Underground Frats - Discover the Networks

Underground Frats 

The heat had been 

coming down all week, 

and things were far too 

dangerous to try anything 

close to home. So toward the 

end of the week, the two men 

notified others that they'd 

found a safe locale for the 

operation. Leaving instructions 

for everyone coming to the 

secret meeting to take 

different routes, they drove 

cautiously through town, taking 

care to see that they were 

not followed, and then proceeded 

along a deserted 

highway for about 30 miles. 

The man on the passenger 

side unfolded a hand-drawn 

map antt? watched carefully for 

the spot where they were to 

turn off. The road took them 

into the woods. They drove 

until they found three cars 

parked beside a fence. Some 

of the others had arrived there before them. 

After getting out of the car, the pair followed the 

map to a small cabin in a clearing. A half-dozen other 

young men greeted them with cryptic signs and handshakes. 

Satisfied that they were alone and unobserved, the group 

got down to business, although they still maintained a 

watchful eye because they knew that even in this secluded 

site, there was still a possibility that one among them was 

a traitor who would turn them in to the authorities. 

Now for the multiple choice test. Was this a 

gathering of Maquis resistance fighters in the south of 

France in 1943? Or perhaps a clandestine conclave of 

Christians in the USSR during the reign of Nikita 

Khrushchev? Or a group of Weatherman revolutionaries 

during the '60s plotting death to fascist Amerika? No, it 

was a meeting of an underground fraternity in the 

northeastern United States in 1994. 

Security measures like the ones described above 

are carried out with a certain self-dramatization, but they 

are also well justified. Administrators at a number of 

American schools, most in the Northeast, are engaged in an 

all-out campaign against fraternities and are doing 

everything in their power to stomp them out of existence. 

From all appearances, they will be satisfied with nothing 

less than the elimination of the fraternity as a class, a kind 

of university version of ethnic cleansing. 

But what these administrators havedone, of course, 

is not kill fraternities but drive them underground. Banned 

from campuses, fraternity brothers now meet in secret 

locations. Their new rituals somewhat resemble the 

candlelight cave meeting in Dead Poets Society combined 

with, of course, the usual rowdy highjinks that have defined 

fraternity life. But college administrators have done 

something that a few years ago would have seemed unthinkable. 

By their repression, they have made fraternities 

Jimmy Hoffa Move Over, Here's the NEA 

EDUCATION THUGS 

Tl he climactic moment of the National Educational 

Association' s annual conference in New Orleans came 

when California delegate Arlene Pavey stood up and 

said she was angry. But, strangely enough, Pavey was 

not angry over the way that youth violence has left 

public school hallways soaked in blood, or about 

plummeting test scores and high dropout rates, or 

about the refashioning of curricula to accord with the 

laws of political correctness, or about what even the 

casual observer must regard as the central tragedy of 

American public education: the fact that most high 

school graduates are culturally illiterate and many are 

quite literally unable to read the diploma handed to 

them as they go out into the world. No, Arlene Pavey 

was angry at.. .Rush Limbaugh! 

"This man denigrates teachers," she shouted, "he 

denigrates minorities, he denigrates women." As her colleagues 

cheered wildly, Pavey proposed a way of dealing with the 

problem. The NEA should begin a boycott of Florida citrus 

growers, who had hired Limbaugh to promote their products on 

his radio show. Jeff Wright, an NEA man from the offending 

state of Florida, followed Pavey to the rostrum. "We must now 

stand together, shoulder-to-shoulder and say no morel" he said. 

political, in effect marrying 

Animal House and the First 

Amendment 

The anti-fraternity jihad 

centers are, as one might 

assume, on large state 

schools and on a network 

of upper-crust private 

colleges in the Northeast. 

The list of colleges that 

have banned or crippled 

fraternities includes many 

of the usual suspects: 

Williams, Buck-nell, 

Colgate, Tufts, Lowell, and 

Wesleyan. Princeton has 

campaigned against all-male 

eating clubs, and Yale has 

pressured its all-male 

societies to admit women. 

Pennsylvania's Franklin 

and Marshall College 

withdrew official 

recognition of fraternities 

and sororities. Administrators 

at Lafayette and 

Trinity Colleges have conducted 

war against the 

Greeks by demanding that fraternities become co-ed. 

• As the fraternities have gone underground to 

survive, schools such as Amherst College have gone an 

extra step: setting up a network of snitches to inform on the 

fraternities' secret doings. Students caught engaging in 

private acts of fraternization between consenting adults— 

even off campus and on their own time—can expect to be 

summarily expelled, suspended, or disqualified from 

scholarships and student jobs. Mere membership in a 

fraternity, regardless of activity, is enough toearn draconian 

punishment at some schools, the clearest example of guilt 

by association on the current political scene. 

A glance athistory confirms that fraternity brothers are 

perhaps the least likely candidates for life in the 

underground. John Belushi and the panty raids of the 1950s 

notwithstanding, fraternities have been a celebrated facet 

of American life since the founding of the Republic. 

Fraternities began as groups of students associating together 

Please turn to page 8 

"If you choose Rush Limbaugh, we choose not to buy Florida 

orange juice!" With union chief Keith Geiger calling the question 

beneath a huge banner reading "NEA MOBILIZES FOR 

ACTION," the NEA delegates immediately passed the boycott 

measure. . 

As it worked out, this was one of 111 resolutions passed 

during the NEA's 1994 convention. But only four of them had 

anything to do with education, a fact that substantiated what 

critics have long said about the National Education Association: 

Power politics always trumps education in this organization's 

scale of values. 

And power politics is a game that the NEA has learned 

to play very adroitly over the past 25 years. To compare this 

union with the Teamsters during Jimmy Hoffa's heyday does not 

do the NEA full justice. This 2.1-million member organization 

has not only surpassed the Teamsters as the biggest union in the 

United States but is now the largest and most powerful union in 

the world. It swaggers every bit as dramatically as Jimmy 

Hoffa's bunch did in the '60s and is every bit as intolerant of 

dissent—both from within and without. Its behavior in New 

Orleans shows that this organization feels good about itself and 

perceives its clout to be so strong that it can strike with impunity 

at those, such as Rush Limbaugh, who dare oppose it. 

And on the surface, the current NEA seems invulnerable. 

Please turn to page 10

PAGE 2 

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 

C O M M U N I Q U E S 

Overheard on the Info Superhighway... 

Re: chilly climate-biased study 

WMST-L@UMDD.UMD.EDU 

WMST-L@UMDD.UMD.EDU 

From: kowan@MIT.EDU (Rich Cowan) 

Sender WMST-Jj@UMDD.UMD£DU(Women'sStudiesList) 

Reply to: WMST-L@UMDD.UMD.EDU (Women Studies 

List) 

To: WMST-L@UMDD.UMD.EDU 

Hi—please put the University Conversion Project on 

your mailing list if you have one; we are monitoring the 

right-wing groups who we feel are responsible for 

making the climate for women much chillier (the Center 

for Study of Popular Culture [sic] is a prime example) and 

we need data to refute their propagandists claims. 

-Rich Cowan UCP Box 748 

Cambridge, MA 02142 

Wonder Bread and WASPs 

I'm not sure how I got on your mailing list, but please feel 

free to keep sending me your paper. Both of my parents are 

descended from Mayflower pilgrims—good White.Anglo- 

Saxon Protestant stock, Daughters of the American 

Revolution, etc. I had such a good laugh reading your 

publication. 

It's refreshing to see that you folks 

aren't ashamed to have your insecurities splashed across 

every article. I think the more you publish this kind of 

material, the more it becomes obvious that you are like 

scared little children who have been taught to fear the world 

as it really is. 

Maybe you could find a nice deserted island 

stocked with Wonder Bread, mayonnaise, Pat Boone 

records, and maybe Michael Hufflngton as your resident 

philosopher. Then the rest of us can enjoy all of the variety • 

in the world without your drivel polluting our atmosphere. 

Carry on the good work; the more you print the 

more ridiculous and insignificant you appear. By the way, 

what is it like to live day after day with such hatred? It 

seems like such a sad way to pass your time. 

Stephen S. Tiger 

San Francisco, CA 

A Juicier, Funnier Book 

Help! "The Highjacking of C.S. Lewis" (October) was a 

direct hit except for this error "Lindskoog is now working 

on an expanded version of this work to be called Light on 

C.S. Lewis's Shadowlands, which will be published with a 

foreword by University of Southern California religion 

professor Robert Ellwood." 

The new book, a lot juicier and funnier 

than people expect, came out in October—bearing kind 

words from Robert Ellwood and 29 other dignitaries 

such as Richard Wilbur (our second Poet Laureate) and 

conservative icon Russell Kirk. The title is Light in the 

Shadowlands: Protecting the Real C,S. Lewis (Questar, 

360 pages, $10.99). If you liked Billingsley's article, you'll 

love the book. Trust me. 

Kathryn Lindskoog 

Orange, CA 

The CTA on Delivering Mud 

When a writer gives me a double negative, I know he's 

sending a positive. When he gives me a "double 'clear,'" I 

know he's delivering mud. 

That is what Craig Hymowitz conveyed in this 

part of his Proposition 187 "analysis": "Nearly half the 

money raised to oppose 187 has come from the CTA 

[California Teachers Association]. And it's clear that the 

teachers' union has clearly ponied up less for reasons of 

principle than of pocketbook." 

CTA members pride themselves on knowing 

clearly and exactly why they "pony up" money in 

electoral contests. And their reasons for opposing Prop. 

187 with dollars, votes, and work had nothing to do with 

their pocketbooks. Were Hymowitz an investigative 

journalist, rather than merely on the staff of the 

Investigative Journalism Project, he might have attended 

the meeting of CTA's State Council mat voted to fight Prop 

187. Failing that, he might have asked any one of the 

journalists who did cover that session of CTA's policymaking 

assembly what the debate was all about. 

Either method of investigation would have in- 

NOTICE TO 

SUBSCRIBERS 

Due to printer scheduling conflicts 

and the holidays, this issue of 

Heterodoxy is a joint November/ 

December issue. This will count 

only as a single issue on your 

subscription, however. 

We will be back on regular 

schedule in January. Happy New 

Year! 

formed Hymowitz that every speaker—from among the 

660-plus elected teacher-representatives—cited the social 

injustice and the moral wrong of excluding children from 

the classroom simply because their parents are "illegals." 

Not one referred to his own "pocketbook," much less to 

CTA's income. Indeed, those same delegates—at mat same 

meeting—voted to reduce CTA's income for the current year. 

It was, rather, the pro-187 side that was motivated 

by pocketbook concerns, as Hymowitz unwittingly 

acknowledges. The initiative's advocates wrote and 

campaigned for 187, he writes, because illegal immigration 

"has reached catastrophic proportions in recent years ___ 

Costs for California's 1.7 million illegals are estimated at 

more than $3.4 billion annually ."He gives no other reasonno 

reason other than the bite on their billfolds—for the 187 

sponsors* stance. 

That is not the end of Hymowitz's ineptitude. A 

bit of investigative journalism would have shown him that 

the $3.4-billion figure is only a partisan estimate that, for 

one thing, ignores the taxes paid by "illegals." (How much 

do they pay? I don't know, but nobody else knows either. 

Nor does anybody know so much as whether they take from 

more than they give to the state's coffers.) 

But presenting a balanced investigative report 

wouldnothaveaccordedwithHymowitz'sform of political 

correctness now—would it? 

Ned Hopkins 

Livermore, CA 

P.S.Full disclosure: I am an associate executive director of 

the California Teachers Association, as well as a paying 

subscriber of Heterodoxy. 

Craig L. Hymowitz replies: Mr. Hopkins' concerns 

regarding my investigation were discussed at length with 

CTA spokeswoman Tornmye Hutto in early October. Ms. 

Hutto presented a similar explanation for the CTA's position 

and actions regarding Proposition 187. Further investigation, 

however, revealed conflicting information and 

motives for the CTA's actions. 

As for Mr. Hopkins concerns regarding the costs 

of illegal immigration, all figures were supplied by the 

California Governor's Office of Planning and Research 

and other state agencies. 

Although the voters spoke with resounding force 

passing Prop. 187 59 to 41 percent, carrying majorities of 

white, black, and Asian voters—the special interests haven't 

given up yet. Before all the ballots had even been counted 

MALDEF, the ACLU, and others had filed eight lawsuits 

against 187 (the CTA is planning to "file a motion to 

intervene" in an existing suit). So once again; the people 

have spoken, and the special interests have scoffed. 

Thoughts from a Second Thoughter 

I have been an avid reader of Heterodoxy for about two 

years. I am 44 and was, like Mr. Horowitz, at one time very 

left-leaning. But after coming to the realization that there 

was no truth in the Liberal movement, I became a 

Libertarian/Conservative (I would be more Libertarian, 

but it leaves Liberals too many cracks to slip through). I 

particularly enjoy the way Heterodoxy exposes the old 

guard left, and this is why I am writing. 

I have been a member of the entertainment 

industry, and although I am not involved at this time, I stay 

up on all the poop. As of late, one could hardly have missed 

the fanfare that accompanied the announcement of the joint 

venture undertaken by Messrs. Spielberg, Katzenberg, and 

Geffen. Now, being an old leftie, I seem to remember back 

in the early Seventies that David Geffen was a name in the 

movement, and I also seem to remember that he was 

arrested for drug smuggling, but the FBI couldn't make it 

stick. Also, knowing people in the music industry, I have 

heard it rumored that this is, in fact, how Geffen got the 

money together to buy his way into the record biz. My 

research hasn't led anywhere as of yet, and I thought you 

and your paper might do an article on Mr. Geffen and his 

early days. 

Please keep up the fight. 

Shannon Van Patten 

Anaheim,CA 

Erratum 

Through an editorial oversight, Richard Grenier, author of 

"Mickey Marxism" in our last issue, received an incomplete 

byline. Grenier, of course, is a one-time reporter for the 

New York Times who now works as a columnist for the 

Washington Times. He is the author o/Captur-ing the 

Culture (1991). Apologies. 

Editors Literary Staff 

Peter Collier Editor Writer 

David Horowitz John Ellis K.L. Billingsley 

Production 

Editor 

Elizabeth Larson 

Editorial Assistants 

Lauren Galacia 

Ann Marie Yoh 

Illustrator 

Mark 

Teague 

Circulation 

Manager 

Lisa Maguire 

HETERODOXY (ISSN: 1069-7268) is published by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. The Center is a California 501(c)3. Editorial: (916)265-9306. Fax: (916)265-3119. 

