to existing ones” (MacKinnon, supra note 97 at 1326).

178See e.g. Taylor in New York, supra note 92, for synopses of feminism: “‘To know is to fuck’
has become a radical feminist rallying cry”; the work of Allison Jaggar: any woman who goes
on a date with a man is a prostitute; and Afrocentrism: “The human race, according to [Leonard]
Jeffries, is divided into the ‘ice people’ and the ‘sun people”‘; the former are “materialistic, self-
ish, and violent”; the latter, including Black people, are “nonviolent, cooperative, and spiritual”
as well as “biologically superior to whites … because they have more melanin” (all at 39). Dinesh
D’Souza includes a similar profile of Jeffries in the introduction to Illiberal Education, claim-
ing “such extreme views are now frequently expressed by black scholars and activists” (supra note
10 at 7).

179In addition to the spotlight on Professor Eve Sedgwick (see supra note 93), D’Souza mentions
a Modem Language Association [hereinafter M.L.A.] panel entitled “Literary and Critical Theory
from a Lesbian Perspective” (supra note 56 at 62). Taylor in New York, supra note 92 at 36, refers
to an assigned text called Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand which, “like many contemporary
speculative fictions finds conventional heterosexuality absurd.” Charles Sykes, supra note 78 at
207-09, devotes a small section of his book to SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
one of the most prestigious feminist scholarly journals in the U.S., illustrating its “radical” flavour
by listing the titles of essays collected in The Lesbian Issue published six years before his book.
He also mentions other papers delivered at the M.L.A. panel where Sedgwick presented “Jane Aus-
ten and the Masturbating Girl,” “Clitoral Imagery and Masturbation in Emily Dickenson” and
“Desublimating the Male Sublime: Autoerotics, Anal Erotics, and Corporeal Violence in Melville
and William Burroughs.” Bernstein, The [Kingston] Whig-Standard, supra note 26 at A2, lists
“Brotherly Love: Nabokov’s Homosexual Double” and “A Womb of His Own: Male Renaissance
Poets in the Female Body.” The Wall Street Journal, supra note 150, singles out “The Lesbian
Phallus – Or Does Heterosexuality Exist?” and “Psychological Issues of Lesbians and Gay
Males.”

180See supra note 93.
l’lAs Mary Eaton has documented, supra note 4, law and society construct gay men as uncon-
trollable sexual predators with a predilection towards pederasty. Not only is child sexual abuse
more commonly a heterosexual than gay crime, and not only do many pederasts prey on girls as
well as boys, but women in general and lesbians in particular rarely molest children sexually.
Moreover, in law and society, lesbians are often de-sexed or lesbian sexuality rendered invisible.
To the extent fear-mongering about “homosexuals” in the anti-PC literature disproportic lately sex-
ualizes lesbian scholars and implies that the “proselytizing” or “indoctrinating” beir g done by

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But even more interesting is that spliced among the sexual titles meant to
delegitimate the new scholars are course offerings such as: “Strategies for Fem-
inist Team Teaching of Hispanic Women Writers” and “Postcolonial Women
Writers.”‘8 2 Why are such titles meant to raise eyebrows? Is it racist disbelief
that enough meritorious Hispanic or Third World women’s literature exists to
fill a course? White outrage that such texts could displace the core curriculum?
Concern that students might learn the meaning of colonialism or collaborative
pedagogy?

Lest the irrational, inobjective and sub-cultural character of PC scholars is
not adequately conveyed by these means, there remains the other wing of the
dichotomy of subordination to impugn the new scholars: crass self-interest.
According to D’Souza, the champions of the victim’s revolution have much to
gain from assailing formal equality and universal standards:

Because the old notion of neutral standards in scholarship corresponded with a
white male regime at American universities, minority and feminist scholars have
grown increasingly attached to the new scholarship, which promises to dismantle
and subvert these old authoritative systems. They view the new scholarship both
as a mechanism to change the structure and content of what is taught in the class-
room and as a source of jobs and promotions. 183
If all standards are arbitrary or imbued with sex and race bias, then the new
scholars can excuse their incompetence by arguing that traditional academic
standards do not apply to them. More, they can insist that “oppression” studies
can only be taught by the oppressed, thereby ensuring for themselves a field in
which they will not have to compete with better scholars.’ Their faculty sup-
porters reap advantages from altering the old “neutral” standards too: they can
gain celebrity and distinction by embracing “fashionable” theories without hard
work and without having to master or teach sophisticated classics.”

VI. Privilege as Property: Whose Takeover?

A.

Innocence (Re)Asserted

Once one understands that hostility to substantive egalitarian change is
what animates the anti-PC crusade, the anomaly of conservatives passionately

feminists-deemed-lesbians or lesbians-deemed-sex-obsessed may corrupt the young, it is promot-
ing a particularly misogynist and homophobic agenda.

‘8 2Wa11 Street Journal, supra note 150.
183D’Souza, supra note 56 at 62. He also states that questioning the neutrality of all standards
“make[s] it more respectable within the university for minority-group members to be admitted or
hired without reference to the reactionary notion of academic merit … [B]y reducing truth to bias,
and knowledge to ideology, some believe they can win greater rewards than they might have by
struggling to meet traditional academic-review criteria, such as the publishing requirements for hir-
ing and tenure” (ibid. at 76-78). See also Open Letter, supra note 7; Amy Friedman, Nothing
Sacred: A Conversation with Feminism (Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1992) at 43-44.
184See Randall Kennedy, “Racial Critiques of Legal Academia” (1989) 102 Harv. L. Rev. 1745.
Kennedy warns that a concept of “intellectual standing” in legal scholarship based on race would
likely “transform the study of race-relations law into a zone of limited intellectual competition”
(ibid. at 1795).

185See e.g. Kimball, supra note 10 at xiii, 7, 157; D’Souza, supra note 10 at 65.

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defending freedom of expression makes somewhat more sense. Formalists have
never supported affirmative action in principle because entitlement is based on
group status rather than individual merit, and on actual social and material ine-
quality not abstract equal opportunity blind to “accidents” of race, sex, ethnic
origin and so on. But neither, I think, did they ever imagine the degree to which
affirmative action would seriously challenge their world. Insulated in their self-
referential superiority, they expected the actual or deemed beneficiaries of
affirmative action to be grateful for token inclusion at the margins of university
life, all the while mindful of their presumptively second class minds and creden-
tials, deferential to their seniors, in short, knowing their place. When the priv-
ileged construct their subordinates as less than fully human, they confuse dis-
respect for others with lack of self-respect in others, assuming the subordinated
lack the will to resist conditions no self-respecting person, certainly no self-
respecting white man, would tolerate.

The maintenance of systemic inequality turns on more than the power of
the dominant to sell the rational merits or, at least, the necessity of dominant
norms. It also turns on the self-assurance of the dominant in their own disinter-
estedness and in the legitimacy and rational merit of their ideological and social
positions. Both conditions depend on powerholders’ exclusive and exclusionary
interpretive domain. However modest the real yield of affirmative action, the
self-legitimating authority of male supremacy and Eurocentrism as universally
civilizing goods is subverted by direct contact with the lives and knowledge of
the excluded. Because it was assumed that token women and minorities would
undertake to be seen and not heard, their refusal to comply has profoundly
shocked those who view them with lofty and benign disregard.

Changes to admissions, hiring and the curriculum have invariably been
hard-fought and hard-won. They have also been modest because proponents of
change are clearly outnumbered and unranked,’ 6 such that the boundaries of
institutional change can be contained. What cannot be contained is the informal
life of the community. It takes only one brave or desperate student to name the
racism, misogyny or heterosexism in a course syllabus, in a textbook or in class-
room conduct; only one leak to expose the open or veiled bigotry in hiring com-
mittee deliberations; only one impassioned student or faculty caucus to chal-
lenge administrative practices. Although effective control of university
decision-making power can determine the institutional outcome of such
moments, it cannot determine their personal impact on those challenged.

