DEFENDING ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND DISCUSSIONS OF RACISM, SEXISM, AND THE FUNDAMENTALS OF THE ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL SYSTEM: Part 1

Harry Targ

September 8, 2016

(With the return to colleges and universities for the fall, 2016 term, the issues of academic freedom have reappeared in the mainstream media. Recently a story was published about a letter the University of Chicago sent to its incoming students warning that all discourse was fair game, that “safe spaces” and warnings of uncomfortable subjects would not be encouraged in the class room. The hallowed idea of academic freedom was justified by University of Chicago authorities and echoed by administrators at various universities. Ironically, as two prior posted essays suggest, academic freedom has always been constrained or censured in higher education, not by radical students demanding more attention and sensitivity to issues of class, race, gender, sexual preference, and violence at home and abroad, but those who oppose such discussions. The defenses of academic freedom today are designed to stifle the demands for open discussion on these issues rather than encourage them. The two essays written and posted in 2015 illustrate this contradiction. HT)

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THE UNHAPPY MARRIAGE OF POLITICAL CONTROL AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Harry Targ

December 1, 2015

And at college after college in recent years, students have rallied to block appearances by speakers whose views don’t jibe with current campus orthodoxy. Most of those speakers are conservatives. (Rem Rieder, “Campuses Need First Amendment Training,” USA Today-Journal and Courier, November 29, 2015, 8B).

Stories about academic freedom and free speech have been appearing in newspapers more frequently over the last few weeks. And curiously enough political actors on and off campus who traditionally have been least likely to be concerned about these subjects are becoming its major advocates. 

Historically, universities, like most institutions in society, have been designed by and served the interests of the dominant powers. Higher education in the United States from the seventeenth century until the civil war educated theologians and lawyers to take leading positions in the political and economic system. As the nation was transformed by the industrial revolution, universities became training grounds and research tools for the rise of modern capitalism. Young people, to advance the needs of a modern economic system, were educated to be scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and managers. Economists were produced to develop theories that justified the essential features of capitalism. 

After the rise of the United States as a world power in the twentieth century, higher education increasingly included studies of international relations, weapons systems, and the particular mission of powerful nations in the world. In sum, the historical function of the American university since the 1860s has been to mobilize knowledge and trained personnel to service a modern economy and a global political power.

The conception of the university articulated by intellectuals through the centuries, however, also implied a space where ideas about scientific truths, engineering possibilities, ethical systems, the products of culture, and societal ideals would be discussed and debated. During various periods in United States history, during and after the Spanish-American War, the Progressive era, World War I and its aftermath, the Great Depression, and the Vietnam War era, for example, the university became the site for intellectual contestation. But during most periods of United States history unpopular ideas introduced in the academy by faculty or students were subject to repression, firings of faculty, and expulsion of students. This was particularly true during World War I and the depths of the Cold War. 

It was out of the many forms of repression that faculty and student associations advocated for the idea of academic freedom. Articulated by philosopher John Dewey early in the twentieth century and formalized by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the principle, not the practice, was enshrined in official statements by both university administrators and faculty.

Despite the broadly endorsed tradition faculty were purged from universities during the 1940s and 1950s, not primarily because of their teaching and research activities, but because of alleged political associations off campus. Others were fired or did not have contracts renewed because their teaching and research challenged reigning orthodoxies about economics, politics, and war and peace. In the 1960s, universities sought to restrict the free speech rights of students as well. 

For a time as a result of the tumult of the 1960s, universities began to provide more space for competing ideas, theories, approaches to education, and allowed for some discussion of fundamental societal problems including class exploitation, racism, sexism, homophobia, and long-term environmental devastation. 

