The kind of politicization reflected in these episodes is, in fact, a fairly recent development in academic life. Its origin can be traced to a famous battle at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) in I969. At that meeting, a "radical caucus" led by Staughton Lynd and Arthur Waskow attempted to have the organization pass an official resolution calling for American withdrawal from the Vietnam War and an end to the "repression" of the Black Panther Party. Opposition to the resolution was led by radical historian Eugene Genovese and by liberal historian H. Stuart Hughes. Four years earlier, Genovese had become a national cause celebre when he publicly declared his support for the Communist Vietcong. He nonetheless opposed the radical call for such a resolution as a "totalitarian" threat to the profession and to the intellectual standards on which it is based. Hughes, who had been a peace candidate for Congress, joined in asserting that any anti-war resolution would "politicize" the AHA and urging the members to reject it.
Hughes and Genovese narrowly won the battle, but eventually lost the war. The AHA joined other professional academic associations in becoming organizations controlled by the political left. A recent memoir by a distinguished academic scholar and administrator, Alvin Kernan, sums up the developments this way: "But while Marxism may have failed in Moscow, class conflict thrived on the American campus, where gender, race, and class politics increasingly drove academic debate. If the 1970s had been the time of radical theories, then the 1980s were the time when politics began increasingly to replace professionalism in the universities. Government lent powerful reinforcement to the new concept of university regulations and funding that favored social justice over knowledge or merit. Women and minorities could now openly use their subjects to argue for the purposes of their cause."*
The politicization has gone so far that a few years ago the philosopher Richard Rorty smugly applauded the fact that "The power base of the left in America is now in the universities since the trade unions have largely been killed off." As if to confirm this claim, a Nation editorial written by one of the signers of the historians' statement, boasted that "three members of the Nation family" have just been elected to head three powerful professional associations-the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and the Modern Language Association (MLA) — with a combined membership of fifty-four thousand academics.†
The president-elect of the AHA, Columbia professor Eric Foner, is indeed the scion of a family of well-known American communists, a die-hard proponent of the "innocence" of the Rosenberg spies, a sponsor of university events honoring Communist Party stalwarts Angela Davis and Herbert Aptheker, a lifelong member of the radical left and recently even an organizer of the secretaries' union at Columbia with an eye towards re-forging a 1930s-style Popular Front between radical intellectuals and organized labor. David Montgomery, the new president of the OAH, is described in the Nation as "a factory worker, union organizer and Communist militant in St. Paul in the Fifties. . . . Montgomery's ties to labor remain strong: He was active,in the Yale clerical workers' strike and other campus and union struggles." Edward Said, the new president of the lWLA, is a former member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) governing council and was the most prominent apologist in America for PLO terrorism until he fell out with Yassir Arafat over the Oslo peace accords, which Said regards as a "sellout" to Israeli imperialists.
That is the bad news. The good news is more modest. The historians' statement was not an official resolution of either the AHA or the OAH, and neither Montgomery nor Eric Foner signed it. When asked, Foner said he did not think it was appropriate for him to do so because of his position as head of an organization representing fifteen thousand members, many of whom might not agree with its sentiments. That was the right idea, but unfortunately he was unable to extend it to the issue at hand. Thus he did not think the volatile political statement by four hundred professors, invoking the authority of their profession, was itself inappropriate, even though almost all of them lacked competence in the subject.
The deeper problem revealed by this episode is the serious absence of intellectual diversity in university faculties. Such diversity would provide a check on the hubris of academic activists like Wilentz and his co-signers. The fact is that leftists in the university, through decades of political hiring and promotion, and through systematic intellectual intimidation, have virtually driven conservative thought from the halls of academe.
A call made to one of the handful of known conservatives allowed to teach a humanities subject at Princeton confirmed the following suspicion: in Sean Wilentz's history department not a single conservative can be found among its fifty-six faculty members. If Wilentz believes in the original intent of the Constitution to create a pluralistic society, that lack of diversity is something for Professor Wilentz to be more concerned about than the fact that House Republicans differ with his interpretation of constitutional issues.
As it happens, the hero of the lost battle for scholarly neutrality, Eugene Genovese, has formed a new organization, the American Historical Society, to take politics out of the profession. Already one thousand historians have joined. On the other hand, several signers of the historians' statement are already charter members, including Wilentz himself. If Genovese's organization is serious, it will eventually have to chasten politicians like Sean Wilentz and promote a scholarly distance from partisan line-ups. Even more importantly, it will have to press for the systematic hiring of professors with under-represented conservative viewpoints. This is a daunting task, but without such a commitment to intellectual diversity, the profession can hardly hope to restore its damaged credibility.
* * *
*Alvin Kernan, In Plato's Cave, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999
†Jon Weiner, "Scholars on the Left, " Nation, February 1, 1999.
