Higher Education Today: Theory and
Practice
Posted Aug 10, 2009 by Harry Targ, MROnline
In the Beginning
I am a child of the cold war. I was born in 1940, was an
adolescent in the 1950s, and devoid of political consciousness when President
Eisenhower warned of the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by
the military-industrial complex” in 1960. I was modestly inspired
by the young President Kennedy’s admonition to “ask not what your country can
do for you but what you can do for your country.” In fact I have thought
a lot about that exhortation recently as I compare the enthusiasm with which
young people embraced the Kennedy campaign in 1960 and the way young people
today are energized by Barak Obama. While most of us did not realize then
that JFK spoke for American empire, he helped mobilize young people who
throughout the 1960s fought against it.
I was not just an empty vessel, ready for cooptation,
however. I read and heard about the courageous people organizing and
participating in the Montgomery bus boycott, the lunch counter sit-ins, and the
freedom rides in the south. And I slowly but significantly drifted into
the cognitive orbit of the melodies and messages of Pete Seeger and the
Weavers, but the politics of social change only marginally entered course work
in high school and college. As a student of foreign policy and diplomacy
and international relations I gravitated toward the most “radical’ paradigm
reflected in curricula at the time, “the realist” perspective. This view
suggested that all nations, even our own, were driven by the pursuit of
power. Defending freedom, fighting totalitarianism, standing up to
communism, the realists said, was the discursive “cover” for the drive to power
for which all nations were driven.
I attended a graduate program in political science that was in
the forefront of the new “behavioral science” revolution. We were told we
were scientists in the academy and citizens when we returned home. As
scientists we were engaged in the pursuit of the construction of empirical
theory about human behavior. Our task was to better describe, explain,
and predict — not change — political behavior. The unverifiable “laws” of
human nature, embedded in the realist logic, were to be replaced by rigorously
acquired data and verifiable knowledge claims.
When I came to Purdue University in 1967, assigned to teach
courses on international relations, I was troubled by the fact that neither the
realists nor the behaviorists helped me understand the escalating war in
Vietnam. I was also increasingly troubled by the assumption that it was
not my place as a professor to do anything about the war, as teacher or
citizen, presumably armed with a body of knowledge that might have value to the
debate about the war.
I started teaching a course with the ambiguous title
“Contemporary Political Problems,” and through it my students and I explored
the writings of the day that we thought bore upon our place in the world.
These ranged from The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), to the Port Huron Statement
(1995), to Camus’ The Rebel (1992), to C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite
(1959), to William Appleman Williams’ The Tragedy of American
Diplomacy (1972). Later on I organized courses around
anarchist and utopian thought. My exposure to the Marxist tradition came
later.
Almost invariably, our discussions ended up exploring what the
various theorists and activists we read thought about education. We added
to our readings in these courses essays on education by Paul Goodman (1964),
Ivan Illich (1999), Jonathan Kozol (1968), Herbert Kohl (1988), Robert Paul
Wolff (1970), and such eclectic writers as Lewis Mumford (1963). And this
was before the availability of the works of Paulo Freire in the 1970s, and
followers such as Henry Giroux (2007), Peter McLaren (2000), and other radical
educational theorists. Out of all this, I began to develop an analysis of
the political and economic contexts of higher education; a sense of the
contradictory character of education, particularly higher education; a conception
of how my education had been shaped by the cold war and U.S. empire; how the
modern university was “contested terrain,” as to ideas and behavior; how
“theory and practice” were connected; and, for me, what the obligations of the
educator were in the modern world.
The Political Economy of Higher Education
In his presidential address to the Society for the Study of
Social Problems in 2000, Robert Perrucci refers to “Galileo’s crime.” He
argues 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 serve to reinforce the economic, political,
ideological, and cultural interests of those who create them, fund them, and
populate them.
Robert Paul Wolff years ago wrote a book entitled The Ideal of the University (1970). In it he identifies the historical university as
the training ground for theology, literature, and law. In each case,
sacred or secular canonical texts were studied with a microscope. Their
study was designed to reify and transmit the core knowledge claims, ethics, and
laws across generations. Wolff’s description, written forty years ago,
about a reality hundreds of years earlier might still resonate with us today.
Thus the activity of scholarship is in the first instance a
religious and literary activity, directed toward a given corpus of texts,
either divine or secular, around which a literature of commentary has
accumulated. The corpus is finite, clearly defined, growing slowly as
each stage in the progress of Western civilization deposits its masterpieces in
the Great Tradition. Though the tradition may contain pregnant,
emotionally powerful commentaries upon life and men’s affairs, the scholar’s
concern is with the textual world, not with the world about which the text
speaks. (Wolff, 5)
Wolff (1970), Berlin (1996), Smith (1974) and others add 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 can
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
to modern capitalism. The model then “trickled down” to less prestigious
universities, which in the end become 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, is 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
began to serve 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.
Henry Giroux paraphrased President Eisenhower’s warning,
referred to above: “. . . the conditions for production of violence, the
amassing of huge profits by defense industries, and the corruption of
government officials in the interest of making war the organizing principle of
society had created a set of conditions in which the very idea of democracy, if
not the possibility of politics itself, was at stake” (Giroux, 14-15).
Giroux claims that in Eisenhower’s first draft of his famous
farewell address he refers to a “military-industrial-academic complex.”
In it Eisenhower recalls 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 claims 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 by society
to solve human puzzles and problems. In other words, the doctrine of
higher education diametrically conflicts with the reality described above.
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 have 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 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 documents 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.
Since the collapse of the cold war international system, some
scholars have begun to examine other aspects of the anti-communist hysteria as
it related to the academy. Fones-Wolf (1995) and others have 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 privilege 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. 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” can 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 need.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 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” can somehow participate in political decision-making.
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.
