<>
The right’s assault on the
academy: An interview with Robert
Jensen
posted on Counterpunch,
July 5, 2005.
by Bob Libal
A version of the following interview with Robert
Jensen,
journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of
The
Heart of Whiteness and Citizens
of the Empire, originally appeared in the June 2005 Issue,
an independent
progressive magazine published in Austin, TX (http://www.issueonline.org/files/09_issue_june_05.pdf).
BL: David Horowitz was on campus a few weeks ago
promoting his bill of academic rights (http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/)
and his version of free speech. I was
wondering if you could comment on efforts to promote these academic
“bills of
rights” and what the effect could be on the academy.
RJ: Actually if you took the principles in that
bill of
rights and applied them uniformly across the campus, it would probably
be very
beneficial to the institution. It would
be healthy to ask, “Are there orthodoxies in place that are routinely
not
challenged by the curriculum and the faculty? Are there orthodoxies in
place
that students are punished for trying to challenge?”
<>If you took that question seriously, the first place that
you would look is the business school. You’d look at the places where
basically
a centrist to right orthodoxy is in place.
The most grotesque example is the business school where
corporate
capitalism is taught as if it were the only way to organize an economy. It’s a massive propaganda campaign.
What’s going on today is the targeting of faculty
with
certain points of view to try to create a climate of fear that will
turn the
university into nothing but an ideological factory, which it almost
already is. That’s what this is all about.
It is a
political intervention; there are no principles involved.
BL: Do you think efforts by Horowitz and others who have
formed the “Discover the Network” online database (http://discoverthenetwork.org/)
covering
the left, are in a similar vein? For instance that network describes
you and
other progressive and radical academics and activists as “anti-American
leftists” and “totalitarian radicals.”
RJ: [Discover the Network] is a political project. One has to analyze what is the project and
what is the source of the potential coercion of the project. And, [the left] has to be a little more
precise in this.
<>For instance, I think calling this McCarthyism is
inaccurate,
for several reasons. First of all, to
label
the second red scare of the 20th century “McCarthyism” is to
demonize one individual. There was a
consistent attack on the left from the late 40s through the 60s that
wasn’t perpetrated
just by Joe McCarthy. Harry Truman and Democrats also participated in
it. So, I avoid the term McCarthyism.
Second, that attack on the left in the 1940s and
1950s involved
the imposition of government power directly through various agencies of
the
state -- House committee hearings, FBI involvement, criminal
prosecutions, and
such things -- which put direct pressure on universities and the
entertainment
industry to fire and blacklist people.
That’s state power.
<>David Horowitz is not petitioning anyone in the government
to
directly suppress the speech. He’s smart
to not call for faculty to be fired; he knows that that won’t play in
the U.S.
at this
point with a large enough public to make it politically effective. So it’s not McCarthyism in that sense. It’s not intended to bring state power down
on anyone. It’s a political intervention,
not a legal one. And he has a right to
do it.
And, of course, I have a right to say the Discover
the
Network website and the argument implicit in it is literally incoherent
and
laughable. It has no principled or
logical application of terms; it’s just ridiculous.
The appropriate response is to answer it and
explain why it’s silly to have a chart of the left that links Katie
Couric and
Mohammed Atta.
<>Here’s what I think is at the core of this: At a time when
conservative political forces control the legislative, executive and
judicial
branches of the government, the right-wingers are trying to neutralize
two
institutions where there is some minimal commitment to free and open
inquiry --
the media and university system. They’re
trying to shut those down. It’s a logic of total control that is so
common in
political movements that have an authoritarian bent like the
reactionary right
has.
<>
But they also know there is a deeper commitment to free
speech and academic freedom in the culture today than there was in 1950. Those concepts have deepened and enriched
American society, so that even among ordinary people who 50 years ago
would
have been happy to hang communists, there is an appreciation of the
importance
of these concepts. So, [the right] is
approaching them in a way that is different than in the 19-teens or
1950s, but
with the same goal -- to shut down any space for free and open inquiry
that could
lead to critique of dominant institutions.
