It is our view that recent curricular reforms influenced by multiculturalism and feminism have greatly enriched education rather than corrupted it. It is our view as well that the controversies that have been provoked over admissions and hiring practices, the social functions of teaching and scholarship, and the status of such concepts as objectivity and ideology are signs of educational health, not decline.
Yet because the mainstream media have reported misinformed opinions as if they were established facts, the picture the public has received of recent academic developments has come almost entirely from the most strident detractors of these developments.
It is time for those who believe in the values of democratic education and reasoned dialogue to join together in an organization that can fight such powerful forms of intolerance and answer mischievous misrepresentations. We support the right of scholars and teachers to raise questions about the relations of culture, scholarship and education to politics — not in order to shut down debate on such issues but to open it. It is such debate that is prevented by discussion-stopping slogans like “political correctness.”
We need an organization that can not only refute malicious distortions but also educate the interested public about matters still too often remain shrouded in mystery — new literary theories and movements such as deconstructionism, feminism, multiculturalism and new historicism, and their actual effects on classroom practice.