57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. Stuart Reges, “Feigned acceptance of gays is toughest barrier to break,” The Stanford Daily, January 11, 1989.
60. Abbott, supra note 54.
61. Mickelson, supra note 5.
62. Corey Davis, “Facing fear has rewards,” The Stanford Daily, May 23, 1990.
63. Daniel Bao of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance at Stanford offered some perspective: “Only a few schools have taken this positive, groundbreaking step of officially sponsoring a gay, lesbian and bisexual organization. The move is a bold action by the University—GLAS had not even asked for total sponsorship until early last year.” Chris Shuttlesworth, “University funds combined center,” The Stanford Daily, September 27, 1988.
64. Bart Romney, “Married Students Oppose ‘Domestic Partners,’” The Stanford Review, October 22, 1990.
65. Marci Shore, “Stanford coalition demands University diversify faculty,” The Stanford Daily, April 5, 1991.
66. Somewhat more aggressively, the Stanford policy directly privileged homosexuals over unmarried heterosexuals, limiting the new benefits to the partners of homosexual employees only: “The subcommittee is unanimous in the view that the case for extending benefits to heterosexual partners is weaker than for gay and lesbian partners. As a result, the subcommittee recommends that if current cost considerations militate against extending coverage to both groups, coverage be extended now to gays and lesbians, and the question of coverage for heterosexual partners be reconsidered at a later date.” See Anoop Prakash, “Domestic partners proposal would give preference to same-sex partners,” The Stanford Review, October 5, 1992 (citing “The Report of the University Subcommittee on Domestic Partners’ Benefits,” June 1992).
67. Miranda Doyle, “Talks reach stalemate; hunger strike continues,” The Stanford Daily, May 6, 1994.
68. Interview with Sally Dickson, May 1994.
69. A Woman's Guide to Stanford, Stanford, CA 1993-94.
70. Ibid.
71. Debby Lu, “Women struggling for ‘Herstory,’” The Stanford Daily, March 3, 1989.
72. June Cohen, “Month to celebrate women's herstory,” The Stanford Daily, March 1, 1991.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid.
75. Lesley Edwards, “Taking Back the Night: 75 march for women's right to walk alone, without fear,” The Stanford Daily, March 1, 1993.
76. In his address, for instance, UC Berkeley sociology professor Michael Kimmel emphasized the deep psychological differences between men and women, arguing that men had a “predatory” and “sexual entitlement” mind set. See Johnathon Briggs, “Kimmel attacks apathy about rape: Speaker says male drive to be macho helps cause crime,” The Stanford Daily, April 22, 1993. See also Johnathon Briggs, “Events to raise rape awareness,” The Stanford Daily, April 19, 1993.
77. Interview with Rebecca Bliss, May 2, 1994.
78. Edmund Yeh, “SWOPSI class ‘goes out of its mind,’” The Stanford Review, January 27, 1992. See also Grace Lee, “Carrying the world on her shoulders: Feminist leader teaches course on stereotypes,” The Stanford Daily, January 21, 1992. According to The Daily, “After the defeat of the ERA in Illinois, Johnson said she decided that women must not merely reform the existing society, but actually create a new one, resolving that women were ‘essentially different’ from men.”
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid.
82. Ibid.
83. Bliss, supra note 77.
84. Miranda Doyle, “Talks reach stalemate; hunger strike continues,” The Stanford Daily, May 6, 1994.
85. A Woman's Guide to Stanford, supra note 69.
6
“Welcome to Salem”
If you cannot freely express your opinion…then you have lost what makes universities important…. I studied a country that thought that everyone would be better off if it controlled what people said and thought, and that nation just committed suicide.1
—Sovietologist and Stanford Provost Condoleezza Rice
Multicultural identities require the proclamation of victimization. Or, more precisely: Multicultural identification is the proclamation of victimization. Absent such a proclamation (whether in terms of race, gender, sexual preference, or some other vector of oppression), the new-found identities would lack substance. The multiculture, which is nothing more than the set of these myriad new identities, would dissolve into nothingness—like a rainbow under a clear sky.
Few of the multicultural claims withstand close scrutiny. Even when particular groups have experienced real oppression in the past, the present-day picture tends to be more hazy and confused. The very recognition of historical injustices distinguishes the present from the past and indicates that progress has been made in the interval. Those persons complaining about oppression are generally not the ones to have experienced it first-hand. To the outside observer, the resulting multicultural theater appears contrived and fictional, sometimes even bordering on the surreal or the absurd.
From the inside, however, these roles are assumed with great seriousness of purpose. To question the validity of these grievances is to violate the most fundamental of taboos. Multicultural identification, depending on a never-ending cycle of oppression and resistance, entraps the very people it seeks to liberate within a narrowly constructed set of victimized identities. If there is any sense in which these people are “victims,” then perhaps they are largely their own.