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 opposes
those scholar-activists who participate in political movements or in any way
connect their professional life with their political lives. And he opposes
those academics who participate in academic programs that are
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
presents distorted profiles of illustrative faculty whom he believes have
violated academic standards because of a variety of transgressions. Most
of those identified either engage in political activity and/or participate in
interdisciplinary scholarly programs that he finds offensive: 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
disagrees with on his electronic news magazine, Horowitz has encouraged
right-wing students to challenge the legitimacy of these professors on college
campuses and has tried to get conservative student groups to get state
legislatures to endorse so-called “student bill-of-rights legislation.”
Such legislation would establish oversight by state legislatures over colleges
and universities, especially their hiring practices.
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 summarizes 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”
Giroux, 162).
Horowitz, ACTA, and others who attack the university have
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 anti-semitism because they published a long essay and book analyzing
the “Israeli lobby.”
This latest red scare against higher education has had failures
and successes. Horowitz has had a visible presence on national cable
television and radio. He used it to attack some of the 101 dangerous
professors. However, his supporters have not been able to get any of
their legislative proposals accepted. Also, most university
administrators have defended their faculty from the crude assaults from Horowitz
and his followers. In addition, many of the 101 and others like them have
stepped up their public defenses of their scholarship and teaching. It is
unusual for any students to level attacks against targeted professors. If
anything, they defend the right of professors to be critical analysts in their
subject areas in the classroom.
But, the new red scare has reinforced and legitimized the
dominant paradigms in various academic disciples and created an environment of
intellectual caution in the academy. While the impacts are immeasurable,
younger faculty cannot help but be intimidated by the public attacks on their
senior colleagues. The system of tenure and promotion in most
institutions is 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 vulnerable to outside assault on their institutions,
those passing judgment on today’s faculty might see the necessity of caution in
hiring and retaining faculty whose perspectives are new, different, radical,
and engaged.
Intellectuals, the Critical Organic Discourse
Model, and Higher Education
The latest red scare has rekindled debate concerning the role of
higher education and faculty as to research, teaching, and activism.
Those propagating the red scare insist that education should focus on celebrating American society, history, and
institutions. Anything less, to them, constitutes bias and a violation of
the principles of academic freedom. In addition, educators should not
engage in political activism. Being an academic and being a citizen must
remain separate.
While ACTA and others complain about the negativity of those
reflecting on United States history, more sophisticated red scare
spokespersons, including Horowitz himself, emphasize one or another of two
different approaches to the academy. Some argue 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.
Parallel to the fair and balanced position is 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 requires 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 have responded by claiming
they are fair and balanced and objective, and occasionally their students have
defended them on these grounds as well. In fact, when Horowitz has been
asked on national television if he has proof that his victims have not been
fair and balanced and objective in the classroom, he has been forced to admit
that he has 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. . .” (Gramsci, 10). 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.
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.
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 is a site of contestation
defined by a public ideology of academic freedom that justifies critical
thought, pedagogy, and practice. In this latter regard, Giroux points
out, the university is an uncommon institution in modern life where full
democratic participation in dialogue and critical reflection can take
place. Being fair, balanced, and objective is not enough to meet the
needs of building a democratic space. 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. (Some peace researchers
have defended their practice by using a medical education metaphor.
Medical education is based on the study of creating health out of
illness. Fields like Peace Studies are based on the creation of a healthy
body politic out of violence, discrimination, and inequality.)
Each approach to teaching in the university is evaluated on the
basis of different “validation principles,” that is, the standards of judgment
of success or failure. For the crude celebration-of-America approach,
teaching and writing is judged on the basis of how positive it has been about
the American experience. For the fairness and balance and objectivity
approaches, validation comes from colleagues who judge the quotients of
different points of view and/or the distance of the research and teaching from
a point of view. For the critical and organic discourse model, validation
comes from the extent to which the ideas developed resonate with and reflect
the voiceless and the extent to which the total product of the
professors activities — teaching, research, and activism — have facilitated
peace and justice or not. This is indeed a very high standard but, given
the world we live in, the only realistic standard that should be applied both
to the university and those of us who work in it.
References
Aronowitz, Stanley, The
Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True
Higher Education,
Beacon, 2001.
Berlin, James. A., Rhetorics,
Poetics, and Cultures, Refiguring College English Studies,
National Council of Teachers of Education, 1996.
Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth, Selling
Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60,
University of Illinois, 1995.
McLaren, Peter, Che
Guevara, Paulo Friere, and the Pedagogy of Revolution, Rowman
and Littlefield, 2000.
Perrucci, Robert, “Inventing Social Justice: SSSP and the Twenty-First
Century,” Social Problems, May,
2001, 159-167.
Students for a Democratic Society, “The Port Huron Statement,”
in Alexander Bloom and Win Breines, ‘Takin It to the Streets,’ Oxford,
1995.
Harry Targ is Professor at the Department
of Political Science of Purdue University. This article is the text of
his public lecture, presented at the Departments of Philosophy and Political
Science, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, 1 April 2008.
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Diary of Heartland
Radical
HIGHER
EDUCATION AND GOVERNMENT: SHAPING THE LEGITIMACY OF THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC
ORDER
Harry Targ
What
radical scholars must therefore rediscover is not merely that intellectuals
play a significant role in the reproduction of capitalism and the capitalist
state, but that education has been and remains every bit as much a contested
terrain as the shop floor, the party caucus, and the halls of legislative
assemblies. Clyde W. Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State:
Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education,
1894-1928, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990, 9.
But many
professors and other observers said the roller coaster hit a new low Friday
afternoon when the (Wisconsin) State Legislature's powerful Joint Finance Committee approved, by a
vote of 12-4, the elimination of tenure from state statute. The committee also
approved adding new limits to the faculty role in shared governance and
procedures for eliminating faculty members in good standing outside of
financial exigency. (Colleen Flaherty, “Trying to Kill Tenure,” Inside Higher Education, June 1, 2015).
