The following article by Dr. William Pierce has never been seen online before now, and reads as fresh and valid today as it did 20 years ago.

The Destruction of the Academy

From National Vanguard Magazine Issue No. 112, January-February 1992:

The debate over the enforcement of Political Correctness at American colleges and universities has been raging in the print media long enough that everyone from the party-loving frathouse jock to the most uncool computer nerd on campus has been made at least dimly aware that he must be careful what he says when talking about anything even remotely racial or sexual in nature.

One must never use the word "girl" in referring to any female over 10 years of age or the word "boy" in referring to a Black male of any age. (And one must not use the word "Black" either, which is considered by the most Politically Correct thinkers to be almost as offensive as "Negro," "darky," or "nigger"; the only acceptable designation now is "African American.")

Homosexuals must never be referred to as "queers," "lesbos," "dykes," "fruits," "faggots," "fairies," or anything else but "gays" (except when the speaker is himself or herself of the sodomite persuasion: "queer" is now in vogue as a self-descriptive term among the pervert avant garde).

If one really wants to be on the safe side, he also should use the term "Politically Correct" (or its abbreviation, "PC") as sparingly as possible -- and certainly never with a smile on his face or a hint of derision in his voice -- lest he indicate that he is one of those benighted souls whom the Red Guardist cadres of Political Correctness have been charged with re-educating. The PC position is that there is now and never has been a program to enforce Political Correctness, and that the term itself was invented by bigots and reactionaries to stigmatize progressive, right-thinking folks.

Does that sound a bit Orwellian? Alsa, Orwell himself would be dumbfounded by the present state of affairs on our campuses. At the University of Connecticut students may be expelled for "conspicuous exclusion [of a female, non-White, or homosexual student] from conversation" or for "inappropriately directed laughter"; i.e., laughter at a "racist" or "sexist" or "homophobic" joke or at or about a woman or a member of a protected minority group in a way which might cause embarrassment or injured feelings. Although the University of Connecticut conduct code doesn't spell it out, perhaps an inappropriately directed smirk or smile or grin would draw the same penalty as actual laughter, especially for a repeat or unapologetic offender. Remember Orwell's definition of "facecrime"?

At the University of Minnesota six professors recently were charged with sexual harassment. The specifics of the charges included such offenses as not greeting a female student in a friendly enough manner, not teaching in a sensitive enough way, and not having read a certain feminist-favored novel. Eventually the charges were dropped, but only after the professors had been subjected to an ordeal of calumny and intimidation and had gone to great lengths of grovelling and self-abasement to prove themselves innocent of any non-PC tendencies.

At the University of Michigan a student who recited a limerick which speculated jokingly about the homosexuality of a well known athlete was required to attend "gay-sensitivity" training sessions and write a letter of self-criticism for publication in the campus newspaper, under threat of expulsion.

Pages could be filled with similar outrageous -- or amusing or alarming -- anecdotes about the excesses of Political Correctness, but anecdotes alone, no matter how outrageous, cannot give us a full understanding of the disaster which has befallen our universities. Many people have the belief that the enforcement of Political Correctness is simply an effort by well-intentioned university administrators to keep the peace on campuses with increasing numbers of minority students: that the main thrust of their effort has been to restrain uncivil students from using expressions like "kike" or "nigger" or "queer" or "bitch" in referring to their fellow students, thereby giving offense and disrupting the orderly climate of learning. People with this belief generally regard anecdotes of the sort cited here as evidence that in a few cases the efforts to maintain civility have become a little overzealous and have gone a little too far in the direction of restricting speech and other forms of expression. They tend to believe that what we need to do is guard against these excesses and protect the freedoms of students and faculty members to protect their First Amendment rights -- within reasonable limits, of course.

Such people miss the whole point. The drive for Political Correctness is not an overzealous effort to maintain an orderly learning environment at our universities; on the contrary, it is a manifestation of the determination of certain elements inside and outside the universities to insure that the universities not be permitted to perform their traditional function of educating and civilizing a leadership elite for the next generation of Americans.

