My book is on an abstract topic, but as I have told people during my book tour, it also grows directly out of personal experience. It was my time at the National Endowment for Humanities which was the personal experience that formed this book. I had come there after being away from the academy for ten years, and it was a great shock to me to find the state of the humanities as I did.

In my confirmation hearings, I had quoted generously from Matthew Arnold on the idea that the pursuit of the humanities should be the pursuit of the best that has been thought and known in the world. I talked about history as a place where we could find models of excellence. I talked about literature as a place where we would find enduring truths.

So it was a great shock to me to come to the NEH and very quickly discover how great a divergence there was between what I was talking about and where the humanities were going. Ideas like excellence, beauty, and, most of all, the idea of truth, were under great assault. In fact, that may even be understating what was happening because in a sense the assault was over. These ideas were declared invalid--there was no such thing as truth, there is no such thing as a reality outside ourselves, and thus there was no way of establishing the truth of claims that might be made. All those things we think are true are simply the constructs of dominant groups (namely white males) that formed them in order to oppress the rest of us.

So people like me who spoke of truth were either fools, naive in the extreme, or were somehow duplicitous in trying to use a concept like truth, which everyone knew was a false concept and a product of false consciousness, to put something over on people.

I spoke out about what I saw happening. One of the great pleasures about not having been in the academy and having no expectation of going there was that I felt no constraint on what I said. I felt constraints in terms of being responsible, but I didn't have to worry about job prospects. They didn't exist in any case.

And so I could be perfectly frank about what I saw happening, and the violence of the reaction that my really innocuous observations would cause was so curious. I wrote a report called "Humanities in America" which contained the most innocent sentences. I talked about the state of the academy as I found it and wrote: "Truth and beauty and excellence are regarded as irrelevant; questions of intellectual and aesthetic quality are dismissed. . .The key questions are thought to be about gender, race, and class. What groups did the authors of these works represent? How did their books enhance the social power of those groups over others?"

The curious part here was not that I was denounced for having made false accusations. I was denounced, rather, for not understanding that this was simply the way things were, and there was no sense in protesting. A highlight came when Stanley Fish, who is a guru of the relativistic postmodern kind of thinking that I talk about it in this book, took the stage at an academic conference in North Carolina. He had my pamphlet in hand, and reports came back to me, which were in fact given further substantiation by an article in the New York Times of Stanley Fish walking back and forth across the stage waving my pamphlet over his head and dismissing me in many ways to hoots and jeers and encouragement from the audience.

Reaching a peroration in this presentation, in which he said "When you take away race, class, and gender, what is left?" as though this were so true, it was quite amazing that someone like me would object to it. Well, I did, and with the help of wonderful council members like Bea Himmelfarb and Father James Schall, I tried to uphold those terribly retrograde ideas like truth and beauty, and did speak out when I found the NEH was going astray. I felt it was important to do that not only because of the difficulty this kind of thinking caused for the Endowment, but because of the difficulty it caused at colleges and universities all across the country.

There is a common rebuttal to the kinds of things that I say, and it goes very simply that all of this talk about political correctness is merely a chimera of conservative thinking: That it is something that conservatives have imagined or invented in order to discredit our colleges and universities. But as I pointed out then, and I make the same case in two chapters in my book, political correctness is alive and entrenched. The stories that you heard when there was great media interest in 1990 and 1991 continue today.

I think we have an impression in our society that when the media quits talking about something, it ceases to exist. And the media has, more or less, quit talking about political correctness. So many people think it is no longer the case that the orthodoxies of political correctness are being enforced. That is not the case; they are very much in evidence as you travel to campuses around the country. And I thought tonight by way of making that point I would talk about one of the stories in my book which I haven't seen reported anywhere else.

Professor David Goldberg at the University of Michigan was charged in 1993 with "race and gender-baiting," "inflammatory racial rhetoric," and harassing entire groups of people based on their particular racial, gender, or ethnic identities or sexual orientation." And he did all of this in Sociology 510, a required course for sociology graduate students. These are charges made by students in newspapers, and they based them on handouts that Professor Goldberg had given in class.

