Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Nat Hentoff, the only sane person the Worldnutdaily has writing for them, devotes a column to a story I've been following at Brandeis University.
For years, I have reported on many cases of college and university administrators infected with "political correctness," punishing students and faculty members for allegedly prejudicial and otherwise "offensive" remarks - as if there were a constitutional right not to be offended. I have now found the most outrageous case of all.At Brandeis University in Massachusetts, professor Donald Hindley - on the faculty for 48 years - teaches a course on Latin American politics. Last fall, he described how Mexican migrants to the United States used to be discriminatorily called "wetbacks." An anonymous student complained to the administration, accusing Hindley of using prejudicial language - the first complaint against him in 48 years.
Here's what happened:
After an investigation, during which Hindley was not told the nature of the complaint, Brandeis Provost Marty Krauss informed Hindley that "The University will not tolerate inappropriate, racial and discriminatory conduct by members of its faculty." A corollary accusation was that students suffered "significant emotional trauma" when exposed to such a term.An administration monitor was assigned to his class. Threatened with "termination," Hindley was ordered to take a sensitivity-training class. With no charges against him, no evidence of misconduct given him and no hearing, he refused - in the spirit of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, for whom this university is named.
I've been watching this story as it has developed and I agree with Hentoff, it's one of the most ridiculous cases I've ever seen. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a group I strongly support, has been all over it for months. It's every bit as stupid as the case at IUPUI, where a janitor faced charges of racial harassment for reading an anti-racist book because the title mentioned the KKK.
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I suppose Brandeis English professors won't be assigning Huckleberry Finn any time in the near future. Prejudicial language is becoming what profanity was 100 years ago. Words deemed sooo eeevil that even a matter of fact, artistic, or academic usage is considered totally corrupting to public morals. Oh fug!
Posted by: Bill in NC | October 4, 2008 9:53 AM
I must say, you ocassionally read about these people that support such ridiculous notions, but I've never met one, or read any of their arguments. Do they hang-out somewhere online so we can better understand them and their viewpoints?
Posted by: Michael Heath | October 4, 2008 10:14 AM
Reminds me of the guy who got in trouble for using the word "niggardly". Man, I wish he had ridiculed his detractors, instead, he apologized.
Posted by: Phaedrus | October 4, 2008 10:54 AM
I briefly investigated the possibility of taking a doctorate at a well-known eastern university in 2000, but found that the venerable and scholarly director of the program had been replaced by a political-correctness nutbar.
Without naming either university, program, or director, this nit-picking knee-jerk liberal had moved the entire direction of the program toward one particular hot-button area, claiming that "we have to do right by our Hispanics."
It made no difference that I had honed my own field of study over years of experience, capped off with an advanced degree from the same university. I was to become a mere cog in this activist's programme for social change.
That was enough for me. I answered, "Where I come from, there have been 'Hispanics' since before there was a United States. They intermarry with the 'Anglos' freely, own prominent businesses, and get elected to public office. It really improves their outlook."
I thought, Screw that doctorate. I didn't need to waste my time with a bunch of smug elites still learning the basics of race relations by calling it an academic discipline. I was out of there in a hurry.
Posted by: Farb | October 4, 2008 11:52 AM
The best part of this is that the term "wetback" was originally coined to describe Texan squatters who crossed the Rio Grande to settle in Mexican territory throughout the 1820s and 1830s.
This makes me wonder who this "anonymous" student was and how well-versed he or she is in American history.
Posted by: MisterDomino | October 4, 2008 11:54 AM
The astronomy profs at Brandeis better be careful when talking about black holes.
Posted by: Taz | October 4, 2008 6:18 PM
I wonder how the student reported the offence, for surely he could not repeat the actual word without using it in exactly the same manner that the prof. did, which if he did so, would make him a hypocrite as well as a cry baby?
Posted by: shane | October 4, 2008 10:36 PM
If Professor Hindley personally called a student a "wetback" or ranted in class about how "wetbacks" are stealing jobs, then you would have cause for complaint, but he wasn't.
This is just beyond ridiculous. It's a bad python sketch. Any minute now, Graham Chapman is going to come in dressed in uniform and shut it down for being too silly.
Posted by: tincture | October 5, 2008 12:14 AM
Himdley is, of course, entirely in the right and the harassment against him is, of course, completely wrong.
I am however slightly puzzled by Hentoff's citing of the US Constitution to support this position.
Isn't Brandeis a private institution and therefore not bound by the Constitition in this regard?
Or can US employees cite the Constitution to justify telling customers they'd get a better deal at the competing business down the street?
Posted by: Ian Gould | October 5, 2008 6:48 AM
Good grief! It's one thing for the student to be that stupid, but it's appalling that everyone else in the chain of command has been infected with the same strain of idiocy.
I wonder if there would be a similar outcry on that campus now if a teacher spoke of cleaning his garage over the weekend, proclaiming that it was now "spic and span."
~David D.G.
Posted by: David D.G. | October 6, 2008 12:50 AM
"Hindley tells me that despite the response of the faculty Senate and the committee on faculty rights, individual tenured members of his department, though outraged, would not stand up publicly on his behalf. One of them explained to him, 'I'm about to retire.' He and others fear retaliation."
Wait a minute--isn't this why tenure exists? Isn't it the reason that people who have been through a rigorous Ph.D. program and then competed for tenure-track jobs (often barely scraping by for years in adjunct positions while waiting for one of those to open up) then willingly put themselves through 7-10 years of heavy teaching schedules, writing and publishing in their spare time, and--oh yeah--deferring to senior faculty out of fear of retaliation if they don't? If tenure doesn't protect your ability to teach freely and stand up for your colleagues when they do, what is it good for?
Posted by: MJ | October 6, 2008 7:14 AM
This is the leftie-nutter version of rightie-nutter puritanical fundamentalism: the kind of obsessive concrete thinking in which words are not *symbols* but are the *things themselves* that the words describe. Good God almighty!, we need a new DSM-4 category for this kind of psychiatric disease. And then we need a serious cure, preferably something that works in one or two doses.
Pardon me for being tasteless, but if I was on the receiving end of this kind of garbage, I'd tell them to provide suction service to my naughty bits. Then I'd get hold of the best darn lawyer in town and make sure those bastards lived to regret the day they even thought of calling a witch hunt.
As for the Quislings who refused to grow some vertibrae and support their local witch, they deserve to have someone spit on their shoes publicly, in utter contempt. They are beyond spineless, they are at the moral level of jellyfish.
Someone needs to revise that George Carlin skit about the seven forbidden words and perform it on the steps of the administration building at Brandeis. Or the Ginsburg poem that was prosecuted as obscenity due to its use of the verb "to come." Heck, do 'em both. All the better if the performance can be fully diverse (ethnically, gender, etc.) with each person doing the naughty words that fit their particular identity.
Posted by: g347 | October 6, 2008 8:22 AM