Beyond Political Correctness: Toward the Inclusive University ed. by Stephen Richer, Lorna Weir (review)

HUMANITIES 305 Although 2020 Visions offers readers interested in public education challenging insights, the book fails to offer the focused analysis of Kilian's 1985 School Wars. While that book looked closely at a decade of Social Credit attacks on public education in British Columbia, this one offers a wide scope that the 'cautious' versus 'confident' discussion fails to control. In sum, Crawford Kilian's discussion of public schooling in Canada offers engaging, often imaginative, individual insights, but not a profound, coherent analysis of the educational structure. Both critics and supporters of present public education will find a good deal ofsupport for their views, and interestingchallengesfor the future. However, in this book, supporters of post-secondaryeducation inCanada will find little to learn and even less to cheer. (HENRY A. HUBERT) Stephen Richer and Lorna Weir, editors. Beyond Political Correctness: Toward the Inclusive University University of Toronto Press. 272. $55.00, $20.95 As its title suggests, this book purports to take its readers beyond political correctness, beyond the predictable polarization of left and right, beyond the polemical hyperbole that has made rational debate a rarity in the culture wars that still beset us. Indeed, the editors explicitly claim to offer 'insight into the values, ideals, and motives of both sides' and thus to transcend the sterile and static opposition between affirmative action and merit, between human rights and academic freedom. These worthy intentions notwithstanding, the writers engaged in this collective project make little effort to get inside the discourse of the Lneoconservative' other and assume rather than demonstrate the rectitude of their own 'progressive' position. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with an inclusive university that enshrines employment equity, selective recruitment, innovative curriculum, and anti-sexist and anti-racist policies. Quite the contrary. The problem resides in the implicit assumption that progressivist rhetoric is wholly immune from the ideological contaminants that compromise neoconservative rhetoric. (For the sake of convenience, I too will use the blanket term 'neoconservative' to describe those who oppose political correctness, even though not everyone who opposes political correctness is necessarily a neoconservative.) In drawing his famous distinction between positive and negative hermeneutics , between a hermeneutics of restoration and a hermeneutics of suspicion , Paul Ricoeur in Freud and Philosophy (1970) points to the essential duplicity of the hermeneutical motive itself. 'At one pole herm~neutics is understood as the manifestation and restoration of a meaning ... according to the other, it is Wlderstood as a demystification, as a reduction of illusion 306 LETTERS IN CANADA 1995 ... Hermeneutics seems ... to be animated by this double motivation: willmgness to suspect, willingness to listen; vow of rigor, vow of obedience.' Giventhis seeminglyinescapable doubIemotivation, a truly thoroughgoing hermeneutics should strive to be a two-way street, lest in its zeal to demystify the discourse of the other, whose own goes-without-saying is conspicuously ideological ~ all the most deplorable ways, it reinscribes that mystification at a deeper level in its own discourse, whose goeswithout -saying remains unsaid. It is one thing, in the spirit of negative hermeneutics, to unmask the ideological code underwriting neoconservative assaults on political correctness, and quite another, in the spirit of positive hermeneutics, to offer the alternative of progressive pedagogy, an ideological code that goes under the name of no ideological code. And this is my major reservation about this book. The writers are far too adept at distinguishing their reasoning and ideation from the rationalization and ideology of their opponents. Ideology, as Louis Althusser reminds us, embraces the ways we live our relations to society as a whole. It is a habitual style ofperception that has affective and unconscious components as well as cognitive and conscious ones. There is no uncontaminated free space that escapes ideology's operation, no way of transcending the situatedness of our own discourse. And this is the uncomfortable and inevitable consequence of embracing the four dogmas of postmodernity: anti-foundationalism (the belief that there are no empirical facts or rationalist ideas upon which knowledge is grounded), anti-essentialism (the belief that everything is semiotically and socially constructed), coherentism (the belief that propositions do not correspond to any external frameof reference, that the only criterion for validity is internal...