One handout that was found to be particularly offensive was about the 59-cent button. It is often worn by feminists who are making the point that for every dollar a man earns, a woman earns fifty-nine cents. Well, Professor Goldberg had given out a handout in class showing that you could get different numbers depending on what you fed into the statistics. If you factored in education and marital status, for example, the number might go all the way up to ninety-three cents, or it could go down as low as fifty-three cents, depending upon what factors you took into account. This was seen as gender baiting.

He had a teaching technique that I suspect many of you have experienced, the kind of professor who is in your face, up there all the time challenging you. It is not the kind of class where you want to not be prepared, because you could be embarrassed by a professor who is unwilling to let a sloppy answer slip by. This technique was seen as particularly damaging to women and minorities. Professor Goldberg saw it, of course, as a way of encouraging achievement. But when applied to all students without regard to race or gender, or so a student wrote in a student newspaper, it amounts to racial and sexual harassment of women and minorities who, operating from a position of powerlessness, easily interpret challenges and demands as "an academic form of social exclusion."

Now these students' charges are so bizarre, that you would think they wouldn't go anywhere. And that they are just the kind of thing that professors have to put up with these days. But, indeed, his department decided that he shouldn't teach the required sociology course anymore. Their solution was to get rid of Professor Goldberg in Sociology 510 so no one who didn't want to wouldn't have to face him.

Fortunately, Professor Goldberg had a few principled colleagues at the University of Michigan who raised a fuss. The situation was finally resolved by establishing a second track of Sociology 510, so that no one would have to face Professor Goldberg. Well, it goes on and on, and I suspect that many of my readers know the reason that the situation doesn't remedy itself, and that so many obstacles have been put in place to keep the pendulum from swinging back. Typically you would expect a new generation to come along who would look for the opposite arguments to make, look for other ways to make their cases from the ones that the old guard was making. In another era, my research assistant would be the perfect person to go to graduate school and get a Ph.D. But I can't sincerely recommend that she do that given the state of art history. Anybody with a sensible and traditional approach to the discipline is going to find it hard to get a dissertation advisor and then will find it hard to get a job. John Patrick Diggins at CUNY says that any historian who is more interested in Madison than in Marx has about as much chance of getting tenure at a university today as Woody Allen does of playing center for the New York Knicks.

So she would find it hard to advance professionally in any way at all. Steven Ambrose has a very interesting description of the American Historical Association. He wrote about their annual meeting in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago. The 1993 meeting was held on the 250th anniversary of Jefferson's birth, and it was also the 50th anniversary of many of the greatest battles of World War II. Ambrose reported that not a single session at the AHA meeting was devoted to either Jefferson or World War II, which gives you some indication of the barriers that are in place. If your paper cannot be presented at a professional meeting, it is very harmful to you in your career. So, it is intractable in a way that makes me very sad, but it is not only in higher education. And that it the main point of my book--that this idea is now off campus and in the culture, and the consequences of it are devastating.

It is perhaps was psychotherapy and the whole "recovered memory" movement, which is clearly a product of this kind of thinking, that the most shocking evidence of this can be found. The notion being that it doesn't matter what story a patient comes up with, or is encouraged to come up with, or hypnotized to come up with, or given drug induced therapy to come up with. If the story makes the patient feel better, then that is the true story, and it doesn't matter if there is any objective evidence to support it.

Now I don't mean to suggest that sexual abuse is not a real and important problem in our society, but therapists are encouraging people to come up with "memories" of sexual abuse. These "memories" are very different from other memories. They have a movie-like ephemeral quality to them, and they aren't substantiated by objective evidence. But the patients are told "Make the charge" and then cut yourself off from your parents (those are the ones usually charged) because they will simply try to get you to go back on this memory, and this memory will make you feel better. This is such a denial of the idea of truth, it is really quite amazing to me.

