Nazi
Cleansing Of America’s Universities: Could It Happen Here?
By Reggie Dylan
14 Ocotber, 2006
Countercurrents.org
As
students were heading back to campus for the fall term, University of
Texas professor Robert Jensen compared a recent announcement by the
President of Iran—that “he wants to purge liberal and secular
teachers from Iranian universities”—to the attack on college
faculty in this country, pointing to the call by a number of politicians
in the past year for the firing of University of Colorado professor
Ward Churchill for an essay he wrote right after the 911 attacks.1 Could
it happen here? Could we see the widespread intellectual “cleansing”
of America’s universities? Could students and faculty witness
professors and colleagues silenced, dismissed, and hauled in front of
government hearings for teaching evolution as a fact, or questioning
the “official story” of U.S. history and its role in the
world “in a time of war”? This question conjures up images
of McCarthyism, intellectual life under Iran’s mullahs, or Nazi
Germany—but could it happen here?
A profound “culture
war” has been raging in this country coming off the political
and cultural turmoil and upsurge in this country and internationally
of the 1960s and ‘70s. On the campuses whole new fields of study—which
emerged to challenge the distorted official history taught in colleges
and universities—have come under fire themselves since the 1980s,
an expression of the U.S. ruling class’s assertion of its position
as unrivaled superpower in the world.
In the wake of 9/11 this
attack on the campuses took a leap. The warning by Bush’s press
secretary, Ari Fleischer, that people should “watch what they
say, watch what they do,” was soon followed by an incendiary report
by the self-appointed campus watchdog group the American Council of
Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) titled “Defending Civilization: How
Our Universities Are Failing America.” The ACTA report claimed
that “colleges and university faculty have been the weak link
in America’s response” to September 11th. “When a
nation’s intellectuals are unwilling to defend its civilization,
they give comfort to its adversaries.” Here the use of the phrase
“give comfort”—implying something “treasonous”
about the actions of the nation’s intellectuals—was coming
from a group started by Lynne Cheney, wife of the Vice President, and
Senator Joe Lieberman, and includes the governors of New York and Colorado
among others. This report compiled a list of more than 40 professors,
including the president of Wesleyan University, as examples of an unpatriotic
academy.2
David Horowitz has become
the self-described “battering ram” for the escalated assault
on the universities—and on critical thinking and dissent itself—which
has unfolded since then. Horowitz is a reactionary political operative
with close ties to Karl Rove and other forces grouped around the Bush
regime. Through his “Center for the Study of Popular Culture,”
his frontpagemag.com website, and endless publications, he oversees
a national operation that includes Students for Academic Freedom (SAF)
and other groups that organize right-wing students on the campuses,
not unlike Hitler’s brownshirts, to spy and inform on targeted
faculty. Horowitz’ book Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the
American Left (praised by former CIA Chief James Woolsey) gave encouragement,
direction, and political ammunition to Campus Watch and the pro-Israeli
David Project which launched attacks on Middle Eastern departments and
scholars at Columbia University and elsewhere in late 2004, accusing
them of intimidating students, being biased and anti-Semitic, and of
silencing students whose views differ from theirs.
Assault on Ward Churchill
This assault on progressive
and radical professors, and on dissent and critical thinking on the
campuses, rose to a whole new level with the attack on ethnic studies
professor Ward Churchill in February 2005. Churchill was head of the
Ethnic Studies Department of the University of Colorado (UC) at Boulder
when suddenly an essay he wrote after 9/11 was brought to light and
used to prevent him from speaking at Hamilton College in New York. He
became the target of a nationwide campaign by the right-wing noise machine
and Republican politicians to drive him out of the university. The CU
Boulder administration first launched an investigation to see if the
content of his essay warranted firing (or arrest!). Then, with public
advice from Horowitz, the attack was retooled, becoming an investigation
into Ward Churchill’s body of work in search of evidence of “research
misconduct.”
Same Witch-hunt—Different
Form
A faculty committee was formed
to provide a thin cover of legitimacy to the continuation of the same
witch-hunt in new form. By agreeing to participate in an investigation
illegitimate on its face, and in spite of the poisoned atmosphere surrounding
it, this faculty committee has done far greater damage to the academy
than any alleged research misconduct by Churchill they claim to have
found. Their finding of serious research misconduct—described
by a Boulder sociology professor that studied their report as “grotesque
exaggeration” 3 —has sown confusion, giving the appearance
of a neutral review by peers. This was quickly used by Interim CU Chancellor
DiStefano to announce his intention to fire Churchill.
Horowitz and ACTA didn’t
wait for the investigative committee’s findings to be made public
to unleash the next salvo in their offensive. In spring 2006, Horowitz
published the book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics
in America, branding as “terrorists, racists, and communists”
a list that includes some of the most distinguished scholars and public
intellectuals in the country. For their part ACTA published a Report
asking “How Many Ward Churchills?” with the answer, “Ward
Churchill is not only not alone—he is quite common.” Since
this report was released days before the Colorado investigative committee’s
announcement, ACTA wasn’t talking about the quality of Churchill’s
footnotes but his radical political critique.