Subscription: 12 issues, $25. Send checks to Center for the Study of Popular Culture, P.O. Box 67398, Los Angeles, California 90067. Visa and MasterCard accepted. 

Inquiries: 800-752-6562 

Heterodoxy is distributed to newsstands and bookstores by Bernhard B. DeBoer, 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, NJ 07110

HETERODOXY 

PAGE 

REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM 

BLACK MAN'S BURDEN: After the startling revelation 

that Susan Smith had actually murdered her own 

children, Jesse Jackson, reacting to Smith's initial assertion 

that she was the victim of a carjacking by a black man, said, 

"Racism is still the black man's burden and the white 

man's shame. We shouldn't be surprised that. . .Susan 

Smith.. .chose to make her attacker black. The clouds in 

American have been seeded 

with racism." Jackson's charge 

was echoed throughout the 

liberal press—which, after 

having competed to spread 

Smith's story of the black 

carjacker, engaged in an 

orgy of self-flagellation as it 

claimed that we should have 

been more critical of the tale to 

begin with. Far be it from us to 

rob liberals of their cherished 

white guilt. But our 

Philadelphia correspondent, 

Paul Mulshine, points out that a 

sensible post mortem would 

acknowledge that what was 

unbelievable about Smith's 

alibi had nothing to do with 

race. Her story was suspect not 

because she named a black man 

as the culprit, but because of 

the circumstance of the incident. 

That is, some people feel a 

need to steal cars and some 

people need to steal children, 

but only very rarely do those 

urges coincide. Mulshine did 

what no other reporter we are 

aware of bothered to do: call 

the FBI to find out the 

profile of the average carjacker. 

It turns out that the 

typical perpetrator of this 

crime is a black male between 

the ages of 18 and 26. In 

fact, blacks commit 67 

percent of all carjackings in the 

United States. What was 

amazing about this story was 

that the media seized on 

Smith's diabolical charge 

and broadcasted it across the 

country and then lectured us on 

having taken the charge 

seriously. 

LESBIANS NEED APPLY: 

An advertisement placed by the 

Los Angeles Police Department 

in the Lesbian News states that 

300 women will join the LAPD 

this year. There is a picture of 

one woman under the line, 

"Some straight." And 

a pictureof another women under the line, "Some lesbian." 

The ad concludes, "We want both." 

CAN YOU DIGGER IT?: The venerable Sunset magazine, 

bible of the western gardener, received an irate letter 

after referring to "digger pines" in its September issue; 

Marilyn Wolf of the California State Indian Museum 

wrote irately, "Those of us who work for and with 

California's Native Americans were very disappointed... 

The name [digger] was applied to California Indians during 

the Gold Rush as a most derogatory term.. . . .For 

a magazine like Sunset to perpetuate a term like digger 

shows a lack of understanding of our state's original 

people and of their history." The editors replied, "Despite 

growing awareness among horticulturalists that 'digger' 

is a disparaging term referring to some Native Americans' 

subsistence on roots, it is still widely recognized as the 

common name for Pinus sabiniana." Sports coaches 

Digger O'Dell and Digger Phelps better watch out. 

DONNA DO-NOTHING: After Donna Shalala, secretary 

of Health and Human Services, was interviewed in the 

frothy Wmagazine and failed to mention the topic of AIDS, 

Larry Kramer, dramatist and founder of ACT-UP, became 

exceedingly wroth. According to the New York Post, 

Kramer lambasted "Donna Do-Nothing" and said, "In 

fact, and it pains me very much to say it, I think a very good 

case can be made mat, as far as AIDS is concerned, we 

were actually better off under George Bush." Venting 

extravagantly, Kramer went on to say, "On the basis of 

their behavior thus far, neither Shalala nor Clinton will 

have done one single thing to see that I, or the one billion 

people who are predicted to be HIV positive by the turn 

of the century, will survive. God how I hate them both." 

When a spokesman for Shalala told the Post that Kramer 

was a minority of one in the gay community, he retorted, 

"That she has to be asked about AIDS before she talks 

about it shows what an asshole she is." 

STUART SMALLEY REDUX: At Montclair State 

University in New Jersey, the Resident Assistants who 

supervise each floor of the undergraduate dormitories 

had to take a sensitivity training class entitled 

"Homosexuality." Class materials handed out to prospective 

RAs included the following "permission slip": 

"I, _______, hereby have permission to be 

imperfect with regards to homophobia and heterosexism. 

It is OK if I do not know all of the answers or if at times my 

ignorance and misunderstandings become obvious. 

I have permission to ask questions that appear stupid. 

I have permission to struggle with these issues and be up 

front and honest about my feelings. I am a product of 

this homophobic/heterosexist culture, and I am who I 

am; I don't have to feel guilty about what I know or believe, 

but I do need to take responsibility for what I can 

do now: 

— Trying to learn as much as I can. 

—Struggling to change my false/inaccurate beliefs 

or oppressive attitudes. 

—Learning what I can do to make a difference." 

JIHAD IN THE SKY: Renae Bilial, a Northwest Airlines 

employee's wife, sued the airline for religious discrimination 

after receiving a comment about her Muslim 

clothing. NWA has a policy requiring 

anyone using an employee pass to 

conform to a dress code that prohibits 

sandals without hosiery. Bilial, 

traveling on one of those passes, was 

wearing traditional Muslim attire that 

included "a head scarf, long tunic, 

dress pants, and sandals" without 

hosiery. This led customer service 

supervisor Barb Patrick to stop Bilial 

and tell her that her outfit was 

"inappropriate" and that she should 

dress "as though she was going to 

church." Although Bilial was not 

prevented from boarding the plane, 

she later testified that because of this 

incident; she "had difficulty sleeping 

for several weeks, felt humiliated, felt 

a lack of self-worth, experienced 

difficulty trusting people, and. . 

.experienced anxiety and mental 

anguish." The court concluded that 

Patrick's comments were motivated 

by hostility towards Bilial's religion 

because she told Bilial to dress as she 

would to attend a Christian church 

service when, in fact, Bilial was 

dressed appropriately to go to prayer 

at a mosque. Bilial was awarded 

$4,000 actual damages, a $ 1,000 fine, 

and $23,700 in attorney's fees. The 

Court of Appeals upheld this ruling, 

reasoning that the remark is "offensive 

to one of the Islamic faith," To 

the court's credit, one judge dissented. 

Judge Randall argued that 

Patrick's right to free speech was 

violated because the "possible 

offensiveness of the word 'church' is 

irrelevant" and thought the court was 

in a "mindless rush. . .to political 

correctness." 

DONE IT: We go press just having 

learned of the passing of our old 

friend and enemy Jerry Rubin. We 

knew him back in the good old 

days when we were all so bad. He 

liked to think that he had a touch of the 

poet in him, Jerry did, but what he 

really had was a touch of the 

impresario. His first actions as a 

radical involved entrepreneuring 

some of the early marches against 

the war in Vietnam in Berkeley. 

He never quit selling. His book Do It! was a sort of 

hip radical version of Dale Carnegie. He was one of the 

first radical crossover artists, having seen the political 

and commercial possibilities of an alliance between 

those erstwhile opponents—the hardcore radicals and 

the hippies—during the Summer of Love. Never completely 

trusted by the hardcore radicals with whom he 

was in loose alliance (which is one reason to treat his 

memory gently), Rubin became a master of '60s hokum 

and outdid them all in the great race to be noticed. He 

conceived of what qualifies as one of the fundamental 

principles of the era: There's a sucker born every minute. 

Jerry's suckers were in the media, and they found him 

irresistible when he showed up before HUAC in 

Revolutionary Era drag or when he posed in his sarong-like 

Vietcong get-up with a gun. He continued to sell himself 

and his contagious enthusiasm in later incarnations 

during the '80s and '90s as a hip venture capitalist and 

spokesman for hip tonics. Hard to take seriously and hard 

to dislike, he was impatient with all the dreary Stalinist 

Games—in and out of the university—that other '60s 

survivors have played in the downhill half of their lives. 

Always ready to seize the main chance and ^I always 

ready to talk non-stop about almost ^f anything, Jerry 

was an American Original.

PAGE 


Gay-Bashing by Homosexuals 

Let me be frank. I am a 

gay white male who 

was victimized by the 

gay and, especially, 

the lesbian left. 

Here's my story. 

For more than five years, I 

chaired the media committee 

of the New York chapter of 

the Gay and Lesbian 

Alliance Against Defamation. 

I coordinated national 

media efforts responding to 

perceived defamation and 

wrote and placed numerous 

letters to the editor, opinion 

pieces, magazine and newspaper 

articles, and press 

quotes. I met with leading 

American media figures, 

including the president of 

CBS News and the managing 

editor of Time magazine. In 

1990, I received a GLAAD 

Media Award for 

Outstanding Volunteer Services. 

Then, in December 

of 1992, I was "purged" 

(there is no better word for 

it) because I challenged 

some of the left-wing, 

politically correct mantras constantly intoned by those who 

are involved in the "progressive" wing of the lesbian and 

gay movement. 

To many readers of this magazine, GLAAD's 

mission itself may be suspect: "To fight for fair, accurate 

and inclusive representations of gay and lesbian lives in the 

media and elsewhere." Actually, I thoughtup this definition, 

which is still used by the organization to this day. But even 

if I hadn't, I would still maintain that this is a valid goal— 

responding to misinformation and stereotype with reasoned 

argument. Yet it is also a goal that has been greatly 

perverted (if there is a pun here, it is intended) as a result of 

the rise of political correctness and its censorious ways 

within the gay and lesbian movement. GLAAD/New York 

got off track when, in the early '90s, old-guard gay activists 

began to be supplanted by younger PC types. Militant 

lesbian feminists—using "diversity" as their battle cry— 

assumed positions of power and started attacking a new 

enemy: gay white men. 

Ellen Carton, formerly head of National Abortion 

Rights Action League/New York, was hired by GLAAD 

toward the end of 1991. Shortly thereafter, a majority of the 

old board members, most of them suffering from burnout, 

drifted away. Carton, along with then-chair of GLAAD 

Mary Nealon and current chair Peggy Brady, was 

instrumental in packing the new board with many of their 

friends and political cronies. As in the universities and 

other venues where such a radical takeover has occurred, it 

soon became apparent that under this new regime, race and 

gender would be given precedence over individual merit 

when it came to hiring staff. Moreover, only leftists now 

seemed welcome. Discussions with the new staff were 

dominated by endless sensitivity sessions meant to inculcate 

political correctness, sessions that quickly identified white 

men (whatever their sexual orientation) as the oppressor 

class. In fact, the reconstituted and radicalized GLAAD 

staff (Carton especially) seemed far more passionate about 

combatting the pernicious influence of patriarchal white 

males within the lesbian and gay movement than in focusing 

on anti-gay defamation from without. 

As a political moderate who believed in dialogue 

with the straight world and a good-faith search for common 

ground, I found myself shunned by the new clique in 

charge of GLAAD. Finally, Carton announced she would 

no longer work with me because I didn't treat her with 

"sufficient respect." (That is, I disagreed with her 

occasionally!) Finding no support from the recently 

reconstituted board and unable to awaken the dormant 

By Stephen Miller 

membership about the PC fog that had descended over 

Lesbian women bikers in the 1993 gay rights march in Washington, D.C. 

GLAAD, I felt I had no choice but to depart. (Board Chair 

Peggy Brady, by the way, often pointed to the fact that I 

appeared to doze off during one of the organization's 

interminable all-day "diversity" retreats as proof of my 

prejudice against women and a "progressive" agenda.) 

Carton and Brady like to claim thatthe organization 

is still controlled by white males. But as I will show in a 

minute, the dominance of GLAAD by radical lesbians 

couldn't be more evident. 

At the same time Carton is complaining of ongoing 

white male domination, however, she tells The Chronicle 

of Philanthropy, "Now that we've become more diverse, 

we have a diversity of opinion." I hear this and wonder 

what left-wing African Americans, left-wing Latinos/ 

Latinas, left-wing Asian feminists, and upper-middle-class 

left-wing white lesbians—all of whom think exactly alike— 

can possibly have a diversity of opinion about; perhaps, 

which group has been more victimized by gay white men? 

Here' s the point. To most conservatives, gays and 

lesbians may seem an undifferentiated radical bloc intent 

on subverting all the bourgeois norms that underlie the 

social order. (Especially when we seek the right to marry 

the person we love or to serve our country in the armed 

forces—both of which, somehow, get termed "special 

rights" when, in my opinion, they are basic equity issues, 

as opposed to the gay left's more sweeping and intrusive 

demands.) 

What straight conservatives haven' t acknowledged 

(or, for that matter, exploited) are the fault lines inside the 

gay and lesbian movement. These conservatives haven't 

seen the extent to which people who are gay but not 

otherwise politically radical have been targeted and 

scapegoated by the self-appointed gay-left and lesbianfeminist 

cliques that dominate the organized "lesbigay" 

political movement. 

HPo those who can't fathom that gays could be victims 

of JL PC, here are some examples of how it happens: 

THE QUOTA GAME. The national by-laws of the 

Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation now contain 

a convoluted quota requirement under which each chapter 

sends two delegates to the GLAAD/USA steering 

committee. But unless one of these delegates is a "person 

of color" and one is a woman, the chapter is penalized by 

getting only one vote instead of two. This sanction can be 

avoided only when one delegate is a lesbian of color (a 

"two-fer"), which allows the second to be a gay white male. 

(I said it was convoluted.) 

For the new regime, quotas 

are cool. Ellen Carton, head 

of GLAAD/ New York, 

proudly notes that her staff 

now is both 75 percent people 

of color and 75 percent 

female. There are currently no 

white men on staff. Even so, 

Carton says, "Lesbians have 

deep resentments of what 

they see as yet another 

conspiracy of white males at 

the top — even if they are 

gay white males." 

