Evron Kirkpatrick, who served as director of the American Political Science Association for more than twenty-five years, proudly enumerated the many political scientists who occupied public office, worked in electoral campaigns or served officialdom in various capacities.44 His comments evoked no outcry from his mainstream colleagues on behalf of scientific detachment. It seemed there was nothing wrong with political activism as long as one played a “sound role in government” (his words) rather than a dissenting role against it. Establishment academics like Kirkpatrick never explain how they supposedly avoid injecting politics into their science while so assiduously injecting their science into politics.
How neutral in their writings and teachings were such scholars as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Jeane Kirkpatrick? Despite being proponents of American industrial-military policies at home and abroad—or because of it—they enjoyed meteoric academic careers and subsequently were selected to occupy prominent policymaking positions within conservative administrations in Washington. Outspoken political advocacy, then, is not a hindrance to one’s career as long as one advocates the right things.
It is a rare radical scholar who has not encountered difficulties when seeking employment or tenure, regardless of his or her qualifications. The relatively few progressive dissidents who manage to get tenure sometimes discover that their lot is one of isolation within their own departments. They endure numerous slights and are seldom consulted about policy matters. And they are not likely to be appointed to committees dealing with curriculum, hiring, and tenure, even when such assignments would be a normal part of their responsibilities.
At the University of Washington, Philip Meranto, a tenured–anticapitalist political scientist, was frozen out of all departmental decisions and department social life. Graduate students were advised not to take his classes. He was given the most cramped faculty office despite his senior rank and was subjected to verbal harassment from university police. He eventually resigned.
After serving for many years as a tenured senior faculty member of Queens College, CUNY, noted author and political analyst John Gerassi was moved to voice his displeasure at the treatment he had been accorded, including the case of my own candidacy. In a letter to his department colleagues, he wrote:
I have never been asked to participate in anything meaningful in this department. For example, I have never been asked to be an adviser to graduates or undergraduates or [anyone else] . . . . Now since my colleagues tell me they like me, and I assume that they are not saying that just to humor me, the reason must be political. Indeed, I remember years ago when I informed my colleagues that a friend of mine who was nationally known, in fact internationally respected, Michael Parenti, who would be a great draw because of his reputation, was available for a job (at a time when the department was actually trying to fill a position), I was quickly informed that he would not be considered no matter what, and I was told in effect to stay out of department business.45
Gerassi concluded on an ironic note: “If nothing else, may I respectfully request that while all decisions may be made by a small group of my colleagues behind closed doors, do, please, let us know what those decisions are.”
The only radical to receive tenure in the department of philosophy in the 1970s at the University of Vermont was Willard Miller, a popular teacher, published author, participant in scholarly conferences, and political activist. Though he prevailed in his battle for tenure, Miller was made to pay for it. He was denied promotion and remained an assistant professor for thirty-three years with a salary frozen for a long time at below the entry level of the lowest-paid instructor. He was passed over for sabbatical for thirteen years and finally received a one-semester leave only after threatening court action. And he was perpetually passed over for reduced teaching load, a consideration granted to his departmental colleagues on a rotation basis.46 He died in 2005, still an assistant professor.
Campus activism did not pass away with the Vietnam era. Student protests have arisen against the nuclear arms race, the university’s corporate investments in an apartheid-ruled South Africa, U.S. involvement in Central America (including the U.S. invasion of Panama), and the U.S. bombing and invasion of Iraq. There have been demonstrations in support of affirmative action, women’s studies, and multiculturalism, and protests against racism, sexism, and Eurocentric biases in the curriculum. But such actions are rarely inspired by anything taught in the classroom, and often despite what is taught.
Facing a campus that is not nearly as reactionary as they would wish, ultra-conservatives rail about how academia is permeated with doctrinaire, “politically correct” leftists. This is not surprising since they describe as “leftist” anyone to the left of themselves, including mainstream centrists. Their diatribes usually are little more than attacks upon socio-political views they find intolerable and want eradicated from college curricula. Through all this, one seldom actually hears from the “politically correct” people who supposedly dominate the universe of discourse.
It was the novelist Saul Bellow who denigrated preliterate societies by asking, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?” When criticized for his Eurocentrism, Bellow fired back in the nation’s most prominent newspaper: “We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists.”47 Writers like Bellow, who enjoy every acclaim from conventional literary quarters and plum appointments at leading universities, and who criticize anyone they wish, apparently expect to remain above criticism themselves. And when opinions arise that challenge their unexamined biases, they have the major media through which they can reach wide audiences to complain about being unjustly muted.
Networks of well-financed, right-wing campus groups coordinate conservative activities at schools around the nation, and fund over one hundred conservative campus publications, reaching more than a million students. Such undertakings are well financed by the Scaife Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and other wealthy donors. The nearly complete lack of a similar largesse for progressive groups further belies the notion that political communication in academia is dominated by left-wingers.
