AND ANOTHER THING
A stampede of water buffaloes on the American campus
PAUL JOHNSON
In New York I find people plunged in angry gloom about the Clinton presidency: `Even worse than we'd expected.' One Bill Clinton decision which has aroused particu- lar frissons is his nomination of Sheldon Hackney to run the National Endowment for the Humanities, a key post in American culture-formation. Hackney is a prime example of the high-placed liberal appeasers and stringalongs who are making it possible for Political Correctness to bull- doze the American education system into rubble. He is president of the University of Pennsylvania, the once great institution founded by Benjamin Franklin, now a hell- hole of PC and racial hatred.
The things that go on down there almost pass belief. Hackney cited the privileges of free speech to justify the appearance on campus of the violent black racist and anti- Semite Louis Farrakhan and the hard-core homosexual pornographer Robert Map- plethorpe, but in his book anyone who is not on the Left's culture-list of approved persons has no rights at all. Recently, blacks at his university destroyed an entire issue of a student newspaper because they objected to an article in it criticising posi- tive discrimination in favour of themselves on the campus. Hackney refused to con- demn their action on the grounds that `there can be no ignoring the pain that expression [of views] may cause'.
With the authorities abdicating their responsibilities, militants swagger about the place rather like Nazi students on pre-war German campuses. Last January an 18- year-old Israeli student, Eden Jacobovitz, was hard at work on a theme paper at mid- night when a group of black women stu- dents began shouting and singing and howl- ing 'woo woo' underneath the window of his room. They said they were 'looking for a party'. After enduring the noise for 20 minutes, he shouted down at them to stow it and was greeted with the usual obsceni- ties. Other disturbed students also shouted, but only Jacobovitz's words were recorded. According to the women, who immediately reported the matter to the campus police, he called them 'water buffalo'. This is an English translation of a Hebrew word behayma, described as 'a mild epithet to chide an uncouth person'. The campus police, instead of taking action against the noisy women who had caused the incident, immediately began an elaborate prosecu- tion of the Israeli student on the grounds that he had broken a university law which prohibits 'racial epithets' which 'inflict direct injury' on minority students.
The object at the University of Pennsyl- vania seems to be to create an atmosphere of terror in which whites will keep a low profile and cringe, while the black militants rule the roost. If that be the case, it seems to me that white students who simply want to get on with their degrees should boycott the place altogether and leave the blacks to carry on wrecking things. There are many good alternative universities in Pennsylva- nia. One of the riches of the United States, and one reason I am not despondent about the plight of the campus despite all the rav- ages of PC, is the sheer number and variety of places of higher education there are. There are about 3,500 universities and col- leges, most of them highly competitive and capable of rapid change and improvement under a dynamic president and an ambi- tious board of trustees. Some famous Ivy League places like Princeton, Yale and Harvard have been badly bruised by PC and weak leadership, but none of them is indispensable and plenty of others are only too eager to appropriate their reputations by displaying first-class objective scholar- ship, tolerance and freedom of thought.
I was in America to spend a weekend at Adelphi University in Long Island, attend its annual Commencement and receive an honorary doctorate. These ceremonies are much more fun than similar functions here. They take place in the open in blazing sun- shine in front of tens of thousands of peo- ple, who are addressed by all kinds of `You've terribly old and decrepit, probably the result of your lifestyle, so I'm not treating you.' celebrities. The same day as we congregat- ed at Adelphi, William and Mary celebrat- ed its 300th anniversary with a speech from Bill Cosby the comedian, Spelman College was harangued by the talk-show hostess Oprah Winfrey, Hofstra University had the famous puppeteer and ventriloquist Cyn- thia Gregory, Penn State got the head of Merrill Lynch, Smith College the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Ellen Goodman, and the University of North Carolina pro- duced Ted Turner, boss of the world televi- sion news network CNN. There is a great deal of cheering and irreverence. Many of the thousands of new graduates mark their appreciation of their parents' struggles to keep them in college by adorning their mortarboards with the slogan, 'Thanks, Mom and Dad.'
Adelphi will soon be celebrating its cen- tenary, but in the last decade it has been totally transformed and rejuvenated by an outstanding classical philosopher, Peter Diamandopoulos. He comes from Crete where, as a 13-year-old in 1941, he defend- ed his country with a tommy-gun against invading Nazi paratroopers. Unlike most university presidents these days, he is a scholar as well as an administrator, which is one reason why he has been able to recruit such an outstanding faculty. He is an entrepreneur, too, and scored a big hit with his cheeky advertising slogan, 'Harvard, the Adelphi of Massachusetts'. The Clinton years are clearly going to be a tough time for American scholarship and culture, and a disastrous one for American morals — Washington is rapidly being transformed into Sodom-on-the-Potomac — but they will also provide paradoxical opportunities for up-and-coming universi- ties like Adelphi to thrust themselves right into the front rank by upholding the tradi- tional high standards of the academy. American parents, and the young people themselves, are not fools. They know that a university which surrenders to Political Correctness eventually wrecks the value of its degrees in the market-place. And they are quite capable of shopping around for institutions of higher education which stick to their principles and keep the barbarians off their campuses. So, while the Hillary Clintons and the Sheldon Hackneys per- form their debased ideological caracoles, universities which keep the faith are quietly consolidating their positions in the hearts of the young.
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