Theorizing About Social Movements and Activism

Harry Targ

(This was part of an essay that was written a decade ago. Thie issues and debates still matter)

 

    The Rag Blog

 Social Movement History 

Social movement activism has spread like wildfire across the entire globe over the last decade. One group of scholars studied “protest incidents” in over 80 countries from 2006-2013. They found 840 protests in these countries with at least half motivated by demands for economic changes and democratization. A centerpiece of movements from Greece to Chile, to Spain, to Canada to the United States has been outrage against neoliberal policies (sometimes referred to as “austerity” policies). Fundamentally these policies involve shifting wealth from the vast majority to the tiny minority. In the United States, the Occupy Movement introduced an accurate metaphor for this transformation: the one percent versus the 99 percent. Moral Mondays movements in over a dozen states in the South and Midwest emerged as one large-scale protest against the imposition of austerity and the weakening of democratic institutions.

David Harvey, a political theorist, has posited a “co-revolutionary theory” about social movements. He argues that because there are so many problems in so many different locations in society political activism can and must start anywhere. If one is at a university or elsewhere in the education system struggles over “mental constructs’ matter. If persons are engaged in or near the electoral arena targeting politicians must be done. Work in the corporate sector, the media, government institutions are all sites for the application of political pressure and organizing. What needs to be remembered however is that all the separate struggles are interconnected and that activists need to understand how each struggle relates to every other struggle. Also, victory in one place and time does not mean that the goals of struggle have been achieved. In the end, Harvey argues that the interconnected crises relating to class, race, gender, homophobia, war and peace, and the environment are intimately connected to the capitalist system.

Further, activists debate the utility of political engagement around elections and legislation compared to mass movement activity. Some progressives have proposed as a solution to this dilemma, developing an “inside/outside” strategy. The inside/outside strategy argues for pursuing electoral work, electing candidates who might act on the people’s behalf, and lobbying to secure legislative victories, even if such efforts cannot solve the panoply of economic, environmental, war, racial and other problems that are faced. Electoral and legislative work, however, needs to be supplemented by “street heat;” building a mass movement that can be mobilized to publicly demonstrate its outrage and its demands for change. The outside strategy might include creating a large, disciplined organization with resources that can respond to and lead the mass movement of people for change. It is through the outside strategy that politicians can be forced to carry out the will of the people.

Rev. William Barber ten years ago through his “fusion politics” approach incorporated all of the above thinking. Fusion politics, he said, emphasizes the need for progressive groups to work together in coalitions, in partnerships, in common organizational fronts to bring the energy of all groups together. Ruling classes or power elites do not respond to change unless masses of organizations and people come together to make demands. 

The 99 percent do not have the material resources- the money, ownership of media outlets, influence over education and police power-to bring about change. All they have potentially are their numbers. And the fusion politics model is about mobilizing masses of people, developing effective and democratic organizations, and applying people power all across the political and economic map.

Moving Ahead in 2025 the Following Questions Remain

1.How do we organize locally and statewide, particularly in “red states”

2.How do we develop in our literature and public agenda the view that what we are struggling against is a forty-year program of austerity, redistributing the wealth and power from the many to the few. And how can we effectively show that our local struggles parallel those in other states and countries.

 3.How can we effectively link our theoretical understanding of history, much like Rev. Barber’s provocative discussion of the three reconstructions, to the concrete campaigns we are engaged in

4.How can we take the general worldview and discuss:

   -the threat to voting rights

   -racist police practices

   -the transformation of a 150-year tradition of public education   into for-profit charter schools

    -the deregulation of environmental controls at the very same time that fires, floods, draughts are increasing

    -the rationing of health care and the rising cost of medication

    -the use of state enticements to bring investors who create low wage jobs that worsen income inequality

    -the use of government to destroy the right of workers to form unions of their choosing and to honor the work of those unions to defend worker rights

    -the support for war and violence everywhere and the danger of nuclear war

 These are the substantive issues that we face, now with a brutal new billionaire racist oligarchy.

 -the proportion of work devoted to inside and outside strategies

 -the relative weight and autonomy to be given to national, state and community organizations

 -the connections between socialist, labor, environmentalist, peace, anti-racist, feminist, educational and other organizations

 - the relationship between the varying decision-making bodies, local organizations and issue committees  

 - finally thinking tactically such as relating to Gene Sharp’s 198 forms of non-violent activity.

https://www.brandeis.edu/peace-conflict/pdfs/198-methods-non-violent-action.pdf

Conclusion

The world is in turmoil. Protests all across the globe have some common origins, causes, and solutions. While communities have their own problems they are not too different from those elsewhere. The ongoing work must involve addressing the particular while being cognizant of the general, building coalitions of shared responsibility and respect, organizing people power from the centers of power to the  streets, and reconstructing institutions that serve, not oppress the people.