But there exists a more troublesome dimension to multicultural identification. As stressed in the last chapter, the new-found identities are interdividual, not individual. Oppression is relational. For every victim of racism, there must be a racist; for every victim of sexism, a sexist; for every victim of homophobia, a homophobe; for every Caliban, a Prospero. The multiculture cannot simply celebrate its new-found identities: They do not stand on their own. To affirm their victimization, multiculturalists must hunt down and eliminate their supposed oppressors. This expulsion of oppression does not occur once and for all, but must be periodically reenacted, to reconstruct victimized identities threatened with dissipation over time.
Of course, because the multicultural victims are largely mythical, the “victimizers” identified by the multiculture are similarly fictitious. By and large, these “victimizers” are innocent of the crimes of which they stand accused. And so, in a final paradox, the multicultural liberation of mythological victims necessarily will culminate with the generation of real victims, singled out for reprisal due to no fault of their own. The unfortunate reality is that Stanford's multiculturalists have become expert in generating enemies and dealing with them, and these same graduates will likely use similar strategies to punish the enemies they create in the outside world.
Enforcing Orthodoxy: The Speech Code
We have already met some of the multiculture's victims—the Donner Four (with their “conservative” graffiti art), the seven Phi Delts at Otero (whose candlelight vigil reminded observers of the KKK), the two freshmen thrown out of Ujamaa (for making fun of the notion that Beethoven was black). On their face, none of these “oppressors” engaged in threatening behavior. Indeed, if one imagined a silent tableau—depicting, for instance, the seven Phi Delts surrounded by a mob threatening to beat them up—one could not help but reach the opposite conclusion. The only immediate threats were coming from multiculturalists themselves.
But none of this should detract from the fact that multiculturalists experienced these behaviors as dangerous attacks. And, indeed, these challenges did threaten multicultural identification—by rendering hollow the mythological claims upon which it is based. And so, it should hardly be surprising that such challenges became reinterpreted as prima facie evidence of widespread oppression against multiculturalists. Thus, in a double elimination, multiculturalists would remove as “oppressors” precisely those individuals who were, in some measure, pointing to multicultural intolerance and oppression.
Of course, the fact
that challenges to multiculturalism occurred in the first place was a big problem. With respect to the Ujamaa incident, for example, even if nobody defended Ben and Gus in public, people would think for themselves in the privacy of their own dorm rooms and realize that Beethoven was not black, that the two freshmen had been mistreated, and that there was something wrong with a regime that punished people for speaking the truth. There would always be an interval between the subversive incident and the multicultural reaction. No matter how fierce that reaction, not all traces of the unorthodox ideas could be removed. In the hope of preventing dissent such as that at Ujamaa or at Otero from occurring in the first place, Stanford's multiculturalists sought to enact a set of formal rules specifying who could say what to whom. “You have to set up something that tells students what the limits are, what they can do and what they can't,” explained student leader Canetta Ivy to the New York Times. “What we are proposing is not completely in line with the First Amendment,” she added. “We don't put as many restrictions on freedom of speech as we should.”2
In the two years following the Otero and Ujamaa incidents, law professor Thomas Grey, with the help of other faculty, students and administrators, drafted a revision of Stanford's student conduct code, the Fundamental Standard. Like the regulations implemented at many other college campuses, Stanford's new speech code, adopted in May 1990, prohibited so-called “fighting words” directed at other students. Outlawed speech included words “intended to insult or stigmatize an individual or a small number of individuals on the basis of their sex, race, color, handicap, religion, sexual orientation, or national and ethnic origin.”3
Although Stanford's code seemed to prohibit all vilification on the basis of sex, race, and these other characteristics, there was a catch. Only epithets targeted at so-called “subordinated” groups were considered “fighting words.” Those with a “superordinate” role in society were not protected. For these individuals, explained law professor Charles Lawrence, a supporter of the speech code, there were no “fighting words” in the English language that would “inflict injury.”4 In other words, those who were superordinate were so dominant that, by definition, they could never be hurt by others, and those who were subordinate were so powerless that they could never hurt others.
Because multiculturalists view whites, men, heterosexuals, and Christians as “superordinate,” the speech code did not protect most Americans from abuse. Indeed, Judicial Affairs Officer Sally Cole, who enforced the code, said that it would not constitute a violation for an African American to call a Caucasian a “honkey.” “Anything that comes to me as a possible violation is going to be looked at in the context of who does what to whom,” Cole explained.5 Clearly, much turns on the definition of what counts as a “subordinate” and what counts as a “superordinate” group—and, predictably, these groups turn out to be the ones that fit the standard multicultural victimology. Of course, it goes without saying that the groups protected by the speech code were sufficiently dominant (or “superordinate”) to insure their inclusion in the list of protected groups. In this respect, the fact of the code's enactment suggests that it identified precisely the wrong groups for special protection.