In anti-PC literature, the social, economic and professional power accrued
by imposed inequality is treated morally and legally as a vested right. Although
the running argument that affirmative action amounts to unjust expropriation is
an obvious illustration, it is an old theme. What is new is the degree and quality
of outrage expressed against the simple naming of inequality in concrete terms
at the local level. Piercing through the grand abstractions and ringing symbols
one can hear the unmistakable howls of wounded egos. The expropriation which
really hurts is the shake up of that systemically constructed personal self-regard

I86See infra notes 218, 242 and accompanying text.

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which turns on viewing one’s own privilege abstractly and ahistorically as inno-
cent and individually deserved, on having one’s perspective constantly reaf-
firmed as rational and meritorious, and on feeling superior to those isolated indi-
vidual bigots conveniently designated the authors of discrimination.” 7 When
disempowered individuals or groups name names, books, syllabi, and local pol-
icies as oppressive, those whose innocent self-regard is implicated react as if
attacked personally and without provocation, as if forceful self-defence were the
only appropriate response.’88 Anti-PC literature transforms the resentful out-
bursts of wounded egos into public-spirited defence of Westem tradition. Inno-
cent Mr. Nice Guy is restored even while No More Mr. Nice Guy takes
revenge. 89

The overt charge levelled against feminist and/or anti-racist and/or anti-
heterosexist scholars 9 is that their work and praxis amounts to political
“thought control” inconsistent with and fundamentally hostile to the tradition of
intellectual freedom cherished in the university. Their enterprise is categorically
labelled propagandistic, 9′ closed-minded,’92 totalitarian, 93 intolerant of dis-

187Freeman, supra note 24 at 96.
188See e.g. Williams, supra note 18 at 55-79, on the way that the mere presence of three Black
men in the white neighbourhood of Howard Beach was seen as provocation sufficient to justify
their savage beating. See also how a wife’s assertion of independence from her spouse reduces her
murder to manslaughter on the ground of provocation (Andrre C6t6, “La rage au coeur: rapport
de recherche sur le traitement judiciaire de l’homicide conjugal au Quebec” (Baie Comeau, Qu6.:
Regroupement des femmes de Ia Crte-Nord, 1991) [unpublished]).

1891t is not only full professors who bitterly resent being injured in their self-regard as a result
of encounters with insubordinate social subordinates. In my view, the only possible explanation for
the rapidity with which alarms against “political correctness” saturated the media and were so
widely and enthusiastically embraced is the outlet and relief anti-PC logic offers for injured inno-
cence. Those who resent any and all movements towards egalitarian change, particularly the expe-
rience of having their relative privileges or internalized prejudices named as such, may now ratio-
nalize feminist, racial minority and lesbian and gay bashing as a public-spirited, and even
courageous, defence of liberal values in the face of PC intolerance and intimidation.

tgNot all feminists are white, heterosexual women; not all women of colour fighting for equality
on campus identify themselves as feminists and not all men of colour are pro-feminist; not all les-
bians, Black, aboriginal or Asian students or faculty are feminist or committed to the struggle
against racism; not all gay men are white or pro-feminist or anti-racist. By my “and/or” structure,
I intend to acknowledge here not only that the membership within oppressed groups overlaps, but
that the priorities of oppressed groups sometimes collide and that privilege is relative.

91As David Toogood states:

[T]here is in [Canada] a clear limit to [the] level of propaganda tolerable in our edu-
cational system. We [cannot], now or in the future, offer a cloak of respectability to
individuals or organizations wishing to have an exclusive, unchallenged right to give
their version of current and historical events in our schools and universities, especially
where these views attempt to vilify identifiable sections of the community with con-
spiracy and oppression myths. We take this to be a self-evident truth regardless of
whether those involved are fascists or feminists (Queen’s Journal, supra note 7 at 11).

192Taylor in New York, supra note 92 at 40, claims that if labelling something racist makes debate
impossible, “that is just as well according to the new fundamentalists. Debate, and the analytic
thinking it requires, is oppressive.” See also Bok, supra note 5 at 8-9.

‘3See e.g. Wall Street Journal, supra note 150 at A10. The editorial states:

Students and others just emerging from the grip of political and cultural dictatorship
elsewhere in the world must look with astonishment at the eagerness with which the

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

sent 94 and self-righteously moralistic.19 These are extreme, even risky, claims
to make unless one is confident about one’s leverage to make the charges stick.
A one-sided debate helps, of course, as does one-sided reporting. But so does
the appeal to and promotion of that sense of outraged innocence made possible
by formal equality’s refusal to recognize systemic harms and their systemic con-
sequences.

B.

Intolerance (Re)Claimed

Most anti-PC literature refers to bitter and polarized campus debates over
egalitarian reform of admissions, curriculum content, pedagogy, hiring and pro-
motion. However, without exception, these articles single out as voices of intol-
erance only those who name curricular content, classroom discourse, or admin-
istrative decisions racist, sexist or heterosexist.’96 With very few exceptions,”9
the “victims” of campus intolerance profiled in the literature are those accused
or fearful of being accused of sexism or racism.’ Typically such accusations
are presented as outrageous,1 99 often on the basis of the credentials of the person
accused.2
00 Not once does someone faulted for racist or sexist conduct admit

people charged with managing American universities have embraced thought control,
political re-education and other basics of totalitarianism.

See also Adler in Newsweek, supra note 8 at 51: “PC is, strictly speaking, a totalitarian philoso-
phy.”

194This is the nub of the “censorship” claim. Interestingly, in the anti-PC literature, expressing
racism or heterosexism or misogyny is construed as dissent. See e.g. Hyde & Fishman, supra note
11 at 1478-92; the discussion of censorship, infra notes 228-30 and accompanying text.
195This charge is made by Allemang in The [Toronto] Globe and Mail: “Self-important, guilt-
tripping, holier-than-thou and unforgiving…. The new Puritans indulge in relentless moralizing.
Preaching tolerance of diversity, they foster intolerance and conformity” (supra note 27).

196One explanation is that historically subordinated groups are expected to accept insults or, at
least, spare offenders the discomfort of being accountable. See Williams, supra note 18 at 64-65.
197In the few exceptional cases, those subjected to what is conceded to be racist or sexist abuse

are students, not feminist faculty or scholars of colour.

’98See e.g. the remarks of Professor Judy Wubnig reported by Fennell in Maclean’s, supra note
8 at 40, 41. As well, see the often-repeated story of Harvard Professor Stephen Thernstrom, who
was called “racially insensitive” by three students-of colour for his approach to teaching slavery
and affirmative action. According to the lead paragraph by Taylor in New York, supra note 92,
Thernstrom was “haunted” for weeks by “denunciations, hissed in tones of self-righteousness and
contempt, vicious and vengeful, furious, smoking with hatred.” It was a “hellish … persecution.”
In Maclean’s, ibid. at 45, Thernstrom remarks that being accused of racial insensitivity is like
“being called a commie in the 1950s. Once accused, you’re always suspect.” See also D’Souza,
supra note 10 at 194-97, 200, 226-27 (when Harvard did not rush to his defence, Thernstrom
claimed “I felt like a rape victim …” (at 196)). For a very different account of the story from a Har-
vard student, see e.g. Rosa Ehrenreich, “What Campus Radicals?” (December 1991) Harper’s 57
at 57-58. For an account from a scholar with serious criticisms of Thermstrom’s defence of his own
ignorance, see Judith Frank, supra note 45 at 20-21.

199D’Souza’s chapter profiling a number of scholars challenged for biased teaching begins with
a quotation from Kafka: “Somebody must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without hav-
ing done anything wrong he was arrested one morning” (D’Souza, ibid. at 194).

2Ibid. For instance, Taylor in New York, supra note 92 at 35, describes Thernstrom as “one of
the preeminent scholars of the history of race relations in America” who has “won prizes and pub-
lished numerous afticles and four books”; Jenish in Maclean’s, supra note 8 at 45 describes him
as a “respected author and historian of racial and ethnic relations”; D’Souza notes Themstrom “had
a good reputation as a progressive” (ibid. at 194).

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there could be any validity in the judgment, or that he or she learned from the
encounter, let alone altered what at least some students or colleagues considered
offensive or oppressive.”‘ Nowhere does the literature present an unexpurgated
account of what triggered a complaint, for instance, by reprinting the entire text
of a student letter criticizing teacher bias. Rarely is a complainant interviewed
–
let alone profiled in the sympathetic detail reserved for faculty subject to crit-
icism –

about the impacts of the conduct which triggered a complaint.