I quote many therapists in my book who are advocates of this way of thinking. Here is just one quote so you can get some flavor for how closely related this is to the ideas that we have seen develop on campus. This is a therapist who is talking about accepting a client's truth: "We have to accept it, whether it existed in objective reality or not." How is that truth playing out in the client's life? It is the dynamic past, not the content past that is important."

I don't mean to suggest that every therapist is advocating this point of view, as there are also some brave therapists speaking out against it. But a significant number believe it. And they seem to be under the same spell that we see in the academy. The idea that there is no such thing as objective truth; there are only various stories, yours and mine and someone else's, and we will accept the one that works best.

Journalism is another place where I have been amazed at how accurately the conversation that is going on mimics the postmodern conversation that is going on in the academy. Because there is no truth and no reality, you can never be objective. The American Council of Learned Societies, an organization for which I had a certain reverence when I became NEH chairman, once spent a good deal of its resources and energy putting out a pamphlet to denounce me. In fact, they were really interested in Allan Bloom and Bill Bennett, but I came in for some serious attacks too, because I had embraced the idea of objectivity. Not that I thought I could display it in its absolute form, not that I thought that I was totally objective, but that it was a good thing for scholars to try to be.

An entire pamphlet was devoted to showing how ridiculous and retrograde this notion was. Objectivity can't exist because there is no reality out there to get to, you're permanently locked in yourself, you're permanently in a subjective state, the pamphlet argued. This is the conversation on campus, and it is also the conversation going on among journalists. Joann Byrd, until recently the ombudsman for the Washington Post, wrote right after the 1992 election that during the elections of her lifetime, the convention of objectivity had ruled. Byrd called it a kind of "bias police." But she said, "we wised up and dismissed objectivity as a pretentious fantasy that made stenographers of reporters and produced irresponsible journalism." So objectivity is now linked with irresponsible journalism.

Howard Kurtz does the same thing in his book about the 1992 campaign called Media Circus. In the book he talks about objectivity at least twice as a set of "shackles" that journalists have to break and shrug off in order to be truly responsible and carry out the kind of crusades that journalists need to carry out. This same kind of thinking was in a recent piece that Max Frankel wrote in the New York Times Magazine. He talked about objective misrepresentation, the same idea where trying to be objective misrepresents the situation. Only if you're subjective are you going to be doing the responsible reportorial job?

Well, I don't want to get too far into this topic tonight, but it certainly is one that interests me. There are actually one or two things where I agree with Michael Kinsley. One was a column he wrote about objectivity in the press, and he was very upset because people like me do mention from time to time that the mainstream press tends to be dominated by liberals. Michael thought it was rather unnecessary for people to keep pointing this out, because he said "As long as people are objective in their reporting, what difference does it make if the press is mostly liberal?"  I had to agree with that. If people try to be objective, what difference does it really make?  Now, though, the chickens have come home to roost, because what happens when people are no longer interested in being objective, and the mainstream press is dominated by liberals?  I think what you see is a situation that we have watched over the last few years where people become so upset by obvious bias in the mainstream press that they begin going to other sources to seek information, a development which I regard as totally healthy.

I talk about many areas in my book, including the cultural world of museums, movies, and politics. But I do have to share with you one quote, as the section on politics in my book has gotten me in a lot of trouble. On my book tour, people often ask why I wrote about Bill Clinton. I respond: "But how could you write a book about truth in our time and not mention Bill Clinton?"  This argument has not been regarded as totally convincing, but I do notice that since the president stood up in Houston and declared that he really didn't mean to raise our taxes that much, that the question has been avoided. In one passage in my book I quote Richard Lanham, a scholar at UCLA who, twenty years ago, wrote about the rise of postmodernism. He saw it in its nascent stages, and he absolutely and accurately predicted how this way of thinking would thrive in the years ahead. He thought it was a perfectly good thing for the postmodern rhetorical way of thinking to thrive in our culture. But here is his description of rhetorical man:

"Rhetorical man is an actor; his reality public, dramatic. His sense of identity, his self, depends on the reassurance of daily histrionic reenactment. . . .He thinks first of winning, of mastering the rules the current game enforces. He assumes a natural agility in changing orientations. He hits the street already street-wise. From birth, almost, he has dwelt not in a single value-structure but in several. He is thus committed to no single construction of the world; much rather, to prevailing in the game at hand. . . . Rhetorical man is trained not to discover reality but to manipulate it. Reality is what is accepted as reality, what is useful. . . .Rhetorical man does not ask, "What is real?" He asks, "What is accepted as reality here and now?"

