None of these dire trends are of any concern to the ruling elites who have the power to address them. They are citizens of the world, and no one -- now not even the Soviet bloc -- stands in their way. They have no need for borders; free trade is what they want and what they will eventually get. Many on Wall Street prefer unrestricted immigration, which would drive down wages and fold up our few remaining unions. For ruling elites, private security provides insulation and "social decay" is just an irrelevant phrase. A massive amount of money, some $1 trillion, is traded every day on currency exchanges around the world. On those rare occasions
when money laundering is discovered, the tax man gets too greedy, or regulators become pesky, one nation can be played off against another. And there is disturbing evidence that even the CIA operates at the level of offshore banking and drug-running, presumably after they determine that
their already-bloated budgets, picked from our pockets, simply don't meet their needs.

     The owners of corporate America have the resources to move offshore or south of the border, while the rest of us are here for the duration. If we were all tightening our belts together, there might be some basis for programs designed to redistribute opportunities. But the rich are getting richer at the same time that they institute policies such as affirmative action and NAFTA. It doesn't pass the smell test. The campus left speaks of equality, and then forgets about justice by ignoring economic and class distinctions. This failure is so fundamental that multiculturalists
should no longer be considered "leftists." As long as they claim this description, some of us -- those who still feel that elites ought to be accountable -- are beginning to feel more comfortable as "populists."

     Back on campus, the debate rages over the quality of politically-correct (PC) courses and the propriety of speech codes designed to penalize so-called "hate" speech. Multiculturalism is
pervasive throughout the humanities, but English and art classes seem to attract most of the PC professors. At the University of Maryland, Josephine Withers taught "Contemporary Issues in Feminist Art" in 1993. Nine of her students, in an effort to propagate the awareness of rape as
a feminist issue, tacked up hundreds of fliers bearing the heading "Notice: These Men Are Potential Rapists." The names underneath were chosen arbitrarily from the student directory. Some of those named were not amused. This is not "hate speech," because in this case the
perpetrators -- the nine women -- are victims of a "male-identified" culture, and are simply expressing sensitivity to their own oppression.[20]

     For an example of actionable hate speech, we go to the University of Pennsylvania. The theft of 14,000 copies of the student newspaper by black students unhappy with a white columnist went unpunished at Penn. But a white male freshman was hauled before the school's judicial board after yelling "water buffalo" at a group of black sorority sisters creating a disturbance under his dormitory window.[21]

     Some of the steam has gone out of campus speech codes because of recent court decisions that have declared them unconstitutional. But political correctness and multiculturalism is still rampant inside some classrooms. Scholars from NAS have expressed concern over standards of
scholarship and rising campus tensions.[22] Thoughtful progressives like Barbara Epstein worry that "a politics that is organized around defending identities ... forces people's experience into categories that are too narrow."[23] Todd Gitlin, a former 1960s student leader who now teaches at Berkeley, echoes similar sentiments:

The academic left has degenerated into a loose aggregation of margins -- often cannibalistic, romancing the varieties of otherness, speaking in tongues. In this new interest-group pluralism, the shopping center of identity politics makes a fetish of the virtues of the minority, which, in the end, is not only intellectually stultifying but also politically suicidal.... Authentic liberals have
good reason to worry that the elevation of 'difference' to a first principle is undermining everyone's capacity to see, or change, the world as a whole.[24]

     The critics of course content object to some of the sensitivity training programs and techniques that are in vogue on the multicultural campus. Many universities now require PC sensitivity exposure of some sort for incoming freshmen. The NAS worries that such programs are making the situation on campus worse, not better:

 'Sensitivity training' programs designed to cultivate 'correct thought' about complicated normative, social, and political issues do not teach tolerance but impose orthodoxy. And when these programs favor manipulative psychological techniques over honest discussion, they also undermine the intellectual purposes of higher education and anger those subjected to them. If entire programs of study or required courses relentlessly pursue issues of 'race, gender, and class' in preference to all other approaches to assessing the human condition, one can expect the increasing division of the campus along similar lines.[27]

     Ethical questions should be raised when such techniques are applied with a political agenda. In the late 1960s in California, a group with liberal Protestant connections calling itself the "Urban Plunge" organized sensitivity immersions for white liberals from the suburbs. After several days or more of intensive ghetto exposure organized by charismatic Plunge staffers, interspersed with group "attack therapy" sessions, many participants were duly impressed. I attended two or three "Plunges" in 1967-1968 in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In early 1970, when I believed in pacifism and was appealing a conviction for draft resistance, the Los
Angeles "Plunge" invited me to speak to the weekend participants. I arrived at the scheduled time and discovered that new techniques were being used: everyone had been deprived of sleep and food for two days in an effort to sensitize them to the Third World. Tempers were
understandably short. As I walked in, fists were flying between a staffer and participant. Disgusted with the whole scene, I immediately walked back out.

