The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

I have read with interest the review by C. Vann Woodward of Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus [NYR, July 18]. While one is tempted to re-examine not only D’Souza’s work and Woodward’s review of it, I shall confine my comments to Woodward’s use of the work to expatiate on the evolution of black studies as an area of intellectual inquiry and discourse. In his discussion of Duke’s “plunge into the mainstream of academic fashions,” he said that it made a “fine start by recruiting John Hope Franklin, the best historian in his field.” Your readers should know that I was not recruited to teach black studies, if Woodward is referring to that when he calls me “the best in his field.” As the James B. Duke Professor of History I was free to teach whatever I wished. Not having taught African American history in 25 years only because I chose to “integrate” white and African American history of the South, I taught a colloquium on the History of the South and, later, the Constitutional History of the United States. I have no way of knowing how Mr. D’Souza’s view of Duke would have been affected by a discussion with me. He made an appointment with me on two different occasions and he broke both of them without explanation or apology.

One wonders what Woodward meant by describing me as the “best in his field.” It is reminiscent of the resistance to “breaking out of Negro Studies” that characterized my own efforts as well as the efforts of countless other African American scholars who preceded me. There was Charles H. Wesley who was denied the opportunity in 1924 to write a dissertation at Harvard on “The Collapse of the Confederacy.” In 1935, when I chose as my Harvard Seminar topic “Lyman Abbott and the Social Gospel,” I declined the professor’s suggestion that I might prefer to write a paper on Booker T. Washington. When I submitted a manuscript to the Harvard University Press analyzing and describing the essential paranoid bellicosity of the antebellum South, the distinguished historian who read the manuscript for the Press wondered why they would want a view of the white South by an African American historian. The Press ignored the lame complaint and published the work in 1956 as The Militant South, 1800–1860.

I mention these items to place into context Woodward’s quotation from my Race and History in his review of D’Souza’s book. In referring to the emergence of “Negro Studies,” Woodward quotes me as saying:

This was a tragedy. Negro scholarship had foundered on the rocks of racism. It had been devoured by principles of separation and segregation. It had become the victim of the view that there was some “mystique” about Negro studies, similar to the view that there was some “mystique” about Negro spirituals which required that a person possess a black skin in order to sing them. This was not scholarship; it was folklore, it was voodoo.

Since Race and History was not reviewed in The New York Review, as indeed none of my books has ever been reviewed in these pages, your readers deserve to know the context in which the statement that Woodward quoted was made. This is all the more important since it is entirely possible that your readers will make the erroneous inference from Woodward’s remarks that I was accusing black scholars of racism.

The burden of my argument in that essay in Race and History, entitled “The Dilemma of the American Negro Scholar,” that originally appeared in 1963, was that even as African American scholars sought to extend themselves into various fields, they were pushed back into “Negro studies” by white so-called scholars who would not tolerate their presence in non-Negro fields. In the paragraph following the one quoted by Woodward, I said, “The Negro scholar can hardly be held responsible for this sad turn of events. He had acted in good faith, and had proceeded in the best traditions of American scholarship…. That the field was the Negro and that the resources were also Negroes are typical irrelevancies of which objective scholarship can take no cognizance…” Thus, seeking diligently to qualify as scholars of authority and having been rebuffed by white scholars in other fields, they retreated to the study of Negroes. That is what “foundered on the rocks of racism,” and that is how most African American scholars went into so called black studies, not by choice but by the force of white racism that dictated the nature of scholarship, as it did in virtually all other aspects of American life.

John Hope Franklin
James B. Duke Professor of
History Emeritus
Professor of Legal History
Duke Law School
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina

To the Editors:

I have not read the book by Dinesh D’Souza that is the subject of C. Vann Woodward’s review, but I must take exception to the image of Stanford as an offender against freedom in the universities that Woodward conveys and apparently endorses. Having been involved in the events described, I find myself dismayed that the dean of American historians can give credence to some of the half-truths and misunderstandings that the right-wing critics of “multi-culturalism” at Stanford have been purveying. To Woodward’s credit, he qualifies the charge that Stanford gave in to pressure from minority students to overthrow Western Civilization (the course, that is) by quoting at length from John Searle’s judgment that the reformed set of courses are justifiable on educational grounds and intellectually liberating. But his other references to Stanford stand in need of similar correctives.