Small wonder, then, that in anti-PC literature it is far worse to be called
racist or sexist, even by a student, than to be subjected to racism or sexism, even
by a grading instructor.2″ For Charles Sykes, “even though they are often utterly
without merit, charges of ‘racism’ can take a terrible toll”: people are “pillor-
ied,” “denounced,” and “assigned into the academic gulag of ‘sensitivity train-
ing seminars’.””2 3 For Judy Wubnig, many faculty are frightened of “attack”: “If
I give a bad grade to a student from a minority group, then I could be assailed
as a racist.”2” For Congressman Hyde,

It is not a pleasant experience to be branded by one’s peers and professors as “rac-
ist,” “sexist,” or “homophobic.” Students witness the creation of inquisitorial star
chambers dedicated to the eradication of political and cultural insensitivity … They
know that to be brought before such a tribunal means possible career-jeopardizing
punishment.

205

On its face, this is hardly disinterested non-partisan reportage. Less obvious to
the reader of isolated accounts is the air-brush treatment received by “victims”
of bias allegations. For instance, to illustrate his claim that “hostility to free
expression in the name of race and gender sensitivities is now the norm” on
American campuses, Dinesh D’Souza relates the case of Nina Wu. We learn that
Ms Wu was expelled from her dormitory and dining hall after she

put up what she considered to be a humorous poster on her dormitory door.
Among the categories of people who were “unwelcome” in her room, the poster
allegedly listed “bimbos,” “preppies,” “racists,” and “homos.” She was brought up
on charges by the administration and found guilty of using the word “homos” in
violation of a policy which prohibits “making slurs or epithets based on race, sex,
ethnic origin, religion or sexual orientation. ‘ 2

0

6

20 lndeed, some faculty criticized for discriminatory practices have responded by refusing to
teach the course in which they were criticized. For instance, Michigan’s Robert Farley withdrew
his course on race relations after Black and white students criticized its content: “I experienced
considerable hostility from a small number of people. It was too much of a hassle to teach the
course” (Jenish in Maclean’s, supra note 8 at 45). The same route was adopted by Harvard’s
Stephen Themstrom and Ian Macneil. See D’Souza, ibid. at 194-99. What is astonishing is that
even D’Souza’s sympathetic portrait of these “victims” reveals they deserved criticism.
202Interestingly, in all the profiles of faculty reportedly devastated by being told their pedagogy
or research was oppressive to some people, none deals with the devastation of being challenged
for anti-lesbian or anti-gay conduct. Perhaps heterosexism is still so normalized that such chal-
lenges do not yet undermine self-regard.

203Supra note 78 at 56.
204As reported by Fennell in Maclean’s, supra note 8 at 40, 43.
205Hyde & Fishman, supra note 11 at 1484.
26D’Souza, supra note 10 at 145. Kevin Doyle’s editorial (“The Evil of the Nons” in Maclean’s,
supra note 8 at 4) refers to the poster as “ridiculing homos” et aL Todd Pettigrew leads his column

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

In fact, the poster said “homos” et al. are “people who are shot on sight.”27 It
is true, that the term “homo” is considered denigrating by lesbians and gay men,
and conveys, at a minimum, their unwelcomeness. It is not true that the slur
complained of reduces to the word “homos.” And the term “unwelcome” does
not accurately capture the injury of a poster which publicly jokes about shooting
“homos” on sight.

D’Souza also claims that the University of Michigan’s speech code has
“resulted in the harassment and punishment” of those whose views fall “outside
the range of acceptable orthodoxy.” By way of illustration, he cites a Social
Work student censured for expressing in class his view that homosexuals could
be “cured.” Even though the student was cleared of violating the speech code,
the panel which heard the complaint suggested the student should be reviewed
by “appropriate social’work professionals in considering his suitability as a pro-
fessional social worker.”2 “8 What D’Souza fails to mention is that it was not the
student’s ideas which concerned the panel (which is why they found no speech
code violation) but his conduct outside of the classroom. He not only stated that
he believed homosexuality was a disease, but that he was developing a counsel-
ling plan to cure lesbian and gay “patients” and was already treating several of
his “patients” accordingly.” At a minimum, this amounts to imposing his pri-
vate views and/or bigotry on others in a potentially coercive context without
professional accreditation or academic permission and despite medical opinion
that homosexuality as such is not a disease.2″‘

Another often reported example of PC intolerance is the expulsion of a
Brown student. As Congressman Hyde tells the story, “[slometimes such speech
seems nothing more than mean-spirited: At Brown University, a student was
expelled for drunkenly shouting a number of anti-Black, anti-Semitic and anti-
homosexual epithets the night of his birthday. 2.1 In fact, after shouting the
string of epithets, he directed anti-Semitic slurs towards an individual Jewish
student. On a separate occasion he also directed racist slurs toward an individual
Black student. Only after the second offence was he expelled.2″2

entitled “Tyranny of Goodwill Presents a Real Danger” London Free Press (5 October 1991) E5,
with the story of Wu’s “lighthearted notice … which campus homosexuals found offensive.”

expulsion, she was allowed to return.

2Adler in Newsweek, supra note 8 at 48. When Ms Wu filed a federal lawsuit protesting her
2 0 Supra note 10 at 148.
2gHyde & Fishman, supra note 11 at 1476, citing Doe v. University of Michigan, 721 F. Supp.
852 at 865 (E.D. Mich. 1989). A separate complaint against the same student concerning sexual
harassment was upheld.
21In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association agreed that homosexuality per se is not a dis-
ease and removed it from its official catalogue of mental illnesses, the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual (DSM). Indeed the DSM now contains a condition called “ego dystonic homosexuality”
which describes as maladjusted the lesbian or gay man who wishes to convert to heterosexuality.
See Celia Kitzinger, The Social Construction of Lesbianism (London: Sage Publications, 1987) at
43, 53-54. This is not to elevate psychiatrists or other medical professionals as reliable authorities
on lesbian and gay well-being. It is to suggest that a social work student who unilaterally under-
takes to “cure” lesbians and gays is not a victim of “censorship” and is clearly in need of super-
visory review.

211Hyde & Fishman, supra note 11 at 1488.
2 12 Jones, supra note 83 at 1398, note 62. For another tilted report, see the discussion of Professor

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In these accounts, media reports of dramatic increases in campus racism
and anti-Semitism are said to be inflated by the hypersensitive reactions of
women and racial minorities to “ambiguous” incidents, and even by faked inci-
dents initiated by their alleged victims to prove bigotry is a problem.2″3 But even
unambiguously hostile incidents are said to be the natural and justifiable back-
lash to affirmative action. It is nothing so simple as a privileged elite’s resist-
ance to sharing space with society’s historic outsiders, whose very presence as
well as distinctive life experiences and perspectives challenge previously
uncontested truths. It is rather what Dinesh D’Souza calls the “new racism”
based, not on the prejudice of ignoramuses, but on rational observation, notions
of fairness and principled reaction to hypocrisy.2″ 4

The anatomy of the new racism goes like this. First, elite universities lower
their entrance standards and admit racial minority students whose intellectual
abilities are unequal to unaltered academic standards. Soon, such students fall
so far behind that even tutorials cannot help them cope. Dislocated from their
old communities and troubled by academic inadequacy, they gravitate to race-
specific student caucuses or theme houses where they find “a novel explanation
for their difficulties”: subtle, even “deceptively polite” racism in everyone
around them, and deep-rooted institutional racism in the administration. Affirm-
ative action is not to blame for their personal failures, pervasive racism is.
“Meanwhile feminists and homosexual activists” exploit the “moral momentum
of the race issue” and complain that they too are victimized by the same
oppressor. And administrators “eager.to deflect frustration and anger” from
themselves agree to narrow “re-education efforts” to “target the white, male,
heterosexual element” so that in a “Kafkaesque turn of events, the academic ine-
quality of minority students is blamed on the social prejudices of their white
male peers.”2 5 The end result is the new racism emanating from white and
Asian students who enter college open-minded and tolerant until they are con-
fronted by the inherent unfairness of admissions policies which restrict entry of
well-qualified people like themselves in favour of underqualified Black and
Hispanic students, snubbed by those minorities who cling to separatism and
censured if they then try to discuss their concerns about both.