One of the most thorough, analytical, and historical
analyses of the relationship between the capitalist economy, the state, and
higher education was provided by political scientist, Clyde W. Barrow (Universities and the Capitalist State:
Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education
1894-1928, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). Although his focus was
on the rise of the modern university in the “age of reform” (from the 1890s
until the 1920s), many of his insights are relevant today, another era of
educational “reform.”
According to Barrow, the modern university had its roots in
the period of rising capitalism after the Great Depression of the 1870s to the
1890s when mergers created an economic system in which a few hundred corporations
and banks came to dominate the entire U.S. economy. Interlocking directorates
of corporations and banks created a system of financial speculation,
concentrated wealth, and a capitalist state. The capitalist state through
pro-corporate and banking regulations, the allocation of tax and other benefits
for the wealthy and powerful, and military mobilizations, such as President
Cleveland’s use of the United States army to crush workers during the Pullman
strike of 1894, helped create twentieth century monopoly capitalism.
Higher education, once dominated by theological pursuits,
was refashioned to serve the needs of modern capitalist society. The need for
scientific and technical skills coupled with a trained work force stimulated
the establishment of educational institutions that could produce credentialed
graduates who would serve the capitalist system. Also theoretical work and
classroom education was required to educate the young to celebrate the
blessings of the economic system and the conduct of the government. Young
people learned about the desirability of market economies, the country’s long
tradition of democratic institutions, and the manifest destiny of the United
States as it conquered the North American continent and established a global
empire from the Philippine Islands, to Cuba, to Central and South America.
Barrow provides data to show that members of university
Boards of Trustees, the key decision makers in these institutions, came largely
from big corporations, huge banks, and law firms which served big business.
Some universities from the Midwest and South were led by trustees who
represented regional manufacturing and finance capital, but their outlook and
interests paralleled those from the major universities of the Northeast and the
major state universities. There were never representatives of broader citizens
groups such as labor unions on these boards.
During the early twentieth century, Trustees worked to
establish an administrative class that could carry out the day-to-day operations
of the university and manage the faculty who were the producers of the mental
products the university was assigned to produce. Managerial procedures were
adopted to control mental labor in the classroom and the laboratory. Metrics
were institutionalized to evaluate the rates of productivity of the faculty;
from measuring enrollments, publications, and the rankings of the university.
Federal and state governments and foundations funded the
construction of a national university system that would serve the interests of
twentieth century capitalism. Major foundations generated studies, did surveys,
and made recommendations that found their way into institutions and policies of
both public and private universities. During periods when domestic crises, such
as depressions, and international ones, such as World War I, stimulated
critical analyses from universities, faculty were disciplined or fired for
challenging the economic system or state policy. The educational mission was to
serve the interests of the capitalist elites and the state, not to provide a
venue for critical thinking and debate about issues important to society.
Barrow summarized his findings about higher education:
Individual
institutions were developing into centralized corporate bureaucracies
administered according to nationally standardized measurements of productivity
and rates of return on investment. The entire educational enterprise was being
restructured within these standards as a production process that was
increasingly integrated into local or regional markets for labor, information,
research and professional expertise. The process was more and more a planned
undertaking directed by the federal government. The construction of a national
ideological state apparatus oriented toward solving the problems of capitalist
infrastructure, capital accumulation, and political leadership within a
capitalist democracy was well under way. (123)
This description of the emergence of the modern university
system about one hundred years ago bears resemblance to the wrenching changes
that are occurring in higher education in the twenty-first century. First, the
further consolidation of capitalist class power in higher education in the
current century comes in the aftermath of the Great Recession that began in
2008. United States capitalism continued its transformation from manufacturing
to finance as rates of profit from the latter declined. Financial speculation
led to banking failures and the collapse of the housing market. Consumer demand
shrunk due to rising structural unemployment and falling real wages. And the
cost of state support for the provision of education and various social safety
nets programs rose. Economic crisis was used to justify austerity policies that
included significant reductions in support for higher education. As Naomi Klein
suggested, economic shocks facilitated changes in public policy, in this case
the adoption of “educational reforms.”
Second, the economic shocks were used by Boards of Trustees,
and their advisers in think tanks and political organizations, to demand
increasing efficiencies in the production and teaching of knowledge. Programs
that could not be justified as good “investments” became vulnerable. The
humanities disciplines had to be justified by their use value to the so-called
STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines.Third, metrics have become omnipresent. Colleges and universities are using quantitative instruments to measure “creativity,” “critical thinking,” “personal satisfaction,” “teacher effectiveness,” and faculty “productivity.” University administrators strongly imply that if the activities at their institutions are not measurable in the narrow numerical sense, they should not be supported.
Fourth, academic fields are shaped by paradigms, or theories
that justify the existing economic and political order. The university is not
usually a haven for discussions about the fundamental structures of inequality,
racism, patriarchy, the devastation of the environment, or war. In the end,
Boards of Trustees, think tanks, university administrators, and federal
programs, are committed to a university system that supports the capitalist
state. Only limited and circumscribed debate about issues fundamental to
economic vitality and political democracy are allowed. In sum, the
university was not created for nor does it prioritize today discussions of
fundamental truths.
Finally, as the experience of academic critics one hundred
years ago of child labor, anti-union policies, World War I, and financial
speculation suggests, the nature of debate in the university is circumscribed.
University policies, in response to organizations of professors and students,
have expanded rights to “academic freedom” and have provided some job security
through tenure. But, as the recent decision made by the Wisconsin state
legislature suggests, attacks on tenure (which is a right to job security that
all workers should enjoy if they perform their duties) may spread as the
twenty-first century “reconstruction of American higher education”
proceeds. To forestall these trends, faculty and students, as Barrows suggests, need to understand that “education has been and remains a contested terrain.” Most educators believe that the primary purpose of the university is or should be to stimulate a “marketplace of ideas.” However, the history of higher education, he says, is really about how the university can serve the preservation and enhancement of the capitalist state.
JACOBIN
An Education Worth Fighting For
The neoliberal
revolution is radically reshaping higher education. Faculty can play a central
role in fighting it.
