Red Scares in Higher
Education Continue
Harry Targ
Originally posted on Monday, December 2, 2024
(Some of the text below appeared in Jacobin and Monthly
Review Online, and various essays in Diary of a Heartland Radical).
Students with Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation
(GTFF) holding a sign for the protest. (Saj undaram/Emerald). University of
Oregon
“Wasn’t That a Time” (a song by the Weavers and Pete
Seeger)
https://youtu.be/y096F_jFy3c?si=b9GEmAaClMjveZzk
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.
https://academeblog.org/2021/09/12/yes-these-bills-are-the-new-mccarthyism/
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 reported, 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.
Since the collapse of the cold war international
system, some scholars began to examine other aspects of the anti-communist
hysteria as it related to the academy. Fones-Wolf[1] and others addressed the
multiplicity of ways in which funding priorities, rightwing assaults, official
pronouncements from government officials, lobbying efforts by big business
groups, and shifting electoral political currents affected and shaped the
content of academic programs.
For example, disciplines can be seen as reflecting
dominant “paradigms” which include assumptions about what the subject entails,
what aspects of the subject deserve study, what theories are most appropriate
for understanding the subject of the field, and what methods should be used to
study subjects in the field. All the social sciences and humanities
privileged paradigms that did not challenge ongoing U.S. cold war assumptions
about the world.
In each case, dominant paradigms of the 1950s and
beyond constituted a rejection of 1930s and 1940s thinking, which was shaped by
the labor and other struggles of the Depression era. For example,
literature shifted from privileging proletarian novels to the “new criticism,”
separating “the text” from historical contexts. History shifted from a
model of historical change that highlighted conflict to one that emphasized
consensus-building. Sociology shifted from class struggle/stratification
models of society to “structural functional” approaches. Political
science shifted from “elitism” and institutional approaches to emphasizing
“pluralism,” in political processes. For political science, every citizen
in a “democracy,” it was said, 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.
The spirit of ideological struggle 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.
A New Round of McCarthyism
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 had 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
connecting 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.
Horowitz 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:
again Middle East Studies, Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, American
Studies, and Peace Studies.
In conjunction with the book and similar assaults on
those he disagreed with on his electronic news magazine, Horowitz encouraged
right-wing students to challenge the legitimacy of these professors on college
campuses and tried to get conservative student groups to get state legislatures
to endorse so-called “student bill-of-rights legislation.” Such
legislation would have established oversight by state legislatures over
colleges and universities, especially their hiring practices.
In addition, Lynn Cheney, the former vice-president’s
wife, and former Senator Joe Lieberman, senator from Connecticut, helped create
an organization called the American Council of Trustees and Alumni
(ACTA). As Giroux summarized it, “. . ACTA actively supports policing
classroom knowledge, monitoring curricula, and limiting the autonomy of
teachers and students as part of its larger assault on academic freedom”.[2]
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 were the subject of vitriol and false charges
of antisemitism because they published a long essay and book analyzing the
“Israeli lobby.”
This red scare against higher education of the last
twenty years had failures and successes. Horowitz had a
visible presence on national cable television and radio, particular on Fox
News He used it to attack some of the 101 dangerous professors.
However, his supporters were not able to get any of their legislative proposals
accepted. Also, most university administrators defended their faculty
from the crude assaults from Horowitz and his followers. In addition, many
of the 101 and others like them stepped up their public defenses of their
scholarship and teaching. In addition, it was unusual then for any
students to level attacks against targeted professors. If anything, they
defended the right of professors to be critical analysts in their subject areas
in the classroom.
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. While the impacts were immeasurable,
younger faculty could not help but be intimidated by the public attacks on
their senior colleagues. The system of tenure and promotion in most
institutions remained vulnerable to public pressures, individual reviewer bias,
and honest disagreements among faculty about whether published work and
teaching is worthy of promotion and tenure. Therefore, just as the
administrators and faculty of the 1950s felt intimidated by outside assault on
their institutions, those passing judgment on faculty might saw the
necessity of caution in hiring and retaining faculty whose perspectives were
new, different, radical, and engaged.