Therstrom’s story, supra note 198.

2t3See e.g. Hyde & Fishman, supra note 11 at 1471-74; D’Souza, supra note 10 at 132-36. On
“ambiguity,” compare D’Souza’s account of a white student who painted an Afro haircut and thick
lips on a Beethoven poster (ibid. at 133-34) with the analysis of the same incident by Williams,
supra note 18 at 110-15. On faked incidents, see D’Souza, ibid. at 134-36.

214D’Souza, ibid. at 24041.
2t5Ibid. at 230-36. See also Taylor in New York, supra note 92 at 40: “instead of increasing self-
esteem, schools that offer an Afrocentric education will ohly turn out students who are more resent-
ful, and incompetent, than ever”; Bloom, supra note 68 at 95 says: “And everywhere hypocrisy,
contempt-producing lies about what is going on and how the whole system is working. This little
black empire has gained its legitimacy from the alleged racism surrounding it and from which it
defends its subjects.” At 96, Bloom continues: “A disposition … of shame and resentment has set-
tled on many black students who are beneficiaries of preferential treatment…. White students do
not really believe in the justice of affirmative action, do not wish to deal with the facts, and turn
without mentioning it to … non-black society. Affirmative action (quotas), at least in universities,
is a source of what I fear is a long-term deterioration of the relations between the races in Amer-
ica.”

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Nina Wu’s poster, the Social Work student who imposed his personal cure
on his lesbian and gay clients and the Brown student’s anti-Semitic epithets are
hard to reconcile with D’Souza’s victim-blaming rationales for campus racism,
or his trivialization of feminist and lesbian and gay equality struggles. So are the
students who hung up posters celebrating “Bestiality Awareness Day” to protest
gay awareness programs at Yale, the students who published a column describ-
ing an administrator as a “feminazi” suffering from “penis envy,” or D’Souza’s
own bigotry at Dartmouth.2″6

C. Omission (Re)Constructed

Even if one strips backlash to affirmative action of its blame-the-victim
dimensions, the anti-PC account of campus turmoil reveals the errors of omis-
sion paradigmatic of a formalist worldview. Women’s struggles to replace the
formalist regime of equal pay for equal work with comparable worth legislation
make no sense without a historic account of the origins and consequences of
sex-based wage inequalities and occupational segregation. Similarly, campus
initiatives to alter admissions standards, curriculum content and hiring and pro-
motion procedures make little sense without a historic account of the discrim-
inatory practices in universities which led to calls for change.

To the extent that this literature alludes to exclusionary practices in univer-
sities at all, the point made is that the present underrepresentation of men of col-
our and women on faculty is the result of past wrongs now eliminated, and that
the cure should not be present wrongs against the best qualified candidates or
against academic standards.2″7 That the bad old days did not end when admis-
sion and hiring were formally opened to men of colour and women is utterly
ignored in the anti-PC literature. This erasure gives credence to claims that
reports of a dramatic increase in racism and sexism on campus are exaggerated
by hypersensitive complainants and that affirmative action is primarily to blame
for the problem, while it simultaneously shores up the credibility of the eminent
men who claim to have been unfairly victimized by bias allegations. But it is
not only history and context which are erased. People are disappeared, too: all
those feminist and minority students and faculty who have experienced, docu-
mented and/or litigated academic discrimination disappear without a trace in
this white-washed defence of traditionalism.

The catalogue of what has been erased in the telling gives a different mean-
ing to the metaphor of “thought control.” There is no reference to long-standing
and continuing preferential hiring of white men over white women and minor-
ities in violation of merit criteria,”‘ and little or no reference to admissions prac-

216See Hyde & Fishman, supra note I1 at 1483. See also supra note 10 and accompanying text.
217See e.g. D’Souza, supra note 10 at 162-66; Bloom, supra note 68 at 89-97.
21 On racism in hiring, see comparative credentials of minority and non-minority faculty hired
in 1987-88 by American law schools noted by Leslie Espinoza, “Masks and Other Disguises:
Exposing Legal Academia” (1990) 103 Harv. L. Rev. 1878 at 1882-83. On sexism, see Constance
Backhouse, Roma Harris, Gillian Michell & Alison Wylie, “The Chilly Climate for Faculty
Women at University of Western Ontario” (November 1989) at 6-8 [unpublished, on file with
author]; Sheila McIntyre, “Promethea Unbound: A Feminist Perspective on Law in the University”
(1989) 38 U.N.B.L.J. 157 at 159-61 and sources cited therein.

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tices which relax standards for the children of alumni/ae.219 There is no refer-
ence to the extensive academic writing on the “chilly” or openly hostile aca-
demic climate faced by white women, women and men of colour, or lesbians
and gay men on faculty.22 None of this literature refers to the extensive and
sorry litigation history of feminist or other critical scholars denied renewal or
tenure on discriminatory grounds, or the degree to which academic freedom has
been used to justify termination. 2 The pervasiveness of sexual harassment in
universities, the history of institutional inaction and/or faculty resistance to anti-
harassment regulations and the reasons for and ,problems of under-reporting
never appear in this literature.2 Where sexual harassment is mentioned at all,
it is in the context of male professors’ fear of or anger at being “falsely” charged
for making sexist remarks or jokes and being unable to clear their names.’
Finally, in anti-PC writing, not one feminist or minority scholar receives any air
time to describe in his or her own words his or her personal experiences of dis-
criminatory treatment by colleagues or administrators, or the adverse impact of
such treatment on their work, career ambitions and well-being.

In aggregate, these compound omissions present a one-sided picture that is
both false and utterly indulgent of the property of privilege. Perhaps some of the

2191n 1988, children of Harvard alumnae/i exceeded the number of students admitted through

affirmative action (Duster, supra note 156 at 33, 63).

22See sources listed supra notes 41, 218. As well, see generally Katharine Bartlett & Jean
O’Barr, “The Chilly Climate on College Campuses: An Expansion of the ‘Hate Speech’ Debate”
[1990] Duke L.J. 574; Bell, supra note 73; Anne Innis Dagg & Patricia Thompson, MisEducation:
Women and Canadian Universities (Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1988);
Richard Delgado, “The Imperial Scholar: Reflections on a Review of Civil Rights Literature”
(1984) 132 U. Pa. L. Rev. 561; Richard Delgado, “Minority Law Professors’ Lives: The Bell-
Delgado Survey” (1989) 24 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 349; Charles Martin, “The Origins of Racial
& Ethnic Conflict on U.S. College and University Campuses” (1991) 37 Wayne L. Rev. 1363; Nel-
lie McKay, “Black Woman Professor-White University” in Klein & Steinberg, eds., supra note 16
at 36; Athena Theodore, The Campus Troublemakers: Academic Women in Protest (Houston: Cap
and Gown Press, 1986); Jeri Dawn Wine, “Outsiders on the Inside: Lesbians in Canadian Aca-
deme” in Sharon Dale Stone, ed., Lesbians in Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1990) 157.
221For a summary of the scholarship and caselaw on academic sex discrimination suits, see Mary
Gray, “Academic Freedom and Nondiscrimination: Enemies or Allies?” (1988) 66 Texas L. Rev.
1591. Gray notes that the only cases in which discrimination suits prevailed over an institution’s
claims of academic freedom involve white plaintiffs against Black institutions. Otherwise, courts
have been “extremely deferential” to the academic power structure and rarely find for the plaintiff
in sex discrimination suits. For personal accounts of some of the human casualties, see Phoebe
Haddon, “Academic Freedom and Governance: A Call for Increased Dialogue and Diversity”
(1988) 66 Texas L. Rev. 1561 (events following summary discharge of Black Dean of Temple Law
School); Newsletter of the Conference on Critical Studies (July 1988) (containing brief articles, let-
ters and circulars describing renewal and tenure denials of feminist and critical legal scholars at
Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania and City University of New York at Queens).
222See e.g. Phyllis Crocker, “Annotated Bibliography on Sexual Harassment in Education”
(1982) 7 Women’s Rts. L. Rep. 91; Kathleen Storrie, Pearl Dykstra & Kelleen Wiseman, “Bibli-
ography on Sexual Harassment” (1981) 10:4 Resources for Feminist Research 25; L. Canimaert,
“How Widespread is Sexual Harassment on Campus?” (1985) 8 Int. J. of Women’s Studies 388.
On under-reporting, see Arjun Aggarwal, Sexual Harassment in the Workplace, 2d ed. (Toronto:
Butterworths, 1992) at 127-29, especially note 3 which cites three cases in which women students
faced defamation suits after filing complaints.