The announcement surprised the university community, who learned
about the deal either during a hastily called meeting between Daniels and
select faculty or through an email message. When the Chronicle of Higher
Education interviewed students and professors about the proposed merger,
many expressed concern.
My colleague David Sanders decried the “Walmartization” of
higher education, in which degrees are provided quickly and cheaply. “When
speed and cost become more important than quality,” he explained, “faculty are
going to object.”
The dramatic developments at Purdue point to a number of issues
facing universities and colleges in the twenty-first century. While
universities have long served the interests of business and the capitalist
state, the neoliberal revolution has radically shifted educational priorities,
assessments, and budgets, sparking adjunctification, state disinvestment,
attacks on faculty tenure, the prioritization of STEM fields, and the
introduction of online education.
In the face of this barrage, faculty, in alliance with
students and other groups, must fight for a free and well-rounded education for
all students, fair employment practices for all instructors, and the right to
participate in the decision-making process about their institutions’
future.
The Ivory Tower’s Capitalist Roots
The modern university system in the US developed at the turn of the twentieth
century, as capitalism bounced back after a string of deep recessions.
Mergers created an economic system in which a few hundred
corporations and banks dominated the entire economy. Interlocking directorates
birthed a system of financial speculation and concentrated wealth. The
government enacted pro-corporate and pro-banking regulations, allocated tax and
other benefits to the wealthy and powerful, and used repression — as when
President Grover Cleveland deployed the army to break the 1894 Pullman strike — on capitalists’ behalf.
During this period, higher education, which had been dominated
by theological pursuits, refashioned itself to serve the modern economy.
Corporations needed workers with scientific and technical knowledge, so
educational institutions were established that could produce credentialed
graduates.
Theoretical work and classroom education inculcated in the young
a reverence for capitalism’s blessings and the government’s conduct. Young
people learned about the benefits of free-market economies, the United States’
long tradition of democratic institutions, and the glories of Manifest Destiny,
which justified the American conquest of not only North America, but the Philippine Islands, Cuba,
and Central and South America.
As Clyde Barrow documents in Universities and the Capitalist State, members of university boards of trustees came largely from corporations, banks, and law firms that served big business. In the Midwest and South, trustees who represented regional manufacturing and finance capital ran the universities. Their outlook paralleled the administrators at the Northeast’s major universities. Few representatives of non-elite groups, like labor unions, were ever selected to serve on these boards.
Trustees established an administrative class that both oversaw
the university’s day-to-day operations and managed the faculty, who produced
the school’s key commodities: education and research. They adopted managerial
procedures to control mental labor in the classroom and the laboratory and
institutionalized metrics that measured enrollment, publications, and
university rankings to evaluate productivity.
Federal and state governments, as well as nonprofit
organizations, stepped in to fund a national university system designed to
serve the interests of twentieth-century capitalism. Major foundations
generated studies, conducted surveys, and made recommendations that influenced
both public and private universities’ policies.
Crises, from the depressions of the late nineteenth century to
World War I, sparked critical analyses from some professors. Frequently,
faculty faced discipline or even termination for challenging the economic
system or the state. The university’s educational mission was to serve elites and
the state, not provide a venue for debating important social issues.
Fast forward to today. The capitalist class has further
consolidated its power in higher education since the Great Recession of 2008,
using the crisis to justify austerity policies that have wrested money away
from colleges and universities (not to mention public K–12 schools).Boards of trustees and their advisers in think tanks and political organizations have used economic shocks to demand greater efficiency in the production and teaching of knowledge. Programs that cannot be justified as good “investments” have become vulnerable to termination. Humanities programs now have to prove their utility to the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) to survive.
Colleges and universities use quantitative instruments to
measure qualitative categories like “creativity,” “critical thinking,”
“personal satisfaction,” and “teacher effectiveness.” University administrators
strongly imply that if faculty cannot measure their activities in the narrow
numerical sense, they do not count.
Finally, just as academic critics of child labor, anti-union
policies, World War I, and financial speculation a hundred years ago faced
censure and unemployment, universities are being pressured to circumscribe
accepted debates. While the higher-education system has extended academic
freedom and provided job security for some through tenure, attacks on these
provisions are spreading as the twenty-first century reconstruction of American
higher education proceeds.
The Crisis of Higher Education
The decades between the end of the Great Depression of the 1930s
and the onset of neoliberalism can be characterized as the golden years of
American higher education.
After World War II, economic priorities shifted toward
stimulating manufacturing, creating consumer and military demand, and expanding
education. For the first time, college was affordable for working-class
Americans. War veterans enrolled in great numbers with the help of the GI Bill,
and big states like New York and California built whole university systems to
serve the influx of students. Community colleges were set up to provide
inexpensive degrees and allow workers to attend school part-time.
Simultaneously, the size of faculties increased dramatically.
Professional associations and journals grew to credential new generations of
instructors. In response to uprisings in the 1960s over war, racism, and
student rights, universities created new programs that supplemented the
traditional canons of scholarship and education, which had often omitted people
of color, women, workers, and immigrants. The postwar economy boomed and took
higher education along with it.
But national and global economic stagnation set in in the 1970s. Rates of profit declined, and
consumption could no longer match production. Governments stopped allocating
sufficient resources to fund public programs, and critics of the modern welfare
state marshaled their wealth and power to challenge the very premises of public
policy.
By the late 1970s, Democrats as well as Republicans began to
endorse government policies that cut support for social programs. Both parties
deregulated finance, manufacturing, and markets; politicians on both sides of
the aisle approved privatization schemes for public institutions and programs.
Below the political radar, the billionaire Koch brothers established the American Legislative Exchange
Council (ALEC) in the early 1970s to encourage state legislators to pass pro-business
bills. ALEC created expert think tanks on various policy issues and wrote model
legislation on subjects as varied as health care, labor, charter schools, and
higher education.
Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 brought a cascade of victories
for the neoliberal project in the US. By the late 1980s, Rush Limbaugh could
celebrate neoliberalism’s many triumphs. But the radio host declared that one
institution remained as-yet untouched: the university.
This has become the project endorsed by ALEC, state legislators,
right-wing advocacy groups, and university administrators all across the
nation.
The Shock Doctrine
On March 17, 2015, Mitch Daniels testified before a US House subcommittee
about what he calls higher-education reform. That same week, he spoke to
the American Council on Education and the Brookings Institute. A centerpiece of
his recommendations was “income share
agreements,” whereby students partner with investors, particularly alumni,
who provide funds for their education in exchange “for a small share of the
student’s future income.”
Daniels touted this idea while boasting about new policies at
Purdue that he said would save students money: three-year programs, new metrics
for measuring student preparation to reduce the time to degree, and
tuition freezes. He also urged a reduction in federal regulations.
Some of Daniels’s proposals and programs have merit, but the
ideas he and other administrators have put forward to slow rising tuition and
mounting student debt ignore the major reason why costs are increasing: the
collapse in state government financing.
In 2014, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP)
issued a report demonstrating that higher-education
funding remained below 2007–8 levels in forty-eight states. According to the
CBPP, “the large funding cuts have led to both steep tuition increases and
spending cuts that may diminish the quality of education available to
students.”
CBPP reported that, since the Great Recession, state spending on
higher education had fallen 23 percent, or $2,026 per student. Public colleges
and universities substantially increased tuition from 2008 to 2014, ranging
from $253 in Montana to $4,493 in Arizona. In Indiana, tuition rose $1,191
during this period.
In 1988, higher education institutions received 3.2 times more
of their revenue from government than from students. By 2013, that ratio had
declined to 1.1.
“Nearly every state has shifted costs to students over the last
25 years — with the most drastic shift occurring since the onset of the
recession,” the CBPP writes. “Today, tuition revenue now outweighs government
funding for higher education in 23 states.”
In The Shock Doctrine:
The
Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein argues that elites use periods of economic
or political crisis to introduce policies that slash public services.
The CBPP data suggests that the Great Recession gave ALEC, as
well as the politicians and educators they support, the pretext to reduce
resources available to higher education. As a result, universities have become
even more dependent on corporations, banks, and the military, and students have
had to pay a higher share of the cost of their education. The Daniels plan, for
instance, relies on wealthy benefactors to support students while doing nothing
to stall rising costs.
The end result of these trends is the privatization of higher
education.
Threats to Education and Faculty
In 2015, Lindsey Russell, director of ALEC’s education task
force, published an essay called “STEM — Will It
Replace Liberal Arts?” His answer was a qualified yes. While Russell cited
Bureau of Labor Statistics projections that estimate a 13 percent growth in
STEM-related jobs between 2012 and 2022, he also quoted a Forbes
article suggesting that STEM graduates still need “critical thinking
skills” to pursue their careers.
These skills, Russell asserted, are precisely what a liberal
arts education provides. “Liberal arts education may seem irrelevant today, but
it is necessary if America’s youth are to become successful members of today’s
STEM-dominated workforce,” he wrote.
Arguments like Russell’s — as well as similar claims that the
American educational system is falling behind in science and math education —
are nothing new: they date back as far as the Soviet Union’s successful Sputnik
launch. Nor are they particularly
well-founded.
As a May 2015 article in Monthly Labor Review
notes, STEM-related employment prospects are far more complicated
than Russell implies. “The STEM labor market is heterogeneous,” the report
states. “There are both shortages and surpluses of STEM workers, depending on
the particular job market segment.”
In the academic sector, evidence points to “noticeable
oversupplies of PhDs,” while some government sectors cannot find enough
STEM-trained personnel to hire. Private industry struggles to hire “software
developers, petroleum engineers, data scientists, and those in skilled trades,”
but have plenty of biomedical, chemistry, and physics PhDs to choose from.
Training in science and technology alone cannot solve the United States’ rising
youth unemployment rate.
Perhaps the most damning statement about STEM degrees and
jobs came a few years ago in an article by the sociologist Hal Salzman: “All credible research finds the
same evidence about the STEM workforce: ample supply, stagnant wages and, by
industry accounts, thousands of applicants for any advertised job.”
Rather than continuing to debate about prioritizing STEM, we
should discuss the substance and role of what is usually called the liberal
arts. Are they only a training ground for honing critical thinking and communications
skills, or does the project go deeper?
At Purdue University and elsewhere, administrators now measure
all sorts of things. They collect data on time to degree, on trends in grades,
on the quality of jobs attained by students, on employer satisfaction with
graduates, and on graduates’ and faculty’s satisfaction. They’ve begun ranking
professional journals and other universities (and only those with high scores
count toward faculty promotion).
In virtually every phase of the education process, universities
have traded qualitative evaluations for quantitative assessments.
There’s nothing wrong with quantitative metrics. But they should
be supplemented with qualitative yardsticks, and assessed with rigor.
Instead, administrators use a narrow set of metrics to justify the neoliberal
policies they endorse. For example, they defend the shift to STEM education on
the basis of some empirical research while ignoring findings that would suggest
a different set of educational priorities. Numbers have all but replaced
analysis.
The shift in metrics has pushed schools to socialize
administrators, faculty, and students into measuring their own performance in
terms of these standards. Some schools have even created new programs to
help “mentor” faculty and students to perform better according to the new
regime.
Faculty end up worrying more about the number of articles they
publish than their quality. Students end up focusing on grades rather than
acquiring knowledge. Assessing a school’s performance comes down to enrollment
numbers, grade distribution, and the introduction of new technologies.
Intellectual curiosity, a passion for knowledge, and the pursuit of exciting
questions have disappeared; no one has time to do anything except perform by the
numbers.
On top of that, tenure itself is under assault. Schools and states are attacking
the idea that faculty, who work in a setting where the free flow of ideas is
vital, should be protected from controversy in their teaching and
research.
