Word: corrections
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Vice President for Finance Robert H. Scottconcedes that the government's objection is"technically correct" but insists a randomstarting point would not have made any statisticaldifference...
...very term "politically correct," I would argue, works not unlike the convert rhetoric of the Holocaust advertisement or the Peninsula "special" issue. Indeed, these texts themselves were heavily invested in the "p.c." debate. This debate has opened the flood gates for a covert Right-wing hostility that pretends to operate independently from structures of social, cultural and institutional power. To term an opinion "politically correct" has come to be a power play in itself that delegitimizes the content of the opinion, placing it outside debate and outside what need be debated...
...most recent Harvard Magazine terms a Core class "politically correct" because it assigns books written by "African American Women Writers." The author, William Cole, proposes to translate the hidden agenda for us: "read: Novels of Social Criticism by Black Women, Written Primarily Since 1960 or So." I have to imagine, since Cole doesn't specify, that what he is telling us here is that "Black" and "African American" are merely political distinctions, with no scholarly consequence; that to specify race is to specify "social criticism"; and that a course about presumably contemporary authors (his presumption) is so ambiguous...
Cole calls Literature and Arts A-50 both "popular" and "politically correct," as if, like Thernstrom, he would like to suggest that the canon, the institution, even the tenured professor, is being threatened by the overwhelming collective power of identity politics. Way back when Cole was an undergraduate at Columbia--in the 1980s--all the kids had to study "mainly the works of dead white males," but nobody seemed to mind, he says. I am not particularly interested here in a debate about the relative merits of Harvard and Columbia's core systems; it seems to me of little difference...
...anxiety. From Professor Thernstrom's railings to William Cole's reactionary tirades, the signs of conservative distress are apparent. That those who call for "reopening" debate so often seem to have controlled the debate all along is an irony not without consequence. It reminds us that the slogan "politically correct" has come to identify the correcting discipline of the politically powerful...