Grass is Greener-Harry Targ: "Higher Education and the Three University Presidents" WXRW riverwestradio.com. 104.1fm:
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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