Politically Correct Orthodoxy

In her article (“New Times, Fossil Minds on the Campus,” Column Left, Commentary, Jan. 20), Prof. Ruth Rosen appears not to understand the connection between the politicization of the curriculum of which she approves and the insistence of the academic left on “political correctness” of which she disapproves. In the first case, she is misled by a belief--now widely current--that the teaching of the classics of the Western tradition has been driven by negative attitudes toward all other cultures and races.

It would be a pity if this gross misrepresentation were to be generally accepted. I have taught such courses for many years in many colleges and universities and I have never encountered such attitudes among my colleagues. To suppose otherwise is itself a political inference based not on what was in fact taught, but on the misguided idea that such courses are to be used to “give credit” to certain groups defined by race and sex who have been the victims of injustice.

By this logic, it must follow that since the latter are not to be found in any numbers among the authors studied in such courses, they must have been excluded in some prejudicial way. This is the same logic that yields the conclusion that the fact that Shakespeare and Kant, say, were “white males” has something to do with the merits of their work.

Once this kind of thing gets going, political partisanship is the only standard by which anything is judged, and we should not be surprised if a virulent intolerance begins to infect every aspect of life in our universities as it now threatens to do.

FREDERICK A. OLAFSON

Professor of Philosophy

UC San Diego