2024-01-16-2000- Grass Is Greener - Harry Targ: Higher Education & The Three University Presidents
Harry Targ
The article below was prepared fifteen years ago, shortly after David Horowitz launched yet another assault on higher education. He and a variety of organizations such as the National Association of Scholars (NAS) sought to purge higher education of critical thought.
Another round of more sophisticated and highly resourced attacks on higher education were expanded in the twenty-first century by the Koch Foundation State Policy Networks (SPN). In this case, state organizations were created, rightwing politicians were supported for key administrative posts in universities, particularly university presidencies, and Boards of Trustees representing huge corporations and banks acted more assertively to destroy the rich diversity of educational experiences that had been inspired by the 1960s.
With the rise of the far-rightwing forces around former President Trump, combining corporate elites, religious fundamentalists, extreme free market advocates, and military contractors, the attacks today on education, K through university, have become fierce. Now political puppets have launched attacks on education in state houses and the halls of Congress. Critical Race Theory, rather than being a short-hand description for a body of scholarship, has been redefined as ideology. Politicians running for office talk about the Civil War without mentioning slavery as a root cause. Charges of antisemitism are being used to challenge expressions of intellectual and political points of view on campuses. Presidents at our most prestigious universities, women and persons of color, are attacked for defending academic freedom. The whole edifice of what John Stuart Mill described a long time ago as “the marketplace of ideas” is under assault. To borrow from a book title about the 1950s by Marty Jezer, we are returning to a new “Dark Ages.”
It is time for those who oppose racism, exploitation of workers, patriarchy, environmental spoilation, and other social ills to stand up in defense of freedom of speech, education, and the celebration of diversity and debate.
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The essay is an update and revision of “Higher Education Today: Theory and
Practice,” Monthly Review Online, posted on August 10, 2009.
In his presidential address to the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 2000, Robert Perrucci referred to “Galileo’s crime.” He argued that while most claim that Galileo was punished for proposing that the planets moved around the sun, others have pointed out that he was condemned because “he chose to communicate his findings about the earth and the sun, not in Latin, the medium of the educated elite, but in Italian, the public vernacular, parola del popolo” (Perrucci, 2001).
This thought, for me, constitutes a parable for the history of higher education as we know it. In my view it is not unfair to suggest that institutions of higher education have always been created and shaped by the interests of the ruling classes and elites in the societies in which they exist. This means they have served to reinforce the economic, political, ideological, and cultural interests of those who created them, funded them, and populated them.
Wolff (1970), Berlin (1996), Smith
(1974) and others added to this discussion an analysis of how the university
changed in the late nineteenth century to serve the needs of rising industrial
capitalism in Europe and North America. The university shifted in the
direction of serving new masters: from the clerics and judges to the
capitalists. Plans were instituted in elite universities to develop
“departments,” compartmentalizing knowledge so it could be fashioned for use in
research and development, human relations, making the modern corporation more
efficient, developing communications and accounting skills, and developing good
citizens. Elite universities initiated the changes that made higher
education more compatible with and an instrumentality of modern
capitalism. The model then “trickled down” to less prestigious
universities, which in the end became even more effective developers and
purveyors of knowledge for use in capitalist societies.
Wolff quoted Clark
Kerr, the former president of the
University of California system and the target of the student movement in that
state in the 1960s, who hinted at this theme of connectedness between certain
societal needs, power, and education, and a parallelism between the era of the
industrial revolution and the quarter century after World War II.
“The American University is currently undergoing its second great transformation. The first occurred during roughly the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the land grant movement and German intellectualism were together bringing extraordinary change. The current transformation will cover roughly the quarter century after World War II. The university is being called upon to educate previously un-imagined numbers of students; to respond to the expanding claims of national service; to merge its activities with industry as never before; to adapt to and rechannel new intellectual currents. By the end of this period, there will be a truly American university; an institution unique in world history, an institution not looking to other models but serving, itself, as a model for universities in other parts of the globe.” (Wolff, 33-34)
For Kerr, the modern “multiversity,”
responding to the needs of society as reflected in federal and corporate
research funding, was obliged to produce scientists, engineers, and
doctors. This university, he said, was “a model” for higher education
around the world.