In addition, we witness the growing corporate arrogation of institutional functions, and increasing dependence on private funding, all of which militates against anything resembling a radical predominance. The university’s conservative board of trustees dishes out extravagant salaries to top administrators along with millions of dollars in luxury cars, luxury dwellings, and other hidden perks for themselves and university officers.48 Meanwhile student fees are being dramatically increased, services slashed, and the numbers of low-paid and heavily exploited adjunct teachers (as opposed to fulltime professors) has increased considerably. No university is under leftist rule. The majority of students are from privileged backgrounds, careerist in their concerns, and lacking in the most basic information regarding the politico-economic realities in this country and abroad. As for the faculty, the majority are of mainstream or otherwise conventionally centrist political orientation. In the social sciences there are many more Bill Clinton Democrats than George Bush Republicans. In the business and engineering schools, and maybe also law and medicine, there sometimes are more conservatives. Conservatives seize upon the relative shortage of conservative faculty as proof of deliberate discrimination. This is an odd argument coming from them, Steven Lubet points out, since conservatives usually dismiss the scarcity of women or minorities in a workforce or student body as simply the absence of qualified applicants. That is not discrimination, they insist, it is self-selection. “Conservatives abandon these arguments however when it comes to their own prospects in academe. Then the relative scarcity of Republican professors is widely asserted as proof of willful prejudice.” Lubet continues:
Beyond the ivy walls there are many professions that are dominated by Republicans. You will find very few Democrats (and still fewer outright liberals) among the ranks of high-level
corporate executives, military officers or football coaches. Yet no one complains about these imbalances, and conservatives will no doubt explain that the seeming disparities are merely the result of market forces.
They are probably right. It is entirely rational for conservatives to flock to jobs that reward competition, aggression and victory at the expense of others. So it should not be surprising that liberals gravitate to professions—such as academics, journalism, social work and the arts—that emphasize inquiry, objectivity and the free exchange of ideas. After all, teachers at all levels—from nursery school to graduate school—tend to be Democrats. Surely there cannot be a conspiracy to deny conservatives employment on kindergarten playgrounds.49
For years mainstream academics scorned antiwar radicals and Marxists of every stripe. Now, ironically, some of these same centrists find themselves attacked by the emboldened student ultra-conservatives who complain that exposure to liberal and “leftist” ideas deprives them of their right to academic freedom and ideological diversity. What they really are protesting is their first encounter with ideological diversity, their first exposure to a critical perspective other than the one they regularly embrace. Conservative students grumble about being denied their First Amendment rights by occasionally being required to read leftist scholars. “Where are the readings by Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and Bill O’Reilly?” complained one.50 They register these complaints with college administrators, trustees, and outside conservative organizations. Accusations of partisanship hurled by the student reactionaries are themselves intensely partisan, being leveled against those who question, but never against those who reinforce, conservative orthodoxy. Thus the campus headhunters act as self-appointed censors while themselves claiming to be victims of censorship.
In recent years, the underpaid adjunct teaching staff and heavily indebted student body have found still fewer opportunities for exploratory studies and iconoclastic views. The world around us faces a growing economic inequality and a potentially catastrophic environmental crisis. Yet the predominant intellectual product in academia remains largely bereft of critical engagements with society’s compelling issues. Not everything written by mainstream scholars serves the powers that be, but very little of it challenges such powers. While orthodoxy no longer goes uncontested, it still rules. Scholarly inquiry may strive to be neutral but it is never confected in a neutral universe of discourse. It is always subjected to institutional and material constraints that shape the way it is produced, funded, distributed, and acknowledged. Money speaks louder than footnotes.
NOTES
1. New York Times, 9 May 2006.
2. Mark Dowie, “A Teflon Correspondent,” Nation, 7 January 2002.
3. New York Times, 6 September 2005; and see. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, documentary by Robert Greenwald, 2004.
4. Quoted in Nation, 10 January 2000.
5. See Ben Bagdikian, The New Media Monopoly (Beacon Press, 2004).
6. Commission on Freedom of the Press, quoted in Robert Cirino, Don’t Blame the People (Vintage, 1972). 47.
7. San Francisco Chronicle, 12 July and 14 October 2004; New York Times, 31 March 2003 and 4 May 2004.
8. As an example of this conservative media critic, see bully-boy Fred Barnes, “Is the Mainstream Media Fair and Balanced?” Imprimis, August 2006.
9. New York Times, 5 April 1966.
10. See Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (Seven Stories, 1998)
11. New York Times, 21 October 1997.
12. For further discussion of the left, right and center labels, see herein selection 21, “Left, Right, and the ‘Extreme Moderates.’”
13. Quoted in Amy Goodman and David Goodman, “The War on Truth,” http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/889, 20 September 2006.
14. For further discussion of this herein, see selection 31, “The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia.”
15. Report by MediaMatters, http://mediamatters.org, 15 February 2006.
16. BBC World Service report, 11 December 1997.
17. Charlie Rose Show, NPR, 22 January 1998.
18. General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), World Trade Organization (WTO).
19. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (Free Press, 1960 [1921]), 81.