Taken at face value, the code was inconsistent with the reasoning used to rationalize it. One basic problem had to do with the strange notion, argued by Professor Lawrence, that fighting words aimed at subordinated individuals “produce physical symptoms that temporarily disable the victim.”6 With this far-fetched claim, the speech code created an especially invidious distinction of its own. White people presumably could respond to insults, but for racial minorities “there is little (if anything) that can be said to redress either the emotional or reputational injury,” according to Professor Lawrence.7 Because of some (genetic?!) differences between racial groups, speech code advocates seemed to maintain, a code was needed to specially “protect” those people who, by nature, were incapable of doing so for themselves. Even if Professors Lawrence and Grey were right about their psychological speculations, they should have reached very different conclusions. For if Professor Lawrence's claims about “temporarily disabling” the victims were true, then it would follow that there could be no “fighting words” aimed at “subordinated” peoples, because such peoples were literally incapable of fighting back. This line of reasoning suggests that if the purpose really had been to maintain peace on campus, the speech code got it exactly backwards, since the only kind of speech that could possibly involve “fighting words” would be that aimed at “superordinated” peoples.
Serious as these theoretical problems may have been, the speech code also suffered from impossible practical hurdles. One of its absurd consequences was that many words were deemed bad only if spoken by certain types of people to other types of people. For example, calling somebody a “faggot” would be a problem only if the person targeted really were homosexual. The finding of a speech code violation would require a determination regarding the sexual practices of the person to whom the word was targeted. And even if the person targeted were shown to be homosexual, one would still have to demonstrate that the speaker was heterosexual—since such epithets presumably would only rise to the level of a violation if made by a “superordinate” person against a “subordinate” person. Thus, two homosexuals could call one another “faggot” with impunity. So could two heterosexuals. A homosexual could use the epithet against a heterosexual. The code only prohibited a heterosexual from hurling the charge at a homosexual. As this example suggests, the complexity of the requisite fact-finding would have made the code unworkable in any proper judicial proceedings.
The speech code's advocates never confronted these serious difficulties with enforcement because they never had to. The fact is that documented incidents involving direct verbal abuse are virtually nonexistent at Stanford. The overwhelming majority of Stanford students, whatever their other shortcomings may be, do not insult one another personally. The code never had to be enforced because it had not really been needed, at least not for the stated reason of combating an epidemic of fighting words and similar abuse. Thus, in January 1993, Judicial Affairs Officer Sally Cole admitted that the speech code had “not been invoked in the more than two years that it's been on the books.”8
The same, one might add, would have been true in the years preceding the enactment of the speech code. Even the two best documented cases of offensive speech—those at Ujamaa and Otero, which provided much of the impetus for the code's enactment—would not have involved a violation of the actual speech code. At Ujamaa, the challenge came in the form of a picture, not any verbal “fighting words.” Even Kenny Ehrman's epithet “faggot” would not have fallen within the ambit of the speech code, because Kenny made this comment behind the closed doors of his dorm room, and not directly to the RA about whom he was complaining.
If there was no epidemic of offensive speech on campus, then why was there a need for a speech code? Its real purpose was not to protect students from racial fights, but rather to seal the door, once and for all, on any disruptive voices. The ambiguities in the code reflected this goal. A comprehensive list of disruptive speech could not simply be banned, because to the extent such a list is explicit (and enumerates the forbidden words and ideas) the list itself would be subversive. The code would actually be more effective in discouraging speech if it were not precise about exactly what words were forbidden. And so, the speech code ignored the precise definitions so essential to a legal framework and only hinted and suggested that there were forbidden ideas and suspect people. Students wishing to avoid the fate of the Otero seven would do best to err on the side of silence. Thus, although Stanford's speech code (along with others like it) would not be comprehensive enough to stifle dissent within the letter of the law, it nonetheless had a chilling effect on student speech—an effect far too comprehensive to avoid suggesting that such a result was not desired.
Over the long term, a speech code that is never applied may be more useful than one that i
s applied vigorously. Every time a code is officially invoked, after all, there would be a new controversy concerning the invocation itself—over whether the speech at issue really was so terrible, whether the punishment was appropriate, and whether the ideas were clearly mistaken. A vigorous application of a speech code would have the important side effect of drawing further attention to particular instances of the speech that the code was designed to prohibit. By contrast, a code that is never applied may still discourage speech, but will never draw additional attention to subversive ideas. In the case of speech codes, the threat is greater than the execution.
Consider, once more, the Beethoven incident in Ujamaa. Even if the speech code had explicitly prohibited such speech and had been applied against Ben Dugan and Gus Heldt, the net effect would not have been favorable to the multicultural movement. There would have been a judicial investigation and a thorough fact-finding process, including a full review of the surreal discussion about classical music. The two freshmen would have been able to defend themselves and present the other side of events. Indeed, if truth were a complete defense, such a judicial inquiry might even have had to make a factual finding regarding the question of whether Beethoven was black—which, after all, had been the original claim advanced by B. J. Kerr. The national media would have had a field day with the incident, and many unpleasant questions would have been raised about the true meaning of “diversity.”
The actual unfolding of events in the Ujamaa episode was much to be preferred. Nobody could say exactly what the two freshmen had done wrong, but everyone was left with the ineffable feeling that the two were guilty of some (literally) unspeakable crime. The lack of a formal judicial process ensured that people would be slow to ask difficult questions about the precise context of these events. Some nagging doubts would remain, but that might not be enough to shatter the multicultural consensus.
The Diversity Myth Page 25