As part of this assault on tenure, colleges and universities
have radically reduced the percentage of classes taught by tenure or tenure-track
faculty, relying instead on graduate students and adjuncts. This policy also
saves the institution money: as state legislatures reduce funding, universities
hire low-paid adjuncts, often on a course-by-course basis.
The adjunctification of teaching has negative effects on
part-time faculty as well as students. As most adjuncts have to teach at more
than one university to survive, they spend more time traveling between
institutions than they do keeping up with relevant research and working with students.
These precarious jobs not only reduce the quality of education but also hinder
instructors from securing one of the very few secure, full-time jobs still
available.
Of course, as the Purdue-Kaplan story shows, boards of trustees,
ALEC, corporate executives, and politicians-turned-university administrators
all believe that online education works just as well as in-person instruction.
But this is not necessarily the case. Online education
may have a place in a student’s total academic career, but there first must be
discussion and debate on the appropriate mix of campus and online coursework,
of interpersonal and electronic contact, of reading assignments, video
lectures, and remote PowerPoint presentations. While Kaplan’s model of
for-profit education is being touted as a boon for nontraditional
students, the quality of such education is not being discussed.
In fact, Bernie Sanders’s proposal to make higher education free
for everyone would do more to help nontraditional students than collaborations
with for-profit firms with dubious performance records. Likewise, programs that
provide additional support to regional campuses, community colleges, and
extension programs or extended hours on campus for evening classes would
help students who cannot access a traditional course of study.
Organizing for the Future of Higher Education
Seven years ago, Andrew Hacker and
Claudia Dreifus made a series of proposals to address some of higher
education’s crises. They began by noting that tuition for public and private
colleges had doubled compared to a generation ago. Rising costs have forced
parents to make large financial outlays for their children’s education — often
second only to house mortgages. Students have had to take out loans that
burdened them for their entire lives.
To combat this accumulation of debt, Hacker and Dreifus
suggested a number of proposals, all of which faculty should fight for.
Institute free higher education for all who want it. Maintain
course requirements that provide instruction in history, the arts, sciences,
and reasoned discourse. Provide secure, full-time teachers for every classroom
and eliminate the system of graduate students and temporary adjuncts, who
receive one-sixth the pay of the tenured faculty. Pay presidents and other
administrators salaries commensurate with public employees, not Wall Street
CEOs.
While our wealthiest and most powerful institutions — corporations,
banks, the military, the health care system — have come under intense public
scrutiny in the new century, higher education has not. Education is still cast as an escape route from poverty,
despite elevated real unemployment and crushing debt.
For faculty, the task is to organize effective groups, in
alliance with students, labor, and the public at large, to defend the
ideals of the university and challenge assumptions about higher education and
its costs, accessibility, and labor practices. In every college and university
setting, instructors must lead discussions about the strengths and weaknesses
of the neoliberal agenda, with particular emphasis on its consequences for
higher education.
The erosion of public higher education is proceeding
apace, but it is not inevitable. “Education,” Barrow reminds us, “has been and
remains a contested terrain.”
Monthly Review
Cold War Revisionism Revisited: The Radical Historians of U.S. Empire
by Harry Targ
(Dec 01, 2017)
Since the end of the Second World War, undergraduate and
graduate education in international relations has been largely shaped by four
theoretical approaches. As an undergraduate in the 1950s, I was exposed to the
logic and rhetorical elegance of theories of political realism. The textbook
used in my first course in international politics was a later version of Hans
Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations, and in my subsequent courses,
Morgenthau’s version of realpolitik was
supplemented by the work of realist writers such as George Kennan, Reinhold
Niebuhr, Henry Kissinger, and E. H. Carr. While varying widely in their
politics and background, all saw the root causes of violence and war as
grounded in “human nature.”
As a graduate student in the 1960s, I was inspired by the new
science of international politics and the claim that by gathering enough data
and analyzing it carefully, using the latest statistical techniques, scholars
could develop an integrated theory of international politics that could replace
limiting assumptions about human nature. We could study war, intra-state
violence, revolution, economic cooperation, and institution-building with
rigor. At last, scholars could develop a science of human behavior that would
parallel the natural and physical sciences.
Based on the lingering assumptions of realism and the passion
for constructing a science of international relations, two areas were subjected
to specific inquiry: national security and modernization. Security studies was
designed to use the tools of science to determine how nations could best defend
their physical space and deter aggression. Modernization studies emphasized
processes of economic development that could improve living standards,
particularly through markets and democratic institutions. In the end, the
American field of international politics was dominated by this nexus of
realism, behavioralism (the quasi-scientific study of international behavior),
security studies, and modernization.
Not coincidentally, these approaches to research and education
in international politics arose at the height of the Cold War. The United
States was embarking on a dramatic escalation of its adventure in Southeast
Asia, and defense spending was expanding such that President Eisenhower warned
of a growing “military-industrial complex.” As the war in Vietnam grew more
controversial, the prevailing international-relations perspectives were
increasingly challenged, both in the classrooms and the streets. But for the most
part, studies based on paradigms of realism, behavioralism, security, and
modernization remained disconnected from broader debates about the world.
To the era’s activists and radicals, the cause of this disparity
between the academic study of international politics and the social reality of
the anti-war movement was obvious. The former was influenced and supported by
governmental institutions, including the Department of Defense and the Central
Intelligence Agency, and in the main, its theories and approaches served
intellectually to justify U.S. foreign policy—from nuclear buildups and
military interventions to sponsoring coups and assassinations. In sum, the
midcentury American science of international politics, which shaped a
generation of students, was an ideological tool serving the foreign policy of
the United States and its allies.
