From "PCU" to DEI

How a 90's Cult Film Sheds Light on 21st-Century Campus Identity Politics

The December 5th, 2023 Congressional hearings into rising and persistent campus antisemitism—during which the presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania were all repeatedly incapable of stating that calls for Jewish genocide on their campuses conflicted with their respective codes of conduct—have spurred an intense political and media response, much of it condemning the presidents’ collective evasiveness. Historian Niall Ferguson likened their remarks to the “treason of the intellectuals,” French philosopher Julien Benda’s description of the German academicians who embraced Hitler’s totalitarianism prior to and during World War II, accusing them of engaging in “the racial passions, class passions, and national passions. . . owing to which men rise up against other men.” Some—like Eric Kaufmann—argue that the extent to which universities in the West have become captured by far-left political ideology and bigotry shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the rigorous suppression of viewpoint diversity. Kaufmann writes,

The loss of viewpoint diversity among the professoriate has opened the door to radicalism…when viewpoint diversity is lost, there are no counterarguments to the dominant position and decisions are more extreme. People lose touch with reality as like-minded individuals confirm their biases. People push each other toward extremes while rewards flow to those who exemplify the progressive values of the community rather than those who synthesise competing positions.

There is now as a consequence of these hearings an increasingly open discussion of the extent to which Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies have contributed to this extremism, and these observations aren’t confined to Republicans but have now—quite suddenly—become acceptable currency among mainstream outlets like CNN. Witness Fareed Zakaria’s December 12th video op-ed arguing that US universities are pushing leftist political agendas—that DEI regimes may have started with good intentions but have now enforced a rigid “hierarchy of oppression” that, for all practical purposes, excludes Jews and Asians, leading to discrimination and a dramatic loss of faith in post-secondary education among the American public.

The scale of the institutionalization of DEI on campus is indeed jaw-dropping. DEI is in fact a multibillion dollar industry fueling an increasingly bloated bureaucracy in the academy: Yale, for example, announced in 2019 that it was planning on spending $85 million over the subsequent 5 years on DEI initiatives. In spite of this massive investment, however, there is little empirical evidence that the “DEI-Industrial Complex” can demonstrate positive outcomes commensurate with its claims. As well, a recent poll shows that a majority of people still associate DEI (negatively) with “political correctness,” the term that previously dominated campus life in the 1990s and beyond.

(Interestingly, a Google search for “political correctness” DEI yields this curious graphic, suggesting that even positing such a relationship is a “conspiracy theory”!)

I would argue, however, that “PC culture” can offer some useful insights into our current moment—specifically in the form of the now mostly forgotten 90s’ college comedy PCU. Starring Jeremy Piven, David Spade, and Jessica Walter, and directed by Hart Bochner (best known as the slimy corporate raider Ellis from Die Hard) the movie brilliantly skewered then-current campus political correctness. While a financial dud upon its release in 1994, PCU has since become something of a cult classic (despite being out of print on DVD and unavailable on streaming) owing to its extremely clever writing and hilarious performances, both of which reward multiple viewings. As summarized perfectly by Eric Ducker writing at Vice,

[t]he movie mostly takes place over a single day as a clueless pre-frosh named Tom (played by Chris Young) visits the fictional Port Chester University. He is assigned to stay with Droz (Jeremy Piven, in his first lead performance), a fast-talking shitstarter who rules over The Pit, a former fraternity that’s become the home of the school’s wastoids and weirdos. The Pit is in the midst of a multi-front war. The house is loathed by the Causeheads, whose protests dominate campus life, as well as a group of radical feminists called the Womynists. They are also seen as a blight on the college by both the school’s self-servingly progressive administration (represented by an acidic Jessica Walter as President Garcia-Thompson) and Balls and Shaft, a crew of preppy Reaganites led by David Spade’s Rand McPherson. When the residents of The Pit learn they must pay $7000 in property damages or lose their house, they plan to raise the cash with a rager that will attract the entire student body. After house band Everyone Gets Laid can’t perform, they miraculously get [George Clinton’s real-life band] Parliament-Funkadelic to replace them. Good times and fleeting student unity ensues.

In the film, Port Chester University (actually the campus of the University of Toronto) is depicted as completely dominated by student identity politics, with the “Causeheads” engaged in daily public protests over whatever cause they happen to be championing that week; the man-hating Womynists maintaining constant vigilance against rape culture; members of identity groups competing with each other over their historic victimization; and Walter’s President Garcia-Thomspon swooping in to distribute forms so students can record their offense and trauma. When not planning ever more fragmented identitarian “studies” programs to replace the conventional curriculum, the hyper-liberal Garcia-Thompson is actually engaging in a cynical alliance with the all-white, Republican and openly anti-Semitic men of the Balls and Shaft fraternity to oust the residents of The Pit. At the film’s climax, however, the Board of Trustees become fed up with how her unrepentant stoking of student radicalism has made the campus ungovernable, and fire her.

