Contrary to what many conservatives assert, preferential treatment is not something new to our patterns of public policy. Moreover, it has an ethical basis in what might be called a “higher public purpose”—that of undoing and compensating for a long …
I am surprised that Frederick Crews acknowledges Freud’s suggestiveness and persuasiveness and his brilliant transmutation of late-Romantic literary culture into “science,” for nothing in his article “The Unknown Freud” (New York Review of Books, November 18, 1993) grants Freud’s work …
President Bill Clinton is a Southerner. That fact alone may explain why, given the opportunity to rethink the logic and effect of affirmative action, he failed. In his July speech at the National Archives before a largely black audience, the …
The invitation to respond to David Plotke’s essay, “Racial Politics and the Clinton-Guinier Episode” (Dissent, Spring 1995) came as I was preparing to travel to Budapest to attend a conference hosted by Eastern and Central European academics and politicians. This …
In many European countries, far-right political parties have made important gains. During the past year, elections in France, Belgium, Austria, and Italy have shown the extreme right consolidating its grip and steadily attracting new voters. If we add to this …
In 1994 a handsome woman appeared on television news in the Boston area: poised, energetic, well-groomed, with healthy body language—the kind of midlife woman who looks competent whether she’s selling Tupperware or bonds or simply walking across a street. She …
I was born a few years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (1949) in Beijing and grew up an equal of everybody else—judged, at least, by one important criterion, gender equality. My sisters and many friends shared …
‘Lord, enlighten thou our enemies,’ should be the prayer of every true reformer,” wrote Mill in his essay on Coleridge. “Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger …
Some wise American once argued that our laws protecting freedom of speech do not extend to the individual who falsely yells “fire” in a crowded theater. Likewise, freedom of speech should not allow a group of black faculty members to …
Public higher education is under attack, and nowhere is this more evident than at the City University of New York. Many of CUNY’s 213,000 students are poor. Most are minority and more than a few are on public assistance. The …
American friends have asked me about the current political situation in France: Who is this Jacques Chirac, a politician from the right, who was just elected president after having run a more or less leftist campaign? Who is Lionel Jospin, …
It is wrong, we increasingly hear, to give favored treatment to individuals simply because they have African ancestors. Hence, too, the argument that we no longer reserve places for persons of European descent, so it is time to remove race …
Nancy Reagan had one next to the bed, and before you know it, Barbie’s wardrobe may include one. The pearl-handled hairbrush on the dressing table ofAmerican women may soon be joined by a pearl-handled revolver. Even more important than the …
Scattered reports of problems with pesticides had appeared in the technical literature from the fifties onwards, but it was only in 1962 that a wide-ranging critique of pesticides was published for a popular audience. Brought out by a major trade …
If American culture is centrifugal, and things are falling apart, what is the center that is not holding? Presumably, it is some core of principles—individual rights and opportunities— united by the affirmation that America, heartland of the West, is their …
