Contrary Notions

by Michael Parenti

  On these same campuses one can find ROTC programs that train future military officers, programs that are difficult to justify by any normal academic standard. The campuses are open to recruiters from various corporations, the CIA, and the armed forces. In 1993, an advertisement appeared in student newspapers across the nation promoting “student programs and career opportunities” with the CIA. Students “could be eligible for a CIA internship and tuition assistance” and would “get hands-on experience” working with CIA “professionals.” The advertisement did not explain how full-time students could get “hands-on experience” as undercover agents. Would it be by reporting on professors and fellow students who voiced iconoclastic views?

  Without any apparent sense of irony, many of the faculty engaged in these worldly pursuits argue that a university should be a place apart from worldly and partisan interests, a temple of knowledge. In reality, many universities have direct investments in corporate America in the form of substantial stock portfolios. By purchase and persuasion, our institutions of higher learning are wedded to institutions of higher earning. In this respect, universities differ little from other social institutions such as the media, the arts, the church, schools, and various professions.26

  Most universities and colleges hardly qualify as hotbeds of dissident thought. The more likely product is a mild but pervasive ideological orthodoxy. College is a place where fundamental criticisms are not totally unknown but are just in scarce supply. It is also a place where students, out of necessity or choice, mortgage their future to corporate America.27

  Ideological repression in academia is as old as the nation itself. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most colleges were governed by prominent churchmen and wealthy merchants and landowners who believed it their duty to ensure faculty acceptance of theological preachments. In the early 1800s, trustees at northern colleges prohibited their faculties from engaging in critical discussions of slavery; abolitionism was a taboo subject. At southern colleges, faculty devoted much of their intellectual energies to justifying slavery and injecting racial supremacist notions into various parts of the curriculum.28 By the 1870s and 1880s, Darwinism was the great bugaboo in higher education. Presidents of nine prominent eastern colleges went on record as prohibiting the teaching of evolutionary theory.

  By the 1880s, prominent businessmen came to dominate the boards of trustees of most institutions of higher learning (as they still do). Seldom hesitant to impose ideological controls, they fired faculty members who expressed heretical ideas on and off campus, who attended Populist Party conventions, championed anti-monopoly views, supported free silver, opposed U.S. military interventions abroad, or defended the rights of labor leaders and socialists.29 Among the hundreds dismissed over the years were such notable scholars as George Steele, Richard Ely, Edward Bemis, James Allen Smith, Henry Wade Rogers, Thorstein Veblen, E. A. Ross, Paul Baran, and Scott Nearing.

  The first president of Cornell, Andrew White, observed that while he believed “in freedom from authoritarianism of every kind, this freedom did not, however, extend to Marxists, anarchists, and other radical disturbers of the social order.” In 1908, White’s contemporary, Harvard president Charles William Elliot, expressed relief that higher education rested safely in the hands of the “public-spirited, business or professional man,” away from the dangerous “class influences . . . exerted by farmers as a class, or trade unionists as a class.”30

  During World War I, university officials such as Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, explicitly forbade faculty from criticizing the war, arguing that such heresy was no longer tolerable, for in times of war wrongheadedness was sedition and folly was treason. A leading historian, Charles Beard, was grilled by the Columbia trustees, who were concerned that his views might “inculcate disrespect for American institutions.” In disgust, Beard resigned from his teaching position, declaring that the trustees and Nicholas Murray Butler sought “to drive out or humiliate or terrorize every man who held progressive, liberal, or unconventional views on political matters.”31

  Academia has seldom been receptive to persons of anticapitalist persuasion. Even during the radical days of the 1930s there were relatively few socialists or communists on college teaching staffs. Repression reached a heightened intensity during the McCarthyite witchhunts of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The rooting out of communists, Marxists, and other radicals was sometimes conducted by congressional and state legislative committees or by college administrators themselves.32 Among the victims were those who had a past or present association with the Communist Party or one of its affiliated organizations.

  One study during the McCarthy period found that, though never called before any investigative body, many faculty felt a need to prove their loyalty. Almost any criticism of the existing politico-economic order invited the suspicion that one might be harboring “communist tendencies.” Those who refused to sign loyalty oaths were dismissed outright.33 The relatively few academics who denounced the anticommunist witchhunts usually did so from an anticommunist premise, arguing that “innocent” (non-communist) people were being silenced or hounded out of their professions. The implication was that the inquisition was not wrong, just clumsy and overdone, that it was all right to deny Americans their constitutional rights if they were “guilty,” that is, really communists. The idea that Reds had as much right as anyone else to teach was openly entertained by only a few brave souls.

