Political Correctness and Higher Education

British and American Perspectives

John Lea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781135895877
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

• How many times have you heard the phrase: `it's all political correctness gone mad!'
• Do you ever wonder whether colleges and universities are really awash with trivial concerns about the use of language or whether they are actually trying to address serious concerns about discrimination and harassment?
• Have you ever wanted to get to the bottom of what all the fuss is about?

This book is the first major study of political correctness in post compulsory education to be published in the UK. For readers in the UK unfamiliar with the nature of the controversies in US college campuses this book offers a comprehensive assessment of the key themes, including who and what was behind key campaigns. For readers in the US unfamiliar with how this cultural export has faired in the UK this book looks at the significant similarities and differences in the ways that the phrase has been used in both societies.

Apart from addressing the roots of political correctness the book seeks to show how the phrase has helped to complicate the traditional boundaries between those on the political Left and those on the political Right. The book also demonstrates in clear terms how the phrase is integral to understanding key themes in cultural theory, such as postmodernism and identity politics.

This book is intended to be of interest to a number of readers:

• Teachers working in colleges and universities;
• Teacher educators and student teachers working on programmes of initial teacher education;
• Students studying undergraduate programmes in comparative politics and/or sociology and cultural studies

Finally, the book will seek to capture the reflections of prominent academics and educationalists bon both sides of the Atlantic, who have worked in environments where the phrase has impinged on aspects of their work over the last twenty five years.

If you think that `political correctness' simply amounts to what jokes you are allowed to tell in a classroom, hopefully this book will challenge you to think again.

1
PC world

Political correctness and the modern zeitgeist

STAN (AS LORETTA): ‘It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.’

REG: ‘But you can’t have babies.’

STAN (AS LORETTA): ‘Don’t you oppress me!’

(from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, scene 7, 1979;
reprinted with permission from Python (Monty) Pictures Ltd)

JUDGE TO CARTMAN: ‘I am making an example of you, to send a message out to people everywhere: that if you want to hurt another human being, you’d better make damn sure they’re the same color as you are!’

(from South Park season 4 (1) Cartman’s
Silly Hate Crime, 2000; reprinted with permission)

WHEELCHAIR USER (AFTER ENTERING A PUBLIC RESTROOM): ‘There’s one stall for me and you’re in it!’

LARRY DAVID: ‘You know, if you were here I would have given you first dibs. But honestly I haven’t seen a handicapped person in the bathroom maybe ever. So I thought I could perhaps take my chances.’

WHEELCHAIR USER: ‘A handicapped person? That’s nice. Oh, that’s nice. It’s called disabled.’

LARRY DAVID: ‘Disabled? Well, that doesn’t sound so hot.’

(from Curb Your Enthusiasm, season 5 (2),
The Bowtie, 2005; reprinted with permission)

Overview

The term ‘political correctness’ (PC) has become part of the vocabulary of contemporary life both in Britain and, more especially, in the US. It seems to capture an essential quality of the modern zeitgeist and incidents have often become causes célèbres. It has also been able to accommodate both negative and positive connotations. On the one hand, people have been able to demonstrate their progressive outlook by reference to it, but equally, and increasingly, people have been able to use it to distance themselves from what they see as the ludicrous and the demeaning. Rarely has a week gone by in the past twenty years when the term was not used to describe an unwarranted intrusion into the status quo of everyday professional life. In all of this, what is perhaps a little surprising is that the term, although part of a huge academic industry in the US, is rarely the subject of serious scholarly scrutiny in Britain. First and foremost, therefore, this book is an attempt to produce an Anglo-American cross-cultural analysis of the term.

The book will compare and contrast the history of the use of the term ‘political correctness’ in the US, where it has been widely discussed in the intellectual media, and in Britain, where the term has been mostly used in the popular media. The specific context in which the discussion will be applied is post-16 education (for Britain) or higher education (for the US), defined simply as educational institutions whose student body is beyond the statutory school leaving age (essentially colleges and universities). An undercurrent running throughout will be the extent to which political correctness has contributed either to the reprofessionalization or the deprofessionalization of teachers within this sector. The sub-headings used throughout this introduction will signpost some of the more specific dimensions that will be explored.