To be sure, there is among the PC cadres an element motivated primarily by the desire to maintain civility -- or, rather, to avoid giving offense. There always have been those excessively tender-minded souls who flinch at the very thought of saying anything which might hurt someone else's feelings. A cripple must never be referred to matter of factly as a cripple, but as a "physically disadvantaged person'; a man who likes to bugger little boys must under no circumstances be made to feel that his behavior is considered distasteful, unnatural, or contrary to the public interest; a woman must not be reminded that she is in any way different from a man, because that might limit her self-image and lead her to resign herself to motherhood and housewifery instead of pursuing a career as a corporate raider or a mud wrestler; a Black -- oops, an African American -- must not be laughed at or even gently corrected when, full of the absurdities and pufferies of one of the "Black history" courses now being offered at most major universities, he proudly claims that Hannibal and Cleopatra were of his race.

Solicitude for the feelings of others and the avoidance of unnecessary offense always have been characteristics of a gentleman. Women traditionally have gone a bit further and put a high premium on being "nice," even at the expense of truth. Elevating niceness to the ultimate virtue, however, has become possible only in a society which has completely lost its moral bearings. Such niceness is the virtue of emasculated men and women deranged by the ravings of the feminists.

Such niceness is the principal motivation of only a relatively tiny element among the cadres of Political Correctness, however, even though it plays a substantially larger role among the camp followers of the movement. The cadres themselves are recruited mainly from the ranks of the radical feminists, the militant homosexuals, and the racial-minority activists (Blacks, mestizos, Asians, Amerindians, etc.). Their ranks are supplemented by a sprinkling of very sick White males hoping to atone through self-flagellation for their sins of Whiteness and maleness, a few die-hard Marxists who have established a final redoubt in America's universities, and a very significant contingent of Jews -- about whom more later.

The sayings and writings of these cadres, taken as a whole, leave no doubt that their aim goes far beyond protecting the sensibilities of hypersensitive minorities. One of the main thrusts of the Political Correctness movement has been to stamp out what they call "Eurocentrism" in university curricula. Their contention is that traditional curricula, freighted as they are with the writings of "dead White European males" -- "dwems" for short -- are not only irrelevant to the needs of today's university students but are absolutely harmful.

PC Professor Stanley Hauerwas of the Duke University Divinity School complains, "The canon of great literature was created by High Anglican assholes to underwrite their social class."

A Politically Correct committee at Tulane University has prepared a report on "race and gender enrichment" which laments: "It is difficult for us to see and overcome racism and sexism because we are all the progeny of a racist and sexist society."

There is, of course, truth in the assertion of Tulane's Red Guardists about the nature of European society. Pick almost any White male writer of prominence from any era prior to the Second World War, and you can be practically certain that his message will be tainted with racism, sexism, homophobia, paternalism, patriarchism, imperialism, or some other streng verboten "ism."

Open Virgil's great epic from the first century before this era, and the first words we see are, "Of arms and the man I sing..." Not "Of arms and the person": clearly a male-centered, sexist screed.

Fourteen hundred years later Geoffrey Chaucer still was writing in the same vein, of a husband invited to keep tally of debts on the tail of his wife and a "cursed Jew" who slit the throat of a Christian child in an act of ritual murder.

A century and a half after Chaucer the great Martin Luther was writing of the Jews: "The sun has never shined on such a bloodthirsty and vindictive people, who cherish the idea of murdering and strangling the Gentiles. No other men under the sun are more greedy than they have been, and always will be, as one can see from their accursed usury. They console themselves that when their Messiah comes he will collect all the gold and silver in the world and divide it among them."

Toward the end of the 16th century William Shakespeare was writing of the Jew Shylock and his demand for a pound of flesh.

In the 18th century we may be tempted to peek into the works of the Founding Fathers -- oops! make that the Founding Parents. Thomas Jefferson wrote that Whites and Blacks were so manifestly different that they could never live as equals in the same society. Benjamin Franklin's often quoted advice on choosing a mistress would send today's feminists into orbit. http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bdo...cs/51-fra.html

In Germany at the same time (and well into the next century) Wolfgang von Goethe was inspiring his own countrymen with his patriotic writing. We could nail him for sexism, racism, or any of a half-dozen other heresies. For example: "The important thing is that the race remain pure: in this way we become a people! And only in this way will we be able to preserve and enhance the German character."