It is no accident 

that gay white men have 

been shut out of all GLAAD 

leadership positions since 

the adoption of the diversity 

agenda. The executive directors 

of the two coastal 

offices, GLAAD/New York 

and GLAAD/Los Angeles, 

are women, as is the national 

coordinator of GLAAD/ 

USA. Nor is this quota 

system in effect only at 

GLAAD. Most of today's 

gay organizations are characterized 

by rigid gender 

and race quotas for staff 

and leadership (including weighted voting favoring 

women and people of color) and a disdain for professional 

expertise. This is evident in 

the penchant for labeling gay 

white men (especially gay white male professionals) as 

part of the "oppressor patriarchy" from which leadership 

must be wrested. 

Organizers of the 1993 March on Washington for 

gay, lesbian, and bisexual rights mandated 50-percent 

"people of color" quotas in communiques with state 

organizing committees. Next came Stonewall 25, a march 

and rally in New York City on June 25, 1994, to 

commemorate the quarter-century anniversary of the 

Greenwich Village riots set off by a police raid on a gay bar 

(the Stonewall Inn) that sparked the modern gay rights 

movementThe Stonewall 25 organizers seemed determined 

to go to the March on Washington one better. The event's 

executive committee conformed to a requirement for 50- 

percent gender parity and 25-percent representation by 

people of color. But "since many of the regional delegations 

that filled out the larger national steering committee failed 

to achieve their quotas at a meeting in Milwaukee in 

August 1993, it was decided that women present could cast 

three votes apiece, and people of color, two. Mutterings of 

reverse discrimination were summarily dismissed by the 

event's "progressive" organizers with a lecture about the 

importance of diversity. 

According to an editorial in San Francisco's Bay 

Area Reporter, the meeting "left one Minnesota white male 

furious that his policy vote was 'weighted down' and 

therefore did not equal the votes of women and people of 

color. 'I feel I don't count,' he said. And he was right, and 

that was wrong." 

In knee-jerk fashion, those who challenge the new 

orthodoxy are deemed racist and sexist. (At a GLAAD/NY 

retreat, I was denounced as "someone who thinks white 

men are the main victims of discrimination" simply for 

raising the issue of gender and race quotas.) As a 

consequence, those sensing that hostility toward gay white 

men, rather than desire for equality and community, is the 

motive of radical gays and lesbians have learned not to 

express their opposition too openly. 

The results are not unexpected. The March on 

Washington came off despite its organizers. In particular, 

the state organizing committees (with the 50-percent 

minority quotas) failed miserably at directing participants 

to lobby their Congress members while in town. 

Writing in The New Republic, Jacob Weisberg noted the 

event "was appallingly organized [and] failed to coordinate 

even a single time for a photo-op on the Mall."

HETERODOXY 

PAGE 5 

Similarly, the Stonewall 25 committee was beset by such 

mismanagement and internal turmoil that when the 

commemoration ended, the committee was over $300,000 

in debt. 

Call it another victory for left-wing organizational 

strategy, with its "appointment-by-quota, only-leftists-needapply" 

mentality along with a fixation on "process" and 

consensus based decision making (a demand foruniformity 

that, in effect, stifles democratic debate). 

MALE- BASHING IN EXTREMIS. Increasingly, 

it seems, radical feminists (lesbian and 

straight), influenced by academic feminist 

theory, propound a variant of neo-Marxism in 

which capitalists are replaced by white men 

(straight and gay) as the oppressor "class." 

Torie Osborn, a former "executive director of 

the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, 

blamed "straight white men talking in 

detached terms about our lives" for backing the 

military's ban on gays—failing to 

acknowledge that then-Joint Chiefs of Staff 

Chairman Colin Powell and other people of 

color were major players supporting the ban (or, 

for that matter, that two white men on the 

Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl 

Levin and the vigorously heterosexual Ted 

Kennedy, were outspoken ban opponents). A 

subsequent NGLTF fundraising letter signed by 

Martina Navratilova demanded power be taken 

from "white, Christian, heterosexual 

males"—apparently the configuration of vices 

representing the root of evil in the world. 

But it's not just heterosexual white 

males who are targeted. NGLTF, having 

abandoned its former policy of alternating 

between male and female directors, now has 

appointed its third consecutive female top 

executive. And the Human Rights Campaign 

Fund, the nation's largest gay organization, 

recently joined NGLTF and GLAAD in 

appointing a female leader. So much for gay 

white male hegemony. 

Leftist lesbian feminists who disproportionately 

influence the feminist movement 

have, to a large extent, taken charge of the 

"lesbian and gay" movement—leaving gay 

men who don't buy the militant feminist 

agenda out in the cold. At the 1992 Democratic 

Convention, for instance, signs demanding "Lesbian 

Rights" equaled in number the placards proclaiming 

"Lesbian and Gay Rights," while of course anyone 

urging "Rights for Gay Men" would have been hooted 

off the floor. 

Gay men receive fundraising letters from the 

National Center for Lesbian Rights and numerous other 

women's and lesbian organizations. There is*no 

National Center for Gay Male Rights to focus 

exclusively on gay male issues (such as defending a gay 

father's right to child visitation when his former spouse, 

backed by the courts, says no). Any attempts to form such 

a group would be condemned by lesbian feminists as 

"sexist and elitist." 

Even the Gay Men's Health Crisis, a leading 

AIDS service and support organization, was pressured into 

creating a Lesbian AIDS Project with its own female 

executive director—despite the fact that women-towomen 

transmission of the virus remains so rare that 

whenever a case is documented, it makes headlines. At 

the same time they are insinuating themselves into the 

AIDS crisis, however, lesbian feminists, playing a game of 

"whose disease is more PC," often decry the fact that 

AIDS receives too much attention compared to breast 

cancer. And a left-wing Latino drag queen, one of the 

co-chairs of the Stonewall 25 rally, blasted gay men as 

sexists for wearing red AIDS ribbons but not pink 

breast cancer ribbons (a predominantly gay male tragedy 

alone, it seems, being unworthy of a special memorial). 

If anything, male-bashing within the lesbian/gay 

movement is getting increasingly more bizarre. At last 

year's Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, a largely 

lesbian affair, four postoperative male-^to-female 

(MTF) transsexuals were thrown out of the event for 

violating the "womyn-born womyn only" policy. As 

recounted in the Washington Blade, concerns were 

expressed over these transsexuals' socialization* privilege, 

and "male energy." 

To assert that transsexual women had a high old 

time as part of the patriarchy is curious, to say the least. As 

one of the exiled transsexuals lamented, "I felt that I was a 

woman. I changed my body to correspond with my gender." 

Regardless, the womyn-born-womyn refused to consider 

comprom-ising around a simple "no penis" policy. To have 

been once tainted by maleness was sufficient to be banished, 

evenif the taint wassubsequentlyremoved with thesurgeon's 

knife. 

T 

here's a context here that should be 

recognized. When an entire stratum of gay male 

movement leaders succumbed to AIDS, radical lesbian 

Members of Siren, a lesbian biker group 

feminists, nurtured by the politics of the women's 

movement, moved in and fundamentally altered the nature 

of gay politics. Today's radically feminist "lesbian and 

gay" movement tends to incorporate lesbi-an feminism's 

critical attitude toward men, male sexuality, and "the 

patriarchy." Male so-lidarity, once a hallmark of gay 

liberation, is now anathema. 

Radical feminists, of course, argue all this is 

necessary because of the greater discrimination faced 

by lesbians. In truth, a convincing argument can be made 

that American society as a whole is far more accepting 

of women loving women than of men loving men. Gay 

men are much more frequently victims of anti-gay 

violence than are lesbians. Even that paragon of PC, the 

New York Times, admitted recently that "people are much 

likelier to express animosity toward gay men than toward 

homosexual women." 

But let facts not stand in the way of feminist 

victimology. It's now common for feminist lesbians to 

demand that they not only be welcome in gay male bars 

(few are ever turned away) but that there be something 

close to numerical parity among patrons—while also 

demanding the creation of more exclusively lesbian bars. 

This parallels in the social sphere the feminist lesbian dual 

political demand for their own "lesbian rights" in lesbian 

organizations funded not only by lesbian but also by gay 

male money and also guaranteed quotas for top leadership 

positions in all "lesbian and gay" organizations. 

The issue of lesbian parity in gay bars was 

highlighted by a polemic titled "Brothers—Or Oppressors," 

which appeared in HheBayAreaReporter. Written by 

the women'scaucus of SanFranciseo's Community United 

Against Violence organization, the diatribe complained of 

"the way women are made to feel less than welcome in the 

majority of bars" in the Castro district. "It will take a lot of 

conscientious hard work to get us out of this mess intact as 

a community," the CUAV women declared. In short, bring 

on the sensitivity trainers, and let's hear another round of 

white male guilt. 

: The growing hostility between white gay males 

and radical lesbians was shown in the response of one gay 

man to the CUAV piece in a letter to the editor: "I hope the 

authors remember the women-only Dyke March in June; 

the women-only music festivals up at Camp Mather; the 

women-only Dykes on Bikes. . .while they rage over 

their evil gay brothers." Another letter writer reported 

that when he marched in the political funeral of a lesbian, 

"A woman loudly complained about why all the men 

were there, and why they were not all in the back where 

we belonged. Presumably, if no men showed up at all, 

the complaints would have been about lack of 'community 

support.'" And a third noted that he had attended a 

meeting of the Harvey Milk Democratic Club at which one 

lesbian after another made disparaging remarks 

about gay white men: "A process was announced 

that basically told the GWM in the room to sit 

down and shut up. . . .Talk about 

disempowering people for who they are! After 

the meeting, when I expressed these concerns 

to the organizers, my commitment to a 

'progressive agenda' was immediately 

questioned. . . .Having grown up in a small 

town where conformity was everything, I 

needed to be somewhere where I wouldn't be 

demeaned for who I am. Imagine my surprise to 

discover that in San Francisco being a 

male and having white skin, both of which— 

like being gay—I didn't choose, was something 

for which I would be ridiculed and 

insulted." 

Now the mere right of gay men to 

socialize in a gay male environment is 

increasingly under attack—not by the religious 

right, but by the gay left. A recent AP 

wire story reported that a lounge in New Port 

Richey, Florida, became a gay bar and announced 

it would no longer employ female barmaids. 

Although the bar's manager insisted that his 

patrons preferred being served by other gay 

men, a statewide lesbian and gay rights group 

took up the heterosexual barmaids' cause, arguing 

the women were victims of sexual 

discrimination! 

Lesbian feminists and their left-wing, 

"pro-feminist" gay male cohorts are determined 

to eliminate all gay male-only space, 

holding that a "lesbigay" culture should 

sanction autonomous space for women only, 

but that male space apart from women is an 

anti-female conspiracy. This siege against 

gay male culture by leftists seeking the obliteration 

of gender distinctions is no different than the 

attacks being waged against straight male institutions 

like the Citadel or all-male campus fraternities. 

P 

LAYING THE RACE CARD. A December 1993 New York 

Times op-ed piece by Donald Suggs of GLAAD and 

Mandy Carter of the Human Rights Campaign Fund 

(the nation's largest gay PAC) held gay white men 

responsible for black homophobia. Suggs and Carter, 

both African-Americans, began by asserting that "leaders 

of the gay and lesbian movement have given highest 

priority to the interest of their most powerful constituents— 

white men." And this has apparently led to gays of color 

being alienated from the gay rights movement, which, 

in turn, caused black churches to support the religious 

right. (Got that?) 

The piece ended with the charge that "anyone 

who tries to widen the focus of gay activism is characterized 

in some gay publications as a white-male basher or is 

accused of caving in to political correctness." (This last 

reference may apply to me, since I wrote in the November 

1993 issue, of Christopher Street magazine that "support 

for greater inclusiveness in the gay and lesbian movement 

has been twisted into something altogether different—a 

rationale for bashing gay, white men.") 

One might ask Suggs and Carter to explain just 

what they think are the exclusively "gay white male" issues 

that have dominated the gay movement. Sodomy law 

repeal? Domestic partnership? Employment and housing 

discrimination? Gays in the military? AIDS? None of 

which, of course, solely concerns "gay white men." 

When the foot soldiers of the Nation of Islam 

claimed Jewish racism was the cause of African-American 

anti-Semitism, that view was denounced by the Jewish 

community in no uncertain terms. But when lesbigay 

leftists promote the scurrilous ideal that gay pale males are 

responsible for homophobia in the black community, we 

gays are expected to nod our heads in shameful agreement. 

The amount of knee-jerk agreement with this kind 

of thinking is quite amazing. "I think white gays and 

lesbians can never move forward until they acknowledge 

[their] racism," David Smith (he's white) of the National 

Continued on page 12

NOVEMBE 

PAGE 8 

Underground Frats, continued from page 1 

for social, religious, or literary purposes. Phi Beta Kappa, 

now ascholarship honor society, began as a fraternity at the 

College of William and Mary in 1776. As part of a protest 

against the stuffy social system of the day, Yale students 

established the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity in 1844. 

DKE members include Presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Gerald 

Ford, and George Bush; author Nathaniel Hawthorne, 

composer Cole Porter, 

politicians Sargeant Shriver 

and John Chafee; Benno 

Schmidt, former president 

of Yale, and ageless rocker 

Dick Clark. 

In 1854, Delta 

Kappa Epsilon chartered a 

chapter at Middlebury 

College in Middlebury, 

Vermont, where, as at most 

schools, the fraternity brothers 

proved to be faithful 

alumni and generous financial 

contributors. Formany, 

this fraternity formed a 

keystone of their college 

experience and helped them 

mature. "It was real world 

experience," says 1964grad 

John Buttolph, whose family 

has attended Middlebury 

since 1810, and whose 

great-grandfather purchased 

the property for the 

DKE (or "deke") house. 

During Buttolph's time, 

DKE spearheaded efforts to 

racially integrate both their 

own fraternity and the 

Middlebury campus. 

Until relatively 

recent times, schools valued 

and encouraged the fraternity 

tradition as an 

integral part of the academic 

system. During the 1930s, 

for instance, when Colby 

College officials moved the school to its present site in 

Waterville, Maine, they invited fraternities to come and 

build houses in the center of campus. As at many other 

schools, the fraternity dwellings form a key part of campus 

housing to this day. As late as the 1960s, some 90 percent 

of Middlebury students joined fraternities or sororities 

with scarcely a peep of protest from the administration. 

But that was then, and this is now. On campuses 

today, unreconstructed veterans of the Sixties have gained 

positions of power in the faculty and the dean's office. And 

they never forgot that during their time in school fraternities 

and sororities not only refused to "get serious" but also 

impeded antiwar, anti-school, and anti-American protests. 

