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Eden, in fact, seemed a pawn in a larger game of campus racial politics. In that
spring of 1993, Penn was being sued over the number of "Mayor's Scholarships"
it awarded. These provided a significant number of Philadelphia high school
graduates -- disproportionately black -- with the means to attend the University --
and Hackney was accused of racism. It was the tenth year of his presidency,
and he obsessed throughout on racial relations. If some half-wit -- whether racist
or provocateur -- scribbled an epithet on a stairwell, the campus would gratify the
miscreant by acting as if a fascist night had descended. During freshmen
orientations, students were taught at "diversity education" seminars to perceive
the campus as a hotbed of racism.
Hackney was a captive of the very perception of endemic racism that Penn had
encouraged and of the expectation that he had created that all "disadvantaged"
groups had the right not to be "offended." Penn's policies invited students,
including the women who had disturbed Eden, to react to ordinary abrasions and,
indeed, to disagreeable opinions, as intolerable racism. Hackney's attempt to
guide his administration across the dangerous terrain created by those policies
severely limited his ability to respond soberly to such reactions. Nothing
illustrated this better than the case of Gregory Pavlik, which preceded, and,
in the end, energized the water buffalo affair.
*****
The independent undergraduate campus newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian (DP),
had about fourteen opinion columnists, and it always was hard-pressed to find
even one conservative to mix among them. It was not easy being the token DP
conservative, who always elicited a flood of accusations of racism, sexism,
homophobia, ignorance, and malice, often from administrators as well as from
students. For the spring semester of 1993, the DP had found its lone conservative
columnist in a transfer student from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Greg Pavlik,
soft-spoken and retiring in private, but a blunt and outspoken "paleoconservative"
in his columns.
Pavlik, in fact, was much more critical of "neoconservatives" than of the Left.
The real Right, for Pavlik, opposed centralized big government, non-defensive wars,
and foreign intervention. Pavlik indeed exposed most students to an unfamiliar
political point of view. In a February column, "The Price of Intervention," he
described neoconservatives as "traitors," and he warned against the New World Order,
"the globalists' desire for empire," the loss of sovereignty in foreign affairs to
the UN, and young Americans returning "in body bags" during our interventions from
Korea to the Balkans.22 Whatever neoconservatives there might
have been at Penn read his columns in peace. Others read some of his opinions with
great anger.
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shadowu@world.std.com
9/19/98
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