RACISM ON THE CAMPUS: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES (A revised repost from November 15, 2015 and February 1, 2004)

Black History Month: Some Purdue Remembrances

Harry Targ

                          Journal and Courier photo

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Frederick Douglass

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. W.E.B. DuBois

What a proud contrast to the environments that appear to prevail at places like Missouri and Yale. Mitch Daniels

All across the country students, black and white, hit the streets and the campus malls to protest racism; structural and interpersonal. One thousand students rallied at Purdue University on Friday, November 13, 2014 to show solidarity with students at the University of Missouri and to announce 13 demands they were making to address racism at Purdue; a racism that the university president says no longer exists.

Of course, nationally and locally the struggle for social and economic justice is historic. Rev. William Barber, leader of the Moral Mondays Movement, points to the “Three Reconstructions” in post-Civil War American history. The First Reconstruction occurred in the 1860s and 1870s when black and white farmers and workers came together to write constitutions and to create a new democratic Southern politics. The hope this first reconstruction raised for a truly democratic America was dashed by a shift to the right of the federal government, the reemergence of the old Southern ruling class, and the rise of a brutal violent terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan. Racist policies, coupled with terrorism, instilled formal racial segregation in the South and subtle forms of institutionalized racism throughout the rest of the country. (A later rendition of the KKK dominated Indiana politics in the 1920s. See for example the powerful book by Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland).

The Second Reconstruction, Barber asserts, was inspired by the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision which declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional. With militant sectors of labor, a grassroots Southern civil rights movement revived all across the country. In the 1960s, it culminated in civil rights legislation that outlawed racial segregation and guaranteed voting rights. Also, the “war on poverty” was launched. Shortly after these victories, the Republican Party presidential candidate Richard Nixon employed the so-called “Southern Strategy” to shift federal and state politics to the right. The forerunners of today’s Tea Party (and Trump supporting MAGA) rightwing reaction expanded their political power at the federal and state levels. (and Nancy MacLean documents how opposition to the Brown decision evolved into a vast and powerful rightwing network in the United States financed by the Koch Foundation and other wealthy rightwing people and foundations, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radican Right’s Plan for America, 2017).

Rev. Barber believes that, with the movement that elected President Obama, there emerged a Third Reconstruction. It featured the mobilization of masses of people--blacks and whites, men and women, gays and straights, blue collar and white collar workers, young and old, people of faith and those who choose no faith--coming together to reconstitute the struggle for the achievement of a truly democratic vision. This vision is of a society that is participatory, egalitarian, and economically and psychologically fulfilling.

The Struggle for Racial Justice at Purdue University

https://youtu.be/lMaQyMyQpDc?si=8OmrAB9LTrLGA5ri

The resurgence of protests on college campuses over the last decade, although narrowly focused, represents the contemporary form of the kinds of struggles for social justice Frederick Douglass talked about.  For example, on the campus of Purdue University, the struggle for racial justice has a long history. For the first 60 years of the twentieth century the African American population was less than one percent of the student body.  The numbers of African American students grew to a few hundred in the 1960s. And in the context of the Second Reconstruction and activism around civil rights and opposition to the war in Vietnam, some students organized a “Negro History Study Group” (which later became the Black Student Union). In 1968, to dramatize what they saw as institutional racism coupled with an environment of racial hostility, more than 150 Black students carrying brown bags marched to the Executive Building. At the building they took bricks from the bags. The bricks were piled up and a sign “Or the Fire Next Time,” was set next to the bricks. The students submitted a series of demands including the development of an African American Studies Program and a Black Cultural Center. 

The demonstration was dramatic. The demands clear. The justice of their motivation was unassailable. Administrators and faculty set up committees to discuss the protests. And in the short run, only minor changes were implemented, such as Purdue’s 1968 hiring of the first African American professor in Liberal Arts. 

