Third, how are differences within groups to be resolved? If Chicanos, for instance, have a special “perspective” to share, and if indeed most Chicanos can be found to agree on a particular issue, such as the grape boycott, what does one do with dissenters in the group who hold contrary opinions? How does one determine which view is truly the “Chicano perspective,” or which book is truly the “great Chicano work”? Groups can be defined in such a way as to preclude large degrees of heterogeneity, but intragroup differences cannot conceivably be eliminated altogether. Which individuals within groups count?
One possible answer is to let the larger faction within the group have its way—“majority rules.” Curiously, a number of minority activists have advocated this standard. For instance, prominent black scholar and Yale law professor Stephen Carter, a Stanford graduate who gave the university's commencement speech in 1994, has questioned the worthiness of black conservatives to speak for the group, because they are few in number: “Oh, there are neo-conservative intellectuals with black skin, but, as we have already established, they lack any claim to blackness other than biological. They have forgotten their roots. They may look black, but they are not, we might say, the black people who matter.”29 In Professor Carter's view, black conservatives—a minority of all blacks—are not truly “black,” because they lack the proper political consciousness. They are thus unfit to speak for the group.
But “majority rules,” however indirectly the claim may be articulated, is an inadequate solution to the problem of intragroup difference. Why, for instance, is it appropriate to impose democracy (a Western standard) on groups and cultures that have never embraced the principle? Moreover, if minority groups in general do not have to abide by the will of the majority group, then why should dissenters within a group have to be judged by majoritarianism?
The simplistic definition of multiculturalism provides no answers to any of these foundational questions. The OMD's messianic statement of purpose lacks sufficient substance to provide a blueprint for the multicultural world. It lacks judgments about which groups should count (and which ones should not), which members within these groups should count (and which ones should not), and which groups should trump other groups. Demographic facts alone cannot tell us which demographic facts should matter.
Multiculturalism as Ideology
Stanford's multiculturalists have so much in common with one another that they rarely, if ever, consider these foundational questions about multiculturalism. They generally agree which issues are important and how to address them, and, therefore, never realize the extent to which their underlying values really animate the agenda. If Stanford's activists did not derive their values from a common source, however, a unified effort to “transform” the university would not have been possible. Every multiculturalist would have had a different idea of which groups deserved proportional representation, which minority books truly represented the “perspectives” of their traditions, and which groups were privileged over others in disputes. This much diversity would have been too much: President Kennedy's “great experiment” would never have gotten off the ground.
If there exists an Ariadne's thread running through the multicultural maze, it appears to be this: Most of the multicultural faculty and administrators were student activists in the late 1960s, and many of the multicultural students emulate their adult role models from the earlier wave of protests. CIV professor Barry Katz summarized the attitudes of the multicultural generation:
We felt—and I say we because I was of that somewhat rebellious generation myself—we felt like we needed systems of thought that would help us answer what seemed to us then to be very critical questions: Why were U.S. troops in Vietnam? Why were the urban ghettos in America blowing up every summer, and for that matter, why were there ghettos in the first place? Why was the American power structure so uniformly white, male, old, and rich? And just to make sure that nobody took these questions personally, we set fire to a few police cars and occupied a few administration buildings, shut down a couple of dozen universities, and things like that.30
Many of Stanford's multiculturalists share Professor Katz's radical past and identify with his “systems of thought.” In Stanford's recent Centennial yearbook, for instance, Dean of Student Affairs Michael Jackson, a student senator at Stanford during the 1960s, described the formative role that decade played in the development of his thinking and revolutionary politics:
I was clearly becoming more political. I wasn't a Panther perse, but I supported what the Panthers were doing…. At the time I thought, “Society is really going to change—it really is going to get better. Poverty is going to be wiped out. There's going to be equal opportunity across the board—in education, housing, and access to government.” I was going to be part of the change…. The war dragged on. People became disillusioned. We didn't have the political or social levers to bring about massive cultural change. The young people were not the elected leaders, nor the captains and queens of industry, nor were they the heads of universities or foundations. They weren't the professors and the teachers…. Frederick Douglass said there is no progress without struggle. As I enter my fourth decade, the struggle continues unabated.31 (emphasis added)
In a Centennial yearbook photograph of Dean Jackson, taken in 1969, he is the picture of radical chic, sporting an unkempt Afro and wearing brightly colored bell-bottoms. Now, some 20 years later, the well-groomed dean could be seen strolling the campus, chatting with students, his hair coiffured, his double-breasted suit neatly pressed.32 Having never left campus, many of the 1960s activists now are the professors and teachers. Their “unabated” commitment to the “struggle” has finally paid off. They still occupy administration buildings—only now they are the administration. They finally hold in their grasp the political and social “levers to bring about massive cultural change.”