During World War II and the cold war,
the modern university served powerful new masters. As Charles Wilson,
president of General Motors, advocated in 1946, there was a need to maintain
the coalition of forces that defeated fascism in Europe and Japanese
imperialism in Asia to stave off new threats to U.S. and global
capitalism and to forestall a return to
the grim Depression economy of the 1930s. To do that, Wilson said, we
needed to justify the need for government (particularly the defense department),
corporate, and university collaboration, a collaboration that did so much to
secure victory during the war. He once referred to his vision as “a
permanent war economy” (Jezer, 31).
As the post-war years unfolded, that justification was created, the threat of international communism. The military, defense-related corporations, and research institutions had a reason to work together: to lobby for dollars, do the research, produce the technologies, train future scientists and engineers for the cold war, and educate the broader non-technically trained population in and out of the university to accept the basic parameters of the cold war struggle.
Giroux claimed that in Eisenhower’s first draft of his famous farewell address he refers to a “military-industrial-academic complex.” In it Eisenhower recalled that in prior days scientists tinkered in their laboratories with experiments that intrigued them. Now, because of huge costs, of course, scholarship and research required federal and corporate dollars. But, and here is the warning, “. . . the prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.” Later in the 1960s, J. William Fulbright, former senator from Arkansas, warning about the influences of defense spending and the arms industry, wrote that “In lending itself too much to the purposes of government, a university fails its higher purpose” (Giroux, 14-15).
What kind of generalizations can be
derived from these formative statements; the variety of literatures of more
recent vintage, such as those by theorists such as Giroux; and our observations
of universities, curricula, and academic professions?
First, higher education remains subject to, influenced by, and
financially beholden to governments and corporations. These influences
profoundly shape what professors and graduate students teach and research.
Second, as history shows, conceptions of disciplines, fields, bodies of knowledge, appropriate methods, fundamental truths pervasive in disciplines (rational choice in economics and the pursuit of power in political science) and the academic organization of universities are shaped by economic interest and political power.
Third, the sociology of professions — professional associations, journals, peer review, the validation of professional work, definitions of the substance of courses, dominant paradigms governing disciplines — is largely shaped by economic and political interest.
Fourth, in the main, the university as an institution is, and has always been, designed to serve the interests of the status quo, a status quo, again governed by economic and political interest.
Discourse and Contradiction in Higher Education
It would be a mistake to leave the
impression that all that the university does is diabolical, even as it is
shaped by and serves the dominant economic and political interests in
society. Within the confines of what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science,”
researchers and educators have made enormous contributions to social
advancement in scholarship and human development. However, the argument
here is that the university as we should see it does serve some more centrally
than others. But even this is not the whole story.
There emerged over the centuries and
decades a view that this institution, the university, should have a special
place in society. It should be, as Lasch referred to the family, “a haven
in a heartless world.” Through its seclusion, professors could reflect
critically on their society and develop knowledge that could be productively
used to solve human puzzles and problems.
The Galileo case suggests he was
punished for his theoretical and communications transgressions by the academic
hierarchy of his day. More recently, scholars such as Scott Nearing were
fired for opposing World War I, and over the years hundreds more for being
communists, eccentrics, radicals of one sort or another, or for challenging
accepted professional paradigms. Of particular virulence have been
periods of “red scares,” when faculty who taught and/or engaged in activism
outside some mainstream were labeled “communists,” which by definition meant
they were traitors to the United States.
In response to the ideal of the
free-thinking scholar who must have the freedom to pursue her/his work,
professional organizations and unions embraced and defended the idea of
“academic freedom.” Academic freedom proclaimed that researchers and teachers
had the right to pursue and disseminate knowledge in their field unencumbered
by political constraints and various efforts to silence them and their
work. To encourage young scholars to embrace occupations in higher
education and to encourage diversity of views, most universities in the United
States gave lip service to academic freedom and in the main sought to protect
the principle in the face of attacks on the university in general and
controversial scholars in particular.
