The Next Lani Guinier?

By Bonnie Angelo

Sheldon Hackney's credentials are impeccably liberal. He is the husband of a Friend of Hillary, departing president of an Ivy League university, a white Southerner accredited in the civil rights movement, a defender of Robert Mapplethorpe against Jesse Helms. In April, Hackney seemed the natural choice to be President Clinton's nominee to head the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the agency that dispenses federal grants to academia (about $160 million in 2,200 grants last year). But in this post-Lani Guinier period, the past makes Hackney ideologically suspect. Once he may have been in the catbird seat; now Hackney may be a sitting duck.

In the demonology of conservative politics, Hackney has become a personification of political correctness, that most nettlesome of campus issues. As president of the University of Pennsylvania since 1981, Hackney has handled a series of incidents that critics say reflect on his judgment and temperament. Conservative standard-bearer Patrick Buchanan puts it bluntly: "He is a politically correct leftist like Lani Guinier -- a virtuecrat, out of touch with Middle America."

Stephen Glass, executive editor of the campus newspaper the Daily Pennsylvanian, maintains that in matters of free speech Hackney "very much stands up for complaints from the left but not from the right." In April almost all 14,000 copies of the Daily Pennsylvanian were taken and destroyed by black students protesting "blatant . . . perpetuation of institutional racism" by the newspaper -- specifically the views of a right-wing columnist -- and the university at large. The paper declared it was "betrayed" by Hackney's reaction, a bland statement that "two important university values, diversity and open expression, seem to be in conflict."

Other events have split the Penn campus. In 1988 Hackney defended a campus visit by hatemongering Louis Farrakhan. In April, when gay advocates chalked sexually explicit and antireligious phrases on the main campus sidewalk, maintenance workers were forbidden to wash off the graffiti in the interest of gay free speech.

The most publicized incident occurred last January but, with a little help from conservatives, escalated into national news after Hackney's nomination. Israeli-born freshman Eden Jacobowitz was charged with racial harassment and threatened with probation for yelling, "Shut up, you water buffalo!" at a group of boisterous black women students outside his dorm. He denied any bigotry in the odd epithet, pointing out that it is Hebrew slang for an inconsiderate fool. On May 24, as the campus churned over the controversy, the women dropped the charges, but only after blasting the school for injustice.

"I'm sure all of this has been a nightmare for Sheldon," says a friend of 25 years. "It plays to every weakness he has. He carries a classic load of communal Southern guilt on racial issues. He has always had a hard time with the notion that members of a minority group can misbehave."

Not that Hackney, 59, a graduate of Vanderbilt and Yale and a distinguished historian, is less than highly qualified. Before joining Penn, he got high marks as the president who revitalized Tulane University in New Orleans. Previously, he had been a bright light on the Princeton faculty, rising to the position of provost.

His wife Lucy Durr Hackney served on the Children's Defense Fund with the First Lady and, like her is a lawyer-advocate for children. Washington insiders link Hackney's appointment to the Lucy-Hillary connection. Indeed, the First Lady may be Hackney's most unshakable asset. Amid the "water buffalo" controversy, Hillary Rodham Clinton journeyed to Philadelphia to deliver the commencement address at Penn.

Hackney has other supporters. Among them is former rival and Brown University president Vartan Gregorian, who was passed over for the Penn presidency in favor of Hackney in 1980. Says he: "Sheldon Hackney has a judicious, moderate temperament -- and you need somebody who is an umpire" to run the NEH. Gregorian himself turned down the appointment.

Hackney once wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer that in the campus contests between left and right, he stood in the huge middle ground, residing "somewhere in no-man's-land (excuse me, . . . no-person's-land), ducking the shrapnel from the p.c. bombs exploding in the popular press." When the Senate finally holds confirmation hearings, Hackney may want to consider wearing a flak jacket.

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington