Date: Sun, 22 Jun 1997 22:15:26 -0800
From: rakesh bhandari <djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu>
Subject: M-I: fascism&freespeech3


Early on in my graduate student career, I was involved in a protest against
a physical anthropologist who was making "sociobiological" arguments
against head start, Miranda rights in the inner city and offering
"evolutionary" explanations for gender differences in mathematical ability
and (if memory serves me correctly) racial differences in IQ scores.

I was told by students who claimed to be in his class that in private
consultation this professor had told one that her brain capacity may well
be limited because she was a Hispanic and by another student that her
success may well be a consequence of her mixed parentage. Upon hearing
this, I was so incensed that I did think the professor should be fired
because he was cowardly taking fascist positions in private, instead of in
open classrooms where he could be collectively challenged and his words
publically recorded (at that time  we could find nothing published by
Vincent Sarich on the topics he was discoursing about in lecture).

 Well, it turns out that these so-called students were never told any such
thing; for sure, I later found out that the Hispanic woman was never in his
class. My advice to anyone protesting  fascists is that the call for
censorship tends gives them legitimacy and martyrdom. As a consequence of
this protest, Sarich was later able to write lead editorials against
affirmative action (which was of course destroyed a few year later in
California) and editorials in the San Francisco papers about how the
attempt to achieve equality in the Soviet Union and China killed more
people than the efforts of the German fascists  When years later, the
International Socialist Organization was passing out a petition demanding
that Sarich be fired, I refused to sign it,knowing that their opportunistic
proposal would only allow the  debate to degenerate into one of free speech
against political correctness. The ISO may have thought that they were
proving their righteousness by taking such a position, but if it had taken
off, it would have hurt us.

The task of challenging these fascists has been made difficult, I believe,
because the alternative ideas students are introduced to by the liberal
faculty tend to be weak and hardly decisive. The Cold War has had its
consequences. Students tend either to take the unconvincing position that
biology has no implications for any social behavior (as propounded by the
politically correct faculty) and that humanitarianism and morality require
us to reject their positions (the argument should be that race is a stupid
way to study real biological differences) or to think there is something to
these biological explanations for growing social inequality.

It is out of this frustration that students call for censorship when what
they should be doing is going beyond the weak rebuttals offered by liberal
scholars and pundits who also tend not to explore why the alternative
explanations can take hold despite their weaknesses.  This deeper criticism
takes work, this takes sacrifice of involvement in course work with a good
potential payoff (economics, business, psychology of industrial relations,
applied sciences, etc); and it is unlikely to happen--especially as those
in the higher education factory become ever more middle class and students
worry about all the debt they are incurring.   But still I think the call
for censorship is a mistake and probably counterproductive; it is exposure
and subjection to open, relentless public criticism we want.

When there was finally a public debate, none of the students who were
involved in the protest were allowed to participate. Afterwards, I asked
the prof how he had taken unequal wealth, uneven regional economic
development, cultural bias, racist industrial location decisions etc into
account before he reached the conclusion that nothing could be done to
improve the test scores and more generally the lot of those in the inner
cities.

His response was to call me a Marxist (which I was just becoming at that
point). I told him that this was a pretty pathetic response and that he was
a McCarthyite. He had nothing further to say.  Meanwhile, some students
asked me why I didn't have any respect for the professor. A few years
later, the California governor had slashed affirmative action, joined in a
campaign against the transnational labor force, and remarked that welfare
cuts only meant one less six pack a week.

Rakesh





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