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THIRTY YEARS AGO, WHEN I ARRIVED IN CALIFORNIA IN 1963, MY HOME IN NORTHern England seemed a million miles away and, compared to Oxford's medieval fortress where I had studied as an undergraduate, Berkeley represented the university of the future, bursting with activism, dissent, and relevance. Some 10 years later, when I wrote a manifesto for a radical criminology, I was confident we were engaged in a project would break the chains of the past (Platt, 1974). Now, another 20 years on in a much smaller and more interdependent globe, and in the wake of the collapse and disintegration of the world's Lefts, my mood is certainly less buoyant, my analysis more somber, my proposals hedged with a string of caveats. Yet, in case you were hoping, this talk will not be an apology for youthful indiscretions or a plea to be allowed to enter the ranks of positivist criminology. I still think critical theorists have produced some of the most insightful criminological literature -- from Rusche and Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structure (1939), to Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1977), the Birmingham Group's Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 1978), and Mike Davis' recent (1990) critique of the on Drugs in Los Angeles -- and helped to create dialogue in a profession too often has been characterized by the clamor of one voice speaking to itself as loudly as possible. It has been an eternity of three presidential administrations since Criminology has seen a good argument. Leftists and most liberals abandoned or were excluded from the public arena in the early 1980s. We sat out Reagan and Bush, nursing our wounds, leaving the stage to the cost-cutters, empiricists, efficiency experts, and neo-con consultants. Now we have a moment of opening once again, though we should not have illusions law and order will be abandoned by the new administration. Just examine Governor Clinton's record in Arkansas and the campaign's platform on crime.(1) Yet when you promise change and a new deal, people's expectations get raised. And when President Clinton via Maya Angelou tells us simply/Very simply/With Hope--/Good morning, then it's time to dust off our resumes and shelved ideas. Good Morning? It is a healthy sign that, once again, the university is at the center of ideological controversy. Not since the era of the Vietnam War have we seen such heated and volatile arguments about the purposes of higher education, access to universities, curriculum requirements, and civility and language on campus.(2) On the one side are the supporters (including myself) of multiculturalism, trying to diversify the composition of student and faculty bodies, and the canons of required knowledge. On the other side are the critics of PC, who regard the multiculturalism project as politicized, intolerant, and irrational. If there is any doubt, notes Joan Scott (1992: 59), that the production of knowledge is a enterprise involves contest among conflicting interests, the raging debates of the last few years should have dispelled them. In previous essays (Platt, 1990; 1992), I discussed the legacy of racism in higher education and the roots of the current attack on political correctness. In this talk, I wish to focus on the obstacles we face in implementing even the most modest reforms relating to diversity within the university. Before addressing the challenge, it is important to recognize some significant changes have taken place within the last 20 years. Academia is no longer the pure white, old-boys club it was for a century. When I came to Berkeley in the early 1960s, the student body there was over 90% white, just as it was at every public and private university (with the exception of historically black colleges). Then, women were still intruders: 63% of students were men, 90% of Ph.D.'s, and 80% of faculties. By 1991, students of color had more than doubled their participation in the university; women made up more than half of all undergraduates, about one-third of all graduate students, and a third of university faculties (Scott, 1992: 68). …
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