BL: There’s a political movement to instill a
climate of
fear amongst radical or progressive faculty…
<>RJ: Or even liberal faculty at this point.
<>
We should remember that part of the reason that Horowitz’s argument
is attractive to people is that there is a kernel of truth to it. The university is, in terms of the political
spectrum today in the United States,
disproportionately liberal -- not
radical, but liberal in a certain limited sense. If you look at things
like
support for gay rights, abortion rights, support for the Democratic
Party --
markers of a tepid liberalism -- most any state university is likely to
have a
faculty that is more liberal than the general population. So, we should
acknowledge that compared to lots of other institutions in society, the
media
and universities are disproportionately liberal in certain ways. But
they are
also centrist and reactionary in very important ways, in how they
support the
basic distribution of power and resources in the society.
BL: That’s what you see in things like the
business school
being institutions that support the status quo.
But, you would never see someone like Horowitz saying we need to
be
hiring more left-leaning economists.
<>RJ: That’s the lie of the whole project -- this whole
notion
of balance. Horowitz and others are not really interested in balance
across the
whole curriculum. Also, balance is a useless term in academics, when
you’re
talking about intellectual life. You
can’t balance all positions. Some positions have been presumptively
excluded
from the conversation because of the weight of the evidence and
development of
theory in a field. For example, you don’t let flat earth people teach
geography, you don’t let people who believe in the earth-centered solar
system
teach astrophysics. There is a process by which knowledge goes forward.
BL: It seems that there is shift from this
“culture of
fear” towards actual legislation that has been proposed to rein in
Middle
Eastern Studies departments to make them more “balanced.”
<>RJ: Area studies programs in general were set up to serve U.S.
hegemony,
to train people to go run the world. But some of those programs shifted
to
become places of critical inquiry, and the dominant institutions don’t
like
that. People with power don’t like that
something
they set up to support the dominant interpretation of the world has
become now
a site of struggle.
<>
It’s not that [these professors] shouldn’t be
scrutinized. Everybody should be
scrutinized. But, if you’re going to evaluate every word that Joseph
Massad
(Columbia University professor who has come under fire for his defense
of the Palestinian
right to return) ever said in a classroom, send someone over to the
business school,
and evaluate everything they say. And
what will you find? You’ll find a much
more horrendous ideological conformity.
But that’s not of interest to people.
<>
So Middle Eastern Studies become the focus of scrutiny, and
they become the warning to everybody else in area studies to shut up
and sit
down, or you’ll lose your funding, you’ll lose your professors. So it’s
all
about a demonstration effect.
<>
That’s what the attack on Ward Churchill (the radical University of Colorado professor who has been
investigated by the university for a post-9/11 article) is about. That’s what Joseph Massad is about. You don’t need to bust everybody; you just
need to scare them. It’s the same principle that an authoritarian
government
might apply to a resistance movement: You don’t have to kill them all,
you just
have to hang a few of them every now and then when you find them, and
hang them
up from the lamppost to make sure everyone knows what is happening. That’s what is going on.
BL: Could you
speak on how you feel the academy should respond to these political
creations
of climates of fear?
<>RJ: Well, I think university administrations should
reject
an ad hoc examination of one program or one professor.
And if they’re going to engage in this there
should be some systematic process under faculty control. This ad hoc
style of investigation
is ludicrous. It’s a response to
political pressure. If there is a
problem and the problem is systematic, then it should be dealt with
systematically. Administrators should
rigorously defend the concept of academic freedom, not just for
self-interested
reasons, but by articulating the value of it to the whole society. If
there are
claims that classrooms are inappropriately politicized, then we should
evaluate
what type of problems there are, and if there is a problem we should go
about
trying to solve it a way that is grounded in academic freedom and due
process.
Bob Libal is a student/youth organizer for
Grassroots
Leadership’s Not With Our Money! campaign. He can be reached at bob@notwithourmoney.org.
-----------------------------
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the
University of Texas at Austin, board member of the Third Coast Activist
Resource Center (http://thirdcoastactivist.org),
and the author of The Heart of Whiteness:
Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege
and Citizens
of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City
Lights
Books). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
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