"After the Vietnam War, a lot of us didn't just crawl back 

into our library cubicles," says Jay Parini, radical professor 

of English at Middlebury. "We stepped into academic 

positions. Now we have tenure, and the hard work of 

reshaping the universities has begun in earnest." 

The raw material for this reshaping is not only the 

freshmen who are saturated with PC sensitivity during 

orientation week and thereafter, but also the fraternities. 

The campaign against them by the tenured left is based both 

on historical payback for the way the fraternities were in 

the '60s and on a pragmatic recognition that the Greek 

brothers and sisters will always be the last holdouts against 

today's political re-education. In today's university, the 

desire simply to party down marks one as a dissident; not 

to take the PC regime seriously means struggling for 

survival in an academic gulag. 

Don Wyatt, Middlebury's vice president for 

undergraduate affairs, acknowledges that the push against 

fraternities is part of the PC movement. "This is the 1990s 

and gender is the real issue, the last stand," he says. Like 

many administrators, Wyatt is so fond of standards he has 

several different sets of them for different groups. For 

example, he argues that all-female schools such as 

California's Mills College, which do not admit men, are not 

sexist, but insists that fraternities, which do not admit 

women, are. 

"The mood on campus is so anti-male, even among 

males," says Christina Hoff Summers, professor of 

philosophy at Clark College and author of Who Stole 

Feminism? "Any groups where young men are together is 

outside the control of Big Sister. The gender feminists are 

nervous about men in groups, so fraternities will have to go. 

You can't expect gender feminists to be reasonable." To wean students away from fraternity activity, Colby 

David Easlick, a New York attorney who has administrators engaged in a sort of pacification program, 

devoted his career to defending fraternities because he sees building a student center where they offered free booze. "There 

their struggle as "cutting edge First Amendment stuff," was free beer and tequila, all you could drink," says Chris 

sees fraternity boys as the last free men in the increasingly Mastrangelo, a leader in the fight to keep fraternities at Colby. 

uniform university setting, "Fraternities engage students' "Once the fraternity ban was in effect, however, they cracked 

attention and absorb their energies in ways that distract down on drinking with the zeal of Carry Nation." 

from the inculcation of guilt and anger," Easlick wrote in 

Three Dekes: David Easlick, Teddy Roosevelt, and Gerry Ford 

charges of theft. Cotter 

put the issue in the lap of 

a recent article co-authored with Thomas Short. "More Dean Janice Kassman, who denied that informing or 

important, fraternities provide a social setting, free of 

administrative manipulation, in which their members can 

share their reactions to campus events and discover 

that they are not alone in doubting the doctrines so 

insistently promulgated. This provides much needed 

psychological support for independent thought. 

Fraternities, in short, have become a sanctuary for 

campus heterodoxy, and that is why there are those who 

feel they must be stamped out" But not all fraternities. 

Not all the practices of the ancient Greeks are currently 

out of favor on campus. Officials at the University of 

California at Los Angeles, for example, confirm that the 

administration encouraged the establishment of Lambda 

Delta Lambda, the nation's first lesbian sorority. And the 

University of Nevada at Las Vegas hosts the gay men's 

Delta Lambda Phi, as well as a lesbian sorority whose 

name sounds like a skit onSaturday Night Live—Lambda 

Lambda Lambda. One brother in the Northeast whose 

fraternity has gone underground says that he and his 

brothers actually toyed with the idea of declaring 

themselves gay as a way to gain official approval. 

Fraternities are the issue at Colby College, occupying a 

center stage that 25 years ago was occupied by the war in 

Vietnam. It costs $25,000 a year to attend Colby, which 

demands that all of its approximately 1,700 students live on 

its posh 900-acre campus. 

The school's Baptist founders would doubtless 

have been dismayed by a recent move to chop down the 

school chapel's cross on the grounds that it was 

"exclusionary." They would also probably be surprised at 

the way Colby enforces speech codes, having gone so far 

as to defund The Crossfire, a student publication that took 

issue with a variety of political correctnesses. Colby officials 

criticized a "secret Santa" gift-giving campaign because of 

possible Christian connotations. They changed it to "secret 

snowman," but that too was unacceptable because of the 

dreaded m-word. Finally, they changed it to "secret elf and 

reindeer." 

As part of its social uplift campaign, Colby banned 

fraternities in 1984, even though polls showed that close to 

70 percent of the students wanted to retain them. "Not only 

did they ban the fraternities," says Jed Davis, a Maine 

attorney who works with the ACLU, "but they seized their 

property, and the Maine supreme court agreed with them." 

Colby authorities 

now require students to sign 

the equivalent of loyalty oaths 

promising that they will 

observe the no-fraternity 

mandate. Like other schools 

where fraternities have been 

banned, Colby administrators 

knew that such a ban would 

spawn an underground, and 

they set up anetwork of 

informers to help them 

penetrate it. "They reward 

the snitches, the misfit students 

who hang out with 

deans," says Mastrangelo. And 

attorney Jed Davis cites a 

case in which Colby officials 

entered the room of a student 

and, while searching through 

his belongings, found a list of 

freshman pledges. "The 

school then called them in, 

one by one," he recounts, 

"with faculty members 

grilling and threatening 

them." 

Davis subsequently 

notified Colby President 

William Cotter that the student 

whose belongings had been 

rifled would bring criminal 

interrogation takes place. But Davis believes that Kassman and 

other school officials must have spies in place, because someone 

told them that a group of 61 students, primarily members of the 

football team, had engaged in secret fraternity activity on their 

own time some 30 miles off campus. The college promptly 

suspended 25 juniors and sophomores for one semester and 

denied 19 seniors the right to participate in commencement. 

Among the suspended juniors were three young men 

who could not have been present at the rites because they were 

away studying in England. "The administration didn't know 

who was there, so they punished all of them," says Jed Davis. 

"Then the school told them they were free to come forward and 

prove they weren't there. So much for the presumption of 

innocence." 

Davis and others contrast Colby's heavyhandedness 

in dealing with fraternities with its reaction to the 

appearance of the self-styled radical "Anna R. Kissed" on 

campus. The school caved in to the demand of speaker 

"Kissed" and her feminist allies in the student body that men 

be banned from attending her talk, in which she reportedly 

said, among other things, "If a man was dying on the side of 

the road, I wouldn't help him." Dean Kassman 

acknowledges that the school approved the ban against men 

attending the speech but says the incident sparked positive 

discussion. 

Colby Dean Janice Kassman contends mat students are 

attracted to her school's "fraternity-free" environment and as a 

result of it are the happiest students in the country. As Kassman 

describes it, anti-fraternity administrators are simply following 

the will of the campus masses. The students themselves, she 

says, were upset that underground fraternities existed at Colby 

and wanted the off-campus frats to be expelled, not merely 

suspended. 

"It's bullshit," says attorney Jed Davis who has 

gotten to know many Colby students. 

At Bowdoin, another upper-crust college in Maine, 

there has been the same sort of scorched-earth policy with 

regards to underground fraternities as at Colby. Over the last 

several years, Bowdoin has become such a PC stronghold 

that even faculty liberals feel compelled to protest. In 

February of 1992, Professor Chris Potholm appeared on 

WCBB-Channel 10, a Maine PBS affiliate, decrying the 

school's "thought police" and "ridiculous

HETERODOXY 

PAGE 

rules.' Potholm argued that "diversity" was PC-speak for 

conformity and, as proof, pointed out that the chairman of 

Bowdoin's diversity committee had stated that it was 

wrong for an 18-year-old to be a Republican. 

But when Bowdoin fraternities were the object of 

a PC campaign, they had no campus defenders. The 

fraternities routinely drew faculty flak for a series of 

activities, among them, setting up a chapel on campus. And 

in 1988 Bowdoin gave its fraternities an ultimatum: Go 

co-ed or disband. The fraternities chose the latter course. 

"The crux of 

the matter was that the 

faculty wanted to 

control the students," 

says 1950 Bowdoin 

alumnus Phineas 

Sprague, who remains 

in close touch with the 

campus. Sprague 

makes the obvious 

point that placing 

women with the men 

only increased a 

sexually charged 

atmosphere. A 

firestorm of criticism of 

the school followed its 

decision. Students 

appeared on public 

television claiming that 

the fraternities had 

been "railroaded." Nor 

were the women 

particularly pleased 

with the outcome. 

Student Leslie Morse 

complained that in the 

co-ed houses "women 

don't have the same 

standing" and 

undergrad Iris 

Rodriguez said 

simply, "If s time for 

the college to stopping 

favors for us." 

The PBS station's 

coverage of the controversy 

also included some 

rather startling footage: 

hundreds of students hoisting placards that denounced 

Bowdoin's anti-fraternity policies, which they claimed 

violated not only time-honored traditions but mainstream 

American rights and values as well. As administrators filed 

by, the cameras caught students breaking into a spirited 

rendition of "God Bless America." 

V 

ermont's Middlebury College, which has now banned 

"freshman" in favor of "first-year student" and 

approved the term "womyn" for it its female campus 

organizations, is another once fraternity-friendly school' 

that reversed itself and attempted to ban the voluntary 

organizations as "incompatible with student life." Leading 

the charge was Middlebury President John McCardell, 

ironically a faithful Lambda Kai Alpha brother during his 

student days at Washington and Lee, whose fraternity 

magazine recently trumpeted his rise to a school presidency. 

His efforts to prevent students from enjoying a version of 

his own college experience led him to a carrot-and-stick 

approach vis a vis fraternities, with the emphasis on stick. 

"We'd get dragged into the Community Council based 

on anonymous rumors," says 1991 Middlebury graduate 

Josh Sarkis, a "Deke" vice president in his student days. 

"There were about a dozen of these, and each time they 

would tighten the screws a little further." The council, 

dominated by faculty, derided the fraternity members for 

selecting people they liked, urged them to disavow their 

national organizations, and pressured them to set up a 

quota system for women, complete with time-tables. 

"They tried to take some polls to show that student 

opinion was behind it," says 1991 Middlebury graduate 

Morris Tooker. "But it came out that students enjoyed 

fraternities and didn't want them restricted." Indeed, after 

Middlebury handed down its anti-fraternity edict, the student 

publication Campus took a poll and found that 62 percent 

of the students disapproved of the decision. 

, Trying to give its efforts a veneer of sociology, 

Middlebury administrators appointed a task force to collect 

data on fraternities and fraternity life. Hoping for support, 

the task force "researchers" went to alumni for reactions. 

One 1980 grad said: "Fraternities do nothing but 

discriminate against people who would like that type of 

housing without having to go through some sick humiliating 

initiation rights [sic], or just drinking till you throw up." 

Another one added: "They 're totally outmoded and provide 

no positive input to the college as a whole. Get with the 

times—fraternities, like the Ku Klux Klan, are vestiges of 

a time we'd be better off leaving behind." A third member 

of the class of 1980, doubtless a philosophy major, said: 

"Although fraternities are not a priori despicable, it is 

empirically true that fraternities are despicable. That is, it 

is possible that fraternities are not populated by despicable 

people engaging in despicable behavior (which, by the 

way, is the point of a fraternity)." 

But many other Middlebury alums took the 

opposite view. "Why this asinine witch hunt continues 

seeking to purge the campus of any heterogeneity continues 

to mystify me," responded one 1979 alumni to Middlebury' s 

questionnaire. Said another: "I am tired of these snobs 

using sexism and prejudice as an excuse for their own 

weaknesses. If the college needs to improve the social and/ 

or intellectual atmosphere for this minority who feels left 

out, then do it, but don't destroy what has been so positive 

to so many of us over the years." Another Middlebury grad 

said: "Fraternities are elitist? In one of the ten toughest 

schools in the country to get into, what does elitist mean?" 

But conflicting opinions did not stop the school 

from going ahead with its eradication campaign. Last year, 

President McCardell wrote that the fraternity issue "has 

been approached with a high degree of intelligent, careful, 

sensitive and open-minded consideration.... All voices 

mat have sought a hearing have been heard." 

Activist Josh Sarkis didn't agree, complaining of 

the administration's "crude Stalinist problem solving." He 

initiated a lawsuit against Middlebury on the grounds that 

students' right to free association, as well as their property 

rights, were being violated. President John McCardell 

reacted by saying he found no right to free association even 

in the "deepest penumbras" of the Constitution, an 

interpretation that is breathtaking coming from a liberalarts 

academic. 

Last summer, a Vermont court ruled against the 

Dekes on the grounds that Middlebury was a private 

institution and could ban fraternities if it so desired. So the 

DKEs are not only banned at Middlebury but are forbidden 

to enter the house they own on campus on pain of immediate 

suspension. Asked what other offenses draw the same 

penalties as fraternity activity, Middlebury administrator 

Don Wyatt cited cheating on exams and doing "anything 

criminal" as carrying comparable penalties. Attorney Jed 

Davis says that such administrators are "smug and fanatical." 

Though they fancy themselves trendy liberals, Davis adds, 

they are really stern-as-death authoritarians who believe 

that the end, what he calls their "orthodoxy of the moment," 

justifies the repressive means. 

The problem for the administrators is that there is 

always some spark of rebellion that escapes the net of 

authoritarianism they set up. Despite administrators' 

draconian rules at Middlebury—and at Bowdoin, Colby, 

and many other schools—fraternities continue to thrive in 

the underground. Last year during a football game, for 

instance, a plane flew over Middlebury's stadium trailing a 

"Deke Lives" banner. The students cheered this happening more 

enthusiastically than any moment in the game itself. 

T 

he PC school officials' quarrel with human nature has pushed 

them not only into tactical blunders but also into blindness 

about the possibility of the task they have undertaken. What the 

fraternity eradication campaign has done, in effect, is to 

maximize the contradictions of the 

PC ethos. If political correctness is 

the inflexible establishment of 

the current college campus, then 

fraternities constitute a key 

element of the evolving 

counterculture. On this point, the 

anti-fraternity forces, ignoring the 

laws of unintended consequences, 

are clearly in denial. 

Middlebury’s Don Wyatt, for 

instance, dismisses underground 

frats, claiming that they constitute 

an "army of one." The 

underground Middlebury Dekes, 

their phones ringing off the hook 

with membership inquiries, 

believe that Wyatt needs some 

remedial math, along with some 

sensitivity training in democracy and 

civil liberties. 