One year later, after an African American member of the track team was castigated for wearing a mustache and his verbal response led to his arrest, Black students launched another protest march with more demands. This time the Administration and the Board of Trustees authorized the establishment of the Black Cultural Center, which today is an educational, social, and architectural hub of the campus. In 1973, Antonio Zamora, educator, accomplished musician, and experienced administrator was hired to lead the campus effort to make the BCC the vital embodiment of the university that it has become. One of the leaders of the 1969 protest, Eric McCaskill, told then President Hovde by phone during the protest march and visit to the Executive Building: “We are somebody. I am somebody.”

History of protests at Purdue shows 'another world is possible' https://www.purdueexponent.org/city_state/history-of-protests-at-purdue-shows-another-world-is-possible/article_51b69386-b15e-11ea-8b76-b31b38228621.html

Forty-six years later one thousand similarly motivated students rallied together on Friday, November 13, 2014 on the Purdue campus. They expressed outrage at the systematic violence against people of color throughout the society and the perpetuation of racism in virtually every institution. On the Purdue campus they protested the lack of full, fair representation of African Americans on the faculty and in the student body, a climate on and off campus that perpetuates racism, and the continuation of all the old stereotypes of minority students that has prevailed for years. They also shared their solidarity with the students of the University of Missouri and they made it crystal clear their disagreement with the statement by the Purdue University President that the Purdue campus was different.

The organizers provided thirteen demands including:

-an acknowledgement by the President of Purdue University that a hostile and discriminatory environment still exists at Purdue

-the reinstatement of a Chief Diversity Officer with student involvement in the hiring process

-the creation of a “required comprehensive awareness curriculum”

-the establishment of a campus police advisory board

-a 30 percent increase of underrepresented minorities in the student body and on the faculty by 2019-2020

-greater representatives of minority groups on student government bodies

Frederick Douglass was correct.  Progress requires struggle. DuBois is still correct about the twenty-first century as he was about the prior one: the problem of our day remains “the color line.” And many of those who observed, participated in, and applauded the organizers of protests in 1968, 2015 and today at Purdue recognize  that the struggles are long, the victories sometimes transitory, and each generation of activists is participating in a process of fundamental change that will move society in a more humane direction. The generations of Purdue students of the 1960s and the twenty-first century are linked in a chain for justice.

The Struggle Continues as the importance of DEI Becomes a Political Tool 

Today, the percentage of underrepresented students continues to be low and various programs of relevance to educating all students, including underrepresented ones, of the mixed history and culture of the United States are being threatened with extinction, But Purdue University continues its commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Programs and principles should be celebrated and supported. And, this month, Black History Month, we should remember and pay homage to those students, faculty, and staff who stood up for programs that have made Purdue University a more comfortable and intellectually vital place for everybody.

https://stories.purdue.edu/vice-provost-gates-aims-to-transform-campus-culture/

https://www.purdue.edu/diversity-inclusion/about-us/what-we-do.html

 

THE BANKS ARE (STILL) MADE OF MARBLE

 I want to thank you all for your kind birthday wishes.

Reflecting on my birthday, metaphorically, I was thinking that

old songs might still have some use (even though times change).

Below are some links to old songs that still make sense.

 

Harry Targ

Pete Seeger, “The Banks Are Made of Marble”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-o3CJytIPE

 

 

·                                                          money.cnn.com

 (from December 17, 2017 but still relevant)

The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a report written by its representative, Philip Alston, after an extensive visit to the United States. The report was called “A Journey Through a Land of Extreme Poverty; Welcome to America” and was based on personal observations and an examination of longitudinal and comparative data. He found in California, West Virginia, Alabama, Puerto Rico and elsewhere extremes of poverty and inadequate access to housing, health care, education, and other social needs. He noted that along with the increasing economic misery for the many there was a growing concentration of wealth for the few (the guardian.com, December 15, 2017)

In an NPR interview Alston noted that every other wealthy country provides more for its citizenry than the United States and is more equal in wealth and income. China, he said, a newly developed country, has lowered the gaps in wealth, income, and social well-being more effectively than the United States over the last 15 years.

Paradoxically, this damning report appeared at the same time as the Congress and the President are finalizing a new tax bill that will dramatically increase wealth, income, and security for the tiny ruling class at the growing expense of the vast majority of the United States population: workers, women, African Americans, immigrants, and children, youth, and the elderly.

Many economists are systematically analyzing the impacts of these negative economic trends across time and the draconian effect the new tax bill will have on the whole structure of reform programs that were put in place since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But sometimes the analysis, critique, and call for action is most effectively reflected in song. 

