Multiculturalism, Hayward, and the Campus Culture Wars
If Wood observed changes on U.S. campuses from the sidelines, Custred witnessed them from his lectern at Hayward State. During his first years of teaching, Custred taught students who shared his white working-class roots. In the fall of 1976, five years into his teaching career, 63 percent of the freshman who enrolled at Hayward were white; some 20 percent were African American; 8 percent were Asian or Filipino; and 5 percent were Latino. When school opened in the fall of 1994, Custred faced a class that looked decidedly different: 34 percent were Asian or Filipino; 18 percent were African American; 16 percent were Latino; and only 24 percent were white. A similar change in the racial and ethnic mix had evolved on other state campuses.[4]
Institutional Research and Analysis, California State University, Hayward.
These changes had little to do with affirmative action and everything to do with more permanent demographic changes. The state universities acceptedall high school seniors who finished in the top third of the state's high school graduates, and all but one campus had space for all its eligible applicants.[5]
Only one California State University campus—San Luis Obispo—is oversubscribed.
Increasingly, however, applicants were nonwhite. California was inching toward the time near the year 2000, when, demographers predicted, it would become the first state in which white residents were a minority.[6]California Department of Finance, Demographic Research Unit, Population Projections by Race/Ethnicity for California and Its Counties, 1990-2040. Sacramento: 1993.
In Custred's classroom, this reality had already come to pass.For his part, Custred wasn't bothered by the new students: he found them as uneven in potential as the all-white classes he had taught twenty years earlier. "I have noticed that a lot of the minority students are just not with it," Custred said. "But then we get some who are not only with it but are right at the top. We get a lot of white students who are not prepared either."[7]
Glynn Custred, interview July 25, 1995.
Nonetheless, the new students would trigger other changes that would begin to grate on Custred.In the spring of 1979 Robert Portillo, the special assistant to the president of Hayward State and its director of the Employment Affirmative Action Program, predicted that half of the school's tenure-track faculty would retire in the next decade. "It is vital to recognize this and to begin taking steps to insure appropriate minority representation in our faculty ranks," he wrote.[8]
Robert S. Portillo, ACACIA, Spring 1979, p. 4.
Some of the new faculty recruits arrived at Hayward eager to explore new ways of tackling old disciplines. One new current was to look at history, literature, and other fields from a multicultural perspective. They felt that teaching students about the world required including different points of view—black, Latino, and Asian as well as Anglo-Saxon.Barbara Paige, who had a doctorate in philosophy from U.C. Berkeley, and Gayle Young, who had a doctorate in communications from UCLA, were among the new faculty members enthusiastic about broadening Hayward's curriculum. In 1985 they codirected a three-year state grant to help their colleagues "mainstream the cross-cultural perspective" into their courses. Unlike many grants, this one caught the administration's attention. At seminars attended by the provost, guest
scholars encouraged literature professors to add black writers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison to their reading lists. The scholars suggested that history professors include the experience and viewpoints of blacks, Latinos, and women. As an anthropologist, Paige, who is black, befriended Custred. The two had different African American intellectual heroes—Custred quoted conservatives like Shelby Steele, while Paige was more likely to cite Henry Louis Gates, Jr.—but Custred enjoyed the debate. "He said he had always been vilified and that at least he could talk to me," Paige said.[9]
Barbara Paige, interview, February 20, 1996.
Others warned Paige that Custred was unfriendly to the minority faculty, but she took him at his word when he said he wanted to participate in the grant and invite an anthropologist to lecture on multiculturalism. When Custred's guest trumpeted what Paige viewed as traditional anthropology and ignored multiculturalism, Paige said, "My mouth dropped. I felt that he had been disingenuous, that he was a closet racist." Custred could not recall the incident and said only that he "wasn't very interested in" what Paige and Young were doing. "We felt like we were doing multiculturalism anyway," he explained.[10]
Glynn Custred, interview, September 26, 1996.
Although Paige felt blindsided by Custred, the three-year grant she helped direct at Hayward produced little controversy. If some disagreed with the effort, they did so privately. When the grant ended in 1988, a group of faculty interested in keeping multiculturalism alive at Hayward founded the Center for the Study of Intercultural Relations. "We could see that we were dealing with a very long journey," said Young, who is white. "Other academics were not going to jump on this like scientists jumped on the discovery of DNA."[11]Gayle Young, interview, January 22, 1996.
From the outset, Custred was skeptical of the multicultural scholars. They had, he said, a romantic view of the world. "The model they had was a nice, ethnically diverse neighborhood in a big city where everyone is happy and everyone dances around the Maypole," he said. "As an anthropologist, I know that when you've got diversity, you've got a problem,
which means that you've got to come up with ways to deal with it in the most realistic way possible."[12]
Glynn Custred, interview, July 25, 1995.