Playing the PC game

It is not difficult to demonstrate that the term political correctness has invaded almost every area of the cultural landscape of Britain and the US. On the occasions when the term itself is not used it is obvious where there is an intention that it should be invoked. Furthermore it could be argued that the term has gained such wide currency particularly in the popular media that it can often be used without any need for explanation. In the most extreme cases the term appears to have been granted general permission to be used whenever someone is looking for a shorthand term to distance themselves from decisions they find unpalatable, and very often this is accompanied by the phrase ‘That’s political correctness gone mad!’

There is little doubt that stories and debates which surround the term are hotly contested, and only a cursory glance would indicate that, more often than not, the gloves are off and the ensuing fight is almost always a dirty one. From the accusation in the mid-1980s that UK local government councils in London had banned black coffee, black bin (trash) liners, and the nursery rhyme Baa, Baa Black Sheep, all for being racist, to the ridicule heaped on US colleges in the early 1990s for having established demeaning anti-harassment codes of conduct, including in one case a ‘dating etiquette’, it is clear that the PC terrain is a minefield (Curran et al. 2005; D’Souza 1992). Dogged by counter-accusations of exaggeration and fabrication it is perhaps not surprising that it is difficult to get to the bottom of all this, and seek the truth. It is important to signpost that this book is not intended to be read as a whodunit, that is as an attempt to uncover what is the truth behind specific incidents which have been labelled PC. Rather, it is much more literally about political correctness: what the term itself invokes, and the contexts in which one is most likely to hear the term. In this sense the book does not ask where are the facts in PC stories, but asks why are the stories told in the way they are.

One of the most striking features of political correctness is just how quickly the term is invoked. For example, consider how many people living in Britain or the US in the early twenty-first century would be able instantly to connect the term with the extracts from popular media reproduced at the head of this chapter. In 1991 the New York magazine asked its readers ‘Are you politically correct?’ (Taylor 1991, reproduced in Beckwith and Bauman 1993). Fifteen years later the UK-based The Mail on Sunday newspaper produced the headline ‘We are biased admit the stars of BBC News’, where a veteran BBC executive is reported as saying: ‘There was widespread acknowledgement that we may have gone too far in the direction of political correctness. Unfortunately much of it is so deeply embedded in the BBC’s culture that it is very hard to change it’ (The Mail on Sunday, 22 October 2006).

It is not a question of us all somehow having become PC in the intervening years, but more that as this perception has grown the more this seems to have prompted others to become avowedly non-PC. In this respect PC seems to encapsulate much of what James Davison Hunter implied in his use of the term ‘culture wars’, that the US is fundamentally divided on key questions of right and wrong (Hunter 1991). PC might not have the same kind of moral underpinning as the ‘orthodox’ and ‘progressive’ mindsets he articulates, but it is clear that a real division exists on matters which have become associated with the term. One way to demonstrate this is through a simple question and answer game.

Please answer yes or no to the following questions:

1 Would you be concerned if you saw someone vociferously dismissing the validity of the Qu’ran on a TV show?

2 If you hear someone use the word ‘handicapped’ when referring to another person would you rather he or she had chosen an alternative word that you felt was more appropriate?

3 If you read a newspaper article where a journalist or author was beseeching single/lone parents not to be so dependent on welfare payments, would your first reaction be to question whether he or she fully understands the social circumstances of many families?

If you answered yes to all three questions, congratulations you win the game, and are officially ‘PC’. If you answered no to all three, commiserations you lose the game, and are officially ‘non-PC’. If your answers were a combination of yes and no, maybe, or not sure, then you are officially a ‘waiverer on matters of PC’. Finally, if you object to me congratulating the winners, then you might be either ‘super PC’, or ‘super non-PC’, depending on how you read the virtues of winning such games.

The main focus for this book will be post-16 or higher education, and the game could be adapted for an audience of professionals in that sector, as in the second box.

Consider the following scenarios:

1 You work in a college and a colleague who is moderating some of your students’ work suggests that although your first marker’s feedback to students is accurate it could perhaps be a little more positive. Would you largely ignore this comment?