During periods of controversy and
conflict in society at large, universities have become “contested
terrain.” That is external pressures on universities lead administrators
to act in ways to stifle controversy and dissent. The targets of that
dissent and their supporters, and students and colleagues at large, raise their
voices in protest of efforts to squelch it. Interestingly enough, the
university, which on the one hand serves outside interests, on the other hand,
prizes independence from outside interests.
Red
Scares in Higher Education
Ellen Schrecker documented the enormous impact that the red
scare of the 1940s and 1950s had on higher education in her book, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1988). She interviewed academic victims of
McCarthyite attacks on faculty at prestigious universities. They were
subpoenaed to testify before state legislative or Congressional committees
about their former political affiliations and associations. As was the
requirements of the times, those ordered to testify could not just admit to
their own political activities but were required to give witness against others
who they may have known.
Some victims were former members of the Communist Party, others were signatories to petitions supporting the Spanish loyalists during their civil war, and still others had supported banning atomic weapons. The most troubling element of the red scare story was the fact that university administrations refused to defend those of their faculty attacked and in fact, as she reports, some university officials demanded that their faculty cooperate with the investigatory committees. Her subjects reported that they received little or no support from administrators because officials wished to protect their universities from funding reductions.
Education in various fields, because of political threats,
began to reject 1930s and 1940s thinking, which was shaped by the labor and
other struggles of the Depression era. Literature shifted from
privileging proletarian novels to the “new criticism,” separating “the text”
from historical contexts. History began to highlight consensus-building
rather than conflict. Sociology shifted from class
struggle/stratification models of society to “structural functional”
approaches. Political science rejected theories that emphasized “elitism”
and institutional approaches to emphasizing “pluralism,” in political
processes. For political science, text books asserted, every citizen in a “democracy” could somehow
participate in political decision-making.
In other words, the military-industrial-academic complex
shaped personnel recruitment and retention and the
substance of research and teaching. Some new disciplines, such as Soviet
studies, were funded and rewarded at selected universities and the scholars
trained at these institutions then secured jobs elsewhere. Thus, an
anti-communist lens on the world was propagated. Disciplines with more
ready access to research dollars — from engineering to psychology — defined
their research agendas to comport with government and corporate needs.
In response to the university in the “permanent military economy,” students in the 1960s began to demand new scholarship and education. Opposition to the Vietnam War particularly stimulated demands on professors to rethink the historical character and motivation of United States foreign policy. William Appleman Williams and his students, the so-called revisionists, articulated a view that the United States practiced imperialism ever since it became an industrial power. Classrooms where international relations and foreign policy were taught became “contested terrain” for argumentation and debate between the older and more benign view of the U.S. role in the world and the view of the U.S. as imperial power. Dependency and world system theories gained prominence.
The contestations spread. Students demanded more
diverse and complicated analyses of race and racism in America, patriarchy and
sexism in gender relations, and working-class history. Every discipline
and every dominant paradigm was subjected to challenge. The challenges
were also reflected in radical caucuses in professional associations and even
in some of the more upright (and “uptight”) signature professional
journals. As a result there was a diminution of red scares in higher
education, for a time.
But the spirit of debate in the academy diminished after
the Vietnam War and especially after Ronald Reagan became president.
Reagan brought back militant cold war policies, radically increased military
expenditures, declared Vietnam a “noble cause,” and developed a sustained
campaign to crush dissent and reduce the strength of the labor movement.
The climate on campus to some degree returned to the 1950s.
However, a whole generation of 60s-trained academics were
now tenured faculty at universities around the country. They had
institutionalized programs in African American Studies, Women’s Studies, Peace
Studies, and Middle East Studies. Critical theorists populated education
schools, American Studies programs, and other pockets of the university.
These faculty continued the debate with keepers of dominant paradigms, created
interdisciplinary programs, and developed programs shaped by key social issues
such as racism, class exploitation, gender discrimination, and war.