Custred believed that to live in harmony, Americans had to find common ground.[13]Custred's views drew on writing by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who published The Disuniting of America (Knoxville, TN: Whittle Direct Books) in 1991.
This clashed with the multiculturalists, who were intent on defining and celebrating the uniqueness of ethnic Americans. To many professors interested in multiculturalism, Custred's common ground was limited to traditional Western values and traditions.By 1989 Hayward's embrace of multiculturalism had begun to nettle Custred. When the new Center for the Study of Intercultural Relations organized a conference—Hayward's first national conference—entitled "The Inclusive University: Multicultural Perspectives in Higher Education," Custred objected. "I could see this moving in a direction I didn't like," Custred said.[14]
Glynn Custred, interview, July 25, 1995.
When he complained, his dean suggested that he participate. It was a mistake. Custred felt like a classics professor among pop culture enthusiasts. He represented tradition and they considered themselves on the cutting edge of a new discipline. He presented a paper defending standard English; his fellow panelists wanted to explore the value of black English. Custred's paper, Young said, was "well reasoned, well thought-out," but, she acknowledged, "there was not much tolerance for his argument."[15]Gayle Young, interview, January 22, 1996.
Custred found listening to their papers equally torturous. "I was there listening to some of the most god-awful things you can imagine," he said.[16]Glynn Custred, interview, July 25, 1995.
It wasn't a conference alive with open debate. Many of those who attended were under attack at their own universities, and they attended the gathering to find friends and share war stories. Most didn't want to analyze multiculturalism; they wanted to celebrate it. It is impossible to say what would have happened if everyone had been more civil, but they weren't. Custred was ostracized. There was a sense among the conference's participants that they were "agents of change" and Custred represented the status quo. Custred could have lived with the reputation of being unfashionable, but the debate on multiculturalism had a more cutting subtext. "What
we didn't realize," Young said, "is that we were not just dealing with intellectual issues, but with emotional issues. We were asking what it means to be an American, what it means to be an educated person. We were saying that whiteness was constructed to keep people down and no matter how softly you say this, it's hard to take."[17]
Gayle Young, interview.
For his part, Custred was less offended personally than he was intellectually: "I just found it terribly misguided," he said.[18]Glynn Custred, interview, September 26, 1996.
The slights at the conference were compounded by other developments at Hayward. In the past, the administration's efforts to increase minority faculty had resulted mostly in the hiring of white women. The pool of minority applicants wasn't as large, and Hayward's intentions to hire more were complicated by the competition from other universities. Nonetheless, in 1989 the administration decided to double its efforts. Blacks, Latinos, or Asians in any field could apply through the administration's main office, and their applications were sent to the different departments for consideration. This meant that departments could add to their faculty numbers without waiting for someone in their department to retire. In effect, the university set aside jobs for minorities. This, too, upset Custred. To him, the set-aside trod on individual rights; it favored candidates because they were part of a racial or ethnic group and discriminated against others for the same reason.
As a child growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, during the 1940s, Custred had seen the evils of lumping individuals into groups. He was one of three children in a working-class family. Until after World War II, his father worked in the tin mills as a speed controller, watching over the machines that turned metal into sheets. The young Custred noted early on how his fellow whites in Birmingham treated blacks as a separate species and, for a while, he accepted that view. But as Custred experienced the world, he began to question the notion that blacks were altogether different from whites.
When the war ended, Custred's father took a job as a salesman for the Alabama Gas Corporation, and Custred sometimes
accompanied his father on business calls. His world, he said, opened on those trips. The young Custred discovered black families who lived much like his own family: two parents living in a neat but modest home and struggling to survive. "I was quite surprised," Custred said, recalling the visits. "I thought, 'God, they're no different than we are.'"[19]
Glynn Custred, interview, July 25, 1995.
Custred's family moved on to Vincennes, Indiana, in the year before he entered high school, but every Thanksgiving and for two weeks every summer, they returned to Birmingham, and Custred watched the changes embroiling the South. These experiences and others, he said, informed his belief that it was wrong to sweep individuals into groups. The set-asides, he felt, did exactly that. As a result, when the set-asides were announced at Hayward, Custred organized the anthropology department to decline to participate. "He considered it racist," said Paige.[20]Barbara Paige, interview.
Other developments troubled Custred as well. When the budget crisis hit California in 1990, it looked like Hayward might announce layoffs; recent hires—minorities and women—would be among the first to go. But Terry Jones, a black tenured professor, and others found a clause in the union's rules that would permit the administration to circumvent the seniority system to retain faculty who offered something unique to the university. A faculty member's racial or ethnic identity, Jones argued, could be construed as unique. Hypothetically, Custred could have been laid off at Hayward so that a junior member of the faculty—a woman or a Latino or black who had just been hired—could stay on. Again, Custred organized his department. "I said, hell, that's fine and dandy, but the problem is we have this union understanding and this would adversely affect the anthropology department." The battle in Hayward's academic senate was fierce. "They just screamed their bloody heads off," Custred recalled. "People got hysterical."[21]
Glynn Custred, interview, July 25, 1995.
