PC & NU

OVER on the Urbanists internet list, there's been a long discussion about the Harvard faculty censuring (former) Harvard President Larry Summers, who was later forced to resign. This led to a discussion on political correctness, and what role it plays in the Academy.

Marxism is dead everywhere but in academia and a few Central American countries, but in the Academy some of the attitudes live on as trickle-down behaviors among misanthropic, politically correct professors who are quick to call those they think are to the right of them classist, sexist, elitist, racist or even Fordist — regardless of what the truth is.

New Urbanism is a progressive architecture movements that promotes the social goals "avant garde" and experimental architecture have abandoned, but following the success of the New Urban Mississippi charrette, the Deans and Directors of three architecture schools — Tulane, Louisiana State, and SciArc — tried to paint the New Urbanists as paleo-cons:

Here were the poor New Urbanists staying up all hours of the night, gulping all the coffee and Red Bull they could take, and planning an entire region in seven days. And what did they get in response? They got a kick in the keister from Eric Owen Moss, director of SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture). He told the Post's Linda Hales that the New Urbanists' traditional town planning "would appeal to a kind of anachronistic Mississippi that yearns for the good old days of the Old South as slow and balanced and pleasing and breezy, and each person knew his or her role." Moss didn't say that Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk wanted to bring back the Jim Crow laws, but he might as well have. (Blair Kamin, architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune)

The Dean of Tulane called New Urbanism "reactionary" (and worse). I went to a Princeton, Columbia and CUNY conference about what to do about Katrina, where it was agreed New Urbanism is "racist."

Plain and simple, this is a power move. The New Urbanists are succeeding in Mississippi and Louisiana? Better call them classist and racist. Let the victims of Katrina eat cake, until they embrace Starchitecture.

Universities are supposed to be places of open-minded discovery and debate, but many of the dominant voices in architecture schools are ideologues saying whatever it takes to maintain control of the schools. Why don't their more reasonable colleagues speak out?