Well, it is a marvelous prefiguring of a character that can be found abundantly in a whole generation. I was being previnterviewed for a television show a few weeks ago, and a young woman simply could not grasp what I was talking about. When I would try to say "This is a book about how the idea of external truth has fallen into disdain," she kept saying, "But Mrs. Cheney, that's just your view." It was a conversation that was difficult to get through.

But I want to spend just a few minutes talking about where I think the problem is the worst. And that is in our schools. It is one thing entirely to have museum exhibitions that adults go to and have those be skewed in one way or another, it is one thing to skew the news. But when you skew the version of history that we present to our children, you are doing something very serious indeed, and we are doing that.
 
I start out my chapter on schools with some examples, some that I found particularly outrageous. A teacher of radical math literacy warning against bombarding students with oppressive pro-capitalist ideology. In particular she was concerned about teaching kids story problems that involved grocery bills. Because, she says, such an exercise "carries the nonneutral message that paying for food is natural."

The author of a textbook for future teachers, and this is more pernicious because this person is writing a textbook that is widely used in teacher colleges and departments of education around the country, urges people to be skeptical about the story that the American Indians crossed the Bering land bridge, which is of course the story that all the anthropological evidence leads us to. She says that this is not a story that exists in Indian myth, and that the scientific account has nothing "except logic" to recommend it. This argument was also used by a group of parents in California to object to the use of a certain fourth-grade textbook.

The topic which I have spent the most time on is the National History Standards, which I have felt personally obliged to spend time on, since I helped make them possible. This is a case of having created a monster. It wasn't a monster when we first saw it, it was really quite a reasonable proposal to decide and set standards for what kids should know. Every other industrialized nation does this. The Germans do it most sensibly, since they allow the development of national standards at the state level. There is not the same thing being taught in Bavaria as is being taught in Berlin, but everybody feels obliged to develop standards that can stand up under national comparison. Of course, the Germans got this idea from the school system that we helped them develop after the war. So, in essence, we're seeing the possibility of our own thought developed in a workable way.

What happened with the National History Standards, however, is that a very reasonable proposal which promised to talk both about people that we ignored in the past and about traditional heroes; about the failings of American society in addition to the progress that we have made in overcoming those failings; and about the ways in which we are a successful and triumphant nation, started going off the rails after the 1992 election. It suddenly seemed no holds were barred, and there was no longer any sense that there would be somebody around to say "But you can't do that!" And so they did. In the National History Standards, which I have been describing them for a year now, George Washington is mentioned only fleetingly, while Joseph McCarthy is a main figure with nineteen mentions in the text. It is really quite amazing. The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, a women's rights document that we should teach our children about, is mentioned eight times, but the Gettysburg Address is mentioned just once.

It is a document so wildly out of whack that even Ted Kennedy and Paul Wellstone voted to condemn the standards. But the standards are like political correctness itself, no matter how much they're condemned they don't go away. There is a cadre of people in place who are interested in perpetuating the standards, and they keep working away no matter what happens. There was recently an effort to salvage the standards conducted by the Council for Basic Education. I was gratified that even though they included none of the most prominent critics on the panel that they drew together to talk about the standards, they nonetheless pointed out some of the more egregious errors. The fact that language is biased throughout the standards document, for example. There is even one passage where Ellis Island immigrants are referred to as "intrusive European migrants." Students are asked to compare "intrusive European migrants" with "indigenous peoples."