What administrators like 

Wyatt are doing is what orthodox 

Marxists used to call 

"maximizing the contradictions." 

One Middlebury alum who asks 

not to be named says, "It is absurd 

to force a student body into one 

model of social institution that the 

faculty deems acceptable. Instead, 

Middlebury should provide 

opportunities for students to 

group themselves as they wish. If 

the resulting groups are single sex, 

co-ed, or only people who play the 

tuba, then that is how it should be in a pluralistic society." 

John Buttolph, a 1950 graduate, puts it more 

pragmatically: "The more you prohibit something, the more 

students want to do it. If they want to hurt the fraternity 

impulse, they should legalize them. Students find that this subrosa 

stuff is fun." As for the administrators, Buttolph says, "They 

sense the tide is going the other way and are making a panic 

effort to stake out an extreme position. They are on the 

defensive, even though they won the law case." 

William Simon, one-time DKE brother and onetime 

Secretary of the Treasury, says, "Our fraternity system is stronger 

today than it was in 1952." Pointing to the rapid increase in the 

number of deke chapters across the country, Simon adds, 

"Respect for the fraternity system is respect for the freedom of 

association." 

"It's cool to be in a fraternity now," says Chris 

Mastrangelo, who also works for DKE's national 

organization. "The anti-fraternity mentality is fueling the 

fraternity movement. Part of the appeal is hiding from Big 

Brother." Mastrangelo, who defiantly wore his Deke pin on his 

graduation gown, says that the banned brothers enjoy meeting 

off campus or on other campuses, in restaurants, safe houses, 

or even in foreign countries. "Time teaches you how to do things. 

You make it clandestine and don't let people know. Fraternities 

will outlast the PC movement." 

hi the meantime, David Easlick, Jed Davis, Josh Sarkis, 

and the others fighting against the ban of fraternities see a need for 

a federal statute, modeled on California's, which would give 

those on campus—public or private— the same rights to free 

association and private property enjoyed by ordinary citizens. 

Until such a law restores their constitutional rights and returns 

their confiscated property, says Easlick, "underground frats will 

have to continue to flourish in secret, exchanging secret cryptic 

handshakes and symbols perhaps even as radical as 'Liberty, 

Equality, and Fraternity.'" 

K.L. Billingsley

PAGE 10 


NEA Thugs, continued from page 1 An 

interlocking directorate of 52 state subsidiaries and 

13,000 local affiliates, it is the only labor union 

in the country with a federal charter like that of 

the Red Cross and the Boy Scouts. This quasiofficial 

status saves the union $2 million in 

property taxes every year and gives the NEA a 

huge advantage in its unending work to extend its 

boundaries and influence. But even without such a 

government subvention, the NEA would be rich. 

According to The NEA and AFT: Teacher 

Unions in Power and Politics, a recent book by 

Charlene Haar, Myron Lieberman, andLeo Troy, 

the union receives income from dues of about 

$250 million, although some observers peg the 

NEA's total income from all sources, including 

rake-offs from sweetheart insurance sales to 

school districts, at somewhere between $750 

million and $1 billion. 

If the NEA does not seem to be overly 

concerned about the educational crisis facing 

America in its annual meetings, it is very much 

involved in using its growing resources to affect 

the political arena. Since 1980, NEA members 

have formed the largest block of delegates at 

every Democratic convention. The union has 

amassed an army of paid political organizers and 

lobbyists more numerous than those of the 

Democratic and Republican parties combined. 

The power of this network is such that a line of 

candidates for state and federal office queue up 

cap-in-hand seeking NEA endorsement and 

funding every time there is an election. 

The NEA exacts a commitment to a very 

specific agenda in return for its support, and at 

the very top of this agenda is opposition to school choice. 

"We've got a monopoly," one delegate joked at the New 

Orleans convention, "and we intend to keep it that way." 

P 

ower politics has become the forte of the NEA—a 

game it plays with increasing heavy-handedness in an 

era when other unions have seen their clout evaporate. But 

its current aggressive personality is actually a relatively 

new one for the teachers' union, whose identity in its earlier 

incarnation was that of a genteel association of self-defined 

"professionals" who pushed their policies with delicacy 

and were aghast at the idea of being confused with bluecollar 

trade unionists. 

First called the National Teachers Association, 

the NEA came into being in 1857 as a kind of educators' 

discussion club. In 1870, the group changed its name to the 

National Education Association and opened its ranks to 

any person connected with the educational trade, then 

enjoying rapid expansion in America. 

In 1905, the association setup shop in Washington, 

D.C., where it built an image for itself as a kind of unofficial 

ministry of education, encouraging change through a free 

and open discussion of the issues. It was the sweetness and 

light generated by the NEA, in fact, that led Congress to 

offer the organization an official charter, which the 

organization gladly accepted in 1907. 

In the ensuing decades, American public education 

became increasingly bureaucratized and successful. The 

NEA presided over this triumph with an avuncular pride. 

Yet it could show its teeth when dissenting, and critical 

opinions about the public educational system appeared. 

When the best-seller Why Johnny Can't Read by Rudolph 

Flesch appeared in 1955, for instance, NEA brass attacked 

the author rather than addressing the problems of which 

Flesch's book was an eloquent early warning. This, of 

course, was a portent of things to come. 

By the '60s, money, not education, was becoming 

job one for the National Education Association: federal 

money flowing regularly, if not always with the profusion 

the union wanted, from Washington, D.C. By 1965, the 

NEA Journal was noting that "Once started, federal aid to 

education will never be stopped." This indeed proved 

prophetic, with national spending on education tripling 

between 1964 and 1976. 

Over the last two decades, the NEA's primary 

quest has been to get as much of this money as possible, by 

any means necessary. It has succeeded, as Peter Brimelow 

pointed out in a recent article in Forbes, because it is 

allowed to function as a federally chartered monopoly 

supplier of labor to a government-enforced monopoly 

consumer. 

The NEA's final transformation from a middlebrow 

association with professional pretensions to a brassknuckle 

trade union was accomplished largely as a result of 

the influence of the "Michigan Mafia." There was former 

NEA chief Terry Herndon, now with the union' s Wisconsin 

NEA President Keith Geiger 

affiliate; Donald Cameron, the union's executive secretary; 

and Keith Geiger, currently NEA president, a man known 

to flip off opponents during debates. 

A late-1960s training tape of the Michigan 

Education Association, one of the NEA's most militant 

state subsidiaries, shows the true face behind the mask of 

gentility the union has continued to try to wear even after 

changing its basic character. "Considerbringing in a heavy 

from the outside," goes one piece of advice to local unions. 

".. .Perhaps your Uniserve [the NEA regional network] 

director. When the job is done and that bad guy, you know, 

has to leave town, won’t it be nice when the local association 

won't have to bear the brunt of the resentment?" 

The tape also urges the tarring of opponents as 

"indifferent to the education of children" and advises 

members: "Keep negotiations going until 2 or 3 in the 

morning. Wear down the board [of education] physically 

and psychologically. . . .Remember to apply pressure 

tactics on the board team or board members subtlety, since 

open public evidence of the tactics you are using will have 

the disastrous effect of unifying the board, and you don't 

want to do that." 

Another tool recommended for local use is an 

NEA manual called Alinsky for Teacher Organizers. 

"Know the enemy, divide the enemy, conduct the action on 

several levels," the manual advises. "Personalize the 

conflict. . . .Don't let your people fraternize with the 

enemy... .Personalize it so you fight a person rather than 

the system. . . .Build all strategies and tactics around 

conflict Use confrontation to buy a piece of the power." 

The reference to 1960s community organizer Saul 

Alinsky in its title makes this manual sound somewhat 

quaint, but it still circulates, although the NEA's J. Michael 

Arisman, who authorized it 15 years ago, explains that they 

don't really use it that much any more. When a reporter 

asked him why, Arisman replied, "For one thing, we 

became powerful." 

I 

n the 1970s, the NEA did indeed come of age. George 

Fisher, then president of the organization, said in 1970, 

"We are realistic enough to know that the great lobbies 

have power, and that if we're going to get a share of the pie, 

we'd better move in alongside of them." In 1972, the NEA 

set up a political action committee. The NEA's first major 

objective, its new president Helen Wise said in 1973, was 

to "reverse the national leadership in Washington and put 

a friend of education in the White House and more friends 

of education in Congress." 

In 1976, the NEA finally crossed its Rubicon 

when it endorsed, for the first time, a presidential candidate. 

The union spent its virginity on Jimmy Carter. "The massive 

support of teachers was critical to our winning this election," 

gushed Carter aide Hamilton Jordan after the deed was 

done. "All over the nation, we turned to the NEA for 

assistance, and they delivered." Carter kept his part of the 

deal by giving the NEA, in effect, its own federal 

agency, the Department of Education. (To get a 

sense of the magnitude of Carter's act, one might 

imagine Ronald Reagan or George Bush 

rewarding the National Rifle Association for its 

support by establishing a federal Department of 

Firearms in Washington to promote weapons 

sales and teach marksmanship nationwide.) 

Carter's move further centralized 

American education and gave the NEA the topdown 

control it has worked to consolidate since 

1976. While the union would have to be judged a 

cataclysmic failure if evaluated by what has 

happened to American education during the 

period of its preeminence, it has been a resounding 

success in the political arena. Since establishment of 

its political action committee, some 80 percent of 

the candidates the NEA has backed have been 

elected. 

As with any empire, conquering a vast 

territory has proved to be easier for the NEA than 

maintaining control. Until the '80s, recalcitrant 

local school boards and legislators NEA chiefs 

regarded as stingy with state funds were the 

union's bete noire. But then there appeared a 

concept—once only talked about in the most 

Utopian of terms—to which union officials reacted as 

if it were the black death: school choice. Ever 

since leaving the realm of Friedmanite theory 

and becoming a real alternative to the irreparably 

deteriorating public education system, choice 

has stood alone on the NEA's enemy list, 

representing the union' s version of the line in the 

sand. 

In 1988, George Bush, in what seemed at 

the time a fairly innocuous move, ordered the Department 

of Education to set up a Center for Choice in Education, 

complete with an 800 number for inquiries. Infuriated 

NEA officials regarded this as a declaration of war. They 

vowed to hold the line against choice while also 

redoubling their efforts to get the Republicans out of the 

White House. 

Help was on the way. In December of 1991, 

candidate Bill Clinton told an NEA screening panel, "If I 

become President, you'll be my partners." The NEA backed 

Clinton to the hilt and celebrated his victory by sending 

posters to over 26,000 schools booming "Bill Clinton and 

Al Gore's Most Excellent Inaugural." Like Jimmy Carter, 

Bill Clinton came through on every level of the NEA wish 

list. Scarcely had he ended his inaugural speech when his 

incoming administration shut down the Center For Choice 

in Education, sending choice advocates scrambling for 

cover. Since then, the Clinton Department of Education has 

returned to the status it had during the Carter years as a 

mouthpiece for NEA policy. 

The NEA's effectiveness as a political juggernaut is so A 

striking that it is easy to lose sight of the way in which the 

union has defined the educational culture in this country. But 

here too the NEA has managed to have its way, creating 

something like a hermetic seal around questions of public 

policy where education is concerned and exerting a control 

that is near totalitarian. 

In 1970, NEA President George Fisher said the 

organization was on the edge of finally realizing its "113- 

year-old dream of controlling who enters, who stays, and 

who leaves the profession." Since then, it has crossed over 

into the promised land. The NEA's mania for control has 

been nowhere more evident than in the way it has colonized 

education departments in universities across the country, 

defining who teaches, how and what they teach, and where. 

NEA guidelines have been instrumental in redefining the 

fiercely independent teacher who was almost an American 

folk figure at the turn of the century as a "certificated 

person." This is the result of a course of study for the 

educational credential which dumbs down prospective 

teachers and instructs them in "educanto," the bureaucratic 

patois that refers to libraries as "learning resource centers" 

and grades as "student outcomes" and numbingly insists 

that "goals and objectives" be "prioritized." 

Joe Overton of Michigan's Mackinac Center for 

Public Policy says that the NEA is determined to control the 

certification process because "they don't want to free up 

schools to make choices." Without a teacher's certificate, 

Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison would not be allowed 

to teach in public schools. With certificates, people who are 

definitely not Einstein or Edison’s have come to monopolize 

the teaching profession. 

While insisting on its ideas of teacher certification, 

however, the NEA fights parent ideas of teacher 

accountability. The NEA is against merit pay, one way of

HETERODOXY 

PAGE 11 

rewarding the initiative and resourcefulness of 

teachers who manage extraordinary achievement 

against the grain of the system. The official 

position is that such merit pay increases would 

be "political," involving school administrators in 

judgments about which members of their staffs 

were producing and which were not. But the 

real reason the NEA and its affiliates oppose 

merit pay is that such a system would, decrease 

union bargaining power for teachers en bloc. 

Such a position has led the NEA to the 

preposterous notion that just as there is no such 

thing as an excellent teacher, so there is no such 

thing as a bad one. Union reps make a local 

school board's life miserable when they attempt 

to get rid of even a grossly incompetent teacher. 

A file of several years' duration documenting 

the ineptitude must be established. Even then, it 

costs an average $50,000 to complete the 

negotiations that characterize a dismissal 

process. 

Many teachers are frustrated by the 

opposition to merit pay. Some feel victimized by 

what they call the "forced union two-step." The 

NEA pushes for state laws that require all 

teachers in a bargaining unit to accept even 

unwanted union representation. Once they have 

accomplished this goal, union bosses then 

complain that they must represent those who 

don't want their representation and whom they 

shun and castigate as "free riders" in the NEA 

equivalent of Catch-22. 

While the NEA has made sure that it is 

practically impossible to fire incompetent 

teachers, it has successfully pushed for laws, 

now effective in several states, that allow for the firing of 

teachers who refuse to pay union dues. Anne Parks, a 

Detroit teacher who was fired for refusing to pay agency 

shop fees, says, "If union officials—who function outside 

the control of the public—can determine who has the 

privilege of teaching America's young, men where is 

democracy, where is responsibility, where is academic 

freedom? We can't surrender our schools to the dictates of 

union bossism and then expect our children to respect 

individual human rights." 