Thus the repost below from New Clear Vision, August 10, 2011

Sometimes We Have to Sing and Cry and Hit the Streets…

 Harry Targ

I’m not a Red Diaper baby. I didn’t read Marx until the 1970s. I don’t know when I decided I was a Marxist. I didn’t start teaching Marx and political economy until the late 1970s. But I became a small “r” red when I first heard the folk group, The Weavers in the 1950s. Then on to Pete Seeger alone, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, and later Arlo Guthrie, Phil Ochs, and even Kris Kristofferson and Bruce Springsteen.

I still listen to the music that makes me angry, makes me cry, and makes me want to hit the streets. I forget the fine tuned lectures I listen to (and even give) on neoliberal globalization, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, over-production and under-consumption, and financialization — and break into song and tears as I hear the old music in the car or at home.

 

The Doomsday Clock Continues to Tick: 2025

 Harry Targ

https://thebulletin.org/2025/01/press-release-doomsday-clock-set-at-89-seconds-to-midnight-closest-ever-to-human-extinction/

(“The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the clock to 89 seconds before midnight - the theoretical point of annihilation. That is one second closer than it was set last year. The Chicago-based nonprofit created the clock in 1947 during the Cold War tensions that followed World War Two to warn the public about how close humankind was to destroying the world.” Reuters, January 28, 2025)

 

THE "WE MARCH ONWARD" RALLY: Seven Years Ago and the Threat of War Worsens

 

County Courthouse, Lafayette, Indiana, January 27, 2018, posted February 1, 2018

Threats to Peace Today: Remarks at the 2018 Rally

We are here to reflect on movements for social and economic justice one year into the administration of Donald Trump.

What caught my attention a few days ago was a press conference that was organized by science editors of the esteemed journal, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. This journal began publishing shortly after the end of World War II. Among its most visible tasks has been tracking the probability of nuclear war.

Using its metaphoric Doomsday Clock scientific experts estimate each year how close the world is moving toward nuclear war. The scientists last week moved the dials two minutes closer to midnight (to a dangerous two and one-half minutes to midnight). In other words, over the last year the United States and the world, the scientists say, have moved ever closer to nuclear war.

Reflecting on the policies of the last year that have led to this symbolic prediction of increasing possibility of nuclear war, we can reflect on several developments:

The recently issued National Security Strategy document issued by the Trump Administration indicates US policy would shift from the war on terrorism to homeland security. This shift would be complemented by the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons and a strategy based on the primacy of threats from Russia and China.

The Trump Administration in conjunction with Congress (with support from both parties) has approved a military budget for the coming year in excess of $700 billion, 68 percent of federal discretionary spending.

The Trump Administration is continuing the trajectory of maintaining US troops and private contract armies in 1,000 military installations in anywhere from 70 to 170 countries. The US continues to expand its military presence on the African continent.

The Trump Administration over the last several months has been engaged in a rhetorical war with North Korea, while US and South Korean military forces engage in simulated military exercises. The US has constructed a new provocative anti-missile installation in South Korea as well.

The Trump Administration has threatened to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty with Iran, has announced its intention of expanding troop strength in Afghanistan, and has placed thousands of US troops in Syria.

The United States has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement, begun to reverse improved relations with Cuba, and continues to escalate its efforts to destabilize governments such as in Venezuela and Bolivia.

And, President Trump announced that the US embassy was moving from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a position not only condemned by the Palestinian people but by virtually every country in the world.

All of these historical developments in United States foreign policy are occurring in the context of an international system that is shifting away from United States hegemony to a multipolar world. Countries such as China are experiencing economic development that challenges the economic domination that the United States has held over the global political economy for 100 years. To overcome this declining relative economic power, the United States is pursuing greater advances in military power. This combination of economic decline and military advance makes the world a more dangerous place.

The Historic Role of Women in Peace and Justice Movements

As women and men organized politically during 2017, and come together in January, 2018 to celebrate this mobilization, it is critical to reflect on the centrality of women in the struggle for a peaceful world. Campaigns for social and economic justice and women’s movements, and particularly women’s peace movements, are inextricably connected.

In 1915, 1,200 women from diverse backgrounds met in the Hague to create what became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). They opposed World War I and would continue to oppose war in the over 100 years of their existence. They also demanded that women play a role in decision-making about all matters of foreign policy, including decisions concerning war and peace.