     In 1968, despite all the mistakes and stupidity of that era,victimology as self-justification was not yet in vogue. Poverty program militants acted more like kings on their own turf than like victims; they even seemed to enjoy themselves. Women didn't start complaining until a year or two later. Hispanics were only recently recognized on a par with blacks, even in the huge barrios of Los Angeles. Draft resisters risked prison in an effort to stop the machine, and many who served in Vietnam felt an obligation to society and risked everything. In this social stew
there were many demands for justice but few self-serving claims to entitlements. Today, however, Lehrman discovers that victimology is all the rage:
 

     Terms like sexism, racism, and homophobia have bloated beyond all recognition, and the more politicized the campus, the more frequently they're thrown around.... Those with the most oppressed identities are the most respected.... The irony is not only that these students (who, at the schools I visited at least, were overwhelmingly white and upper-middle class) probably have not come into contact with much oppression, but that they are the first generation of women who have grown up with so many options open to them.[28]

     Another sore point for the critics is the moral relativism of today's
multiculturalists, particularly in the humanities. Lehrman complains that
their "post-structuralism" implies that "all texts are arbitrary, all
knowledge is biased, all standards are illegitimate, all morality is
subjective." When it comes to their own Western-culture feminism, however,
the relativism is conveniently forgotten.[29] Mortimer J. Adler feels that
those who assert subjectivism have dug themselves into a philosophical
hole:

    For such multiculturalists ... what is or is not desirable is, therefore, entirely a matter of taste (about which there should be no disputing), not a matter of truth that can be disputed in terms of empirical evidence and reasons. We are left with a question that should be embarrassing to the multiculturalists, though they are not likely to feel its pinch. When they proclaim the desirability of the multicultural, they dispute about matters that should not be disputed. What, then, can possibly be their grounds of preference? Since in their terms it cannot appeal to any relevant body of truth, what they demand in the name of multiculturalism must arise from a wish for power or self-esteem.[30]

     Classes on campus that are considered PC tend to be easy credits, where students grade each other and spend much of their time discussing personal experiences and writing journals. Indeed, once relativism is embraced, there's not much to learn that doesn't come from within, so what else can be done? But then add social pressure to the classroom, so that certain patterns of experience are validated by one's peers while others are not. If one's classmates represented a cross-section of society the effect might even out, but in this rigged environment they all end up
saying the same thing. Thus college becomes a narrowing experience rather than a broadening experience. Normally this isn't supposed to happen until grad school.

     But perhaps learning has always occurred more frequently outside of the classroom. In 1968 I noticed from a puff piece in our campus yearbook that a university trustee, John McCone, was a former CIA director. In the library there was exactly one book to be found that was critical of the CIA (The Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, published in 1964) and it included some material on McCone. Then I began looking at the other University of Southern California trustees, and discovered some of the people behind Governor Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.

     No one ever assigned me readings on power-structure research; the established order never encourages anyone to research or expose its inner workings. I became interested on my own, with help from soon-defunct magazines like Ramparts. (Years later a former postal worker told me that at his post office, the feds collected lists of Ramparts subscribers.) When it comes to naming and describing the ruling elite, the facts are inconvenient for those who are nursing careers. Students at Columbia published impressive research on the trustees at their university in 1968, but not a hint of this made it into the major media. It was reported as long-haired, pot-smoking draft dodgers who spontaneously decided to take over the campus for no reason at all. Film at eleven.

     Professors know little about ruling elites because they do know how to recognize a career-stopper when they see one. The fact that administrators are actively promoting multiculturalism should have set off alarm bells for class-conscious leftists who haven't yet deluded themselves about the role of the university. This support by the administration ought to clearly suggest that multiculturalism is endorsed by the ruling elite because they find it useful.

