[An op-ed written by one of my professors. I have corrected spelling mistakes which, for an English professor, probably shouldn't be there. --Mark.]
By Richard D. Erlich
American right-wingers make the same mistakes in complaining about liberal colleges and universities as they do in complaining about what Eric Alterman calls "the so-called liberal media." I'll start with media, since this piece appears in a news medium and readers can test my initial assertions without leaving your chairs.
First, the usual political right-wing analysis focuses on hard news and political news, which is clearly only a small portion of a newspaper or electronic "news" show. From a political point of view, the remaining media materials are like the graphite in an old atomic pile: a moderating influence, distractions from hard news. Changing the figure of speech -- but sticking with high-school physics -- most of a newspaper or news show just adds mass for a truly conservative (and often useful) inertia.
The entertainment section of the newspaper or programming most offends the Religious Right with its stress on sex and salaciousness. From the point of view of the Old Right, however -- the Right concerned with power and money -- the entertainment sections and show business generally are just fine: people who follow minutely the lives of Paris Hilton and Brad Pitt aren't out organizing unions or checking the voting records of their senators. From a seriously political point of view, the entertainment media are mostly distractions reinforcing the status quo.
Much of the remaining material is more actively conservative. Newspapers have business sections, not labor sections. Homemaking and style sections are aimed at women, reinforcing traditional roles. Those hundreds of thousands of advertisements and commercials -- and the real estate sections and automotive sections and electronics sections -- all carry the additional message: "Capitalism is good; consume, consume."
The doctrine, "If it bleeds, it leads," especially on television, actively functions to increase fears of street crime, when crime is handled, and distracts from issues that can be handled politically in stressing traffic accidents and "acts of God" such as floods and tornados.
When US media do show bleeding victims of war and other political violence, most of the victims shown are our people or our allies'; much less often do we see people killed, wounded, or maimed by US forces.
Second, the Right's stress on character often blinds them to the importance of context. In much right-wing theory -- e.g., President George W. Bush's, as he usually implies it -- good people do good things; bad people do bad things -- and liberal reporters twist news toward the liberal. Such concentration on character is fine for logic puzzles, where liars always lie and truth-tellers speak truth. The real world is more complicated, and real reporters operate in contexts, and with constraints, including constraints when they do report hard news.
Conventional analyses of political events, using familiar buzzwords, can be presented quickly and simply; unorthodox interpretations require more words. In a "sound-bite" media culture, you're not going to get much radical analysis; it takes too long to explain.
Editors assign stories to reporters, and publishers hire editors. What gets covered and what is considered news is mostly determined by the politics of editors and publishers, not by reporters.
Similar concerns apply to the right-wing analysis of American higher education.
Dedicated college students put in 50-60 hour weeks on their studies; that leaves about 108 hours per school week for sleep and other things even for dedicated students, and some 2/3 of college students don't put in anywhere near 40-hour workweeks. Most college students, during large parts of their waking time, are messing around with other college students in terms of a young-adult (sometimes old-child) sub-culture that participates enthusiastically in the larger American consumer culture.
What does liberalize students is what one of mine typified as the most important thing he learned in college: in his case learning, "Not everyone is Catholic." Real diversity among the student body is liberalizing, and, if social conservatives want to stop it, they should continue cutting subsidies and student aid and discouraging foreign students -- to make college again a place for rich Americans of the lighter shades of skin color, and genteel ideas about work.
Classes are not a crucial factor in most students' lives, and most classes are in fields in which political issues don't come up very directly, or, if they do, are handled in conservative ways. Most colleges have business schools; few have labor institutes. Many colleges have ROTC units; none teach techniques of armed insurrection, and there are few courses handling how to organize a protest march. And even in a radicalized English Department, teachers are going to have to spend much of their time on some pretty basic skills in reading and writing and can do our most radical work just introducing young Americans to logical thought. (Thinking skills, apparently, are not among the "basics" schools get back to.)
Insofar as character counts -- and it counts -- right-wingers underestimate professors' professionalism; more important, though, is underestimating the power of contextual constraints, and greatly overestimating the influence of school, period.
Surveys consistently indicate that most students are in college neither to change the world nor, primarily, to get an education. Most college students are in college for COLLEGE!: "The full collegiate experience," "fun and games," what Murray Sperber calls "Beer and Circus," along with getting a diploma and transcript good enough to get a decent job.
Even in those courses where liberal teachers may be teaching liberalism, most students will be learning-to give a generous meaning to the word learning-by the method of "cram and regurgitate," and we should take very seriously the image of regurgitation. To regurgitate information is different from chewing on an idea, deciding to swallow it, and then digesting it and assimilating it.
Example: My first semester teaching Rhetoric 101 at the University of Illinois (1966/67), all of my students were freshmen from either Illinois or New York State. A student chose for a definition exercise, "Treason," and began her essay, "In the United States, treason is" -- and proceeded to give her own, personal definition of treason. I gave a "Time Out" signal and told her she'd ruined her ethos, her credibility. "If you start out, 'In the United States treason is,' you've got to complete the sentence with the definition in the Constitution." Blank stares. "You can go on from there however you want, but treason is the one crime defined in the Constitution" (III.3.1). More blank stares. "Look," I said, "you're all from states that require you to pass an exam on the Constitution. You just passed the exam; you have to know this." Mutter from class (approximately): "We had the exam."
My position: They'd recently passed the exam; they had to have basic understanding of the Constitution. Their position: They had passed the exam, so why did I expect them to remember anything about the Constitution?
If your primary goal is to get a degree and decent transcript while having a good time in the last bit of freedom before moving on to the suckiness of US adulthood, "cram and regurgitate" makes excellent sense -- and that which is regurgitated is no longer with you.
Alternatively, consider a graffito in a bathroom stall in the business school building of Miami University: "The secret of success: Find out who Big Brother is; find out what Big Brother wants; do it." (Under that in another handwriting, "Marry Big Brother's daughter.")
Many students learn the precept, "Give authority figures what they want from you, to get what you want from them." Students will often give their occasional radical instructor radical views. When they get out into the business world, they'll give their bosses what those bosses demand.
If the politically inclined want a rule for what is crucial, try "Seize and hold the means of reinforcement," power over rewards and punishments. So long as the Right as a group controls so many of America's rewards and punishments, they will remain in control of America and don't have to fear that occasional radical teachers or liberal journalists will subvert the weak minds of innocent Americans. Most of us are occasionally illogical and often no more than semi-conscious, but most college grads try hard to figure out and serve our self-interest.
The joke in the late 1970s into the 1990s was that the deal in 1968 was that the Center and Right would get the Presidency, the Congress, the courts, the military, most business and industry, most of the media; and the Left would get the Berkeley English Department. The culture wars, the joke continued, was that now the Right wanted back the English departments.
The Right should relax. The media are largely theirs, and what isn't theirs is cultural, not directly political. And if the Powers That Be don't move deeply into student lives-a draft or significant interference with booze drinking-the campuses will remain, at most, a mild and long-range threat to their power.
Richard D. Erlich is a professor of English at Miami University (Oxford, OH), where he has worked since 1971.