But by the 1990s, a new red scare was surfacing. Some
conservative academics and their constituencies talked about declining
standards brought by the new programs. Others criticized what they
regarded as an insufficiently rosy view of United States history. They
claimed that the United States was being unfairly condemned for being
complicit, for example, in a holocaust against Native Americans or because
slavery and racism were central to the history of the country. They
formed academic associations and interest groups to defend against critical
scholarship.
Then David Horowitz came along. Overseeing a
multi-million-dollar foundation funded by rightwing groups, Horowitz launched a
campaign to purify academia of those who have records of teaching, research,
and publication that he saw as unduly critical of the United States, ruling
political or economic elites, or the global political economy. He opposed
those scholar-activists who participated in political movements or in any way
connected their professional life with their political lives. And he
opposed those academics who participated in academic programs that were
interdisciplinary, problem-focused, and not tied to traditional fields of
study. He published a book in 2006, The Professors: The 101 Most
Dangerous Academics in America (2006), in
which he presented distorted profiles of illustrative faculty whom he believed
had violated academic standards because of a variety of transgressions.
Most of those identified either engaged in political activity and/or
participated in interdisciplinary scholarly programs that he found offensive:
Middle East Studies, Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, American
Studies, and Peace Studies.
In conjunction with campaigns led by Lynn Cheney, the former vice-president’s wife, and Senator Joe Lieberman, senator from Connecticut, an organization called the American Council of Trustees and Alumni was created. As Giroux summarized it, “. . . ACTA actively supported policing classroom knowledge, monitoring curricula, and limiting the autonomy of teachers and students as part of its larger assault on academic freedom” Giroux, 162).
Horowitz, ACTA, and others who attacked the university
targeted visible academics for scrutiny and persecution. Ward Churchill,
a provocative professor of Ethnic Studies, at the University of Colorado,
was fired after a university committee was created to review his scholarship because
of controversial remarks he made off campus. Norman Finkelstein, a
DePaul University political scientist who had written several books critical of
interpreters of Israeli history and foreign policy, was denied tenure after a
coordinated attack from outside his university led by Harvard Law Professor
Alan Dershowitz. Distinguished political scientists John Mearsheimer and
Stephen Walt have been the subject of vitriol and false charges of antisemitism
because they published a long essay and book analyzing the “Israeli lobby.”
This latest red scare against higher education had failures
and successes. Horowitz had a visible presence on national cable
television and radio. He used it to attack some of the 101 dangerous
professors. However, his supporters were not able to get any of
their legislative proposals to restrict academic freedom accepted. But,
the new red scare reinforced and legitimized the dominant paradigms in various
academic disciples and created an environment of intellectual caution in the
academy.
The attacks on universities and academic freedom rose again
with the rise of the Tea Party and the movement around Donald Trump. Similarly
the Koch Foundation machine relaunched its assault on higher education:
attacking intellectual paradigms such as Critical Race Theory, calling for an
end to tenure, shifting the academic workforce to more vulnerable adjunct
teachers, cutting programs in the Liberal Arts where discussions of social,
economic, and political issues are more likely to be discussed, and raising
claims about how higher education should concentrate on Science, Technology,
Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) not the humanities.
And now, in 2023-2024 Congressional committees level
salacious attacks on university presidents (three women) using false claims
that these presidents somehow supported antisemitism and in the case of the
former President of Harvard engaged in plagiarism.
For an informed discussion of the current political attacks
on the university presidents see; https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/3/harvard_president_claudine_gay_resigns
Conclusion
We have seen that the university historically has reflected
and represented whatever ruling classes were prevalent at a given point in
time. We have also seen that the university has been a site of
contestation defined by the principle of academic freedom which justifies
critical thought, pedagogy, and practice. In this latter regard, Giroux
points out, the university has been an uncommon institution in modern life
where full democratic participation in dialogue and critical reflection could
take place. The university (its educators) must use this democratic space
to engage students in reflection about the pursuit of peace in this violent
world, and the striving for social and economic justice and against racism,
sexism, and economic inequality. The future of humanity is at stake.
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