In 1983, Charleen Sciambi of Fremont, California, 

was named best foreign-language teacher in the state. But 

when union officials demanded that she pay dues, she 

refused. After a bitter fight, the non-union teacher resigned 

rather than be "reduced to playing the role of a beggar at the 

union's back door." Said Sciambi, "I didn't need the union 

for anything. I stood on my performance... .[In resigning] 

I told [the students] my employer intended to confiscate my 

wages without my permission and that was the status of a 

slave." 

It is not as if NEA members are under illusions 

about their product. Increasingly, they send their own 

children to private schools while obeying union leaders' 

demands to block voucher plans mat would enable innercity 

blacks and Hispanics to do likewise. On a recent David 

Brinkley TV show, George Will charged that 50 percent of 

NEA teachers sent their kids to private schools. "It's not 50 

percent," the agitated NEA chief Keith Geiger sputtered in 

response. "It's 40 percent" 

The National Education Association's offensive of the 

past quarter century has not only won it a vast domain 

but destabilized areas of public education that were once at 

least semi-independent and turned them into union satellites. 

The local and national Parent Teacher Association is a 

good example. "You'd be hard pressed to find a difference 

between the PTA and NEA," says a federal education 

official who asks not to be identified and who points out 

that the national Parent Teacher Association recently shared 

office space with the NEA in Washington. 

Ella Miamato, vice president for education of the 

California PTA, acknowledges that the PTA serves in 

"educational coalitions" with the California Teachers 

Association, an NEA affiliate whose president, Del Weber, 

once said that school choice was an idea"so evil it shouldn't 

even be on the ballot." Under Weber's direction, CTA 

union members harassed petition takers trying to get a 

choice initiative on the California ballot in 1992 and signed 

phony names in an effort to block Proposition 174 (as the 

California voucher plan was eventually called) from even 

qualifying for the ballot. 

It was an action at times so extreme that former 

Secretary of the Department of Education William Bennett 

called CTA operatives a "goon squad." But what was 

perhaps most shocking was that the once-independent PTA 

helped the union distribute anti-choice propaganda heavy 

Former NEA President Mary Futreii 

on scare tactics, which teachers sent home stapled to 

children's' homework. In California, the PTA has acted as 

a ventriloquist's dummy for the NEA's questionable claim 

that education is under funded. 

If the NEA has suborned the parents' voice in 

public education, it has also used for financial selfenhancement 

its leverage over school administrators. In a 

July 1993 Forbes article titled "The National Extortion 

Association?," Peter Brimelow and Leslie Spencer pointed 

out that, at the same time it engages in collective bargaining 

with school districts, the NEA also functions as an insurance 

conglomerate, getting fat rake-offs for the benefit plans it 

peddles to them. The authors reveal that in Fairfax, Virginia, 

an NEA-controlled committee transferred school board 

health coverage from Blue Cross/Shield to Prudential, a 

policy that the NEA sells, even though the new coverage 

was inferior and more expensive than the old. This is the 

case in many school districts, where administrators opt for 

the NEA's second-rate coverage lest they suddenly 

experience "labor trouble." 

The NEA also has an official relationship with 

Horace Mann Educators Corporation, a property, casualty, 

and life insurer founded in 1945. Horace Mann provides 

liability insurance for NEA members, which further 

increases union control over the rank and file. When then- 

Gov. of Tennessee Lamar Alexander proposed that the 

state provide teacher's liability insurance, the NEA went 

ballistic—possibly the first time a union has objected to an 

employer providing benefits—and even accused the 

governor of "union busting." 

N 

ot only is the world's largest union uniquely poised to 

maximize its power and profits by sweetheart business 

deals, its clout and quasi-official status give it the inside 

track to push a political agenda. 

In the past, this agenda was defined by naiveté* and 

soft-headedriess in the international arena. High-profile 

American educators such as Stephen P. Duggan admired 

concepts such as "psychopolitics," which Soviet educators 

hoped would mold a New Socialist Man. And in the mid- 

1930s, the NEA sponsored teacher exchanges with the 

USSR; during World War II, it began touting world 

government. 

At the close of the '60s, the NEA leadership, like 

other self-defined "progressives," went from the Utopian to 

the doctrinaire. In 1970, the union lifted restrictions on 

Communist members implemented during the 1950s, when 

even the ACLU had turned its back on the comrades. In 

1971, NEA President Donald Morrison and Executive 

Secretary Sam Lambert spent two weeks on a Potemkinvillage 

tour of the USSR at the behest of the Education and 

Scientific Workers of the Soviet Union. "I was impressed 

with the fact that their system of distributing goods and 

services seemed to be working," said Lambert, "and that 

the Soviets do seem to have eliminated poverty." The 

Soviets were delighted to get such a smiley face 

on their report card from unionized American 

educrats, who visited no pro-democracy dissidents 

and continued to mark the USSR by a lower 

standard than their own country. 

During the '80s, the NEA appeared to 

indulge every anti-corporate, anti-American 

propaganda blitz, at one time going so far as to 

allow the nuclear-freeze campaign to operate 

from NEA offices. In 1981, Robert Moir of the 

Daily World, a Communist Party organ, attended 

the NEA's annual convention in Minneapolis 

and liked what he saw. "Nowhere in the basic 

documents of NEA, in their resolutions or new 

business items, are there any anti-Soviet or antisocialist 

positions," he wrote. "It has chosen a 

position in opposition to transnational 

corporations, to racism, to the Pentagon, and to 

the Reagan Administration. In doing so, it will 

increasingly be righting shoulder-to-shoulder with 

fellow trade unionists as the class struggle 

intensifies." 

The NEA's infatuations once drew fire 

from the rival American Federation of Teachers, 

which did not regard the USSR as a model to be 

admired. "The Communist government considers it 

a great propaganda coup to have their phony 

'unions' accepted around the world as true 

representatives of the workers," says an AFT 

pamphlet. "When the NEA establishes ties with 

these groups and agrees to have official exchanges 

with them, it plays right into the propaganda 

maneuvers of these totalitarian governments." 

But the days when the AFT could be 

considered a possible counterweight to the NEA 

have long since vanished. Presently, the two unions are 

negotiating a merger. 

With the end of the Cold War, the NEA has become a 

classic example of how the traditional left-oriented 

organizations, shorn of foreign Utopias to hold up as 

models, shifted their political focus to the home front. The 

union has stepped into the forefront of race/class/gender 

issues and put itself squarely on the side of 

"multiculturalism" and "diversity." 

The union's institutional leverage enables it to 

disguise PC as educational reform through vehicles such as 

the controversial California Learning Assessment System 

(CLAS), about which CTA boss Del Weber wrote, "This is 

almost exactly what CTA has been urging for more than a 

decade." 

The CLAS tests, largely designed by CTA 

"development teams," have been designed to replace 

objective examinations. They include essays on such PC 

issues as race, recycling, gun control, and non-traditional 

marriage. Children are instructed to write down their 

"feelings" and encouraged to borrow from others in group 

exercises. (One test asks: "How does your group feel about 

the treatment the Chinese received from the Americans? 

Below write what your group thinks.") 

In addition to being "examined" within this 

framework, students are urged to become politically active, 

particularly through protest letters to politicians. In 

Maryland, teachers refused to write college 

recommendations for graduating students unless the kids 

also wrote to local officials urging tax increases that would 

benefit the union. And Thomas Sowell cites a California 

case in which students, after prompting by teachers, wrote 

to officials saying: "I hate you. I would like to kill you" and 

"I'm going to set your house on fire and get my homies to 

beat you up." 

When both conservative and liberal parents 

protested the CLAS tests, the union became extremely 

agitated. "The far-right network in California has a longrange 

goal of discrediting public education," it said in a 

joint declaration of 1994 with the left-wing lobbying group 

People for the American Way. "Its attacks on CLAS are 

designed to undermine reforms that are essential to 

improving the quality of public education in California." 

The California Teachers' Association defense of 

CLAS is not dissimilar to the NEA's defense nationally of 

Outcome Based Education, which also inculcates politically 

correct values. "The National Education Association 

through its Center for Innovation is gaga over OBE," wrote 

Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Robert Holland, who, 

in a series of articles, exposed OBE as "fake reform—PC 

junk—that profits no one except the consultants peddling 

their wares to gullible educrats." 

Educator Linda Page agrees with this 

characterization, charging that OBE, the opposite of a 

standards-based system, is "an attempt to come up with an

PAGE 12 


explanation why students aren't learning and teachers 

aren't teaching." A one-time public school principal and 

educational think tank director, Page says that OBE is "an 

excuse for teaching.anything you want to teach and in the 

process removing accountability." 

Outcome Based Education ignores both standards 

and parental input. In keeping with the era of good feeling 

the NEA is trying to create as the performance of its 

members plummets, OBE seeks to make students "feel 

good about themselves" regardless of whether or not they 

have learned anything in the classroom. In his series for the 

Richmond Times-Dispatch, Robert Holland cited a case in 

which black parents in Chicago sued educrats for 

malpractice because OBE had turned the school into a 

"factory of failure." The district dropped OBE after 

admitting that test scores had plunged during its reign. 

Nonetheless, Goals 2000, the Clinton administration's 

reform plan signed into law this year, is replete 

with OBE concepts. Part of the Goals 2000 program is 

"Exploring the American Experience," an outline of new 

history "standards" for grades 5-12 hot off the presses in 

late October from UCLA's National Center for History in 

the Schools. The product of more than $2 million in grants 

from the Department of Education and National Endowment 

for the Humanities, this history outline was also blessed by 

the NEA, whose representatives served on the committee 

that drew it up. 

The new outline is staunchly revisionist. While 

Paul Revere and the Wright Brothers are not mentioned, 

there are numerous references to the KKK and Joe McCarthy 

and other aspects of what is emphasized as the dark side of 

American history. The Constitution is virtually ignored 

and the Sierra Club and National Organization for Women 

get more attention than the First Continental Congress. 

Under the guidelines established by this work, 

students are to "analyze the achievements and grandeur 

of Mansa Musa's court, and the social customs and wealth 

of the kingdom of Mali," but there is no reference to such 

dead white males as Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas 

Edison, Albert Einstein, and Jonas Salk. Writing in The 

Wall Street Journal, former National Institute of the 

Humanities chair Lynn Cheney concluded that these 

standards were a travesty and "not only a politically correct 

version [of American history], but a version of history 

that's not true." 

Former Department of Education Assistant 

Secretary Diane Ravitch, now at New York University, 

said that the whole thing smacked of "victim psychology," 

and Chester Finn, co-author with Ravitch of What do Our 

17-Year-Olds Know?, called the guidelines "anti-Western" 

and "hostile to the main threads of American History." 

While contributing to the rewriting of American history, 

the NEA has also gotten involved in the sexual 

harassment industry. With the union's helpful input, the 

U.S. Department of Education is currently developing 

national sexual harassment guidelines. "We've had 

extensive dialogue and exchanged some letters," says the 

NEA's Claudia Edwards, who adds that the NEA was also 

involved in "focus group discussions" on the subject. 

In October, the NEA released its own sexualharassment 

guideline, Flirting or Hurting?, which union 

president Keith Geiger said had been "rigorously field 

tested by 42 teachers from Massachusetts/' a state whose 

sexual harassment curriculum, interestingly enough, had 

been developed by Nan Stein, one of the Flirting authors. 

(Stein, who works for the Center for Research on Women 

at Wellesley College, is the source for much gender-based 

propaganda masquerading as social science, including the 

notion that schoolboys who flip up girls' skirts are "gender 

terrorists.") 

Noting that one of the scholarly "resources" for 

Flirting is a column by Ellen Goodman, Christina Hoff 

Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism?, says, "The 

NEA has jumped on the bandwagon, and it's very 

unfortunate. They should immediately put on their staff 

some sound social scientist who could distinguish between 

junk science and the real thing." 

The Flirting guidelines, say the NEA authors, not 

only intend to reduce and eliminate sexual harassment in 

schools but "aim at a transformation of the broader school 

culture." Dealing effectively with sexual harassment, they 

say, "is much easier if a school has committed itself to 

infusing a spirit of equity and including a critique of 

injustice in its curriculum and pedagogy. We need to view 

sexual harassment as a systemic problem and treat it with 

sustained and multidimensional education efforts." They 

insist that those subjected to training should include cafeteria 

workers, bus drivers, teachers' aides, janitors, adjunct 

music teachers, driver's-ed teachers and coaches. 

The NEA's powerful position virtually assures 

that these guidelines—like the revision of American 

history—will soon be in use across the nation and that 

kindergarten boys who flip the dresses of little girls will not 

be punished for rudeness but stigmatized as tiny sexual 

harassers. 

T 

he National Education Association is rich in enemies 

as well as money. The analogy with the Teamsters in 

their halcyon days holds true in the contempt with which 

the NEA is regarded not only by professionals who have 

watched its development but also by parents who have felt 

its power imperil their children’s' education. 

"The NEA represents everything I abhor in 

American Education," said educator Chester Finn in a 

recent TV interview. "They are the monopoly. They are the 

status quo. They are the problem." 

Law professor Phillip Johnson of UC-Berkeley 

adds that "the National Education Association does not 

represent the legitimate interests of school teachers, as it 

should, because it has been taken over by a gang of 

ideologues whose only interest is in left-wing agit prop." 

For Linda Page, who saw the radicalization of the union 

first-hand as a California teacher in 1968, the NEA is "more 

socialistic than the former Soviet Union. Their agenda is 

power and control more than students. The NEA agenda is 

in direct opposition to what is good for kids." 

With a willing collaborator sitting in the White 

House, however precariously, the NEA doesn't seem 

worried about its future. But there are portents that 

the union's power may be waning. While it is true the 

Florida citrus growers did not renew the contract of Rush 

Limbaugh as their spokesman, it is also the case that the 

NEA could not prevent the recent reelection of Michigan 

Gov. John Engler, a tax and education reformer and one 

of the union's most outspoken foes, despite an expenditure 

of some $2 million in behalf of Engler's opponent. Nor 

could the NEA's massive spending on behalf of 

friendly Senate and Congressional candidates prevent the 

conservative tide from sweeping the nation in November. 

Choice, seemingly dead after the defeat of Proposition 

174 in California two years ago, is now a livelier issue than 

ever before. 

