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view . fall 2011
In November 2001, as the ashes of the World Trade
Centre still lay smoldering,
the American Council of
Trustees and Alumni released a report entitled, “Defending
Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and
What Can Be Done About It.”
In what some critics called
a blacklist, the report listed 117
alleged instances of “unpatriotic”
speech by university personnel
whose responses to the 9/11
attacks had, according to
the document, “ranged from
moral equivocation to explicit
condemnations of America.”
The American Council is a
Washington-based group that
has close ties to former US
Vice-President Dick Cheney’s
wife, Lynne. The report was
considered by some to be an
opening salvo of the broader
conservative movement’s
attempt to use 9/11 to revive the
“culture wars” of the early 1990s and renew an attack on
the American professoriate.
Among those who viewed the development with alarm
was Dr. Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale BA ’90, MA ’94,
associate professor in the Department of Communication,
Media and Film at the University of Windsor. Her subsequent
research into the issues forms the basis of her new book,
Cold Breezes and Idiot Winds: Patriotic Correctness and the
Post 9/11 Assault on Academe
published in April 2011, just a
few months before the tenth anniversary of the tragedy.
“When the American Council
report came out, the one thing
that I thought was ironic—and
that inspired me—was that we
kept hearing how 9/11 changed
everything,” says Scatamburlo-
D’Annibale. “But the one thing
it didn’t change were the US
conservative movement’s
concerted attempts to demonize
the academy, which started at
least 40 years ago.”
Her 1998 book,
Soldiers
of Misfortune: The New Right’s
Culture War and the Politics
of Political Correctness
, which
earned her a Critic’s Choice
Award from the American
Educational Research
Association in 2000, had dealt with the perception of
universities as bastions of liberal-left political correctness
and provided a backdrop for
Cold Breezes
.
After 9/11, she says that conservatives created
their own version of political correctness that she calls,
“patriotic correctness”.
“THE PATRIOTIC CORRECTNESS
THAT EMERGED AFTER 9/11
PURPORTED TO DEFINE WHAT
AMERICA WAS ALL ABOUT.
THERE WAS THIS NOTION OF
AMERICA AS GOD’S CHOSEN
COUNTRY, AND DISSENT
BECAME UNACCEPTABLE,
ESPECIALLY IN THE ACADEMY.”
DR. VALERIE SCATAMBURLO-
D’ANNIBALE
BY LORI LEWIS AND JENNIFER BARONE
Cold Breezes and Idiot Winds, Patriotic Correctness and the
Post 9/11 Assault on Academe
SOMETHING IN THE AIR
CAMPUS AUTHORS