Political Economy and Foreign Policy
Anti-imperial sentiment has had a long history in public
discourse on U.S. foreign policy. But by the 1950s, the virulently anti-communist
and conformist environments of academia, the media, and electoral politics had
caused discussion of the United States as an imperial power virtually to
disappear. The last prominent political figure to criticize U.S. Cold War
policy was Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate for president in
1948. A year after Wallace’s defeat, eleven unions were purged from the
Congress of Industrial Organizations for their leftwing politics, including
their support for Wallace.1 The
voice of militant labor was silenced, and this was followed, more famously, by
anti-communist purges in radio, television, and the movies. Prominent
progressive figures lost their jobs, livelihoods, and access to a broad public.
Academic fields were transformed into ideological training
grounds in support of the United States’ mission in the world. In history and
social science, new scholarship portrayed an American politics, history, and
society founded on pluralist democracy rather than political elitism,
consensus-building rather than class struggle, and groups, not classes, as the
basic units of society.
Indeed, in the 1950s, some realists represented the most
“radical” of critics of U.S. foreign policy. While they did not highlight
economic interest, the pursuit of empire, or overreaction to the Soviet threat,
they did argue that U.S. national interests had to be defined more carefully in
security terms. They challenged the view that moral purpose and global vision
should or could guide foreign policy. Theorists such as Morgenthau claimed that
international relations should be motivated by needs of national security, not
some grand campaign against international communism.
At the same time, however, a handful of historians began to
challenge these dominant narratives. In particular, the history department at
the University of Wisconsin encouraged young scholars to examine the economic
taproots of U.S. foreign policy. In 1959, the university’s most influential
historian, William Appleman Williams, broke new ground with The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. His students and
others began to challenge reigning orthodoxy about international relations and
the historic role of the United States in the world. Williams documented the
rise of an American empire that expanded after the Civil War, while other
historians began to conceive of the conquest of the North American continent as
part of an empire-building process founded on the slaughter of millions of
native peoples and the seizure of a large section of the landmass of Mexico.
Still others studied the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of Africans as
central to the construction of the Southern cotton economy, and ultimately to
the global capitalist system.
In The Tragedy of American Diplomacy,
along with The Contours of American History (1961) and The Roots of the Modern American Empire (1969),
Williams located the origins of U.S. imperial expansion in the rise of
agricultural production and the need for a growing economy to find markets
overseas, particularly after domestic outlets had been capped with the closing
of the “frontier.” Drawing on Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,”
U.S. leaders believed that a new, global American empire was needed to sell
products, secure natural resources, and find investment opportunities.
The rift between realist thinking and the newer radical
scholarship is clearly illustrated by their contrasting interpretations of
Secretary of State John Hay’s articulation of a new Open Door policy during the
administration of William McKinley in 1898. In a series of notes, Hay warned
European leaders that the United States regarded Asia as “open” to U.S. trade
and investment, as occasioned by the disintegration of the Chinese state into
civil war and the occupation of the country’s regions by European states and
Japan. The United States insisted that unfettered access to markets in China be
honored—and by implication, that the closing of such markets to U.S. goods
might lead to confrontation.
For realists, the Hay “Open Door Notes” illustrated the
propensity of policymakers to make threats that far exceeded any likely action.
The strategic gap between rhetoric and reality, they argued, had long
characterized U.S. foreign policy, from the 1890s to the era of President
Woodrow Wilson’s calls for democratization to the vehement stance against the
spread of communism expressed by every Cold War president.2
Revisionists such as Williams instead argued that the Open Door Notes presaged the emerging U.S. global imperial vision.3 Hay’s demands that the world respect the country’s right to penetrate economies everywhere would become the guiding standard for the U.S. role in the world.
Some of Williams’s writings seemed to emphasize material
reality—the needs of capitalism—and others the beliefs held by elites, namely
the overriding necessity of new markets. Among the revisionist school of
historians, which also included Lloyd Gardner, Gar Alperowitz, and Thomas
Paterson, was Gabriel Kolko, author of The Politics of War
and, with Joyce Kolko, The Limits of Power: United States Foreign
Policy from 1945 to 1954.4 In
these volumes, the authors laid out in more graphic and precise terms the material
underpinnings of U.S. Cold War policy. The Kolkos emphasized the material and
ideological menace that international communism, particularly the example of
the Soviet Union and popular Communist parties in the third world, represented
to the construction of a global capitalist empire after the Second World War.
For the Kolkos and other revisionists, the expansion of
socialism constituted a global threat to capital accumulation. With the end of
the Second World War, there were widespread fears that the decline in wartime
demand for U.S. products would bring economic stagnation and a return to the
depression of the 1930s. The Marshall Plan, lauded as a humanitarian program
for the rebuilding of war-torn Europe, was at its base a program to increase
demand and secure markets for U.S. products. With the specter of an
international communist threat, military spending, another source of demand,
would likewise help retain customers, including the U.S. government itself. The
idea of empire, which Williams so stressed, was underscored by the materiality
of capitalist dynamics.
The historical revisionists thus introduced a political-economic
approach to the study of foreign policy. This frame emphasized different
factors shaping U.S. global behavior than did those that singularly emphasized
national security. The realists referred to human nature and the inevitable
attributes of state behavior, particularly the pursuit of power. The
traditionalists highlighted the threat to security of certain kinds of states,
mostly from international communism. For them, the modern international system was
driven by a vast ideological contest between free and democratic states and
totalitarian ones. Power, security, and anti-communism were together central to
understanding U.S. foreign policy, not economic interest.
The revisionist approach emphasized several different components
of policy. First, the new historians saw fundamental connections between
economics and politics. Whether the theoretical starting point was Adam Smith
or Karl Marx, they looked to the underlying dynamics, needs, and goals of the economic
system as sources of policy. These writers began from the assumption that
economic interest infused political systems and international relations.