His statement that “the University adopted a new course on American diversity required of all entering freshmen and described as ‘focusing on the work of blacks, hispanics, feminists, and homosexuals’ ” is misleading. What was legislated was the requirement that students take one course for one quarter at some point in their college careers dealing with racial, ethnic, and religious diversity in the United States. The course may be chosen from a list of approximately twenty such courses currently offered at Stanford. These range from a course on the American Jewish community to the umbrella history course that I offer jointly with Albert Camarillo on “Race and Ethnicity in the American Experience.” In these courses, students are invited to confront the problems of American pluralism from a variety of perspectives. There is no “politically correct” line being inculcated and no surrender to student pressure on the question of what should be taught and how.

Indeed, my experience as a white male teaching courses dealing with the history of race relations is that most minority students are seeking the truth about America and their place in it rather than coming to class with their minds made up about what happened and why. I have been gently chided (with some justification) for not including enough on women, but never have I been subject to any criticism for speaking my mind on matters of race. Possibly this is because my views are perceived as “politically correct.” (I hope not, but you never know.) In my seven years at Stanford, however, I have not heard of a single incident in which a professor was harassed, threatened, or formally complained about because of what he or she said in the classroom. Such incidents may have occurred elsewhere, but not (to my knowledge) here. As for the Stanford rule “restraining offensive speech,” it is merely a ban on verbal insults directed at an individual—the equivalent of spitting in someone’s face. If I understand it correctly the rule would not prevent a public speaker from advocating extermination of the Jews or reenslavement of African-Americans, but would make punishable the shouting of “Kike” or “Nigger” in someone’s face. Perhaps such regulations are ill-advised, but I find in them no serious threat to freedom of thought or expression.

It is true that Stanford has sought to diversify its faculty and course offerings by increasing the number of minority faculty and the number of courses devoted to minority experiences. (Do we really have to apologize for this?) But in no cases of which I am aware have the usual standards for academic appointments been lowered or have courses without substantial intellectual content and rigor been authorized. The accepted method has been to make new positions available in fields in which minority scholars are likely to be found, but to make the appointments only if qualified candidates can be found. In the years I’ve been at Stanford “affirmative action” has never meant the appointment of black or other minority professors who failed to meet the general standards of the university.

I begin to wonder if I inhabit the same world as such esteemed fellow historians of America’s multi-racial past as C. Vann Woodward and Eugene Genovese. Possibly Stanford is exceptional and has been unjustly maligned by D’Souza and others, who have nevertheless reported accurately on what has occurred elsewhere. But another possibility is that the threat of a rampant coalition of militant blacks, hispanics, and feminists threatening free thought and educational standards in elite universities has been (in the words of John Searle about alarm over Stanford’s civilization course) “grossly exaggerated.” If so, liberal and radical (or ex-radical) academics like Woodward and Genovese are playing into the hands of right-wingers who wish to eliminate dissent from mainstream American ideas and values from our universities. Problems undoubtedly exist, and on some campuses civil libertarians may need to act vigorously to protect professors with unpopular views from being harassed by offended students. Free expression in the classroom must be protected at all costs. But exaggerating the extent and effectiveness of pressures for “political correctness” might turn out to be a greater threat to academic freedom than the evil against which it is directed. Everyone knows that the real power in American society does not rest with minorities, feminists, and cultural leftists. Under the banner of providing free speech for cultural conservatives, those who pay the bills for our universities might find a way to silence or deny tenure to the radicals of various kinds who currently constitute a small minority of the faculty in elite institutions. That would be a new McCarthyism indeed.

George M. Fredrickson
Department of History
Stanford University
Stanford, California

C. Vann Woodward’s review of Dinesh D’Souza seriously distorts the speech codes recently enacted at various universities. Relying on D’Souza, he reports that “many institutions patterned their codes of speech control” on the University of Michigan’s, which prohibited “any behavior, verbal or physical, that stigmatizes or victimizes an individual on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, creed, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, handicap, or Vietnam-era veteran status.”

In fact most campus speech codes, including those of Stanford, Brown, Penn State, and the Universities of California and Wisconsin, which Woodward cites, explicitly protect all public speech, no matter how offensive, and prohibit only threatening and inflammatory cases of racist, sexist, and homophobic speech in face-to-face verbal assaults on individuals. Under these rules black students must tolerate the use of racial epithets including “nigger” in speech addressed to the public: in campus lectures, in the student newspaper and on the radio station; the university will protect them only from direct, intentional, verbal attacks, where angry or hateful epithets are hurled at particular students.