The CBE panels did point out some of these very grave failings, but they also concluded that the standards would be salvageable if we would just take off all the teaching examples and focus just on the standards themselves. Bob Lerner's fine work on this topic has pointed out that this is not the case, and the standards themselves are just as biased as the examples.

Meanwhile, while we're pointing out the problems with the standards, they're being used in classrooms. One teacher called into a talk show I was doing in Missouri and told me about sitting in a curriculum development session in Maryland. The point was to develop standards for Maryland history teaching, and the document they were to begin with was the National History Standards for U.S. History. Gil Sewell, head of the American Textbook Council, has said that the textbook makers are using them.

Two more tales from the world are very revealing and very demonstrative of how the problem is still working itself through the culture. I did have the good fortune in some ways of having my book tour start on the day O.J. Simpson was declared not guilty. So I've talked about the O.J. Simpson trial in connection with my book, and there really is an interesting connection. I argue, and I get in many disagreements about this, that the jury, instructed that they could tell a narrative about something else besides whether O.J. killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, did exactly that. They constructed an alternative narrative, and they put their decision into this other context that had to do with sending a message to the system and to African-American people about not putting up with racial injustice anymore. It was out of that narrative that this story grew. But one of the most interesting and disheartening conversations I've had about this was with a man who called into a radio talk show I was on and said that he completely disagreed with this analysis. He felt that the jury had made the decision based on the evidence, and knowing that we couldn't solve this issue in a few minutes on a radio show, I suggested maybe we could find some common ground. Couldn't we at least agree that it would be wrong to tell the jury to do that and construct some other narrative and make the decision based on that other discourse? It would be wrong to tell the jury to send a message, to "do the right thing" which would be a code for making the trial a racial statement rather than a statement about abstract justice. And the caller said indeed, that that would be wrong. And so I said then you and I agree that what Johnnie Cochran did was wrong. And the caller said with complete conviction, "That is not what Johnnie Cochran did." And you see how distressing this is, because that is exactly what Johnnie Cochran did, and this is not disputable. You have the fact, the words, you can look it up in NEXIS and the New York Times. But we have fallen so far into the belief that you do not have to look to facts, you do not have to look to evidence, you do not have to seek verification, that this caller was able, with complete conviction, to assert that something that had happened didn't happen.

One other tale from the world. I was in Chicago signing books, and a teacher came up to me. She was so troubled by what she had seen while working as a substitute teacher in the Chicago school system that she brought me some pages from a textbook used there. In these pages, students were being encouraged to write long numbers in Egyptian hieroglyphics and to do addition and subtraction in Mayan mathematics. Now you see this is about something besides education or truth--you can't write 4926 in Egyptian hieroglyphics, not without doing a whole bunch of chicanery to get you there. Youngsters in the city of Chicago do not need to be learning addition and subtraction in Mayan, they need to be learning it in English.

When I think of how we solve the problem, and I know many of you are concerned, it seems you should pick an area, and just demand truth in that area. This isn't a high-faluting suggestion; I wish I had one that would be a panacea or a magic bullet and wipe this out for all time. But I think it is something simpler we have to concentrate on, becoming reasonably expert, applying common sense to some particular area and just not putting up with it when people come into the schools and want to teach an Afrocentric curriculum. When people want to put on an exhibition at the Smithsonian to suggest that the United States waged a racist war of vengeance against the Japanese, just don't put up with it.

My area is the schools. I am a grandmother now, and my granddaughter will be in kindergarten in three years. I do not want her to learn that she is a victim because she is a woman, and I do not want her to think that she is somehow underprivileged because she has been born in this country. I do not want her to think that she has been born into a civilization and a society that are somehow less worthy than other societies that have existed. So for me it is the schools, but I hope for each of you, you will find one area where you insist on truth-telling, and just not put up with the failure to tell the truth and seek the truth and pursue the truth that has become so common in our culture.

Lynne V. Cheney is the W.H. Brady, Jr., Distinguished Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.