Moving further into the 19th century, we can look into the works of the better known and better loved English language writers. Take Edgar Allen Poe. One needs go no further than the third paragraph of what is probably his bestknown tale, The Gold Bug: "In these excursions he was usually accompanied by an old Negro, called Jupiter...who could be induced, neither by threats nor by promises, to abandon what he considered his right of attendance upon his young "Massa Will.'"

Or how about Rudyard Kipling? Do we want to know what secrets lurk in the covetous heart of "dark Israel"? We'll find that in his Song of the Fifth River, among other places, Do we want White supremacy? Here is a snippet from his poem A Song of the White Men: "...Well for the world when the White men drink to the dawn of the White Man's day!" Do we want imperialism? We'll find it in nearly everything he wrote.

Charles Darwin, easily the most significant writer of the last century, remarks in his The Descent of Man, in a chapter in which he compares the mental powers of men and other animals: "...how little can the hard worked wife of an Australian savage, who uses very abstract words, and cannot count above four, exert her self-consciousness, or reflect on the nature of her own existence." This is only one of a hundred passages of Darwin's which would have the Red Guards of Political Correctness shrieking for his blood.

In Russia, at the same time, Feodor Dostoievsky was condemning the avaricious nature and practices of the Jews, most notably in his Diary of a Writer [see "Dostoievsky on the Jews" http://williamlutherpierce.blogspot....-on-jews.html ]. Nicolai Gogol was writing much the same thing about Russia's Jews in fictional form, in his novel, Taras Bulba.

It is easy enough to hunt out explicitly heretical passages from the writings of virtually every contributor of note in the edifice of Western civilization, from the days of Homer to those of Thomas Stearns Eliot and William Butler Yeats, but it is not really necessary. When racism, sexism, and the other heresies are not explicit, they nearly always are implicit. One does not expect to find many commentaries on the shortcomings of the Negro by European writers when there were no Negroes in Europe, but European society was nonetheless "racist" in every fiber of its being. European men usually loved their women, who usually reciprocated, but their society was as "sexist" by today's Politically Correct feminist standards as it was racist.

A generation ago it was enough to attempt to shield students from the more explicit reminders of these facts: to explain away Luther's and Dostoievsky's denunciations of the Jews as aberrations, to make a few excuses of Poe's depictions of Blacks, to skirt around Kipling's more forceful calls for White pride. Anthologies compiled for classroom use carefully omitted the writings which were too hard to explain away.

This bowdlerizing of European civilization in an attempt to make it palatable to a diverse horde of students and teachers without European roots, as well as to growing numbers of disturbed White men and women whose inability to come to grips with their genders make the traditional "sexism" and "homophobia" of our civilization hateful, was utterly dishonest, and it was bound to fail.

The first postwar generation of White professors and university administrators (i.e., those who began retiring in the 1970s) -- the authors of the policy of bowdlerization -- was characterized by timidity and hypocrisy. Many of them were not happy with the moral compromises they were making, but what were they to do? Some simply didn't have the courage to come right out and say that the bearers of Western civilization had committed a collective act of suicide by engaging in the Second World War: that America and Britain, in particular, had been tricked into fighting against everything on which the cultural ascendency of the West is based, and that now they must either repudiate their role in the war or look forward to the eventual abandonment of their heritage altogether. Had the war not been fought in the name of equality and democracy, and is that not what Political Correctness is all about?

Others had already developed the habit of moral ambiguity, and it was easier to compromise even further than to draw a line and take a stand.

The second postwar generation (i.e, those entering their professions during the quarter-century since about 1965) grew up in the television age and went through puberty under the influence of the Beatles, the Students for a Democratic Society, the Yippies, and the media deification of Martin Luther King; with cities being set to the torch by Black rioters and looters, while the media and the politicians blamed "White racism" for the turmoil; with permissiveness, the denial of individual accountability, the belief that all points of view are equally valid, and protests against every form of authority. The youngest members of this generation were weaned on Sesame Street and sent to racially integrated schools.

They grew up, in other words, in a time of cultural, moral, and racial chaos, and they reached maturity with no clear sense of identity, no firm cultural roots, and no moral bedrock as a basis for their values. They were ready to go with the flow, wherever it might lead: to take their direction from anyone with a loud enough voice.

continued...