WILPF, the oldest peace group in the United States was led for many years by Jane Addams, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

In 1961 another women’s peace group, Women Strike for Peace, organized a day-long national strike of 50,000 women in 60 cities demanding nuclear disarmament. They opposed nuclear testing, increased radiation in the atmosphere and marched to the slogan, “End the Arms Race: Not the Human Race.” Women Strike for Peace became early opponents of the escalating Vietnam war. Among its prominent spokespersons was soon-to-be Congresswoman Bella Abzug.

Code Pink is a grassroots women-led organization opposing war and militarism. It was organized in 2002 and includes militant activists such as Medea Benjamin and Colonel Ann Wright. Code Pink advocates peace, a human rights agenda, and demands conversion from military spending to spending for health care, green jobs, and the general welfare. They have been active in campaigns for justice for the Palestinian people and in opposition to United States support for violence perpetuated by Saudi Arabia in the Middle East.

The writing and activism of Jane Addams has been an important inspiration that runs throughout the educational, advocacy, and militant peace activity of women for the last 100 years. Addams’ classic essay, “Newer Ideals of Peace” was originally published in 1907 and reissued with an introduction by Berenice Carroll and Clint Fink in 2007 by the University of Illinois Press.

In this essay, Carroll and Fink indicate that Addams postulated that the tasks of peace activists must go beyond just stopping war. According to Addams,  achieving what peace researchers later called “negative peace,” ending wars, must be coupled with “positive peace.” Positive peace includes transformations of the societies that engaged in warfare. These transformations must include the end of hierarchies of all kinds including patriarchy, paternalism, the criminal justice system, and systems of domination and subordination at the workplace. Addams wrote that there needed to be a theoretical and practical shift from individualism and property rights to community. The spirit of nationalism must be replaced by internationalism. In sum, advocating for social and economic justice was needed along with demanding an end to shooting wars.

We move ahead in these troubled times inspired by the great fighters for racial justice including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis.

We are also inspired by those who struggled for workers’ rights: Joe Hill, Mother Jones, Paul Robeson, A. Philip Randolph, John L. Lewis, and Sidney Hillman.

And, as the Doomsday Clock ticks toward midnight, we desperately need to reacquaint ourselves with our foremothers whose ideas and activism have been central to movements for peace and justice throughout the world.

 

 

REMEMBERING HOWARD ZINN (1922-2010) WHEN THE CONTENT OF EDUCATION IS UNDER THREAT

 

THE LARGER SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DANIELS/ZINN CONTROVERSY

(Critics of the Israeli war on Gaza, particularly on college campuses, are being erroneously labeled as antisemitic. The campaigns in the media and by politicians such as former Indiana Governor and Purdue University President Mitch Daniels are designed to stifle dissent. The Fox News interview below and the attack on Howard Zinn's work a decade ago suggest the continuing threat to academic freedom in higher education. https://youtu.be/HkelVbykuUk?si=We7nSCA8qbBqWB3d )

Harry Targ

On July 17, 2013 an Associated Press story was published in several newspapers quoting from 2010 e-mails Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana wrote to “top state educational officials.” The e-mails encouraged the suppression of popular historian Howard Zinn’s book, “A People’s History of the United States” in Indiana public education, including university level teacher training courses. Upon the death of popular historian Howard Zinn, Daniels e-mailed that “this terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away.”

When challenged on the seeming threats to academic freedom, Daniels claimed that his directives “only” referred to K through 12 instruction despite the fact that his e-mails made it clear he opposed instruction that used Zinn’s writings as tools for in-service training for teachers. 

Ninety Purdue University faculty (including this author) signed a letter to President Daniels objecting to his implied threat to academic freedom. In addition to defending the university as a place for debate among competing ideas, the faculty objected to the negative characterization of Zinn’s scholarship as an historian. They also objected to Daniels’ claim that although he was not interested in censoring scholarship and teaching at the university, when he was governor he had the responsibility to oversee school curricula from kindergarten through high school.

Faculty pointed out that restricting what was being taught to teachers pursuing advanced credits and restricting the right of teachers to use Zinn’s work in pre-college curricula violated academic freedom. Many Purdue faculty believed that extreme statements damning the substance of Zinn’s work cast a pall on the university and made serious reflection on American history in elementary and high schools more difficult for young people and their teachers.