223See Fennell in Maclean’s, supra note 8 at 42; D’Souza, supra note 10 at 199.

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

authors of the anti-PC version of campus conflict really believe that the academ-
ics most at risk of professional reprisal for their views are conservatives or
white men accused of sexism or racism. Yet even in their own accounts, none
of the men named as casualties of the PC menace has been disciplined let alone
discharged. Only one tenure denial is even cited and it dates from the 1970s; the
more common story is of male scholars sufficiently marketable to move to insti-
tutions they find more congenial 4 or sufficiently senior to refuse to continue
teaching courses in which they have been challenged.’ More, none of the great
names reportedly devastated by student complaints or paralyzed by the possibil-
ity they might be criticized comes close to being as personally or professionally
vilified, misrepresented and trivialized as the feminists, lesbians and scholars of
colour featured in anti-PC books and articles which play to an audience of mil-
lions, not to the readers of student papers. As for students, the newly elected edi-
tor of the Harvard Crimson has said:

People call the Crimson and ask what we “did to that man” [Professor Thems-
trom]. It’s important to remember who has the power here, because it’s not stu-
dents. Who would dare criticize a professor for political reasons now? In addition
to fearing for your grade, you’d fear being pilloried in the national press. 226

Slanted reporting and factual omissions support the fiction that inequality’s
victims have turned the tables on history and now victimize white men. The
widespread currency of this fiction also illustrates the way power can dictate
what becomes accepted cultural knowledge. Another illustration is the way
anti-PC literature appropriates the discourse and experience of marginalized
groups to reassert and legitimate control.

D. Discourse (Re)Appropriated

The most obvious appropriation is of the term “political correctness”
itself.227 Adopted initially by activists of the 1960s, sometimes ironically, some-
times self-mockingly, sometimes self-critically, it targeted dogmatism, preachi-
ness and uncritical embrace of any party line. To be sure, within the New Left,
anti-racism, feminist and lesbian and gay movements, strategies, theories and
political principles have been debated passionately, divisively and sometimes

224University of Toronto political philosophy professor Thomas Pangle claims Yale denied him
tenure in the late 1970s (i.e. well before the “PC menace” existed) because he was regarded as too
conservative (Jenish in Maclean’s, supra note 8 at 45); Professor Paul Bator left Harvard Law
School for the University of Chicago Law School because of the alleged political disruption caused
by Critical Legal Scholars (Frug, supra note 7 at 679); Professor Ian Macneil chose not to seek
an extension of his Visitorship at Harvard after being criticized for sexism, but to move on to
Northwestern (D’Souza, supra note 10 at 199). More commonly, discrimination against white men
is simply proclaimed as a fact. See e.g. Open Letter, supra note 7; Sykes, supra note 78 at 21.

2
25See supra note 201.
226Ehrenreich, supra note 198 at 61. As to the claim that multiculturalism has displaced the core
curriculum at Harvard, Ehrenreich, who majored in English and American literature and history,
had only two women teachers in thirty-two courses, was never assigned a single work by a Black
woman, and never even saw a Black or Hispanic professor. Compare D’Souza’s chapter, “Tyranny
of the Minority: Teaching Race and Gender at Harvard” (supra note 10 at c. 7).

227For a history of the origins of the term, see Ruth Perry, “Historically Correct” (1992) 9:5

Women’s Rev. Books 15.

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dogmatically. But when some stance was or seemed self-righteously dogmatic,
someone was sure to urge a more textured critical analysis by warning against
political correctness.

Opponents of affirmative action portray all proponents of substantive egal-
itarian reform and all critics of racism, misogyny or-heterosexism as a powerful
unitary movement devoted to imposing its own political orthodoxy on others
through campus demonstrations, intimidating labels and anti-harassment poli-
cies intolerant of “dissent.” The catchphrase “political correctness” is wonder-
fully efficient in discrediting (and trivializing) commitment to equality of
results. It converts all criticism of oppressive practices into anti-democratic,
even totalitarian, thought control, and inclusive pedagogy encouraging critical
thought about accepted wisdom into indoctrination for closed-mindedness. At
the same time, minority activism against majoritarian “truths” claiming univer-
sal appeal and neutral origins and impacts is converted from political dissent
into a moralizing crusade. This ascription of radicalism and puritanism to sub-
stantive egalitarians conveys illiberalism writ large.’

In a related move, critics of political correctness, despite their power and
majority within universities and their pages and pages of media attention, insist
that their voices have been “silenced.”229 The anatomy of oppression as silenc-
ing and the project of claiming voice as an act of liberation originated in and
continues to animate feminist, anti-racist and lesbian and gay scholarship.”0 The
metaphor comprehends both the manufactured invisibility of subordinated peo-
ples from cultural and political history manifest, for instance, in William F.
Buckley’s assertion that “from Homer to the nineteenth century no great book
has emerged from any non-European source,” 23′ and the literal silence of those
who know the dangers of talking back in the context of unequal power. Striving
to be seen and not heard; seeming sullen, servile, deferential, obsequious or stu-
pid; failing to report harassment or rape –
all these are spirit-destroying options
visiting contempt on subordinated classes, but they may be less self-destructive
than being lynched, gassed, battered, bashed or electroshocked, or merely fired,
demoted, denied tenure, failed or expelled.

In labelling the silenced the silencers, anti-PC literature simultaneously
creates a false symmetry between powerholders and those they disempower and

228See, supra notes 103, 136, 160-69, 193.
229Philosopher Cameron MacKenzie from the University of Alberta claims that only 137 faculty
members signed a petition demanding the university hire and promote solely on the basis of merit
because “[1]ots of people with tenure are scared to speak up” (Fennell in Maclean’s, supra note 8
at 43). Maclean’s cover story of 27 May 1991, is called “The Silencers.”

23See e.g. Nancy Jo Hoffman, “Breaking Silences: Life in the Feminist Classroom” in Culley
& Portuges, eds., supra note 6 at 12; Lawrence, supra note 61 at 453-55, 471-77; Audre Lorde,
SisterlOutsider (Freedom, Calif.: The Crossing Press, 1984) (“The Transformation of Silence into
Language and Action”); MacKinnon, supra note 59 at 39, 206-13; Tillie Olsen, Silences (New
York: Delacorte Press, 1978); Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose
1966-1978 (New York: Norton, 1979).

23Quoted in MeNew, supra note 103 at 6. See also Williams’ observation that when non-whites
achieve recognized greatness they are either counted as exceptions to their race, or erased of their
Blackness like Beethoven, Dumas and Pushkin in order to be claimed as Western (supra note 18
at 113-14).

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a hierarchy of injury elevating the interests of the powerful above those of the
disempowered. By insisting that calling someone a racist is as intimidating,
chilling of speech and harmful to education as being racist, racism becomes an
idea whose articulation becomes dissent. At the same time, having promoted the
belief that racism is not systemic in educational institutions or society and that
allegations of racism are often self-serving fabrications to excuse personal fail-
ure, anti-PC literature portrays the books, practices and teachers who have been
criticized as innocent underdogs bravely defending the virtues of educational
and democratic tradition against outsider attack.

The final appropriation is as ironic as it is outrageous. In the anti-PC lit-
erature, calling a professor on racism or (hetero)sexism, especially anony-
mously, is to engage in “McCarthy-like” tactics. This was the denunciation lev-
elled against the authors of the “Chilly Climate” report at the University of
Western Ontario by President Pedersen. 2 Another spin is that calling someone
racist, sexist or anti-lesbian “is like being a commie in the 1950s. Once accused,
you’re always suspect. ‘””s Ironically, the new McCarthyism accusation coexists
with pervasive red-baiting throughout anti-PC literature. New scholars are rou-
tinely described as “left-leaning” or Marxist, 34 their praxis is labelled
“re-education” or “thought control” and their deviance is highlighted by refer-
ence to the decline of communism in Eastern Europe.15

The McCarthyism metaphor only works if one holds that anti-racist, fem-
inist and gay and lesbian activists have powerful institutional backers or com-
mand a monopoly over institutional opinion. And indeed, this is a common
assertion. Dinesh D’Souza writes that the influence of these new scholars “is in
many places dominant; soon they will displace the old guard,” and that “[m]ost
university presidents and deans cooperate in the project to transform liberal edu-
cation in the name of minority victims. This group includes an overwhelming
majority of presidents of state universities and of Ivy League schools.” 6 The
literature paints a picture of tyranny achieved. Newsweek speaks of the “march
of PC across American campuses” where “no aspect of university life is too

232Backhouse et al., supra note 218; Alan Bass & Wendy McCann, “Pederson Assails Anonym-

ity” London Free Press (17 November 1989) B2.

233The quotation is from Professor Themstrom, referring to a student letter in the Harvard Crim-
son about his lack of “racial sensitivity” (Jenish in Maclean’s, supra note 8 at 45). In D’Souza’s
account, Thernstrom’s letter of reply to the complaint named it “McCarthyism of the left” (supra
note 10 at 195). Newsweek’s feature story is subtitled “Is This the New Enlightenment on Campus
or the New McCarthyism?” (supra note 8 at 48). See also Judge Gee, supra note 42 at 1617, who
remarks that “reverse McCarthyism” against conservatives “occurs almost daily.”

23I have read no anti-PC book or article which does not contain red-baiting language. Even one
of the only intentionally discrediting portraits of conservatives in anti-PC writing is also red-
baiting. Adler in Newsweek, supra note 8 at 49, reports that Professor James D. Barber, a member
of the National Association of Scholars, “stalked into the political-science section [of the Duke
bookstore] one day last spring and turned on its spine every volume with “Marx” in its title –
about one out of seven by his count, a lot more attention than he thought it warrants –
demanded their removal.”

235See e.g. Adler in Newsweek, ibid. at 53; Wall Street Journal, supra note 150; D’Souza, supra
note 10 at 79, 214; Carey, supra note 150 at 107; Meyer, supra note 50 at 115; George Will, as
quoted in McNew, supra note 103.

and angrily

236Supra note 56 at 55, 57.

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obscure to come under [PC] scrutiny.” 7 The Wall Street Journal declares that
“[i]n colleges and universities the country over, political re-education has been
institutionalized. 2 38 Maclean’s cover story called “The Silencers” is sub-titled
“A New Wave of Repression is Sweeping through the Universities.” 9 Anony-
mous members of the Canadian legal profession declared that “[a] most power-
ful network of supporting feminist groups commanding often unchallenged
influence at the highest levels of government and the public media stand by
ready to destroy the career of any non-conforming male faculty.” The root of the
problem, they wrote, is “a dangerous one-view domination by self-styled fem-
inists of the recruitment process, belying the paucity of their numbers. People
are afraid to criticize their feminist wisdom. No one dares speak the truth
openly.”24 Why? “This is a new McCarthyism. It is more frightening than the
old McCarthyism, which had no support in the academy. Now, the enemy is
within.”24′

Leaving aside the plain untruthfulness of the takeover myth in terms of fac-
ulty demographics and power, 2 or of universities’ non-collaboration during the
McCarthy era,243 the case for McCarthyism turns primarily on the allegedly
chilling effect of campus anti-discrimination policies on intellectual inquiry and
the heightened consciousness against discriminatory conduct they provoke.
Although it is true that anti-discrimination policies and/or anti-harassment codes
have been implemented at many colleges and universities,2′
the number of
complaints processed under such policies or codes appears tiny compared to
estimates of the expression of bigotry on campus. For instance, one 1990 U.S.
study estimates that 800,000-1,000,000 minority students (about twenty per-

utation, see Frug, supra note 7.

237Supra note 8 at 49, 51.
28Supra note 150.
29Fennell in Maclean’s, supra note 8 at 40.
24See supra note 7.
241Professor Themstrom, quoted by Jenish in Maclean’s, supra note 8 at 45. But for ample ref-
242D’Souza states that 2.2% of American faculty members are Black (supra note 10 at 167); in
Canada, by 1989, 17.2% of tenured or tenure track faculty positions were held by women (Cana-
dian Association of University Teachers, Status of Women Supplement (1991) at 13); in the U.S.,
Scott states that 31% of U.S. faculty are women, but does not indicate what proportion of those
are not tenure track (supra note 11 at 36); as of 1988, only 47 of 5,860 full-time law faculty in
the U.S. were Latino/a (Espinoza, supra note 218 at 1882); a recent poll of 35,478 American fac-
ulty members disclosed they self-identify as follows: “far left” (4.9%), “liberal” (36.8%), “mod-
erate” (40.2%) and “conservative” (17.8%) (Duster, supra note 156 at 63); the number of four-year
American universities requiring some racial content in their mandatory Western or world civiliza-
tion course was 20%: Phyllis Franklin, Bettina Huber & David Laurence, “Continuity and Change
in the Study of Literature” (1992) 24:1 Change 42 at 51.
243See Frug, supra note 7 (review of Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the

Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)).

244Although the American Civil Liberties Union publicized reports that 70% of U.S. colleges
and universities have adopted restrictive speech codes, the survey it relies upon indicated only that
60% of respondents had a written policy on “bigotry, racial harassment, or intimidation.” Policies
are not speech codes. Note, too, 40% had no policy in place at all at that time (Collins, supra note
5 at 15). In Canada, the Federal Contractor’s Program conditions eligibility to bid on federal con-
tracts of $200,000 on written commitment to employment equity. Virtually all Canadian universi-
ties have now drafted written policies endorsing employment equity. Few have yet been reviewed.
See Canadian Association of University Teachers, Bulletin (October 1990) 19.

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

cent) are subjected to at least one “ethnoviolent” incident every year.245 By com-
parison, consider that the University of Wisconsin, which has more than
160,000 students’state-wide, received a total of thirty-two complaints about all
forms of harassment during the first eighteen months its anti-harassment code
was in operation. Of the first twenty-five cases processed, fifteen were dis-
missed, and only one resulted in suspension.246 Similarly, the gap between sex-
ual harassment or sexual assault on campus and complaints reported is huge,
notwithstanding policies to process complaints.247

My point is not that so few members of the university community are actu-
ally reprimanded or disciplined that campus speech is not significantly chilled
by harassment codes, although it does appear that far less hateful speech is
chilled than one might hope; it is that the potential chilling effect of anti-
discrimination policies on arguably discriminatory speech and conduct occupies
the whole anti-PC landscape. The frightening or degrading impact of racist,
misogynist and/or heterosexist harassment in an already chilly climate is dis-
counted directly or indirectly.

The direct method involves referring to hostile, denigrating or abusive con-
duct as isolated “sophomoric humour,” “insensitivity” or “imprudent” slip-ups
which cause “hurt feelings.” ‘ This is to be contrasted with “devastation” and
“violation” caused by the “denurqciation,” “pillorying,” “persecution” and
“excoriation” of “allegations” about the insensitivity or humour of speech code
offenders.249 The indirect method involves back-of-the-bus logic: historically
subordinated groups should subordinate their claim to freedom from harassment
and to equality in the interest of the freedom of expression. The targets, in short,
are expected to pay a price –
for the
good of that larger society whose history is marked by securing privilege at their
expense. The privileging of the universal value of free speech, even of racists
and misogynists, over the equality of groups that law has so long constructed

their own equality, dignity, expression –

2 5See Charles Jones, supra note 83 at 1389-90 and notes.
246Patricia Hodulik, supra note 83. Of ten disciplinary orders, one required a written apology,
one resulted in a warning letter, and seven led to probation. The probation and suspension orders
resulted from breach of the harassment code plus another breach of conduct such as assault or
threats (ibid. at 1441). Epithets disciplined included calling a woman “fucking cunt” and “fucking
bitch”; calling a Black employee “a piece of shit nigger,” and sending a computer message to an
Islamic professor saying “Death to all Arabs!! Die Islamic scumbags” (ibid. at 1443). Ms Hodulik
also notes that the Madison campus alone processes between 1,000 and 1,200 cases of student dis-
cipline annually for other violations of university rules.

