PC Academe From Maine to Michigan

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 22, 2000 | by Andrea Billups

Universities in two states take opposite approaches to politically correct education.

Two new courses offered for the first time this fall are certain to raise eyebrows inside academe and out. At the University of Maine, Jon Reisman will teach a political-science class called "Political Correctness in America." At the University of Michigan, David M. Halperin will teach "How to Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation."

Reisman, 43, a tenured professor, has taught economics and government at the University of Maine's 1,000-student campus in Machias for 15 years. He proudly calls himself the most "politically incorrect" instructor at his college. His course, he says, is a response to the climate of PC that exists at many schools across the country, including "speech codes masquerading as antiharassment policies." Continues Reisman, "You've got a very dedicated group of faculty members -- I call it the democracy Politburo -- the equal-opportunity officers, the women's studies, peace studies, Marxist-studies groups, and they have a mind-set. But their method of doing it involves imposing a certain code of behavior, speech and action on others."

Reisman believes his class is a first nationwide, although in 1998 a similar course was proposed at Bowling Green University in Kentucky, which the faculty refused to endorse or accept. He intends to delve into the philosophy behind political correctness and its role in American history, which he traces back to the witches in Salem. Mostly, however, he will focus on four areas -- higher education, the media, the public sector and the private sector -- leading his students through the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Bill of Rights, abolition and temperance movements, McCarthyism and drug policy.

Reisman plans to take the course onto statewide interactive television next spring and is looking at global delivery on the World Wide Web. "I don't expect untenured faculty members to do this," he admits, "but tenured faculty members have to. We won't have a free society if we don't."

In Michigan, the state affiliate of the American Family Association, or AFA, already is battling to have Halperin's course on homosexual identity excised from the public university's fall schedule. Gary Glenn, the AFA's Michigan president, has contacted the governor, the board of regents, state legislators and the university's president questioning the appropriateness of the class -- particularly at taxpayer expense. The course, he says, comes at the same time the university is dropping its religion major for two years, citing lack of staff and resources.

"UM actually wants to force taxpayers to pay for a class to openly recruit and teach teen-agers how to engage in a lifestyle of high-risk behavior that is not only illegal, but many believe immoral," wrote Glenn, who has contacted hundreds of alumni about the class and asked them to complain to university officials.

The course description in the university's fall catalog says students will study "the role that initiation plays in the formation of gay identity." Students, it says, will read the works of male homosexual authors and study such topics as "muscle culture," Broadway musicals and interior design, according to the Chronicle.

Halperin, a scholar of "queer theory" and the cultural history of homosexuality, says he's not trying to change his students' sexual status and claims critics such as Glenn have gotten the wrong idea, despite the course's provocative name. Glenn "seems to think that the course is about the causes of homosexuality, whereas it's actually about the cultural process of identification," Halperin told the Chronicle. "If I had the magical power to turn heterosexuals into homosexuals, I wouldn't be wasting my time teaching at a university. I'd engage in world domination."

RELATED ARTICLE: Good Golly, It's Polly

Students entering the teacher-education program at San Diego State University must take a course that requires them to take "cultural plunges" rather than tests. Cultural plunges? Trips to homosexual bars, visits to black churches -- outings intended to help students better understand what it feels like to be different.

For their efforts at training new teachers, San Diego State has been named the top winner of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's Polly Awards, handed out each year for outrageous examples of political correctness on college campuses.

In their third year, the Pollys are awarded to highlight "the zany, bizarre and noxious tendencies of radical faculty and students on the nation's college campuses," says T. Kenneth Cribb Jr., institute president. "Many university deans and presidents decry the idea that political correctness exists and claim that critics of PC use exaggerated or outdated anecdotes. Here's proof to the contrary."

The institute solicits nominations for the Pollys from students on campuses nationwide. Other 2000 Polly award winners include:

* Cornell University, where resident advisers, or RAs, hosted a "Roman Orgy" party in a campus dormitory with funding from student fees. "While organizers suggested that the party would consist of just massages and snacks, it was not long before the clothes started to come off," the institute reports. "The RAs even set the mood: dimmed lights, incense and a bowl of condoms."