In the end, layoffs proved unnecessary, but Custred was becoming more active.Although Hayward's educational battles received little notice in the media, the same wars were making national news
at places like Stanford, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan. Until the 1980s, students had protested actions taken in Washington—notably the country's involvement in Vietnam. Now the tables had turned, and Washington was reacting—volubly—to actions on campus. An intellectual debate was becoming a national political issue. When Stanford University began discussing the possibility of including new ethnic writers in its core humanities course, U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett ridiculed the proposed changes. "They are moving confidently and swiftly into the late 1960s. And why anybody would want to do that intentionally, I don't know," he said, adding that some at Stanford were being intimidated by the "noisiest" of their colleagues.[22]
Ibid.
The Wall Street Journal weighed in with an editorial accusing Stanford of riding "the main hobby horses of today's political left—race, gender and class."[23]"The Stanford Mind," Wall Street Journal, December 22, 1988, p. 14.
What should have been a pedagogical debate became political.In fact, Stanford was talking about only a handful of new writers and, in the end, the changes were modest. The freshman Western civilization course was renamed Culture, Ideas, and Values, and the eighteenth-century autobiography of the African slave Olaudah Equiano, readings from the Koran, and Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 book on women's rights joined Homer, Machiavelli, and Freud on the reading list. A new section, entitled Europe and the Americas, used classics such as Uncle Tom's Cabin or Democracy in America . The conservative U.C. Berkeley philosopher John Searle wrote in the New York Review of Books that "reports of the demise of 'culture,' Western or otherwise, in the required freshman course at Stanford are grossly exaggerated."[24]
John Searle, "The Storm Over the University," New York Review of Books, December, 6, 1990, p. 39.
Referring to the most innovative of Stanford's sections of Culture, Ideas, and Values, he concluded: "If I were a freshman at Stanford, I might well be tempted to take 'Europe and the Americas.'"[25]Ibid.
The canon had survived. But new intellectual camps had formed, and some of the heavyweights were firmly aligned against change. Allan Bloom, an academic from the University
of Chicago, had already risen to fame in 1987 with his book The Closing of the American Mind, and Dinesh D'Souza would follow in 1991 with his attack on the new trends in education in The Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus . A group of prominent scholars, including Jeane Kirkpatrick and James Q. Wilson, formed the National Association of Scholars in 1988 to ensure a "reasoned scholarship in a free society." The Princeton-based group billed itself as "the only American academic organization dedicated to the restoration of intellectual substance, individual merit, and academic freedom in the university." To multiculturalists, those were code words used to defend the Western canon and to attack affirmative action. But it was language to which Custred responded favorably: he helped form a California chapter—the California Association of Scholars, or CAS.
There was much to do. The California State Assembly, concerned that minority students were being left behind in higher education, considered legislation in 1991 to ensure that the freshman classes at the state's public colleges and universities reflected the ethnic composition of the class that graduated from the state's public high schools. A similar bill had been approved by the Democratic-controlled Assembly in 1990 but had been vetoed by Republican Governor George Deukmejian. The California Association of Scholars immediately opposed the 1991 measure, which was introduced in March by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. Brown's bill called for "educational equity," which as defined by the bill meant that the students and faculty at public schools and universities must reflect the diversity of the state.[26]
California Legislature, 1991-1992 Regular Session. Assembly Bill No. 2150. Introduced by Assembly Member Brown, March 8, 1991.
In addition, it called for "enhanced success at all educational levels so that there are similar achievement patterns among all groups regardless of ethnic origin, race, gender, age, disability or economic circumstance."[27]Ibid.
To ensure that the bill's vision was carried out, it also held faculty and administrators accountable. The CAS argued strongly against such provisions, stating that students seeking admission to college and faculty applying for teaching positions should be judged on thebasis of their qualifications as individuals, not by their race, color, or sex. The Brown bill was vetoed by Governor Pete Wilson.
As Custred became involved in these debates, he began to develop his arguments against affirmative action and, to do this, he did what all academics do: he went to the library. For many, the history of affirmative action begins with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so Custred looked it up. He read it once, and then he read it again. He was delighted. Title VII, the section on equal employment opportunity, says: "It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin."
"I thought, 'Hey, there's nothing wrong with this,'" he recalled. "It just wasn't being enforced."[28]
Glynn Custred, interview, January 17, 1996.
He photocopied the act and took it home. Far from promoting affirmative action that took race and gender into account, the Civil Rights Act, by Custred's reading, actually prohibited it. He began toying with the idea of a statewide initiative. In his mind, taking race or gender into consideration violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Custred wanted to write an initiative that would end programs that he viewed as discriminatory against white males and others who were not considered underrepresented minorities.