But by the 1990s, reaction against the expanded meaning of academic freedom set in. The National Association of Scholars was created by political conservatives to challenge the new openness in scholarship and debate on campus. Right-wing foundations funded David Horowitz to launch a systematic attack on faculty deemed “dangerous.” Horowitz unsuccessfully tried to organize students to lobby state legislators to establish rules impinging on university prerogatives as to hiring of faculty and curricula. Politicians targeted scholars deemed most threatening including such noted researchers and teachers as Howard Zinn, William Ayers, Ward Churchill, and Judith Butler. The attacks of the last decade were based more on the ideas which “dangerous” professors articulated than their associations.

Since the upsurge in police violence against African Americans and terrorist attacks on Planned Parenthood, and rising Islamophobia and homophobia, a new generation of student activists has emerged challenging violence, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Students have protested against police shootings everywhere and they have linked the general increase in violence and racism to the indignities they suffer on their own campuses. 

In response to the events at the University of Missouri, student activists around the country have brought demands to administrators challenging the many manifestations of racism and other indignities experienced at their schools. The response at almost all colleges and universities has not been to address the demands raised by students but instead to change the discourse from the original issues to the protection of academic freedom and free speech. In other words, university administrators and media pundits, as the quote above suggests, have swept student complaints under the rug and have used the time-honored defense of academic freedom and free speech to ignore the reality of racism, sexism, and homophobia. The defense of free speech has become a smokescreen. 

Academic freedom and free speech must be defended. But it must be understood that today those who most loudly defend them are doing so to avoid addressing the critical issues around class, race, gender, homophobia, and violence that grip the nation and the world. 

(For a more detailed rendition of political repression in higher education see Harry Targ (below), “Red Scares in Higher Education: Rewriting the Narrative of Academic Freedom,” www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com, May 21, 2015.)

FROM LABOR DAY TO ELECTION DAY (updated)

By Harry Targ,

The original essay appeared in The Rag Blog / September 9, 2010

 (Since the issues and context of 2016 are uncomfortably similar to what was written about 2010, it seemed appropriate to repost this essay making revisions adapted to 2016. The essay substitutes the Trump campaign for the then, but not deceased, Tea Party movement. In addition, the call for a broad-based movement to elect progressive candidates at all levels of government in 2010 parallels the Sanders campaign and his initiation of a grassroots organization called Our Revolution).

The working class built this country: Now we must mobilize to transform it

I want to add my voice to the thousands of essayists and bloggers who have been contemplating the 2016 elections, the media “framing” of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, the role of progressives in the elections, and mobilizing for the last two months before the elections.

First, I think elections still matter. Since most people see politics and elections as equivalent and some of them actively participate in the electoral process, progressives need to be there as well.

In addition, in states and communities decisions will be made about how government money for local school corporations is to be allocated, about workers compensation for victims of asbestos related workplace injuries, so-called Right to Work laws, rules governing bargaining and organizing, support for women’s health,  and how congressional and state legislative districts will be redesigned.

At the national level, policy decisions about such critical issues as jobs, climate change, education, military spending, and judicial appointments will be affected by election outcomes.

Second, most of these issues have not been the main narrative. The media have framed the fall elections around personalities, particularly the inarticulate, bizarre, racist, and personality attacks of the Trump candidacy.

Third the “liberal” media, while more sophisticated and entertaining in its coverage of election year stories, over-emphasizes “making fun” of the outlandish Trump candidacy and his spokespersons and supporters.

In response, Trump staffers have decided to do two things: forget about trying to put together logical, coherent plans for an alternative set of policies. When they are occasionally challenged by enterprising reporters, they just walk away or the potentially embarrassing reporters are ejected from rallies.  Since the media is the enemy, for most Trump supporters, incoherence and evasiveness resonate well with a disillusioned public.

Fourth, part of the context for the unstable politics of the fall, 2016, is the continued economic crisis that grips working people. Unemployment, declining real wages, indebtedness, crumbling public services remain all too real, an actuality or a fear for the majority of Americans.

In addition, the Obama administration has failed to propose an economic stimulus program that could bring millions of un- and underemployed workers back to work, making livable wages. A massive green jobs program to create a well-paid workforce that would rebuilt the American infrastructure while shifting away from an economy based on fossil fuels never materialized as many had hoped. Meanwhile, the political system at all levels has failed to address institutional racism: police brutality, grotesque inequality, and political marginalization.