While the realists acknowledged economic interest as a factor of
some importance to policy-making, it was considered merely one of a
multiplicity of variables shaping international behavior. By contrast,
revisionists argued that while the forces of security, ideology, elite
personalities, and even “human nature” had some role to play, all were
influenced in the end by economic imperatives. The behavior of dominant
nation-states from the seventeenth through the twentieth century involved
trade, investment, financial speculation, the pursuit of slave or cheap labor,
and access to natural resources. The pursuit of economic gain drove the system
of international relations, and while sometimes this required cooperation, at
other times it necessitated war, conquest, and colonization.
The revisionists made a further innovation at the level of
discourse: during the Cold War, the mere mention of the word “capitalism”
signaled that the user was a Marxist. Consequently, without naming the economic
system, any hope of analyzing its relation to politics and policy was
foreclosed. And that meant ignoring the possible relevance of the dominant
economic system from the fifteenth century on. But, as has been suggested, some
historians and social scientists who employed the political-economic
perspective recognized that as an economic system evolved, international
relations changed with it. This was so because capitalist enterprises and their
supporting states accumulated more and more wealth, expanded at breakneck
speed, consolidated both economic and political power, and sometimes built
armies to facilitate further growth.
Some historians, borrowing from Marx, studied the evolution of
capitalism by analyzing the accumulation of capital and newer forms of the
organization of labor. At first, theorists wrote of the rise of capitalism out
of feudalism. Marx called this the age of “primitive” or “primary”
accumulation, because profit came from the enslavement of peoples, the conquest
of territories, and the use of brute force. Subsequently, trade became a
significant feature of the new system, and capitalists traversed the globe to sell
the products produced by slave and wage labor.
This era of commercial capitalism was dwarfed, however, by the
emergence of industrial capitalism. New production techniques developed,
particularly factory systems and mass production. The promotion and sale of
products in domestic and global markets increased. By the 1870s, the
accumulation of capital in products and profits created enormous surpluses in
the developed countries. These required new outlets for sale, new ways to put
money capital to work, and ever-expanding concentrations of capital in
manufacturing and financial institutions. By the mid-twentieth century, some
theorists wrote of a new era of “monopoly capitalism,” a global economic system
in which most commercial and financial activities were controlled by a small
number of multinational corporations and banks.5
The revisionists of the 1960s argued that much of this economic history was ignored entirely by mainstream analyses of international relations. They responded by uncovering the reality of the U.S. role in the world, concentrating on specific cases of links between economics and politics. These included the influence of the country’s largest oil companies on the U.S.-managed overthrow of Mohammed Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953 or the coup in Guatemala in 1954 after president Jacobo Árbenz threatened to nationalize lands owned by the United Fruit Company. And while some revisionists did see the Soviet Union as a security threat to the United States, the broad consensus of the political-economy approach was that socialism as a world force threatened the continued global expansion of capitalism. As the nature of the anti-capitalist forces and challenges in particular countries changed, so too did the needs and tactics of U.S. foreign policy.
The political-economy approach also regarded class structure as
central to the understanding of the foreign policy of any nation. Some classes
dominate the political system at the expense of others. In capitalist
societies, those who own or control the means of production dominate political
life. Therefore, while realists and traditionalists prioritize states as the
most important actors in world affairs, political economists see states and
classes as inextricably connected. Writers of all schools write about rich and
poor states and powerful and weak states. Most, however, stop there. The state
is central. Political economists and historical revisionists connected states
to classes, and vice versa.
Finally, while revisionist historians worked on the principle
that class interest controlled the foreign policy process, they tended to take
a “hegemonic” view of that control, leaving little room in their theoretical
frame for counterforces of resistance. The resulting analyses often seemed to
imply that the United States was omniscient, all-powerful, unbeatable, and
unchangeable in its conduct. After the Cuban Revolution and the Vietnam War,
however, some analysts began to focus on challenges to U.S. hegemony around the
world, especially in the global South. However, in the main, the historical
revisionists developed a top-down understanding of international relations.
Much of the anti-American ferment in the world, including anticolonial
struggles, revolutions, and third world coalition-building, received
insufficient attention.
The Revisionist Legacy
Ways of thinking have consequences. Generations of students in
the twentieth century were exposed to analyses of international relations that
emphasized certain purportedly iron laws of state behavior. Others were taught
that international politics was best understood by embarking on statistically
based studies that disaggregated political reality into a complex array of discrete
variables. Still other students of international relations were encouraged to
specialize in security studies or modernization and democratization. As the
Vietnam War escalated, activists began to turn to a small group of historians
for an alternative understanding of U.S. involvement in the country. The
activism and scholarship of the Vietnam era began the process of challenging
the hegemony of intellectual systems that had generally supported the U.S. role
in the world.
Although that hegemony has been weakened, the traditional ways
of studying international relations in the United States remain influential.
Many studies are ahistorical, atomizing political reality while marginalizing
the causal role of economics, and ignoring the effect of class interests in the
making of foreign policy. The old enemy, international communism, is gone, but
a new one, international terrorism, has taken its place. And like their Cold
War precursors, mainstream theorists of international relations normalize war,
regime change, and an ever-expanding military and security state.
Hegemonic thinking during the Vietnam era was questioned by
scholars who challenged professional barriers and ideological taboos. Social
movements demanded new thinking about world affairs. And scholar-activists
began to revisit the work of maligned theorists such as Marx and V. I. Lenin.
Historical curiosity increasingly led them to ask not only what happened, but
why. Breaking through hegemonic ideas remains a vital task today.
Notes
1.
↩An old but still compelling history of U.S. labor struggles
and anti-communism in the early years of the Cold War can be found in Richard
O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story
(New York: United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, 1955).
2.
↩See George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
4.
↩Lloyd C. Gardner, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Hans J.
Morgenthau, The Origins of the Cold War (Waltham, MA: Genn, 1970);
Gar Alperowitz, Atomic Diplomacy (New York:
Vintage, 1965); Thomas G. Paterson, Soviet-American Confrontation
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Gabriel Kolko, The Roots of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Beacon,
1969) and The Politics of War (New York: Vintage, 1968); Joyce
Kolko and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power
(New York: Harper, 1972).