The relentless drive to purge
the universities of radical and progressive faculty is at its heart
aimed at transforming the campuses from places where students learn
to think critically, including by subjecting the most important issues
in society to critical analysis, into sites of indoctrination instead.
As the Open Letter From Concerned Academics: Defend Dissent and Critical
Thinking states, “The Churchill case is…a concentrated example
of a well-orchestrated campaign launched in the name of ‘academic
freedom’ and ‘balance’ which in fact aims to purge
the universities of more radical thinkers and oppositional thought generally,
and to create a climate of intimidation. While the right-wing claim
that the universities are ‘left-wing dictatorships’ is specious
beyond belief, it is unfortunately true that the campus remains one
of the few surviving refuges of critical thinking and dissent in this
country. This is something to defend and strengthen.”4
Balance—A Straw
Man
Horowitz uses his Academic
Bill of Rights to manufacture a demand for left-right political “balance”
in order to create the conditions, including by whipping up a reactionary
social base, for purging university faculty of scholars and public intellectuals.
This reactionary campaign targets those who have arrived at radical
critiques of the present order and the official myths through subjecting
the dominant and official claims to reality to critical thinking.
In fact, balance has nothing
to do with the search for the truth. Yes, there needs to be ideological
ferment and the clash of contending ideas. But the object is to arrive
at a deeper understanding of reality—not to achieve “balance.”
Insisting on all ideas being given equal weight would be impossible
and wrong. Teaching astronomy and astrology? In a biology class, offering
completely non-scientific intelligent design creationism side-by-side
with evolution?
And as many scholars have
pointed out, to equate having a political view with a bias that prevents
critical thinking denies the existence of objective truth. For Horowitz
the appeal for “balance” is just a transition to silencing
any challenge to restoring the official myths about this country’s
origins, eliminating the reality of genocide, slavery, the theft of
land from Mexico, and its imperial conquest, domination, and exploitation
of whole parts of the world.
With powerful forces grouped
around the Bush regime pushing harder every day to break down the separation
of church and state with the aim of establishing a theocracy, this call
for “balance” in place of critical thinking and the search
for the truth serves that goal as well. According to Professor Dean
Saitta, in an editorial for the August ‘06 issue of Anthropology
Today, Florida’s version of Horowitz’s Academic Bill of
Rights “gives students the right to sue professors who don’t
‘respect’ their beliefs—for example, by teaching Darwinian
evolution to the exclusion of Biblical creation in science class.”5
Opposition Is Growing
In fact opposition to this
relentless and escalating attack on academia has been growing significantly
in recent months, with a concentrated focus now on opposing the attempt
to fire Ward Churchill. The Open Letter From Concerned Academics: Defend
Dissent and Critical Thinking has been mobilizing faculty around the
country to contact the CU administration and express their opposition
to the impending firing, to write about it for newspapers and professional
journals, and to speak about it publicly. And they have made many of
these writings available at their website (www.defendcriticalthinking.org).
Teachers for a Democratic Society (www.teachersfordemocracy.org)—formed
by faculty attacked in Horowitz’s book—features a statement
opposing the firing, with close to 500 faculty signatures. Articles
opposing the firing and condemning the attack on academia are appearing
in newspapers, online publications, and magazines, like the one in Anthropology
Today.
Significantly, a faculty
group at CU Boulder has formed in opposition to the attempt to fire
Ward Churchill and in defense of the Ethnic Studies Department. An Emergency
Summit took place at the University of Kansas in Lawrence at the end
of September under the title “The Latest Indian Wars: The 'War
on Terror' Targets Critical Thinking—Who’s Next, and How
Do We Fight Back?” And campus administrators are awakening to
efforts to bring control of the universities under the thumb of state
and federal legislatures—directly or indirectly, through control
of the process of accreditation.
These developments show the
basis as well as the urgent need for opposition to the assault on academia
to rise to a whole new level. The answer to the question “Could
this happen here?” is, YES.
But it could also be prevented,
and something much, much better brought into being. As an important
part of that, there is a need for political, ideological, and theoretical
debate and clarity around the importance not only of challenging the
direction the country as a whole is being driven toward, and the role
the universities should play in society at this time, but also the need
to fiercely defend, while deepening, an understanding of the scientific
approach to reality. This must go right up against the onslaught by
reactionaries gathered around Horowitz and ACTA, as well as by the Christian
fascists, who would impose their absolutist concepts of “Biblically
revealed truth” with all the horrors that means for humanity.
1. See “Iranian President’s
Attack on Academics Should Sound Familiar in the U.S.” by Robert
Jensen, www.dissidentvoice.org,
September 11, 2006.
2. “Lynne Cheney-Joe
Lieberman group Puts Out a Blacklist” by Roberto J. Gonzalez,
in the San Jose Mercury News, 12/13/01.
3. See Thomas Mayer, “The
Report on Ward Churchill,” available at www.defendcriticalthinking.org.
4. Read the Open Letter at
www.defendcriticalthinking.org.
5. Dean Saitta, “Higher
Education and the Dangerous Professor: Challenges for Anthropology,”
in Anthropology Today, August 2006.
Reggie Dylan is a contributing writer for Revolution
newspaper (revcom.us), focusing on issue of acadmic freedom.
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