At first glance, much of what transpires in the film is consistent with latter-day critiques of the 21st Century “woke” campus, including a pervasive culture of safetyism—in which students are protected from ideas with which they may disagree; incessant virtue signaling (Garcia-Thompson tries to get an audience to applaud the fact that their event programs are printed on recycled paper); and the deliberate stoking of students’ resentments against each other.

Yet if one were to remake the film today, some of the original characters’ activism would now be unrecognizable, and not only because the film takes place before cell phones and social media. For starters, the Womynists—in their ardent, separatist defense of their status as a biological sex class—would be aghast to discover that in the 2020’s nobody seems to be able to define what a woman is, and would undoubtedly be excoriated by their fellow students and the administration as “TERFs” and cancelled into oblivion; while overt expressions of anti-Semitism would now be loudly chanted by many of the leftist Causeheads, not campus Republicans. And while Garcia-Thompson was a one-woman PC operation whose activism earned the ire of the university’s trustees, Port Chester would, in 2023, have a massively-funded trustee-approved DEI bureaucracy that would have long ago shut down The Pit and subjected Droz and his friends to mandatory diversity training.

Two things depicted in the movie, however, are still germane: that the actual quality of higher education has deteriorated under the ideology of identity politics, and that fanning the fires of identitarian grievance makes institutions ungovernable. It is worth considering, as Matthew Syed observes, that the Ivy League presidents’ canned response to Congress “wasn’t about free speech; it was about fear. These presidents were revealing dread of their own student bodies.”

According to critics, what makes DEI regimes more corrosive than mere political correctness is the fact that, (as James Lindsay explains at his New Discourses website), the elements of its acronym signify precisely the opposite of their ostensible, benign-sounding meanings: diversity doesn’t refer to viewpoints, but specifically to the presence of identity groups imbued with a sufficiently Marxist “critical consciousness”; equity means equality of outcomes, not opportunities—the latter being impossible to achieve under democratic conditions; and inclusion requires the deliberate exclusion of people or ideas to which members of specific identity groups might object. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) points out, DEI thus has a “chilling effect” on academic and intellectual freedom, especially when in the form of loyalty oaths or litmus tests to which existing or prospective faculty must declare adherence.

In his new book The Identity Trap, Yascha Mounk characterizes this movement as the “identity synthesis,” combining streams of postmodernism, postcolonialism and critical race theory. The core themes emerging from this synthesis (as summarized by Hugh Breakey at The Conversation) are:

• Scepticism about objective truth: a postmodern wariness about “grand narratives” that extends to scepticism about scientific claims and universal values.

• Discourse analysis for political ends: a critique of speech and language to overcome oppressive structures.

• Doubling down on identity: a strategy of embracing rather than dismantling identities.

• Proud pessimism: the view that no genuine civil rights progress has been made, and that oppressive structures will always exist.

• Identity-sensitive legislation: the failure of “equal treatment” requires policies that explicitly favour marginalised groups.

• The imperative of intersectionality: effectively acting against one form of oppression requires responding to all its forms.

• Standpoint theory: marginalised groups have access to truths that cannot be communicated to outsiders.

Thus, with no shared reality and a reliance on language games to shape a new reality premised on limitless individual identities and a determination to dismantle existing socio-political structures, the unfortunate but inevitable consequence of this worldview is (as Breakey observes), that

everything must be viewed through the lens of oppressive structures. Once it is decided that Palestinian people are the oppressed party, and Israelis the oppressors, even the deliberate murder of Jewish children can seem legitimate. Here, as elsewhere, ideology and in-group dynamics can so easily trump humanity.

However, as Bari Weiss argues, the solution is not to broaden the scope of DEI to include Jews, but rather to dismantle DEI regimes entirely, calling them a threat to liberalism. Accordingly, the path out of this identity trap, Mounk writes, is to be

guided by a clear moral compass...In my case, this compass consists of liberal values like political equality, individual freedom and collective self-determination. For others it could consist of socialist conviction or Christian faith, of conservative principles or the precepts of Buddhism. But what all of us must share is a determination to build a better world…[which means], we must overcome the prejudices and enmities that have for so much of human history boxed us into the roles seemingly foreordained by our gender, our sexual orientation, or the color of our skin. It is time to fight, without shame or hesitation, for a future in which what we have in common truly comes to be more important than what divides us.

Funnily enough, these behaviors are, in fact, the very ones that make the denizens of PCU’s Pit so endearing: politically undeclared, white and black, male and female, they eschew all forms of identity beyond that of their shared residence and are instead united by their commitment to getting along, their love of funk music, and their genuine desire for everyone to just have a great time.

With politicians and major media commentators alike now drawing connections between DEI bureaucracies and a decline in the quality of post-secondary education—to say nothing of open bigotry—it will be essential, I think, for the academy to offer some kind of substantive response to this criticism. Will we see a doubling-down, a modification, or a repositioning of DEI initiatives under other titles? Or will we instead see a return to traditional approaches to creating equal educational opportunities for all students regardless of background, and a pedagogical commitment to the pursuit of truth?

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