It is important to note that the Daniels e-mails, and their threat to free discussion and debate in educational institutions in Indiana, reflect the deep struggles being waged in the American political system. Rush Limbaugh once remarked on his radio show to the effect that “we” have captured most institutions in the society with the exception of the university. Since politics is usually about the contestation of ideas and the development of ideas comes from an understanding of the past and its connection to the present and the future, schools and universities can aptly be seen as “contested terrain.” That is teachers and students learn about their world through reading, writing, debating, and advocating policies, ideas, and values in educational settings.

Consequently, if one sector of society wishes to gain and maintain political and economic power they might see particular value in controlling the ideas that are disseminated in educational institutions. During the dark days of the Cold War professors who had the “wrong” ideas were fired. Professional associations in many disciplines rewarded scholars who worked within accepted perspectives on history, or political science, or literature, or sociology and denied recognition to others. The preferred ideas trickled down to primary and secondary education.  In most instances, professors and teachers who suffered as a result of their teaching were merely presenting competing views so that their students would have more informed reasons for  deciding on their own what interpretations of  subject matter made the most sense.

American history was a prime example of how controversial teaching would become. Most historians after World War II wrote and taught about the American experience emphasizing that elites made history, men made history more than women, social movements were absent from historical change, history moved in the direction of consensus rather than conflict, and the United States always played a positive role in world history. European occupation of North America, the elimination of Native Peoples, building a powerful economy on the backs of a slave system, and a U.S. pattern of involvement in foreign wars were all ignored or slighted. 

Howard Zinn, a creator and product of the intellectual turmoil of the 60s presented us with a new paradigm for examining U.S. history, indeed all history. His classic text, “A People’s History of the United States,” which has been read by millions compellingly presented a view of history that highlighted the roles of indigenous people, workers, women, people of color, people of various ethnicities, and all others who were not situated at the apex of economic, political, or educational institutions. He taught us that we needed to be engaged in the struggles that shaped people’s lives to learn what needs to be changed, how their conditions got to be what they were, and how scholar/activists might help to change the world.

Perhaps most importantly, Zinn demonstrated that participants in people’s struggles were part of a “people’s chain,” that is the long history of movements and campaigns throughout history that have sought to bring about change. As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times:”

“What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

In the 1970s the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was formed by wealthy conservatives and corporations such as Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and AT&T which invested millions of dollars to organize lobby groups, support selected politicians in all 50 states, create “think tanks,” and in other ways strategize about how to transform American society to increase the wealth and power of the few. ALEC lobbyists and scholars developed programs and legislation around labor, healthcare, women’s issues, the environment, and education that were designed to reverse the progressive development of government and policy that social movements had long advocated.

Speakers at ALEC events have included Governors Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Jan Brewer, John Kasich, and Mitch Daniels. ALEC legislative programs include lobbying for charter schools, challenging teachers unions, revisiting school curricula to include materials that deny climate change and more effectively celebrate the successes of the Bill of Rights in U.S. history.

The conservative Bradley Foundation, has awarded $400 million over the last decade to organizations supporting school vouchers, right-to-work laws and traditional marriage laws, and global warming deniers. Two of the four recipients of the organizations 2013 award for support of “American democratic capitalism” were Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News, and Purdue President Mitch Daniels.

Associations which lobby for restricting academic freedom in higher education include David Horowitz’s Freedom Center and the National Association of Scholars, funded by the conservative Sarah Scaife, Bradley, and Olin Foundations among others. NAS seeks to bring together scholars whose work opposes multiculturalism, affirmative action, concerns about climate change, and the “liberal” bias in academia. 

The NAS current president Peter Wood, contributed a blog article in the Chronicle on Higher Education on July 18, 2013, entitled “Why Mitch Daniels Was Right About Howard Zinn.” Wood wrote that “a governor worth his educational salt should be calling out faculty members who cannot or will not distinguish scholarship from propaganda, or who prefer to substitute simplistic storytelling for the complexities of history.”

Howard Zinn’s “A Peoples History of the United States”  is a history of how social movements of workers, women, people of color, native peoples and others often left out of conventional accounts have made and can make history. This is a part of history that political and economic elites, influential organizations such as ALEC, the Bradley Foundation, and education-oriented groups like NAS do not want included in course curricula; in middle school, high school, or the university.

If education at any level is to be shaped by the principle of academic freedom it must encourage student exposure to varieties of theories, perspectives, and points of view. It is in an environment of discussion and debate that rigorous and critical thought emerges. Efforts to expunge certain scholars such as Howard Zinn from educational curricula contradict the spirit of free and rigorous thought.  

A similar version of this essay appeared in the Fort Wayne, Journal Gazette, August 5, 2013.