13
The Loafing Class
HIGHER EDUCATION TODAY is a good news-bad news story. The good news is that a university degree can provide a pass to all to the prodigious bounties of the American economy. The bad news is that the price of the pass can be the equivalent of a Ferrari, putting the average student into hock for a good chunk of his or her working life. As the price tag of a degree has gone up, moreover, the quality of the educational product has declined in a parallel arc. At universities that charge more than one hundred thousand dollars for a Bachelor of Arts degree, professors of English have taken to teaching courses on racism and imperialism, instead of writing and literature. Meanwhile, sociologists now discourse on the "social construction" of scientific truths of which they are as ignorant as their students. In liberal arts and social science courses generally, the discredited doctrines of Marx and his communist disciples abound. Meanwhile, under the gale of real world economic forces, the university is everywhere in the process of restructuring and redefining itself. Credentialed professors are more and more inaccessible to students, as more and more teaching chores are being transferred to less qualified graduate assistants whose labor cost is smaller. New corporate colleges and technical schools have become an educational growth industry in response to the declining significance of the academic degree.
The source of these developments is obviously complex, but a recent article in the prestigious academic journal Social Text offers testimony worth pondering. Couched as a personal memoir and written by one of the magazine's principal editors, "The Last Good Job in America" is a self-portrait of today's liberal arts professor as slacker-in-residence. Its author, Stanley Aronowitz, is one of the leading figures of the academic left. Aronowitz was a labor organizer in the 1960s who received his doctorate from a college extension program and was recruited to the Graduate Center of City University of New York (CUNY) by one of his 196os comrades already on the faculty.
City University is New York's publicly-funded higher-education opportunity for minorities and children of the working classes. Like other over-burdened educational institutions, it is in the process of aca
demic "downsizing," replacing full professors like Aronowitz with less qualified and lower paid teaching assistants in an attempt to match revenues with costs. Twenty years ago, CUNY hired Aronowitz "because they believed I was a labor sociologist." In fact, as he admits in Social Text, this was just a scam: "First and foremost I'm a political intellectual. . . . [I] don't follow the . . . methodological rules of the discipline." After being hired as a sociologist, Aronowitz enrolled in the hottest new academic fad.and created the Center for Cultural Studies to escape the rigors of his professional discipline. "Cultural Studies" provided him with a broad umbrella under which to pursue his marxist politics and pass them on to his unsuspecting students.
As an editor of the fashionable left-wing journal Social Text and head of the Center for Cultural Studies, Aronowitz is more than just a professor. He is an academic star with a six-figure salary and a publishing resume to match. In today's politicized university, it is thoroughly in keeping with Aronowitz's elevated academic status that his chef d'oeuvre is a book called Science As Power, whose core thesis is the Stalinist proposition that science is an instrument of the ruling class. Of Aronowitz's book, a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement said: "If the author knows much about the content or enterprise of science, he keeps the knowledge well hidden."
Non-leftist readers of Aronowitz could hardly have been surpprised last year when he and his fellow editors at Social Text were snookered by Alan Sokal. Sokal, a physicist, submitted a phony paper on quantum mechanics and postmodernism to demonstrate that the magazine would publish pure nonsense about science if the nonsense was politically correct. Although the Sokal article was an international scandal,* Aronowitz's own university seems not to have noticed that its professor had been exposed as an intellectual fraud or. that, by his own admission, he has long since abandoned the discipline that he was hired to teach. Shortly after the publication of "The Last Good Job in America," Aronowitz was made "Distinguished Professor of Sociology" at CUNY.
The "last good job in America" turns out to be the job that Stanley Aronowitz has created for himself at the expense of New York taxpayers and the economically disadvantaged minorities who make up the CUNY Student body: "What I enjoy most is the ability to procrastinate and control my own work-time, especially its pace: taking a walk in the middle of the day, reading between the writing, listening to a CD or tape anytime I want, calling up a friend for a chat." It turns out that Aronowitz teaches only one two-hour course a week. This is a seminar — no surprise here — in Marxism. On Mondays and Wednesdays, Aronowitz does not even leave his house.
During the week of non-activity that his Social Text article reviews, Monday and Wednesday are the days devoted to writing a piece for the Nation on "the future of the left," and of course the article for Social Text on what a good job he has — and the pay is not too bad either. Of course, Aronowitz discloses this coyly, positioning himself as a social victim: "I earn more by some five thousand dollars a year than an auto worker who puts in a sixty-hour week." The last time I checked, an auto worker made forty dollars an hour, which factors out to twenty-four hundred dollars a week (not including overtime) or over 120,000 dollars a year — and one can be sure the auto worker does not make cars only two hours a week for only nine months out of the year.
For nearly three decades, Aronowitz and other academic leftists have been escaping the reality of their failed revolution in America's streets during the 1960s by colonizing the American university, subverting and debasing its curriculum. In the course of this self-absorbed intellectual destruction, they have abused the educational aspirations of unsuspecting students, poor and well-fed alike. And even while this equal opportunity exploitation goes on, they never lose the ability to see themselves as the victims of vast conspiracies of the political right: "We know that the charges against us — that university teaching is a scam, that much research is not 'useful,' that scholarship is hopelessly privileged — emanate from a Right that wants us to put our noses to the grindstone just like everybody else." And why not?