Activists of the 1960s like Dean Jackson and Professor Katz advocated “massive cultural change” because they believed America to be a country hopelessly divided by race, gender, and class. Only revolutionary reform, they argued, could correct a long history of oppression. Professor Katz's “uniformly white, male, old, and rich” establishment, they believed, had structured the “system” to reward itself and limit the success of minorities and women. The 1960s activists “struggled” to destroy this “system” and thereby end all forms of discrimination, and also to redress the “subordinated” groups that had been excluded from positions of power in American society. By the 1990s, their American proletariat had come to include, among others, blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, Asian Americans, homosexuals, and women, along with the poor and the working class.
To be certain, today's multiculturalists do not advocate exactly the same policies as the earlier generation. Some of the nuances and differences are significant, and will be explored in more detail later. But, as a rough first approximation, if one wishes to make predictions about how multiculturalists will derive their values, one need only take a poll of unreconstructed 1960s radicals. The radical answers are going to be quite close to the multicultural answers. The younger generation of student protestors usually sympathizes with these values, and in many cases is even nostalgic for the earlier era, whose activism continues to serve as a role model for its own. “People of my age look back on the 1960s as a time when youth had a voice,” explained 21-year-old senior Tim Choy, a resident of Potter House, Stanford's “1960s” theme dormitory.33
This implicit (but rarely enunciated) frame of reference can answer the foundational questions the more simplistic definition of multiculturalism could not. First, multiculturalists solve the definitional problem (who counts?) by automatically choosing the so-called subordinated groups that comprise the American proletariat. Within this framework, the multiculturalists next solve the problem of intergroup differences by automatically favoring the more subordinated group (or simply ignoring the concerns of nonsubordinated, or “superordinated,” groups). Lastly, minority individuals w
ho do not adhere to the radical politics of their group's leaders are considered “sell-outs,”34 or in Marxian rhetoric are suffering from a “false consciousness.” Multiculturalists may thus ignore such dissonant opinions.
This approach does not deal with every contingency or solve all theoretical problems. Most multiculturalists, if pressed to rank and compare the subordinated groups against one another, would have no easy answers. But in practice such contrasts often can be avoided and the multicultural framework can provide answers to most of the issues that are confronted. For example:
Chip Curran's proposal for an introductory Irish American studies class was never implemented because Irish Americans are not one of the multicultural groups that count. Although Chip invoked the same reasoning that had been used to justify race and gender studies requirements, Stanford's leaders sided with the opinion that such a study would constitute an “ethnic error.”
The Student Senate granted special representational privileges to the “four student-of-color” organizations, and not to the others groups that may have sought them, because these four organizations, unlike the Irish American Student Association or the Baha'i, are the multicultural groups that count. The values underlying Ms. Leyton's argument now come into focus: Whether any minority students have lived in the Third World is irrelevant. The four minority organizations are “Third World communities” because they share with the Third World a putative history of oppression (or cultural imperialism) by establishment American society.
If we accept the characterization of radicals that America is hopelessly flawed by racial division, then their race-conscious remedies become more attractive. As the primary multicultural groups, racial minorities cannot be evaluated by whites. The choice, moreover, between minorities’ and nonminorities’ perspectives favors that of minorities, both as a matter of redress and because their historical condition has given them a special insight (gnosis) into race relations in America. For both these reasons, the Faculty Incentive Fund provides special grants to departments that hire more minority faculty.
“Psychological coercion” means rape because the radical feminist agenda claims that men should be solely responsible for the consequences of any sexual intercourse with women. In multicultural terms, one may reach this value judgment by preferring the perspective of (historically victimized) women over men. Those females who do not agree with this conclusion may be discounted as suffering from a “false consciousness,” as, presumably, they have not overcome the conditioning of male-dominated society. Indeed, some feminists have gone so far as to suggest that such females should not even be viewed as women, an argument analogous to the suggestion that black conservatives should not be considered “black.”
Grapes are politically incorrect fruit that must be excised from the cafeteria menu because the United Farm Workers (UFW) labor union claims that California's grape pickers are exploited by the people for whom they choose to work. The UFW, formerly led by the late Caesar Chavez, is part of the new left political coalition, and thus carries weight with Stanford's multiculturalists. This multicultural value is reached first by privileging the perspectives of poor Latino workers over those of rich white employers, and second by privileging the radical members of the Latino group (labor union leaders) over common workers (who, in spite of the boycott, continue to report for work). Although Stanford's dining services now import grapes from Chile, many occupants of Casa Zapata still deprive themselves of grapes and grape juice in symbolic observation of the protest.35
Enjoying collegiate football, with all of its connotations of Americana, is not one of the highest priorities of political activists—particularly in contrast to the importance of undoing historical injustices (both real and imagined) to American Indians. Fans cheering with cardboard axes might remind Indians of the “tomahawk chop” and offend them. Therefore, students are not permitted to engage in such activity—even though Stanford's axe is merely a symbolic trophy without connection to anything Indian.
