Academics In Opposition

By John Elson

The chairman of Tulane University's political science department is no academic bomb thrower. But when Paul Lewis looked closely at the "initiatives for the race and gender enrichment" of the university proposed by a faculty committee -- well, he says, "I raised a stink." The plan implied a quota system for hiring more black and female teachers and the appointment within all departments of "race and gender liaison persons," whom Lewis likens to political commissars. Thanks largely to the challenge he organized, Lewis is a controversial figure at Tulane, but the initiatives are now being revised. "I never even heard the term politically correct until last September," says Lewis. "Boy, have I had an education since."

As a result of the fracas, Lewis is following the lead of other aroused academics and organizing a Louisiana affiliate of the 1,750-member National Association of Scholars. With headquarters in Princeton, N.J., the N.A.S. has emerged as the cutting edge of faculty opposition to the excesses of multiculturalism and the replacement of traditional curriculums with courses about race and gender issues. One well-known N.A.S. critic, Stanley Fish, chairman of the Duke University English department, has declared that the association is widely known to be "racist, sexist and homophobic" and argued that its members should be barred from committees dealing with tenure or curriculum. But N.A.S. president and co-founder Stephen H. Balch, 47, insists that the N.A.S. seeks only to maintain the standards of excellence that have made U.S. universities the world's envy.

N.A.S. members are manning the intellectual barricades almost everywhere these days. At the University of Texas at Austin, chapter adherents successfully challenged a proposal to focus English 306, a required freshman writing course, on problems of race and gender. They argued that the change would turn the class into a political-indoctrination course. At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the N.A.S. chapter has criticized a plan to hire more minority professors, contending that it would set up the academic equivalent of a patronage system. Christina Hoff Sommers, an associate professor of philosophy at Clark University, refused to sign a course-proposal form that would have required her to explain how she had incorporated "pluralistic views" into her teaching. Other faculty members, including several avowed leftists, shared her outrage that academic freedom could be infringed on by this kind of monitoring. The proposal has been dropped.

To Stephen Balch, all these incidents show that individuals can make a difference if they are prepared to speak out -- and take the heat for doing so. An associate professor of political science at Manhattan's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Balch began meeting with a small group of like- minded academics in the New York City area in 1982 to discuss academic problems. By 1987 they had evolved "from a community to an organization" and opened an office. The N.A.S. is funded in part by four conservative foundations, but Balch insists, "We follow our own lights." The association publishes the quarterly Academic Questions, sponsors regular conferences and has affiliates in 20 states; membership has almost doubled in the past year and is growing at the rate of 25 applications a week. Among the roster of luminaries: Duke political scientist James David Barber, Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson and Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. The reason for such interest, says Clark's Sommers, is that liberals as well as conservatives now worry about an "environment of intimidation" that has forced some professors to tape their lectures as a safeguard against bias charges. "It's the opposite," she says, "of what a university should be."