  During the Vietnam era, things heated up. Faced with student demonstrations, sit-ins, and other disruptions, university authorities responded with a combination of liberalizing and repressive measures. They dropped course-distribution requirements in some instances and abolished parietal rules and other paternalistic restrictions on student dormitory life. Black studies and women’s studies were established, as were a number of experimental social science programs that offered more “relevant” community-oriented courses and innovative teaching methods.

  Along with the concessions, university authorities launched a repressive counteroffensive. Student activists were singled out for disciplinary actions. Campus police forces were expanded and used to attack demonstrations, as were off-campus police and, when necessary, the National Guard. Some students were arrested and expelled. At places like Kent State and Jackson State, students were shot and killed. Radicalized faculty lost their jobs, and some, including me, were assaulted by police during campus confrontations.34

  The purging of faculty continued through the 1970s and 1980s. Angela Davis, a communist, was let go by UCLA. Marlene Dixon, a Marxist-feminist sociologist, was fired from the University of Chicago and then from McGill University for her political activism. Bruce Franklin, a noted Melville scholar and tenured associate professor at Stanford, was fired for “inciting” students to demonstrate. Franklin later received an offer from the University of Colorado that was quashed by its board of regents, who based their decision on a packet of information supplied by the FBI that included false rumors, bogus letters, and unfavorable news articles.35

  A graduate student at the University of California, Mario Savio, who won national prominence in the 1960s as an antiwar activist and leader of the “Free Speech Movement” on the Berkeley campus, served four months in prison for one protest activity and subsequently was denied admission into various doctoral programs in physics despite having a master’s degree in the subject and a sterling academic record. He spent the rest of his life unable to gain a regular appointment in higher education. After many difficult years, Savio died in 1996 at the age of 53. His last job was as a poorly paid adjunct at Sonoma State University.36

  At the University of Washington, Seattle, Kenneth Dolbeare’s attempts to build a truly pluralistic political science department with a mix of conservative, mainstream, and radical faculty, including women and people of color, came under fire from the administration. After a protracted struggle, Dolbeare departed. All the progressive untenured members of the department were let go
, as were progressive-minded members of other departments, including philosophy and economics.37

  Similar purges occurred across the nation. Within a three-year period in the early seventies at Dartmouth College, all but one of a dozen progressive faculty, who used to lunch together, were dismissed. In 1987, four professors at the New England School of Law were fired, despite solid endorsements by their colleagues. All four were involved in the Critical Legal Studies movement, a group that studied how the law acted as an instrument of the rich and powerful.

  To a long list of the purged I can add my own name. In 1972, at the University of Vermont, I was denied renewal by the board of trustees despite my publications in leading scholarly journals, and despite the support of my students, my entire department, the faculty senate, the council of deans, the provost and the president. Unable to fault my teaching or scholarship, the trustees decided in a 15-to-4 vote that my antiwar activities constituted “unprofessional conduct.”

  A dozen or so years later, I went to Brooklyn College as a one-year visiting professor with the understanding that a regular position would be given to the political science department for which I could later apply. My chairman’s feeling was that given my qualifications, I would no doubt be the leading candidate. The administration, however, decided against it. A short time afterward, a City University chemistry professor, John Lombardi, happened to be talking to a Brooklyn College vice president at a faculty gathering. Lombardi, who was familiar with my work, asked him why I had been let go. “We found out about him,” said the vice president, who went on to indicate that the administration had discovered things about my political background that they did not like.38

  One could add many more instances from just about every discipline, including political science, economics, anthropology, literature, history, sociology, psychology and even physics, mathematics, chemistry, and musicology. Whole departments and even whole schools and colleges have been eradicated for taking the road less traveled. At University of California, Berkeley, the entire school of criminology was abolished because many of its faculty had developed a class analysis of crime and criminal enforcement. Those who taught a more orthodox criminology were given appointments in other departments. Only the radicals were let go.

  Even more frequent than the firings are the nonhirings. Highly qualified social scientists, who were also known progressives, have been turned down for positions at institutions too numerous to mention. The pattern became so pronounced at the University of Texas, Austin, in the mid-1970s, that graduate students staged a protest and charged the university with politically discriminatory hiring practices.

  In 1981, the political science department of Virginia Commonwealth University invited me to become chairperson, but the decision was overruled by the dean, who announced that it was unacceptable to have a “leftist” as head of a department. She did not explain why the same rule did not hold for a rightist or centrist or feminist (she claimed to be the latter). It is evident that academia speaks with two voices. One loudly proclaims professional performance as the reigning standard. The other whispers almost inaudibly that if you cross the parameters of permissible opinion, your scholarly and pedagogical performance are of no account.