2 You work in a university and one day you receive an email from an Ethics Committee stating that, from now on, anyone who wishes to use surveys, questionnaires, and interviews with students in order to elicit information about their ‘student experience’, must first submit a proposal to the Committee to assess whether students could be harmed in the process. Would your first reaction to this email be rather scornful?

3 You are in a college committee meeting where a colleague suggests, in the interests of enhancing learner achievement, that wherever the word ‘fail’ currently appears on a student’s work, or transcript of work, it should be replaced with the term ‘needs development’. Would you wish that you could leave the room at this point?

The only difference this time is that the yes votes get the ‘non-PC’ label. Political correctness may elude a simple definition, but I doubt that there are many people who would not know that in answering these questions they were giving their views on it. However, the more difficult question to answer is what connects all the various strands of thought. One of the key purposes of this book is to try to explore and explain these connections.

The parameters of PC

Fired for consistently showing up late at work, a former school district employee sues his former employers, arguing that he is a victim of what his lawyer calls ‘chronic lateness syndrome’.

(Sykes 1992:3)

Of all the thousands of examples of so-called PC behaviour, there seems to be something all-encompassing about this one. It seems to capture the essence of what many people see as increasingly problematic in contemporary society, and contains what appear to be three key ingredients in a PC scenario. First, it is funny to the point of being ridiculous. Second, it appears to absolve someone of a responsibility that they once had for their own behaviour. And third, it produces a label for a form of behaviour which until now had not crossed anyone’s mind as needing a label. Or, as in many cases, it produces a new euphemistic label with the intention that it should become a substitute for a more commonly accepted label. Thus, in the extreme, ‘a fat corpse is a differently sized non-living person’ (Hughes 1993:20).

Many of these euphemisms are exploited for maximum comic effect in guides to PC in the US and in Britain (e.g. Beard and Cerf 1994; Garner 1994; Leo 1994; Midgley and Midgley 2005). My intention throughout this book is not to list the euphemisms, but rather to explore the broader political context in which this labelling has occurred, or, to put it simply, to ask what are the political beliefs which lurk behind these labels, both those which are produced with sincerity and those which are clearly produced with a large measure of insincerity?

An early example of this, indeed one from before the term became popular, was the invitation to think carefully about the use of words like ‘man’ and ‘he’ and to consider whether more appropriate words could be used where women were intended to be included in the usage (Spender 1980; Sarah and Spender 1980). In feminist circles this very quickly began a broader debate about whether ‘wo-men’ was an appropriate word at all, and that perhaps ‘wimin’ or ‘wimyn’ might be a better (PC) alternative, and in more popular circles whether British ‘dustbin men’ should be referred to as ‘refuse collectors’ and ‘manholes’ should become ‘inspection covers’. In the US feminists began to question such terms as ‘seminal text’ and ‘seminar’, with one suggestion that the latter might become ‘ovular’, and ‘ad feminem’ arguments could sit alongside ‘ad hominem’ arguments (quoted in D’Souza 1992:212). Indeed, to counter the contention that the discipline of history was largely one of documenting events which had affected men, this was counterposed with the suggestion that there should be more ‘her-stories’ (Morgan 1970).

It is not always clear whether the intention in such debate is that we should literally adopt these changes in language, or whether they intend simply to direct us to look at how language reflects power structures, or indeed, in postmodern circles, to demonstrate how to be more playful with language. Neither is it always clear whether the producer of these new words has ridicule as his/her aim. In this context, I have no reason to doubt the sincerity behind referring to animals as ‘non-human persons’ (Singer 1975), but equally I do have suspicions about some people’s sincerity when referring to girls as ‘young female persons’.

A detailed d...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 PC world
• 2 Loose canons and straw men of the Apocalypse
• 3 Look right and left before proceeding
• 4 Water buffaloes in Pennsylvania
• 5 The end of civilization in California
• 6 A day at the races in Michigan
• 7 Talking about political correctness
• 8 Green sheep in London
• 9 PC and the panopticon principle
• 10 PC and the attenuated academy
• 11 Talking about political correctness
• 12 Conclusion
• References
• Note on the author
• Index