The Gucci marxists of the tenured left are certainly not lacking in chutzpah. The conclusion to Aronowitz's memoir is, naturally, a call to arms, but phrased in the form of a reproof to his comrades for not advancing their struggle militantly enough: "We have not celebrated the idea of thinking as a full-time activity and the importance of producing what the system terms 'useless' knowledge. Most of all, we have not conducted a struggle for universalizing the self-managed time some of us still enjoy." Loafers of the world unite!
* * *
*The article and subsequent controversy are reported in Alan Sokal and Jean Briemont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998).
14
Campus Brown Shirts
THE LOUISIANA DEMAGOGUE HUEY LONG was once asked whether he thought fascism could ever come to America. His answer was "Yeah, but it'll come calling itself anti-fascism." America is not close to such a future, but it is hard not to recall Huey Long's observation in connection with an episode that occurred recently at Columbia University.
The occasion for this episode was a conference at Columbia organized by a conservative group called Accuracy in Academia. The title of the conference was "A Place at the Table: Conservative Ideas in Higher Education," and its purpose was to highlight the lack of intellectual diversity in the politicized academic environment.
Among the announced speakers were two university trustees, Ward Connerly and Candace DeRussy, and the author Dinesh D'Souza, whose book Illiberal Education was one of the first to draw attention to political correctness in academic life.
The ceremonies were scheduled to begin with a Friday evening dinner, addressed by Connerly, who is currently heading a national civil rights campaign to end racial preferences. Connerly was coming off an electoral victory in Washington, which had become the 159 second state after California to ban such preferences. According to Accuracy in Academia president Dan Flynn, who wrote a report on the event, a hundred and forty students and professors attended the dinner, which was held in the East Room of Columbia's Faculty House.
These were not the only people in attendance, however. The mere presence of someone like Ward Connerly, expressing ideas the campus left does not want to hear, was enough to rouse a hundred raucous radicals into action at the conference site. They threw up a picket line outside the dinner and hurled obscenities and racial epithets at those entering Faculty House. Bear in mind that these same students, like Columbia itself, had previously welcomed such rabid anti-Semites and racial demagogues as Nation of Islam spokesman Khalid Muhammad and rap star Professor Griff, and that Columbia's history department had honored unrepentant communists like Herbert Aptheker and Angela Davis.
Columbia not only welcomes such race-haters, but pays them handsomely out of student funds to propagate their bigotry. By contrast, the conservative conference organized by Accuracy in Academia featured no rabble rousers, no hate-agendas, and actually paid the university a fee of eleven thousand dollars to hold its event on campus and showcase Connerly speaking in behalf of a single standard for all Americans and against racism in all its manifestations.
In a healthy academic environment, a university administration might be expected to respond to the outrage that took place at Columbia by disciplining the students who abused the free speech privileges of others, who hurled racial epithets at those they disagreed with, and who posed a threat to public safety. But these days such thoughts are far from the minds of university administrators whose profiles, as Peter Collier once observed, are a cross between Saul Alinsky and Neville Chamberlain.
In fact, the decision Columbia president George Rupp made the first night of the conference was exactly the opposite. Rupp is the chairman of the Association of American Universities, and his solution to the problem created by the demonstrators was to ban those students who had registered for the conference and whose only offense was their desire to hear the speakers, from att
ending the sessions the following day. As security guards were placed at the entrance to Columbia's Faculty House, its director, John Hogan, piously explained that the action was wholly consistent with free speech because only the audience and not the speakers were subject to the order. It was a nice distinction: you can speak, but nobody will be allowed to listen.
With their event effectively closed down by the university, the organizers decided to move the conference to neighboring Morningside Park. But the Ivy League mob followed them. The first speaker of the day, Dinesh D'Souza, was shouted down by chants of "Ha! Ha! You're Outside/We Don't Want Your Racist Lies." (It was a pure libel against D'Souza, an Indian immigrant.) Demonstrators held up signs that said ACCESS DENIED, WE WIN: RACISTS NOT ALLOWED AT COLUMBIA and THERE'S NO PLACE AT THE TABLE FOR HATE, which shows just how out of touch the protesters were with their own reality. But then, so was the Columbia administration. An official brochure tells visitors that "Columbia University prides itself on being a community committed to free and open discourse and to tolerance of differing views." Orwell could not have constructed it better.
A distressing aspect of the Columbia incident was the absence of almost any public commentary on the event from civil libertarians, from public officials, or from the nation's press. Imagine the uproar if Randall Terry and his Operation Rescue squads had surrounded a campus abortion clinic, blocked its entrance, and attempted to harass and intimidate those who entered, and the President of an Ivy League school had ordered his security forces to block the entrance to the clinic, while a college official explained that no one was interfering with anyone's right to perform an abortion, just barring those who wanted one from entering.
Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes Page 15