  Scholars of an anticapitalist, anti-imperialist bent are regularly discriminated against in the distribution of research grants and scholarships. After writing The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills was abruptly cut off from foundation funding. To this day, radical academics are rarely considered for positions within their professional associations and are regularly passed over for prestigious lecture invitations, grants, and appointments to editorial boards of the more influential professional journals. Faculty are still advised to think twice about voicing controversial politico-economic perspectives. One historian writes that, when a young instructor and a group of her colleagues decided to offer “Marxism” as part of a social history course, she was warned by an older faculty member, “an ordinarily calm and rational gentleman,” that it would be “unwise for their department to list a course on Marxism in the catalogue.”39

  An instructor at Seton Hill College in Pennsylvania confided to a leftist student that he subscribed to a number of left publications and was well-versed in Marxist theory but the administration refused to let him teach it. The student wrote to an associate of mine, “I’ve had classes with this prof for two years and never suspected.” On some campuses, administrative officials have monitored classes, questioned the political content of books and films, and screened the lists of guest speakers—all in the name of scholarly objectivity and balance. In some places, however, trustees and administrators readily pay out huge sums for guest lectures by committed, highly partisan, right-wing ideologues.

  The guardians of academic orthodoxy never admit that some of their decisions about hiring and firing faculty might be politically motivated. Instead they will say the candidate has not published enough articles. Or if enough, the articles are not in conventionally acceptable academic journals. Or if in acceptable journals, they are still wanting in quality and originality, or show too narrow or too diffuse a development. Seemingly objective criteria can be applied in endlessly elastic ways.

  John Womack, one of the very few Marxists ever to obtain tenure at an elite university, and who became chair of the history department at Harvard, ascribes his survival to the fact that he was dealing with relatively obscure topics: “Had I been a bright young student in Russian history and taken positions perpendicular to American policy . . . I think my [academic] elders would have thought that I had a second-rate mind. Which is what you say when you disagree with somebody. You can’t say, ‘I disagree with the person politically.’ You say, ‘It’s clear he has a second-rate mind.’”40

  College administrators and department heads, whatever their scholarly output, must be ready to serve as conservative enforcers. The administration at the University of Vermont brought in someone to chair the philosophy department who, by a nine to one vote, the department had turned down as insufficiently qualified. He proceeded to purge all the nontenured and politically progressive members who had voted against him. Over the objections of the political science department of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, the chancellor gave tenure to Walter Jones, not a particularly distinguished member of the profession. Jones was then made vice-chancellor, from which position he denied tenure to a radical political scientist, overruling a unanimous recommendation of the school’s promotion and tenure committee.

  Professional criteria proved especially elastic for those émigrés from communist countries brought to the United States under the hidden sponsorship of national security agencies and immediately accorded choice university positions without meeting minimal academic standards. Consider the case of Soviet émigré and concert pianist Vladimir Feltsman, who, after receiving a first-rate, free musical education in the Soviet Union, defected to the United States in 1986 with the help of the U.S. embassy. In short time Feltsman gave a White House concert, was hailed by President Reagan as a “moral hero,” and was set up in a posh Manhattan apartment. He then was appointed to the State University of New York at New Paltz, where he taught one class a week for twice the salary of a top-ranking professor, and was awarded an endowed chair and a distinguished fellowship. SUNY, New Paltz, itself was a poorly funded school with low salaries, heavy teaching loads, and inadequate services for students.

  Mainstream academics treat their politically safe brands of teaching and research as the only ones that qualify as genuine scholarship. Such was the notion used to deny Samuel Bowles tenure at Harvard. Since Marxist economics is not really scholarly, it was argued, Bowles was neither a real scholar nor an authentic economist. Thus centrist ideologues have purged scholarly dissidents under the guise of protecting rather than violating academic standards. The decision seriously split the economics department and caused Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontif to quit Harvard in disgust.

  Radical academics have been rejected because their poli
tical commitments supposedly disallow them from objective scholarship. In fact, much of the best scholarship comes from politically committed scholars. One goal of any teacher should be to introduce students to bodies of information and analysis that have been systematically ignored or suppressed—a task that usually is better performed by iconoclasts than by those who accept existing institutional and class arrangements as the finished order of things. So it has been feminists and African-American researchers who, in their partisan urgency, have revealed the previously unexamined sexist and racist presumptions and gaps of conventional scholarship.41 Likewise, it is leftist intellectuals (including some who are female or nonwhite) who have produced the challenging scholarship about popular struggle, political economy, and class power, subjects remaining largely untouched by centrists and conservatives. 42 In sum, a dissenting ideology can awaken us to things regularly overlooked by conventional scholarship.

  Orthodox ideological strictures are applied also to a teacher’s outside political activity. At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, an instructor of political science, Ted Hayes, an anticapitalist, was denied a contract renewal because he was judged to have “outside political commitments” that made it impossible for him to be objective. Two of the senior faculty who voted against him were state committee members of the Republican Party in Wisconsin.43 There was no question as to whether their outside political commitments interfered with their objectivity as teachers or with the judgments they made about colleagues.