In terms of a theory of group-based relations, multiculturalism, as it is publicly defined, has almost no empirical content and seems to be little more than wishful warm fuzziness. But when the value judgments of the American left are used to define the proper parameters, multiculturalism becomes transformed into a comprehensive and detailed worldview. Nevertheless, there is nothing obvious or necessary about these particular answers to the foundational questions. The multicultural resolution is contingent, and acquires a facade of legitimacy only because of widespread agreement on the underlying system of values on the part of all those leading the multicultural revolution.
In practice, only a relatively small vanguard drives the “transformation” of the university—tenured radicals such as Professor Katz, administrators such as Dean Jackson and Ms. Parker (Director of the OMD), and succeeding generations of student activists, such as Tim Choy, Stacey Leyton, and the grape-boycotting residents of Casa Zapata. But the multicultural movement encounters little resistance because the rest of the campus generally shares (or, at least, discerns nothing very wrong with) its underlying values.
Polls consistently show that the Stanford community is overwhelmingly left-of-center. In 1984, 71 percent of voters in the Stanford precinct, comprised almost entirely of the Stanford academic community, chose Walter Mondale over Ronald Reagan for president, despite landslide nationwide electoral and popular vote victories for President Reagan. In 1988, 78 percent of Stanford precinct voters supported Michael Dukakis over George Bush, again in marked contrast to the majority of the American people.36 Even more strikingly, in 1994 Stanford senior Aman Verjee went to the local Registrar of Voters and conducted an extensive survey of political party affiliation among Stanford faculty. He found that the faculty of the major humanities departments are far more Democratic than the nation as a whole. (A similar 1986 study by Hoover Institution Fellow George Marotta produced almost identical findings.) Of the professors registered to vote, Verjee's study found that over 80 percent were Democrats and less than 10 percent were Republicans. A number of the core humanities departments had no Republican professors at all:37
The partisan bias revealed by Verjee is not unique to Stanford, a fact which suggests that multiculturalism is motivated by similar values on other campuses. In a 1989 survey of faculty politics at colleges and universities across the country, commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 70 percent of professors identified themselves as liberal or moderately liberal, 12 to 15 percent as moderately conservative, and only 3 or 4 percent as conservative.38 The single demographic fact most significant to multiculturalism may be that the professoriate of today's academies are almost uniformly on the left of the political spectrum.
In practice, multiculturalists simply are demanding more—and with greater immediacy—of what a large segment of the university community already supports. As a result, the administration cannot convincingly tell activists “enough.” Any admonishment would be like that of an alcoholic parent telling his children not to use drugs; the message simply is not credible. President Donald Kennedy, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration during the Carter administration, was no exception to this rule. Having used the office of the Stanford presidency on behalf of pet political causes—including public support for Michael Dukakis's presidential campaign and a denunciation of the military's ban on homosexuals—he could not convincingly resist multicultural calls for even more extreme politics.39 Admittedly, by the end of his 12-year tenure, President Kennedy hinted that the multicultural experiment had perhaps grown beyond his control: “I do believe I gave it support. I also tried to give it some restraints. From time to time I indicated a worry that multiculturalism would become a kind of political ideology of its own.”40 But like so many of Stanford's educators, President Kennedy could criticize multiculturalism only by criticizing himself. And so, a sharper criticism would have been unimaginable—even if, in his last few months in office, he finally suspected what many othe
rs had known all along: President Kennedy's “bold experiment” had never been scientific; ideology had always biased its results.
Rather than involving a new and innovative approach, then, multiculturalism really depends upon and reinforces the community's preexisting values. The multicultural rhetoric could be used, just as readily, by a diverse array of other causes, in the name of rehabilitating other “victims”—entrepreneurs by critics of the nanny state, victims of crime by conservatives concerned with law and order, baby seals by those committed to animal rights. One could, just as readily, imagine universities setting aside resources for self-made millionaires, people who have been mugged, or pet owners—on the basis that the members of such groups share in some special gnosis.
To take but one more hypothetical example, if Stanford were pandering to Islamic fundamentalists—rather than to 1960s radicals—one could imagine identical rhetoric. From Teheran to Tripoli, militant Muslims have demanded that Western culture must go because it is oppressing their traditional societies. But an Islamic victims’ revolution would differ significantly in the details. Instead of extolling the writings of Aime Cesaire, a revamped CIV might study the sayings of the Ayatollah Khomeini and Moammar Khadafy's Green Book. Religious litmus tests could be used to hire faculty with the gnosis necessary to present a perspective that does not suffer from an “Occidentalist” bias. The University's Committee on Minority Issues might be comprised of representatives from the four “multicultural” groups that would count—Sunnis, Shias, Ishmaelis, and Druze. Instead of grapes, an Islamic focus house might boycott hot dogs. And organizations from Hamas to Hezbollah might be extolled as the new vanguard, leading the way for others to follow. Obviously, Stanford's multiculturalists are not engaged in an Islamic jihad. But this example drives home an important point: Underneath a glossy veneer of open-ended and utopian rhetoric, multiculturalism depends upon very specific values to operate, and at Stanford the values that inform this process happen to be the radical values of the 1960s.
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