The NEA, like the former USSR, has a difficult 

strategic cross to bear. It is condemned to fight on many 

fronts to preserve its empire but can't afford to lose a single 

battle. President Keith Geiger gives the game away when 

he warns members against "letting the kids escape." But 

despite the NEA's desperate efforts, that is what is 

happening. Support for educational school choice is at an 

all-time high, particularly among minorities. The 

information highway is turning the living room into a 

classroom. Many parents now opt to educate their children 

privately, or at home, regardless of cost or inconvenience. 

Choice initiatives are not going to go away, and sooner or 

later the NEA will lose one of these battles—and the kids 

will escape for good. 

"The Berlin Wall analogy is appropriate," says 

educational researcher Joe Overton. "All it takes is one 

crack. Once they see daylight on the other side, all those 

poor people who have suffered all these years will pour 

through." 

—The Editors 

Gay White Males, continued from page 5 Gay and 

Lesbian Task Force told the Washington Post last June. 

Tony Summers of the D.C. Coalition of Black Lesbians and 

Gay Men and Bisexuals was quoted in the same story as 

expressing "concerns [that] black and Hispanic 

homosexuals as well as transvestites might not be well 

represented" at Stonewall 25. Just who was standing at the 

gates keeping them out? After all, the quota-minded 

Stonewall 25 crew appointed a Latino drag queen as a cochair/spokesperson 

for the event, so if gays of color didn't 

participate in sufficient numbers perhaps they should blame 

themselves. 

Speaking of baiting gay white males, RaanMedley, 

a lawyer and former member of ACT BLACK (the African- 

American caucus of ACT-UP) wrote a June Newsday oped 

in which he gave as an example of gay white male 

supremacy (as well as the white gay community's 

"conspicuous consumerism") the IKEA commercial 

featuring a gay white male couple buying furniture. "That 

ad was the culmination of 25 years of.. .de facto segregation 

by one of the nation's best organized, most politically 

cohesive and, indeed, narcissistic minorities," Medley wrote 

in a sentiment that could put the worst gay-bashers in the 

country to shame. 

In July, Eric Stephen Booth, who described himself 

as "a middle-class black gay man," wrote a letter to the 

New York Times in which he came to the astounding 

conclusion that "since AIDS, white gays have endured 

discrimination for the first time." He added that in terms of 

its bigotry "the upper-middle-class white gay community 

is no better than its straight counterparts." 

In fact, there's not one gay organiza-tion that I 

know of which isn't devoting substantial time and energy 

to outreach efforts on behalf of gays and lesbians of color. 

But true "diversity" and "inclusion" isn't really what 

lesbigay leftists are after. They're seeking to 

disempowered gay white men who are, by virtue of their 

race and gender, 

demonized into part of a class of oppressors—regardless of 

their individual histories, economic situations, or what 

have you. It is, in short, an ethos of collective guilt And the 

remedy is quotas. 

T 

he result of all this radicalism in the gay and lesbian 

community is clean polarization between moderates 

interested in gay rights and radical leftists and feminists 

bent on keeping gay white male professionals in 

their place—writing checks and making guilty selfcriticism. 

Gay conservative and libertarian dissidents, 

such as A Place at the Table author Bruce Bawer, are 

regularly excoriated in the leftist gay press. There has 

been a concerted attempt to silence these individuals. 

As lesbian feminist Sara Miles recently huffed in Out 

magazine, "Their criticisms of existing gay politics 

and subculture are rooted in the same backlash against 

feminism, multiculturalism, and affirmative action 

that fuels the broader neo-conservative movement." 

It was my growing sense of unease with all this 

that eventually led me to step back from the gay rights 

organizations, and I'm far from alone. The majority of gay 

men and lesbians avoid active involvement in the movement 

per se (as opposed to AIDS causes). A big reason is that the 

politically correct ethos is so off-putting, especially with 

the new wrinkle of self-criticism sessions led by over-paid 

diversity consultants, where gay participants must confess 

their sexism and racism. 

Fortunately, as in society at large, a growing 

number of gay people are now expressing resentment 

toward the leftist-feminist "oppression hierarchies" 

that scapegoat gay white men as privileged members 

of the patriarchy and belittle the bigotry we face. But 

many on the anti-PC right, rather than reaching out to gays 

and lesbians who are standing up to radical lesbigay 

PC, prefer to label all gay people as naturally subversive. 

These same conservatives have no trouble 

distinguishing between millions of moderate African- 

Americans, on one hand, and militant Afrocentrists on 

the other; or between moderate women and radical 

feminists. Yet when it comes to gays, we're all painted in 

a single shade with a broad brush. 

There are electoral advantages that the conservative 

movement could reap by recognizing that all 

gays are not born leftists and are becoming alienated 

from the gender left in increasing numbers all the time. 

In its recent post-election "Portrait of the Electorate: 

Who Voted for Whom," the New York Times included 

a breakdown of voters across the country who identified 

themselves to exit pollers as gay, lesbian or bisexual. 

In 1992, 23 percent of them had voted for Republican 

House candidates. This' year the figure was 40 percent. 

(Surprised?) 

The trend toward the GOP is even more 

pronounced in the nation's large metropolitan areas. Last 

year saw the election of Rudy Giuliani in New York and 

Dick Riordan in Los Angeles (when they were still 

perceived to be loyal Republicans!). Both ran as fiscal 

conservatives who were gay-friendly. Election day exit 

polling in New York showed Giuliani received 31 percent 

of the gay/lesbian vote and Riordan got about a third of the 

vote in Los Angeles. 

Recently in the radical publication The Nation, 

left-wing gay playwright Tony Kushner expressed his fear 

that gays would reject their self-appointed leadership's 

political radicalism. This makes my point for me. If gay 

leftists can see the handwriting on the wall and realize that 

the average gay person need not remain an unquestioning 

constituent of the far left, why can't straight conservatives 

read the same message? 

Stephen Miller is a writer and recovering 

progressive living in New York City.

HETERODOXY 

PAGE 13 

WOODSTOCK-THE IAST WORD 

BY LAURENCE JARVIK 

1994 should not be allowed to dwindle away 

without a final goodbye to the event at which 

the Sixties generation looked back this year 

with nostalgia—Woodstock 1969. That 

hyper-trophied happening was something of a joke 

at the time (and even more in retrospect), but no 

other event from that destructive decade more 

clearly indicates The Way They Were. 

The film Woodstock—re-released this year as a 

"director's cut" in time for the event's 25th reunion 

concert—presents an image of peace, love, and music. One 

sees the mosh pits, the performers, and the crowds. Interviews 

with revelers are interspersed with townspeople who 

seem drawn from the painting "American Gothic" 

complaining about strange goings-on. There are, of course, 

anecdotal stories of a "bad trip" or lines for the bathrooms. 

In one se-quence, Army helicopters are seen airlifting a few 

victims of drug overcfoses. But overall, the film, produced 

by the same businessmen who promoted the Woodstock 

concert, is more a promotional infomercial than a 

documentary. And, above all, it presents only a tiny slice of 

the truth of the event. 

For those who took the opportunity to look back 

to the original news accounts, it is clear that Woodstock 

was not the peaceable kingdom portrayed in the film but 

rather an orgy of lawlessness, violence, and nihilism at a 

cold and miserable location, which was tolerable 

presumably only because of the drugged condition of the 

concertgoers. In the popular myth, theconcert was supposed 

to display the love, cooperation, and communal good 

feeling at the heart of Sixties utopianism. A close look at 

what happened at Woodstock shows quite the opposite. 

The murders at Altamont were already foreshadowed at 

Woodstock by thefts, assaults, drug sales, and at least two 

reported meaningless deaths. 

If Woodstock had been a General Motors car, 

Ralph Nader would have demanded it be recalled as a 

defective product. Instead, because it was "politically 

correct" for its time, its promoters and mythologizers 

ignored the nightmarish reality in much the same way that 

they and their kissing cousins among the politicos of the era 

painted out the gulags of the Soviet Union. Woodstock had 

in it all the horrors of the ghastly '60s, and this was well 

known at the time. 

Yippie leader Paul Krassner wrote about a famous 

violent incident at Woodstock in his aptly titled 

autobiography, Confessions of a Raving UnconfinedNut. 

He recalled: "While The Who was performing, Abbie 

Hoffman went up on stage with the intention of informing 

the audience that John Sinclair of the White Panthers was 

serving ten years in prison for possession of two joints, that 

this was really the politics behind the event, but before he 

could get his message out, Pete Townshend turned his 

guitar into a tennis racket and smashed Abbie in the head 

with a swift backhand. And my yellow leather fringe jacket 

that I was wearing for the first time was stolen from the 

"Movement City' tent." 

Yet the film Woodstock does not contain this 

scene, or any reference to this scene, an omission no doubt "hush money" was reported in the New York Times, but it 

intended to further the myth of nonviolence that surrounds has yet to be integrated into the mythology of the event. 

the gauzy memory of the concert to this day. Pete If violence and corruption were features of 

Townshend's bashing of Abbie Hoffman was an act of Woodstock, so was crime. The Hog Farm Commune was 

violence—assault and battery, to be precise—and might supposed to help police the event. Richard Reeves noted 

have been both a criminal offense and grounds for a civil that "some festival organizers were dubious about calling 

suit in another circumstance. But in this case, more than them security officers. "They stole everything that wasn't 

simple violence underlay the assault on Hoffman, For nailed down,' one man said. [Concert organizer John] 

Abbie had apparently broken an agreement by "politicizing" Roberts has no idea who took what, but he does say: 

the concert. 

'Everything was taken. The jackets we planned to sell. Our 

New York Times writer Richard Reeves noted in a walkie-talkies. Even the jeeps disappeared.'" 

profile of concert promoters Mike Lang and John Roberts 

in the September 7, 1969, New York Times that accepting And what about the supposed anti-commercialism of 

payoffs was a part of Abbie's reason for being at the Woodstock and of the communal "counterculture" that 

festival. As Reeves wryly pointed out: "Neither rain, nor was more interested in spiritual enlightenment than crass 

garbage, nor Students for a Democratic Society could profit? On August 17, 1969, the New York Times 

provoke the kids. SDS and other radical groups, however, reported that $ 13-million worth of tickets had been sold in 

were paid well notto start trouble. Yippie leader Abbie advance, and $140,000 had been taken in at the gate by 

Hoffman got $10,000 from Woodstock to set up a big tent Woodstock Ventures. The company spent $200,000 on 

as headquarters for assorted radicals." That is probably advertising to promote the concert. And who were the 

equivalent to $100,000 in 1994. No wonder Townshend event's promoters? The film Woodstock shows some 

smashed Abbie with his guitar when he tried to stir things longhairs in work clothes. But the New York Times reports 

up. And no wonder Abbie didn't press charges. He probably of the day saw another side;—a side that prefigures Gordon 

didn't wantto return his payoff. ThatHoffmanhad accepted Gekko and the so-called "decade of greed" of the '80s. 

Then.. .and Now. 

Here's how Richard Reeves described the 

impresario of Woodstock at the time: "There is John 

Roberts in his apartment on East 85th Street. Same age as 

Mike, horn-rimmed glasses, Rogers Peet suit. At 25 he'll 

inherit the first million dollars from the Polident trust fund. 

Outtasight!" And here is Reeves talking about Roberts' 

partner for Woodstock, Mike Lang: "'I knew it was going 

to happen,' Mike said the other day as his white Porsche 

stopped in front of the Plaza." 

Now the film Woodstock, for some reason, never 

showed us Mike Lang's Porsche pulling up in front of New 

York's fashionable Plaza hotel. And it never showed us 

John Roberts' fashionable Upper East Side apartment, or 

his trust fund, for that matter. 

And how, precisely, did Roberts spend his time at 

Woodstock? The film didn't show us, but Richard Reeves 

did. "He spent the weekend far from the madding crowd 

writing $600,000 in bad checks to pay the groups, feed the 

kids, fly medicine in, and generally to prevent a riot by the 

kids or their angry creditors." So the festival of peace and 

music was in fact driven by crass commercial values, the 

cash nexus, and by bad paper. 

The musicians who are remembered simply as 

pied pipers actually wanted to be paid before they would

PAGE 14 


perform. These scenes are not in the film, either. But 

Richard Reeves was there, and he described them in 

the New York Times: "At one point a few of those creditors, 

unimpressed by the slogan 'three days of peace and 

music,' managed to get into Mike's trailer, behind the 

throbbing one-acre stage and begin hassling them for their 

bread. 'We don't have the cash right now,' Mike said 

softly, smiling; no one can remember ever hearing him 

raise his voice. 'We didn't plan it this way, but this is a 

free concert. There is no gate. There is no cash. It's a 

beautiful thing. Have some faith?'Bull—' screamed the 

manager of one of the top groups that played at Bethel. 

'You say you have $40 million behind you. Then get up 

$5,000 cash—now!' 

Another group manager, John Wolff of The Who, 

knifed in with 'cash or certified check or we don't go on.'" 

Such was the anti-commercialism of Woodstock! But this 

side of the concert was airbrushed out of the film because 

it didn't fit in with the mythos surrounding the moral 

superiority of the youth culture to the crude commercial 

system it was pretending to overthrow. 

And how did John Roberts remember the peace 

and love of Woodstock? "It was a nightmare—I wrote a lot 

of bad paper that weekend," Roberts said later as he sipped 

a Seven n' Seven in the Cavendish, a private club which his 

father belongs to on Central Park West "My family is 

scurrying around getting the collateral to make the checks 

good. Everyone will be paid in 60 days." 

Expenses totaled $2.7 million, and the revenues 

were $1.4 million. In other words, the concert was a media 

event designed to generate a.long-term revenue stream 

from the film and album that would more than make up the 

short-sterm shortfall. Even the temporary loss was abusiness 

proposition, engineered in part by Roberts and Lang's two 

other partners, Artie Kornfeld, a contemporary music 

executive at Capitol Records, and Joel Rosenman, a Yale 

Law School grad. Woodstock was Big Business—Wall 

Street, in fact—selling itself as something else. 

Jimi Hendrix was the highest paid performer 

at Woodstock. He got $36,000 for his gig. The film won 

the Oscar for "best documentary." A year later three 

Woodstock performers were dead: Hendrix, Janis Joplin, 

and Al Wilson of Canned Heat. Was this just one of 

those Jungian synchronicities? No. At Woodstock there 

had been not only an endorsement of the drug culture 

which led to their deaths, but also widespread selling 

of drugs—surely the most pure form of capitalist 

exploitation imaginable. 