Having said all this, the administration since 2009 has forestalled return to depression with a modest economic recovery program, “saved” the U.S. auto industry, and has secured the passage of an inadequate health care reform bill but one which may stimulate movement toward a single payer system in the future.

A little history

A high level of distrust of government, low regard for politicians, and periodic active anger at our public institutions is a characteristic feature of American history often reflected in voting against political incumbents and supporting candidates who are most vocal against government programs.

For example, the American National Election Studies (ANES) prepared an index of Trust in Government made up of several questions reflecting the points just raised. Looking over time the level of trust in government was at a score of 49 in 1958, 52 in 1964, 27 in 1980, 29 in 1992, 36 in 2000, and declined to 26 by 2008. Only twice in the Johnson years, did the Trust Index reach a score over 60 and six times since 1958 the index score was below 30.

In addition, a constant feature of political life has been active and extremist politics. For example, the American Party of the 1850s, or “Know Nothing Party,” got its name from members being instructed when asked about the party to say “I know nothing.” While short-lived they elected several national and state office holders before the civil war.

Throughout U.S. history so-called “nativist” groups formed and mobilized against waves of immigrants: Catholics, Germans, the Irish, Chinese, Jews, and Latinos. Armed Klan organizations terrorized the South and the Midwest in the 1880s, 1920s and 1930s and dominated the political life in many states in these eras. The Klan and white nationalist groups have been reenergized in recent years.

Of course, extremist movements, often organized and funded by corporations and wealthy individuals, scared the American people during the dark days of anti-Communism in the 1940s and 1950s. Red Channels, a small but well-funded political organization, published lists of suspected Communists in the entertainment industry and pressured the new television corporations and advertisers to purge actors and actresses, with views supportive of labor, racial integration, and peace, from the airwaves. Their activism paralleled and reinforced Congressional reactionaries who used investigative committees to hound individuals and groups.

Alternatively, for all of Labor’s flaws, the history of the American labor movement has been central to social progress in the United States: from the demands for an eight hour day, skilled trades controls of the pace of work, health and safety at the work place, a fair wage, programs of health and retirement benefits, and, after much internal conflict, support for the struggles against racism and sexism. The civil rights, women’s, gay rights, environmental, and peace movements also have contributed to improvements in the quality of life in the United States.

There is no question that workers mobilizing in struggles such as “The Fight for Fifteen,” and young people of color in mobilizations like Black Lives Matter, represent the most powerful forces in today’s society resisting neoliberalism, state violence at home and abroad, the privatization of public institutions, deregulation of the economy, and attacks on the  environment.

A progressive campaign program

So what to do now? We live in a time of enormous distrust of government and corporate support for campaigns to undermine progressive government and pro-worker policies (the Koch brothers for example). In addition, racism, Islamophobia, and fear of foreigners run deep in American political culture and is being fueled by reactionary political candidates. Therefore, progressives have only one choice for the next two months: work to elect political candidates from the city council to the Congress of the United States who support an anti-racist “working people’s agenda.”

American political history tells us that the Tea Party and grassroots support for a candidate such as Donald Trump are not new. While the concern and anger reflected among those grassroots activists who participate in rallies and marches is usually sincere and motivated by fear of strange times and economic crises with no seeming resolution, its leaders offer no program, no vision, and no coherent agenda.

Progressives cannot argue with the Trump supporters. But, they can campaign, not just for individual candidates or just for a party but for an anti-racist “working people’s agenda,” that includes rebuilding America’s schools, roads, and energy systems; expands support for the maintenance of state and local public services; puts all people who want to work in jobs that need to be done; and regulates banks more effectively so that they are required to support local projects that create businesses which will create jobs. Also institutions at the local and state level must be controlled by the communities of people that these institutions are supposed to support.