247

See e.g. Dagg & Thompson, supra note 220 at 94-112 (Chapter nine, relating numerous
instances of sexism and sexual harassment on campuses); Lyn Kathlene, “Beneath the Tip of the
Iceberg” (1992) 9:5 Women’s Rev. Books 30. When the University of Massachusetts added sexual
orientation to its non-discrimination policy, heterosexist backlash (“hang a homosexual in effigy”
posters, “kill all gays on sight” graffiti) led to a survey of lesbians, gays and bisexuals to identify
their concerns. Fifty percent of respondents reported having been verbally harassed on campus. See
F.elice Yeskel, “The Price of Progress” (1992) 9:5 Women’s Rev. Books 21 at 21.

24SSee Mar Matsuda, “Public Responses to.Racist Speech,” supra note 83 at 2327-31, listing
true “just kidding” stories that have been dismissed as harmless, random and isolated, and conclud-
ing at 2331 that for targetted communities “it is logical to link together several thousand real life
stories into one tale of caution.”

249See e.g. Smith, supra note 80, for an extreme illustration.

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as second-class or non-persons,250 says a lot about the privilege served by uni-
versalism. Similarly, the invocation of established legal precedent to prove that
no existing exceptions to free speech cover hate speech, says a great deal about
the constitutional omissions which remain at the heart of democracy-according-
to-formalism. The timeless truths defended by formalists in invoking either aca-
demic freedom or freedom of expression tell a one-sided story which serves par-
tisan interests and relies on omission for its stature.

VII. The Anti-Democratic Face of Formalism

There is little doubt that the attack on the intolerance of equality-seeking
groups has met with an enormously sympathetic reception. Used to a different
kind of backlash within the universities, those of us who are lujuped together
as totalitarian have yet to mount an effective response. Partly, I think this is
because our energy has been consumed for years in proving sexism, racism and
heterosexism actually exist systemically within universities, and in struggling
for painfully slow and modest incremental changes. As a result, the claim that
we have successfully secured quotas, silenced intransigent opposition and effec-
tively taken over the university has seemed too ridiculous to refute. Partly, I
think we grossly under-estimated how little change those accustomed to unac-
countable power and hegemonically enforced eminence are prepared to tolerate.
In the discourse on political correctness, small inroads towards inclusion
amount to a takeover, describing remarks or policies as racist or sexist amounts
to censorship, critique amounts to propaganda and dissent and protest amount
to intimidation or totalitarianism, whether they change nothing or persuade a
majority. The perplexing question is how one can rebut any of these allegations
without simply confirming the charges our opponents are so eagerly crediting.
To state the obvious, there is a grotesque inversion of reality taking place when
powerholders are victims, when opposing bigotry is intolerant and when closed-
mindedness is attributed to those who challenge traditions presented as sacro-
sanct. As Pat Williams has observed in trying to explain this ideological topsy-
turvy, being called an activist in these conservative times has become a slur in
a culture where the 1988 presidential election was won by denouncing Dukakis
as a liberal.sI

Since the ferment of the 1960s, opponents of top-down egalitarian change
have consistently maintained that inequality is a matter of private, bigoted atti-
tudes which are based on irrationality, myth and false stereotype, and which
cannot and should not be changed by legislation. 2 Education, not state action,
was proposed as the appropriate route to ending discrimination. No one ever
explained who, in an educational system overwhelmingly dominated by white,

25See Lawrence’s brilliant analysis of the way privilege operates here (supra note 61 at 472-76).
25INilliams describes a student coming to her office in tears after a school administrator called
her an “activist” for complaining about an exam which gratuitously incorporated racist stereotypes.
Williams writes that she initially couldn’t understand what was so distressing about the activist
label and then remembers “we’re in the middle of a presidential election in which the word ‘liberal’
has become a synonym for ‘better dead’ …” (supra note 18 at 80).

252See e.g. Peller, supra note 6; Peitchinis, supra note 119; Finley, supra note 99.

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

male heterosexuals, would be the educators to change all these attitudes 53
However exaggerated, all the accounts of the campus takeover by the politically
correct movement suggest that, at least in some universities, the educational sys-
tem has become a catalyst and site of egalitarian change. The men of colour and
the women being admitted or hired are doing more than merely changing the
demographics of the university population. They are, as D’Souza puts it, dilut-
ing and displacing the old core curriculum, and thereby subverting its claimed
neutrality and universal relevance, creating space for alternative perspectives,
affirming difference, accounting for domination and integrating the lived expe-
rience of disadvantage into what and how they teach. This should be heralded
as a triumph of liberal democracy, not a fundamental assault on its foundations,
unless those foundations presuppose perpetuation of white, male supremacy.

Those who have been struggling for such egalitarian change have often
been stonewalled by opponents who demand that terms such as feminism, rac-
ism, misogyny, ethnicity, heterosexism and so on be precisely defined before
reforms can be approved and formulated. And white liberals, mostly fren, have
placed the burden on egalitarian activists to help them understand the nature and
.consequences of inequality by teaching them (giving examples, explaining the
harm, displacing skepticism about its systemic dynamics). Yet in the anti-PC lit-
erature, a Smith college handout which defines oppressions such as hetero-
sexism, ableism and ageism is mocked by most of these articles as an instance
of thought control. 4 In Derek Bok’s swan-song as President of Harvard, “zeal-
ous” proponents of egalitarian change have assembled

a daunting list of ideas, words, and phrases –
seemingly innocuous –
sexist, hegemonic, homophobic, patriarchal, gynophobic, or worse.255

some of them quite familiar and
that one can utter only at the risk of being labeled racist,

Because it would be preposterous for a Harvard President to claim that profes-
sional educators are unable to absorb new ideas, words and phrases, the impli-
cation is that it is the labelling which is preposterous, arbitraryr, incomprehensi-
ble. In Bok’s rendering, campus struggles over oppressive practices are reduced
to protocols about linguistic usage. This posture of innocent bewilderment trivi-
alizes not only the extensive scholarly and non-scholarly literatures which offer
highly articulate elaborations of systems and practices labelled racist, sexist,
hegemonic and so on, but also the “zealots” who use such identifying labels.
What is conveyed is that egalitarian activists call everything oppressive, that

2 53On white, male dominance of educational institutions, see Patricia Hill Collins, “The Social
Construction of Black Feminist Thought” in Micheline Malson, Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, Jean
O’Barr & Mary Wyer, eds., Black Women in America: Social Science Perspectives, 2d ed. (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 297; Dale Spender, Invisible Women: The Schooling
Scandal (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1982); Dorothy Smith, “An Anal-
ysis of Ideological Structures and How Women Are Excluded: Considerations for Academic
Women” in Gaskell & McLaren, eds., supra note 6 at 249.

254Taylor in New York, supra note 92 at 36, prefaces his description of the Smith handout as fol-
lows: “This obsessive tendency to see oppression everywhere is creating a sort of New Age caste
system.” See also Adler in Newsweek, supra note 8 at 53-54; Wall Street Journal, supra note 150;
Jenish in Maclean’s, supra note 8 at 44.

255Supra note 5 at 7.

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they are incapable of distinguishing real racism from innocuous traditions, that
they are too intellectually lax to fathom the real meaning of hegemony. Anyone
who cared to read the literatures in question would not advance such ignorant
claims. That so many anti-PC voices so unapologetically disclose this kind of
ignorance underlines, on the one hand, how little they care to know or learn
about systemic inequality, particularly from those expert in or experienced
about the topic, and on the other, how much the academy is in need of precisely
the forms of affirmative action deplored throughout the anti-PC writings.

Everything about this literature denouncing the changers and the changed
suggests that powerholders never really wanted to be educated and deeply
resent the assertion that they have anything to learn from those they have sub-
ordinated as their inferiors or from the texts they can find no room for in the
core curriculum. It would seem that liberals and conservatives alike never
believed the educational system would or should actually become a vehicle of
consciousness-raising, particularly their own.

