Debating P.C.: The Controversy Over Political Correctness on College Campuses ed. by Paul Berman (review)

Book Reviews69 PAUL BERMAN, ed. Debating P.C.: The Controversy Over Political Correctness on College Campuses. New York: Laurel, 1992. 338 p. Debating P.C. is an engaging anthology, the first to survey arguments related to this important "debate" in American higher education. However, the book is not set up as a typical debate in the classical sense. Berman basically organizes his materials in a pro-con format, apparently attempting to balance the positions of the cultural right and left, but the selections are intellectually skewed to the left, and the super-radical positions are not included . The materials are extracted from a variety of sources: popular magazines , scholarly journals, a presidential address, and even a transcript of a television program. Twenty-one of the "leading lights" in this intellectual controversy are contributors to this anthology, including Irving Howe, one ofAmerica's preeminent literary and social critics, the editor of Dissent magazine; Catherine R. Stimpson, once president of the Modern Language Association and now Dean of the Graduate School at Rutgers University; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Signifying Monkey and Harvard University professor ; Diane Ravitch, the Assistant United States Secretary of Education; Dinesh D'Souza, author of the bestseller Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus; and Barbara Ehrenreich, Time magazine columnist. In his informative essay-length introduction, Berman defines "political correctness," traces the evolution of its usage, provides a historical perspective for the current debate, and states how he selected and organized the materials in the anthology. He selected "the most interesting statements" (24) and organized them broadly into six parts: (1) Debating Political Correctness; (2) Politics and the Canon; (3) Free Speech and Speech Codes; (4) Texas Shoot-Out (the curriculum-reform movement at the University of Texas, Austin); (5) The Public Schools; and (6) Diverse Views. The most crucial and lengthy section of the anthology, Part 1, pits the "straw men" conservatives (Dinesh D'Souza and Roger Kimball) against an intellectually superior set of liberals (Catherine R. Stimpson, John Searle, and Michael Berube). Even though the "debate" seems editorially rigged in length of treatment for each position (35 pages for conservatives, 86 pages for liberals) and in the degree of sophistication brought to bear on the key issues, the clash of ideas is nonetheless enlightening. The selections I savored were John Searle's discussion of the literary canon and multiculturalism; Michael Berube's debunking of the right (especially Roger Kimball and Dinesh D'Souza) for their failure to logically analyze the issues; Irving Howe's articulate defense of the canon; and Stanley Fish's incisive analysis offreedom of speech. For those of you looking for a broad-brush approach to bring you up to date on the multifaceted issues of this ever-heightening campus controversy , then this book is for you. But if you're looking for a more precise definition of political correctness, one that focuses, in great detail, on the political dynamics of speech codes and the alleged repression of free expression on campus, for example, then this anthology would only be a 70Rocky Mountain Review steppingstone to that level of analysis. And Paul Berman provides few scholarly trappings to help you in your quest: the book has neither an index nor a bibliography, and the scholarly notes have been pared away from Catherine R. Stimpson's 1990 MLA presidential address. But as Berman reminds us, "incompleteness is always the outcome when large debates shrivel into small anthologies" (26). ROBERT M. HOGGE Weber State University GEORGE BORNSTEIN, ed. Representing Modernist Texts. Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 1991. 288 p. Probably the most reliable indicator ofthe state ofa discipline is what people intensely disagree about: we live in and thrive on our controversies. Once upon a time we argued about books; then we began to argue about theories ; now, in an interesting development, we argue about texts. Nowhere is this more true than in the study of modernism. The controversy over the Gabler edition of Ulysses has raged for years by now, while a war of lesser intensity but greater duration has been in progress over Yeats. Comparably vexed questions surround The Cantos of Ezra Pound, and textual studies of Eliot...