Most important, progressives must work in their communities and in solidarity with workers, people of color, and youth to elect progressive candidates to public office and to monitor their conduct once they are elected. It must be made clear to all that the progressive majority is not engaged in politics to support candidates or parties but to transform America.

A Radio interview on the Crisis of the Peace Movement and United States Foreign Policy

http://www.wjffradio.org/parchive/mp3/160822_190000connect.MP3

THE MEANINGS OF FERGUSON AND MILWAUKEE

(Portions of this essay, “The Meanings of Ferguson,” appeared on August 20, 2014 in Diary of a Heartland Radical).

Harry Targ

In addressing violence, researchers, educators, journalists and religious leaders have usually concentrated on its most visible forms: murder and war. The central features of such violence include physical assault and killing. In our own day terrorism has joined war as the most popular common subject for study.

Over the years, peace educators have developed intellectual tools to uncover more diverse meanings of violence, their differences and their connections. Structural violence has been distinguished from direct violence. Researchers continue to analyze direct violence, physical assault and killing, but also study structural violence, the various forms of human suffering that take more time; impose pain, sickness, depression, and death on populations; and are perpetuated by leading institutions and relationships in society. Structural violence includes economic inequality, low wages and poverty, inadequate access to health care and education, and the psychological damage that economic suffering causes. These injustices, the concept of structural violence suggests, are embedded in economic, social, and political institutions.

It is possible to disaggregate further the structural violence that is embedded in institutions. Institutional violence refers to unequal distribution of power and influence in major societal institutions: political, criminal justice, and educational, for example.

Finally, cultural violence refers to the images, symbols, and educational materials that value some population groups over others. Culture refers to the public consciousness of history, traditions, and popular narratives that describe people. Stereotypes are short-hand representations of a culture.

In total then violence is direct, structural, institutional, and cultural. These kinds of violence may occur separately but in most cases are inextricably connected. It is this fourfold conception of violence that is relevant to the crisis that unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri.

Ferguson, Missouri 2014      

The tragedy of Ferguson, Missouri came to national attention because of direct violence. A Ferguson policeman shot and killed an unarmed young African American male. In response to the collective expression of community outrage that followed, the local police initiated a multi-day barrage of tear gas, strong-arm arrests, and threatening street protestors with military vehicles and loaded rifles. The images on television screens nationwide were of a people under assault, parallel to Israeli bombings in Gaza and United States targeted air strikes in Iraq. The fear that young African American males in Ferguson have historically felt every time they stepped into the streets of their city escalated since the killing of Michael Brown.

Beyond the threat of direct violence in Ferguson is structural violence, less visible but as important. Brookings Institute researcher Elizabeth Kneebone (“Ferguson, Mo. Emblematic of Growing Suburban Poverty,” brookings.edu, August 15, 2014) reported that the community of Ferguson experienced a qualitative economic decline over the decade before the shooting. The city’s unemployment rate increased from 5 percent in 2000 to 13 percent by 2010. Earnings of community members declined by one-third. One-fourth of the population was living in poverty.

Kneebone indicated that poverty rates have doubled in suburban neighborhoods surrounding the 100 largest cities in the United States. “By 2008-2012, 38 percent of poor residents lived in the neighborhoods with poverty rates of 20 percent or higher. For poor black residents in those communities, the figure was 53 percent.” Of course, poverty is highly related to declining schools, inadequate access to health care, lessened prospects for jobs, and large-scale youth unemployment.

Institutional violence is reflected in a 300-year history of slavery and racism. Professor Clarissa Hayward, Washington University, said: “The St. Louis metropolitan area has been an extreme example of racial segregation for 100 years.” She pointed out that St. Louis geographically was at the nexus of the South, the Midwest, and the West and added: “The practices and politics of St. Louis created the problems that underlie the tension that boiled out in Ferguson this week.” (Puneet Kollipara, “Wonkbook: The Social and Economic Story Behind the Unrest in Ferguson,” Wonkblog, The Washington Post, August 18, 2014).