Liberal ideology has always been that “The System” is basically sound and
that effective and lasting social change can be better achieved by reforming the
system from within than by destructive revolutionary protest. Now, in the
anti-PC literature, the institutional transformations wrought by faculty commit-
ted to substantive equality are portrayed as illegitimate, the work of infiltrators
who have deviously secured tenure and administrative posts unobserved and
who now wield their power to compel change. 6 It seems that working from
within the system for incremental change is valid only in the abstract. When
change actually ensues with majority backing, it is explicable only as the result
of bullying and intimidation rather than rational persuasion based on the sub-
stantive merits of egalitarian change.”

Similarly, in the anti-PC literature student complaints against faculty or
administrative policies invariably amount to intimidation. Letters to the student
press (signed or unsigned), petitions, protest rallies, sensitivity workshops dur-
ing orientation, criticism of guest speakers –
all count as coercive. But one has
to wonder what other vehicles powerholders imagine students realistically have
available to them. Students’ grades, scholarships, summer employment and

2 6See e.g. D’Souza, supra note 56 at 52, where he states that “[t]his alteration of the principles
of liberal education … is occurring with little public scrutiny.” See also D’Souza, ibid. at 55-58;
Bernstein, The [Kingston] Whig-Standard, supra note 26 at A2, citing Allan Bloom’s complaint
about “a hidden radical agenda in university curriculums”; Wall Street Journal, supra note 150 at
AI0: “When the campus upheavals of the late 60s and early 70s ended, a relieved nation supposed
that learning would be restored to its rightful place. Who, though, would have imagined in the
wildest days of that era that 20 years later the universities would be given over to … ideological
zealotry … that would make the 60s militance seem like play by comparison? Today, though, it is
college presidents, deans and faculties –

not students – who are the zealots … ”

25

7For Adler in Newsweek, supra note 8 at 48, the PC agenda is
the program of a generation of campus radicals who grew up in the ’60s and are now
achieving positions of academic influence. If they no longer talk of taking to the streets,
it is because they now are gaining access to the conventional weapons of campus pol-
itics: social pressure, academic perks (including tenure) and – when they have the
administration on their side –

outright coercion.

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

future letters of reference depend on faculty. In a classroom debate, most com-
petent faculty, by virtue of their superior knowledge and communication skills,
can make student challengers look stupid. In institutional decisions about hiring,
teaching assignment and curriculum change, students only have token represen-
tation in public processes; their representatives are not often radically inclined;
and faculty still have potent behind-the-scenes networks to torpedo change. 8

Although all accounts of the proliferation of PC ideology explain campus
change as a product of the tyranny of a minority over the majority that silences
the voices of reason, the illustrations provided are unpersuasive. Leaving aside
the fact that the so-called silenced voices are getting phenomenal air time, this
literature equates consciousness-raising with censorship. As New York puts it,
“making people watch what they say is the central occupation of politically cor-
rect students.”‘”z9 Waterloo’s Judy Wubnig complains that in the new climate of
intolerance, teaching staffs are careful not to make jokes or unguarded state-
ments about women, homosexuals or members of racial minorities for fear of
being “denounced.””26 Berkeley’s David Littlejohn, who initially sounded
alarms about similarities between the “intimidation tactics” of current activists
and the red-baiting on campuses of the 1920s, 40s, 50s and 60s, later back-
tracked: “It’s people at the top who are often feeling intimidated. It isn’t so
much a matter of getting a job or even getting in print, as something in the air,
that you just don’t say some things.”‘ 6′

It should be astonishing when teachers equate thoughtfulness about what
they say with censorship or publicly admit fear about being held accountable for
classroom jokes about women, homosexuals or racial minorities. If one believes
that equality is desirable but far from achieved, it is hard to understand how
change will occur unless those who, consciously or unconsciously, manifest and
reproduce oppressive practices and attitudes become self-conscious about the
harms they cause. Ending unconscious (hetero)sexism and racism will be espe-
cially problematic if educators themselves are content to be unmindful about
What they say and journalists go along with them.

For professionals whose published theories and interpretative analyses are
esteemed by the amount of critical attention and debate they generate, the dis-
play of outrage and resentment toward student critics and the animosity toward
feminist and anti-racist scholarship evident in anti-PC literature is dumb-
founding. It is difficult not to conclude that status accounts for the extremity of
the reaction. The problem seems less that the new minorities in the academy are
intent on imposing some unitary version of political correctness on the majority,

258Berkeley’s Professor David Littlejohn, who has written of the dangers of the PC takeover,
admits he does not openly criticize colleagues he considers propagandists, but opposes them “by
sitting on promotion committees, by getting messages through to the budget committee, or the pro-
vost or the department chairman. That’s how you shoot down what you think is wrong.” See Brian
Hill, “Diversity Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” Berkeley Graduate (April 1991) 14 at 30.

259Taylor in New York, supra note 92 at 36.
2
6As reported by Fennell in Maclean’s, supra note 8 at 41.
21Hill, supra note 258 at 29-30.

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than that members of the majority should be corrected at all, particularly by
their juniors or presumptive social inferiors.

VHI. Epilogue

Anti-PC literature and its extraordinary proliferation make sense only if
you start from the premise that systemic inequality is a myth propagated by its
victims and/or that the privileged should be unaccountable for the harms they
do and from which they benefit.

If, as I do, you start from the premise that the systemic sexual, racial and
economic inequalities which structure Canadian and American society have
been empirically documented, you have to marvel at this portrait of powerhol-
ders as egos so frail that they will silently yield power rather than risk being
called racist or sexist, even with justification. I think of pervasive violence
against women and children, of slavery and its aftermath, of the residential
schools and system of adoption that nearly exterminated First Nations cultures
and the lack of jobs, adequate shelter and running water that threatens survivors,
of the growing numbers of the working poor, unemployed and homeless and
food banks in a decade of tax reform benefiting the rich, of gay bashing and les-
bian custody battles. I also think of the under-representation of white women,
people of colour and out lesbians and gay men on police forces, in higher edu-
cation, in government, in corporate decision-making. I think of Bonnie Robi-
chaud, Anita Hill, Rodney King, Wade Lawson, Harvey Milk, Patricia Ireland,
Donald Marshall, Tawana Brawley, Sofia Cooke, Jane Stafford, the literally
countless prostitutes missing and presumed dead –
all their kin, violated, dis-
credited and/or dead from racial and/or (hetero)sexual violence. Then I think
that if the worst that can happen to white or male or heterosexual or rich or tem-
porarily able people is that someone calls them on their conscious or uncon-
scious prejudices, or expects them to study histories and texts which correct par-
tial truths of liberal progress, or abstain from expressing subordinating “jokes,”
then privilege is privileged indeed. To endorse the rhetoric or content of anti-PC
literature, whether silently or openly, is to endorse a particular politics premised
upon status inequalities and their maintenance. It is to endorse democratic
double-talk perpetuating the second-class status of real people deemed formally
equal only so long as they acquiesce in their own subordination. It may be that
formal equality can be defended against the substantive critique without resort
to status arguments or claims to neutrality, and without the exploitation of supe-
rior material power in’a public debate on the merits. If so, supporters of form-
alism should respond accordingly. Substantive egalitarians, however diverse in
identifying, expressing, prioritizing and implementing their politics, and how-
ever distinctie their constituencies, share a common belief that social, eco-
nomic and political inequalities are growing dramatically both domestically and
globally, that such inequalities are not biological, but are enforced and rein-
forced systemically by private and public liberal institutions and that they are
indefensible and changeable.

In the anti-PC literature’, formalists argue that substantive egalitarian
reforms violate formalist principles. This is true. Indeed, it is the whole point:

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BACKLASH AGAINST EQUALITY

63

as a matter of principle, formalists disregard actual inequality; as a matter of
practice they presume it. It follows logically that defence of formalism is a
defence of the substantively indefensible. The as yet unanswered substantive
challenge to formalists remains: do formalists actually, rather than rhetorically,
wish to end status-based inequalities, and, if so, how do they propose to do so
within a formalist regime?