Intellectuals, the Critical Organic
Discourse Model, and Higher Education
The red scares of the past rekindled debate concerning
the role of higher education and faculty as to research, teaching, and
activism. Those propagating the red scare insisted that education should
focus on celebrating American society, history, and institutions.
Anything less, to them, constituted bias and a violation of the principles of
academic freedom. In addition, educators, it was argued, should not
engage in political activism. Being an academic and being a citizen must
remain separate.
While ACTA and others complained about the negativity
of those reflecting on United States history, more sophisticated red scare
spokespersons, including Horowitz himself, emphasized one or another of two
different approaches to the academy. Some argued that the professorate
must be “fair and balanced” in their academic work. That is,
they should in the classroom present all points of view, indicating favoritism
to none. Presumably their research and writing should strive for this
balance as well. Some asked whether portraits of th inquisition or
20th century fascism necessitated telling “both sides of the story”).
Parallel to the fair and balanced position was the
argument that teachers and researchers should be objective, that is,
apolitical, and indifferent to the merits of competing sides to a conflict
being studied. The objectivity standard required that the professor
abstain, in his/her public role from participation in society. (It should
be noted that some targets of the red scare attacks responded by claiming they
were fair and balanced and objective, and occasionally their students have defended
them on these grounds as well). In fact, when Horowitz was asked on
national television if he had proof that his victims had not been fair and
balanced and objective in the classroom, he was been forced to admit that he
had no way of knowing since he and his researchers had not had occasion to
observe the professors in question.
While being fair, balanced, and objective are worthy
goals, they stand in contradiction to the history of the university alluded to
throughout this paper. What I call the critical and organic
discourse model is a more appropriate standard of scholarship, teaching,
and engagement for these critical times. It has several dimensions:
speaking truth to power; critically reflecting on all institutions and
processes in society, privileging unpopular ideas, and applying those ideas in
social settings where they may be helpful to bring about change.
The last point, inspired by Gramsci’s idea of the
“organic intellectual” and the discussion by Jacoby and others about the role
of the “public intellectual,” suggest that knowledge in the end comes from and
should be used in support of those in society who have been disenfranchised
politically, economically, and culturally. As Gramsci put it, “The mode
of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is
an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation
in practical life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader,’ and not
just a simple orator. . .” [3]. Gramsci’s “organic intellectual”
is the intellectual who is connected to various social groups or movements and
acts in concert with and stimulates the activities of such groups. The
organic intellectual in class society is linked to the project for historical
change of the working class. Historically the university has not served
their needs, and those who embrace this model of teaching, research, and
engagement should stand with the disenfranchised, such as the working class.
The New Context
https://www.campusreform.org/article/aaup-trump-greatest-threat-academic-freedom-since-mccarthy/8414
In sum, the most important elements of the critical
and organic discourse model involve giving voice to the voiceless and
engaging in education, research, and activity to pursue peace, social, and
economic justice.
However, since the rise of candidate and President
Trump and his MAGA allies, the pervasive influence of the Koch Foundation and
its various instrumentalities such as the State Policy Networks and ACTA, and
US escalated military involvement in Ukraine and support for Israeli violence
in the Middle East, a new “red scare” has emerged. Politicians of both
political parties lave launched in Congress and state legislatures attacks on
what was known as academic freedom.
The Purdue Exponent story linked above
refers to just one effort of politicians and administrators to
shape and constrain what goes on in the classroom. Faculty are being subjected
to regular reviews about the content of their curricula; their syllabi are
subject to scrutiny by those who may
not be familiar with the subject matter; students are encouraged to report any
discomfort they may feel in a class; and certain stances inside the classroom
or out by faculty who criticize United States history, polices or practices can
be deemed supportive of authoritarianism or “antisemitism”.
In short, the university as a place where students are
exposed to the breathe of ideas from the past, debate new ideas, and are
encouraged to develop their own identities and perspectives on the world based
upon their educational experiences is being replaced with a site for
indoctrination to whatever political or economic dogma is being promoted at the
current time. This is a very dangerous time for the survival of higher
education.
From
Inside Higher Education
[1] Ellen
Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and
Liberalism, 1945-60, University of Illinois Press, 1994.
[2] Henry
Giroux, The University in Chains, Paradigm, 2007, 16).
[3] Antonio
Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, International
Publishers,10.