In terms of the Ferguson political system, two-thirds of the community is Black and the local government has been almost all white. At the time of the shooting of Michael Brown, five of six city council members were white, the Mayor was white, and six of seven school board members were white. And fifty of 53 police officers were white.

Finally, cultural violence addresses the issue of ideology, consciousness, images of the other, and additional ways in which whites see African-Americans. Racist culture socializes the dominant class and race to reflect its superiority. For example, Missouri Lt. Governor Peter Kinder said shortly after the shooting: “That’s one of the great advances of Anglo-American civilization, that we do not have politicized trials. We let the justice system work it out.” The mayor of Ferguson declared that his community was free of racism.

Since the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, police and politicians organized a campaign to demonize the victim of the police killing. The tall young man, an African-American, was a robber, a drug consumer, and violence-prone. Also, the days of protest in Ferguson were framed to privilege the peaceful, religious, mourning adults and to explain night-time violence not as police violence but violence perpetrated by outside agitators from New York, Chicago, and California. The fact that young African Americans left their houses at their own risk could not, the frame implies, engender outrage.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin 2016

And in August, 2016 Milwaukee, by many measures the most segregated and racist big city in the United States, experienced the police shooting of Sylville K. Smith followed by two days of frustrated rebellion by some residents of the Sherman Park neighborhood. State violence, poverty, and racial segregation have created a tinderbox of frustration and anger in that city. According to a 2015 NPR report, the state of Wisconsin invests more in prisons than education, incarcerating a higher percentage of Black men than anywhere in the country. “…in Milwaukee County more than half of all Black men in their 30s and 40s have served time.” In one zip code alone 62 percent of Black men have been incarcerated for some time by the age of 34. The prison population of the state has tripled since 1990.

NPR also quoted a study finding that Milwaukee has the second highest black poverty rate in the country with an unemployment rate four times higher than whites (Kenay Downs, “Why is Milwaukee So Bad for Black People?” NPR, March 5, 2015). A Madison, Wisconsin group,  the Young, Gifted, and Black Coalition, after defining the idea of a “neighborhood,” found that 31 of Wisconsin’s 56 Black neighborhoods are jails and an additional 21 neighborhoods are apartment complexes or section 8 housing or both. Prisons and poverty dominate the life of Black communities (YGB, “31 of Wisconsin’s 56 Black Neighborhoods are Jails,”

http://ygbcoalition.org/blogitem/691

Summing up the situation in Milwaukee, Alderman Khalif Rainey said: “The Black people of Milwaukee are tired. They’re tired of living under this oppression. This is their life.” (Tanzina Vega, “Milwaukee’s Staggering Black-White Economic Divide,” CNN Money, August 17, 2016, money cnn.com).

So from police violence--killing, gassing, beating--to economic despair, to lack of political representation to cultural rationales for state violence, the basic characteristics of American society are uncovered. And once again, the victimization of people of color, as well as workers, and women, suggest the following conclusions:

--the root cause of exploitation, racism, and sexism is structural violence (capitalism).

--physical violence is used to crush rebellion against class exploitation and racism.

--unrepresentative political institutions are dominated by the wealthy and powerful.

--dominant cultural stereotypes and specific narratives about society reinforce the economic system, the political system, and justify the police violence in the St. Louis area, Milwaukee and all around the United States.

Black Lives Matter

But between Ferguson and Milwaukee a new social movement has emerged, Black Lives Matter, led by young women and men representing over 60 organizations around the country. Recently they issued a powerful programmatic statement “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice, The Movement for Black Lives (POLICY.M4BL.org). It presented six demands, each with detailed recommendations:

-End the War on Black People

-Reparations

-Divest-Invest

-Economic Justice

-Community Control

-Political Power

These demands represent African Americans, Women, Workers, and all oppressed peoples. They address direct violence—Stop the Killing—and structural violence—Redistribute Wealth and Income, Political Power, and Opportunity for Human Development for All. The struggles continue.