Donna Shalala, now secretary of Health and Human Services, once remarked:

The university is institutionally racist. American society is racist and sexist. Covert racism is just as bad today as overt racism was thirty years ago. In the 1960s we were frustrated about all this. But now, we are in a position to do something about it.[31]

 1.  Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural
     Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York:
     Free Press, 1989), 333 pages.

 2.  Dan Schechter, Michael Ansara, and David Kolodney, "The CIA as an
     Equal Opportunity Employer," Ramparts, June 1969, pp. 25-33.
     Reprinted with an introduction in Ellen Ray, William Schaap, Karl
     van Meter, and Louis Wolf, eds., Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa
     (Secaucus NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1979), pp. 50-69.

 3.  David Rieff, "Multiculturalism's Silent Partner: It's the newly
     globalized consumer economy, stupid." Harper's, August 1993,
     pp. 62-72.

 4.  Sigmund Diamond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of
     Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955 (New York:
     Oxford University Press, 1992), 371 pages; David Horowitz, "Sinews of
     Empire," Ramparts, October 1969, pp. 32-42.

 5.  Sara Diamond, "The Funding of the NAS." In Patricia Aufderheide, ed.,
     Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding (Saint Paul MN:
     Graywolf Press, 1992), pp. 89-96. This essay first appeared in
     Z Magazine, February 1991.

 6.  Compare Sigmund Diamond's discussion of the Reece Committee in
     Compromised Campus and Pat Robertson's discussion of same in The New
     World Order (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1991).

 7.  I'm indebted to Ace Hayes for this sentence.

 8.  David Ransom, "Ford Country: Building an Elite for Indonesia." In
     Steve Weissman, ed., The Trojan Horse: A Radical Look at Foreign Aid
     (Palo Alto CA: Ramparts Press, 1975), pp. 93-116.

 9.  Kathleen Teltsch, "Adviser Helping the Rich Discover Worthy Causes,"
     New York Times, 14 October 1984, p. 50.

10.  Who's Who in America, 1984-1985 (Chicago: Marquis Who's Who, 1984).

11.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "Deficit by Default" (14th edition of an
     annual series beginning with Fiscal Year 1976), July 31, 1990,
     pp. xiv - xvii.

12.  Rieff, p. 63.

13.  Ibid., p. 66.

14.  Pat Aufderheide, ed., Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding
     (Saint Paul MN: Graywolf Press, 1992), p. 232.

15.  Ralph Z. Hallow, "Christian Coalition to Court Minorities: Blacks,
     Hispanics Back Key Stands," Washington Times, 10 September 1993,
     p. A5.

16.  George F. Will, "Literary Politics." In Aufderheide, ed., p. 24.

17.  Bureau of Labor Statistics, Handbook of Labor Statistics (Washington:
     1985), p. 435, Table 132.

18.  Carol Innerst, "America's Illiterates Increasing: Survey Disputes
     U.S. Self-Image," Washington Times, 9 September 1993, p. A1, A10.

19.  C. Vann Woodward, "Freedom and the Universities." In Aufderheide,
     ed., p. 32.

20.  Janet Naylor, "'Potential Rapists' Flier Stirs UMd. Flap," Washington
     Times, 7 May 1993, p. A1, A7.

21.  Carol Innerst, "The Hackney Hubbub: PC Debate at Penn Trails
     Clinton's Pick for NEH," Washington Times, 14 June 1993, p. D1, D2.

22.  National Association of Scholars, "The Wrong Way to Reduce Campus
     Tensions." In Aufderheide, ed., pp. 7-10.

23.  Barbara Epstein, "Political Correctness and Identity Politics." In
     Aufderheide, ed., pp. 148-54.

24.  Todd Gitlin, "On the Virtues of a Loose Canon." In Aufderheide, ed.,
     pp. 185-90.

25.  Karen Lehrman, "Off Course," Mother Jones, September-October 1993,
     pp. 45-51, 64, 66, 68.

26.  Shalala is quoted in Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education: The
     Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Vintage Books, 1992),
     p. 13.

27.  National Association of Scholars, p. 9.

28.  Lehrman, pp. 64, 66, 68.

29.  Ibid., p. 66.

30.  Mortimer J. Adler, "Multiculturalism, Transculturalism, and the Great
     Books." In Aufderheide, ed., pp. 59-64.

31.  Shalala is quoted in D'Souza, p. 16.
 

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