I 

n the aftermath of the event, the Times convened a panel 

of kids who had been at Woodstock to conduct a 

postmortem. The interviewers—including Joseph 

Llelyveld, who is today managing editor of the paper— 

noted the kids "all were from comfortable middle-class 

backgrounds." 

Here were some of the voices of Woodstock from 

the August 25, 1969, article: "JUDY: 'I never made it to the 

concert. I never heard any music at all.' BELL: *I mean, 

when I saw the helicopters landing and picking up the 

wounded, it reminded me of Viet Nam.' JIMMY: 'All my 

life I've had just about everything I want. And I have to 

have whatever I want for the rest of my life, except from 

now on I have to begin to think about how to provide it for 

myself. And I don't want to work because I can't have 

everything I want if I have to stay in the same place from 

9 to 5.'" 

Most important, one must remember the two 

reported deaths at Woodstock. One casualty had fallen 

from a tower and was reported to have suffered a drug 

overdose. The Times noted: "One other youth was reported 

killed. The police identified him as Raymond R. Mizsac, 

17, of Trenton, and said he had been run over by a tractor 

yesterday morning." Mizsac was not remembered in the 

film of Woodstock, no doubt because the excruciatingly 

violent way he met his grisly fate might have cast a pall 

over the positive image the promoters wished. 

According to the New York Times, injuries were 

suffered by 5,000 of the concertgoers. On August 19th, 

1969, New York City Councilman Joseph Modugno, a 

Republican, complained that his son became ill after 

attending Woodstock. The Times reported he "called 

yesterday for a Federal investigation of what he charged 

was 'deliberate misrepresentation, fraud, and criminal 

negligence'" on the part of the festival's promoters and 

organizers. 

"They advertised three days of peace and music," 

Mr. Modugno said, "but instead, hundreds of thousands 

who attended faced suffering, illness, injury, and even 

death." 

Apparently nothing came from Councilman 

Modugno's request AH that is left of the event is the 

myth of its beauty and its embodiment of the pristine 

possibilities of the Sixties.

HETERODOXY 

PAGE 15 

Liberalism's Orwellian 

Perversion 

In Defense of Elitism, by Henry William 

III, New York: Doubleday, 1994 

REVIEWED BY GLYNN CUSTRED 

O 

ne would expect a conservative 

Republican, a backer of right-wing causes 

and a supporter of politicians such as 

Jesse Helms and Pat Buchanan to tell us 

that double standards, quotas, and political 

correctness represent "retrograde tribalism or 

wrong-headed moralism." Nor would we be in the 

least surprised if such a person were to say that 

multiculturalists in our schools and universities 

"want all heritages and all groups to be equal," 

yet like "Orwell's pigs" they want "some to be 

more equal than others," or that there is "a 

growing recognition that something else besides 

racism may be holding blacks back," and that 

"blacks may be to some degree responsible for 

their problems." 

Yet these pronouncements were not made by 

a staunch Republican at all, nor for that matter, even 

by a political conservative. Instead they were written 

by a Pulitzer prize-winning critic for Time magazine, 

a self-identified Democrat, a card-carrying member of the 

American Civil Liberties Union, a donor (in* his 

own words) to "left-of-eenter social causes" whose boyhood 

heroes were Hubert Humphrey and Martin Luther King Jr.; a 

man who actively supported opponents of Jesse Helms, 

and who boasts that he once crossed the room at a 

Washington parry to avoid the disagreeable possibility of 

having to say hello to Pat Buchanan. What's going on here? 

Is a journalist with all the right credentials, a bona fide 

member of the chattering class, a man with received 

sensitivities and the proper associations actually criticizing 

so many sacred cows? You bet he is. This and much more. 

His name is William Henry III, and the book in which he 

makes these mordant comments is entitled In Defense of 

Elitism. Here is a sample of what he has to say about 

multiculturalism, affirmative action, feminism, the middle 

of politically correct language, bilingual education, and the 

national culture. 

ON POLITICALLY CORRECT LANGUAGE. Indians, 

like everybody else, were originally immigrants who 

happened to arrive earlier than the rest of us. Following 

the latest fade to hyphenate everything, Henry suggests 

they be called Siber-Americans, for the only real 

native Americans, he says, are "dinosaurs and skunks." 

ON MULTICULTURALISM. Multicultulralists in the 

university are engaged in "pseudo-scholarship," and the 

courses they teach amount to no more than "special pleading 

studies" which seek to instill, then minister to, a paranoid 

sense of victimology among assorted self-proclaimed 

minorities." Indeed such courses are a "sort of feel-good 

learning" which "epitomizes the endemic confusion of the 

roles of the curriculum with those of the counseling service." 

ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION. Such policies "operate 

by setting a lower passing score for one racial group," 

which in turn subverts the rule of merit thus making 

"employees resentful" and imperiling their productivity. 

ON FEMINIST CLAIMS AND DEMANDS. "The 

unvarnished truth is this: you could eliminate every woman 

writer, painter, and composer from the cave man era to the 

present moment and not significantly deform the course of 

Western culture." And in regard to the unequal distribution 

of men and women at the top of the corporate ladder, he 

says that such unevenness is the result of "the biological 

clock" which is ticking away during the period which 

"coincides with the pivotal years in most careers—the 

tenure decisions in universities, decisions at law firms, the 

point where corporate or media comers move into the fast 

track to the very top." For feminists "to want it all/' he says, 

"is to want too much." 

ON BILINGUAL EDUCATION. "The biggest 

proponents of bilingualism are those adult community 

leaders whose careers in politics, or social services or 

whatever, depend on preserving Hispanic identity rather 

than promoting individual achievement. This may serve 

their narrow interests, but does it serve their constituents', 

or society's?" 

ON NATIONAL CULTURE. "When all is said and 

done, the answer to black, Hispanic, or any other sense of 

exclusion from the mainstream must be to bolster boldness 

and self-confidence, not to concoct alternative scholarship 

or instill alternative institutions/America has many races. 

It needs only one culture, the more inclusive the better." 

A t the heart of the absurdities which Henry so harshly 

attacks is an uncritical acceptance of a kind of 

egalitananism which excludes any consideration of 

merit and which even goes as far as to stigmatize 

accomplishment, especially among individuals of 

certified victim groups. Thus, "losers on the basis of 

merit should be shielded from thinking their losing is 

merited," while "winners who win fairly should be 

barred from feeling comfort and pride," a notion so absurd, 

says Henry, that you feel as if you had "ventured into 

Cloud-Cuckooland" when you encounter it. 

Since "education is both the mirror and 

maker of modernity, reflecting the values of contemporary 

culture and instilling them in the succeeding generation," 

the state of public education is a good indicator of the 

kind of general corruption which has attracted Henry's 

criticism. Instead of teaching discipline, self-denial and 

high standards, he says, the schools today have succumbed 

to an egalitarian ethos which makes it impossible for 

students to attain the levels which were, until not so long 

ago, the expected norm. Rather than a place of learning, 

schools, he says, have become "rehabilitation centers 

obliged to make up for social and psychological deficiencies 

of some parents, the ignorance and bone idleness of others, 

the economic privations of others still and the myriad 

unkindness of nature." (One recent illustration is aproposal 

by a school board member in Half Moon Bay, California, 

to abolish homework because it demands too much of the 

students.) 

It is no wonder, then, mat academic performance 

has suffered. And "if students cannot meet the erstwhile 

standards of attainment," says Henry, "then schools find it 

easier to lower standards than to raise performance." This 

is seen in the progressive dumbing down of the curriculum 

and of textbooks. Indeed, the "language of textbooks has 

dropped by about 20 percent during the past couple of 

generations," and "honors high school texts are no more 

difficult than an eighth grade reader was before World War 

n." Add to this the politically correct curriculum which 

substitutes fact with politically inspired delusion 

("publishers now employ more people to censor books for 

content that might offend any organized lobbying group 

than they do to check the correctness of facts"), and the 

results for education are abysmal. 

Although the entire population is adversely 

affected by this shift in public education, minority students 

are the most deeply affected. For example, the Afrocentric 

curriculum which has found its way into some schools 

"breeds children who are resentful, hostile, even paranoid. 

It fosters a pseudo-racial pride not far removed from 

hatred. And it makes young people suspicious for life of the 

mainstream sources of information mat they need to compete 

in the marketplace." This can also be said of most courses 

which have been introduced into schools all over the 

country under the rubric of "diversity." Also, the failure of 

schools to teach basic skills "unleashes upon the world" 

inner-city students who are "barely able to read. Or spell. 

Or count. Or, obviously, fill out a job application, 

comprehend the government coverage in a worthwhile 

newspaper, or avert exploitation by flimflam artists." 

What is missing in the muddle of current American 

culture," says Henry, "is attention to individual 

achievement; to standards of excellence; to the values 

which foster them and a recognition of the natural hierarchies 

which result under conditions in which advancement by 

merit prevails. This, in fact, is what Henry means by the 

term "elitism" as it appears in his title. "Opportunity does 

not need to be exactly equal" (it never is in reality). "It 

needs only to exist. For the talented and the motivated, that 

is enough." 

Henry's frank appraisal of the absurdities of 

the present situation is an assertion of liberalism in the true 

sense of the term before it underwent its present Orwellian 

perversion. Seen from this perspective, the apparent 

.contradiction with which we began this review—namely a 

certified liberal attacking "liberal" policies—is in fact 

resolved, for what we are actually seeing in Henry's book 

is a spirited defense of true liberalism against the corruption 

which masquerades under that name today. 

William Henry (who unfortunately passed away 

before the publication of his book) is not the only man with 

a liberal perspective to speak out in this manner. Arthur 

Schlesinger Jr. in his book Disuniting America preceded 

him, and New York Times writer Richard Bernstein has 

followed hard on their heels with his own recently published 

book Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the 

Battle for America's Future. It appears, therefore, that 

people of true liberal principles and sentiments are finally 

recognizing that mere are indeed ennemis a gauche (in this 

case, the cultural left), and that some liberals at least are 

finally finding the voice to resist. 

Glynn Custred teaches at California State 

University at Hayward.

In a startling press conference this 

morning, Regina Piscopo, the new . 

President of the Confederation 

Internationale des Echecs, announced 

the first modifications of the rules of 

chess since the fourteenth century. 

The announcement followed months of 

negotiations between traditionalists and posttraditionalists 

(known as the Fianchetto 

Sinistro), which have been conducted with a 

degree of secrecy rivaling the Manhattan 

Project. 

The Fianchetto Sinistro had long 

maintained that chess, in its 600-year-old 

present form, had not only become irrelevant, 

but was also exerting an increasingly 

pernicious influence on society with its sexist, 

royalist, religionist, and violent concepts. The 

organization holds that certain posttraditionalist 

innovations will bring the game 

into harmony with 20th-century thinking. 

Changes in the appearance of the 

board and pieces will become official 

concurrently with the revisions in the rules. 

The prototypes unveiled at today's news 

conference elicited gasps and low whistles of 

appreciation. 

Because the old chess sets symbolically 

promoted interracial strife, the 

checkerboard of the new boards eschew the 

traditional black and white in favor of a 

handsome combination of light chartreuse 

and deep purple squares. (Post-traditionalists 

point out that the contrast between dark and 

light still enables the color-perceptionchallenged 

to enjoy the game.) It is believed 

that the new designer colors may also induce 

more girls to take an interest in chess, although there 

has not yet been conclusive research on the subject. 

The figures themselves are of a simple style 

reminiscent of Stanton but with minor alterations. The 

King and Queen have been replaced by the President and 

the Spouse, virtually indistinguishable from one another in 

unisex dress. 

The Knight has been supplanted by the Bodyguard. 

Traditionally, the Knight was represented by a horse, but 

animal-rights activists had pointed out that the knight's 

move, due to its convoluted nature, was deemed too 

dangerous for a large animal with thin legs. The new 

Bodyguard sports a suit and sunglasses. 

Chess Rules Changed 

BY JUDITH SCHUMANN WEIZNER 

Regina Piscopo, shown here with a traditional 

The Bishop has been displaced by the Journalist, stranded at the edge of the board. 

a thin figure in a raincoat 

The Rook or Castle has become the Homeless 

Shelter, a two-story square figure, and the Pawn has been 

replaced by the Taxpayer, a stooped figure of indeterminate 

sex. 

All figures are either light chartreuse or deep 

purple except for the Journalists, which are either very light 

pink or dark red depending on whether they play chartreuse 

or purple. 

The need to update the game became apparent 

several years ago when a spokesperson for the National 

Organization of Women pointed out that the 

Queen's subordinate position to the king, 

despite her superiormobility, was a very poor 

role model for women. 

Studies undertaken subsequently 

under a grant awarded by the National 

Endowment of the Arts demonstrated that the 

traditional game of chess influenced children 

to become aggressive and.bellicose. 

"Children were being exhorted to 

'crush', 'trap' and 'repulse' their opponents," 

Ms. Piscopo explained. 

Such phrases as mating net and 

queening square were also found to be deeply 

offensive to many people. 

After the new board and figures were 

introduced at the news conference, copies of 

the new rules were distributed to journalists 

following the news conference. A summary 

of the most important changes follows here: 

■ The President can make un 

limited horizontal and diagonal moves, the 

Spouse unlimited vertical and diagonal. 

If one is in check, the other must come to 

his/her rescue. Should this not be possible 

within two moves, a Taxpayer is sacrificed. 

(Formerly, the King could move only one 

square at a time, while the Queen had 

great power, being able to move an 

unlimited number of squares in any direction. 

After extensive consultations with NOW, 

the roles of the President and the Spouse 

were equalized so that neither is subordinate 

to the other.) 

The Journalist moves only to the 

left. 

The Bodyguard retains the old 

Knight's move but may compensate for the 

Journalist's leftward bent by moving one 

square to the right when the Journalist is 

The term castling has been supplanted by 

sheltering and takes place when five Taxpayers have 

been exhausted. 

All other moves have been retained. 

At the close of the press conference, Ms. Piscopo 

expressed her appreciation to Hillary Clinton and the 

leadership of NOW, PETA, NEA, and ACT-UP for their 

significant contributions to this epochal change in chess 

and its rules. She noted that next year her ^ w 

organization will begin discussions with the American 

Crossword Society.

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