20. Alvin W. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (Basic Books, 1970).
21. The dominant scientific paradigm is established presumably on the basis of thorough testing and is accepted because it has been used many times with apparent success. “Paradigm change” refers to momentous shifts in basic models of conception and investigation, for instance, the shift from Newtonian physics to Einstein’s theory of relativity. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962).
22. See selection 6, “The Stolen Presidential Elections.”
23. See Kenneth Boulding, “Learning and Reality-Testing Process in the International System,” International Affairs, v. 21 (1967).
24. For a fuller exposition of this, see my Democracy for the Few, 8th ed. (Wadsworth/Thomson, 2007).
25. William James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in his Essays in Pragmatism (Hafner, 1948), 13.
26. For a fuller discussion of this point, see herein selection 27, “Monopoly Culture and Social Legitimacy.”
27. For an early critique, see Thorstein Veblen’s classic: The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (B.W. Huebsch, 1918). On who dominates the university and who is served by it, see David N. Smith, Who Rules the Universities? (Monthly Review Press, 1974) John Trumpbour (ed.), How Harvard Rules: Reason in the Service of Empire (South End Press, 1989); and Geoffry D. White and Flannery Hauck, Campus Inc.(Prometheus, 2000). That the university is an extension of the ideological conformity found in primary and secondary schools is suggested by such works as Joel Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Beacon Press, 1972).
28. Donald Tewksbury, The Founding of American Colleges and Universities Before the Civil War (Archon Press, 1965).
29. Richard Hofstadter and Walter Metzger, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (Columbia University Press, 1955).
30. The White and Elliot quotations are from Smith, Who Rules the Universities?, 85–86 and 88.
31. Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith, American Higher Education, vol. 2 (University of Chicago Press, 1961), 883–892. See also Scott Nearing, The Making of an American Radical: A Political Autobiography (Harper & Row, 1972).
32. See the discussion in Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower (Oxford University Press, 1986); and in regard to a specific discipline, see David Price, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Duke University Press, 2004).
33. Paul Lasersfeld and Wagner Thielens Jr., The Academic Mind (Free Press, 1958), 52–53 and passim; also Robert MacIver, Academic Freedom in Our Time (Columbia University Press, 1955).
34. For details, see my “Struggles in Academe, A Personal Account,” in Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths (City Lights Books, 1996), 235–252.
35. Angela Davis, If They Come in the Morning (New American Library, 1971); Marlene Dixon, Things Which Are Done in Secret (Black Rose Books, 1976); Philip Meranto and Matthew Lippman, Guarding the Ivory Tower: Repression and Rebellion in Higher Education (Lucha Publications, 1985), chapter 5.
36. San Francisco Chronicle, 8 December 1996.
37. Meranto and Lippman, Guarding the Ivory Tower, chapter 4.
38. This exchange was reported to me by Lombardi.
39. Ellen Schrecker, “Academic Freedom,” in Cariag Kaplan and Ellen Schrecker (eds.), Regulating the Intellectuals (Praeger, 1983).
40. Womack quoted in Washington Post, 1 January 1983.
41. Florence Howe and Paul Lanter, The Impact of Women’s Studies on the Cam
pus and the Disciplines (National Institute of Education, 1980); Alan Colon, “Critical Issues in Black Studies: A Selective Analysis,” Journal of Negro Education, 53, (December 1984), 274–281; Carols Brossard, “Classifying Black Studies Programs,” Journal of Negro Education, 53 (November 1984), 282–290.
42. Bertell Ollman and Edward Vernoff (eds.), The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses (McGraw Hill, 1982); and my article “Political Science Fiction,” in Parenti, Dirty Truths, 221–233.
43. Ted Hayes, conversation with me, July 1979.
44. Evron Kirkpatrick, comments in PS (publication of the American Political Science Association), Summer 1981, 597.
45. John Gerassi, correspondence to his department, 15May 1994, made available to me by Gerassi.
46. Willard Miller interviewed by me, 11 July 1994.
47. Saul Bellow, op-ed, New York Times, 10 March 1994.
48. San Francisco Chronicle, 2 June 2006.
49. San Francisco Chronicle, 2 December 2004.
50. Oneida Meranto, “The Third Wave of McCarthyism: Co-opting the Language of Inclusivity.” New Political Science, 27 June 2005, 221.
II.
STEALING OUR BIRTHRIGHT
6 THE STOLEN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
In one of the closest contests in U.S. history, the 2000 presidential election between Democratic Vice-President Al Gore and Republican governor of Texas George W. Bush (Bush Jr.), the final outcome hinged on how the vote went in Florida. Independent investigations in that state revealed serious irregularities directed mostly against ethnic minorities and low-income residents who usually voted heavily Democratic. Some 36,000 newly registered voters were turned away because their names had never been added to the voter rolls by Florida’s secretary of state Kathleen Harris. By virtue of the office she held, Harris presided over the state’s election process while serving as an active member of Bush Jr.’s statewide campaign committee. Other voters were turned away because they were declared—almost always incorrectly—“convicted felons.” In several Democratic precincts, state officials closed the polls early, leaving lines of would-be voters stranded.
Contrary Notions Page 6