Who said it?
![As outlined in the Project for a New American Century’s “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (2000), George Bush and his neoconservative supporters came to power seeking to establish political and military hegemony over the entire Middle East. Having already “liberated” Afghanistan and Iraq, they have now set their sights on Iran. In light of their numerous efforts to demonize Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, including mistranslating his comments on Israel and the holocaust in order to cast him as a total monster on par with Adolph Hitler (see Cole, 2006), we find ourselves bemused by their silence on his recent comments encouraging a purge of “liberal and secular” professors from Iranian universities (Associated Press, 2006). On this matter, at least, they are sympatico with the Iranian President.
Given the nature of the imperialist agenda spelled out in “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (2000), we should not be surprised that the neoconservatives would seek to demonize American academics as part of the broader “war on terror.” In the broadest terms, this report’s recommendations stem from PNAC’s recognition of the United States as
the world’s only superpower, combining preeminent military power, global technological leadership, and the world’s largest economy. Moreover, America stands at the head of a system of alliances, which includes the world’s other leading democratic powers. At present, the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible (p. i).
One of its key recommendations included the repositioning of U.S military forces to Southeast Europe and Southeast Asia. Strategically placed in the middle of those two regions of the globe, of course –if we “read between the lines”, is the Middle East, to which the report directs considerable attention. Identifying the “unresolved conflict with Iraq” as the “immediate justification” for a creating “a substantial American force presence in the Gulf”, PNAC also recognized that the need for the U.S. to assume “a more permanent role in Gulf regional security” transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein” (p. 14). Effecting this repositioning of American forces to the Middle East, along with its numerous other recommendations, the PNAC asserted, “must occur within the larger framework of U.S. national security strategy, military missions and defense budgets. The United States cannot simply declare a ‘strategic pause’ while experimenting with new technologies and operational concepts. . . . Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor” (p. 51 ). While this would seem to suggest that the PNAC acknowledged the necessity of patience in reaching its goals, other elements of the document communicate a far greater sense of urgency. “Today,” the report states,
the United States has an unprecedented strategic opportunity. It faces no immediate great-power challenge; it is blessed with wealthy, powerful and democratic allies in every part of the world; it is in the midst of the longest economic expansion in its history; and its political and economic principles are almost universally embraced. At no time in history has the international security order been as conducive to American interests and ideals. The challenge for the coming century is to preserve and enhance this “American peace.” (p. iv)
Writing for the British Broadcasting Corporation and, subsequently, Harper’s magazine, Greg Palast (2005) has revealed how the Bush administration began planning the invasion of Iraq and the disposition of its oil shortly after taking office if not before. We also know that Bush manipulated intelligence to justify the invasion on the grounds that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and was close to being able to develop nuclear weapons (see Sunday Times, 2005; and Pincus, 2005, p. A18). Meanwhile, Vice-President Dick Cheney set out to convince the American public that Saddam worked with al Quaeda to carry out the attacks on the World Trade Centers and Pentagon on 9-11 (see Milbank and Deane, 2003; Pincus, and Milbank, 2004; and MSNBC, 2004). Further, while Democrats and some Republicans have begun calling for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, Bush has told the American people that we will continue to occupy the country with our military until well after he leaves office in 2009 (CBS News, 2006). The occupation may last longer than that, coming closer to the “more permanent role in Gulf regional security” called for by the Project for a New American Century. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified on February 17, 2005 in Congress: “I can assure you that we have no intention at the present time of putting permanent bases in Iraq” (cited in Graham-Felsen, 2005). That testimony is contradicted however, by Global Security Watch’s report from March 23, 2004:
it was reported that ‘U.S. engineers are focusing on constructing 14 enduring bases,’ long-term encampments for the thousands of American troops expected to serve in Iraq for at least two years. The U.S. plans to operate from former Iraqi bases in Baghdad, Mosul, Taji, Balad, Kirkuk and in areas near Nasiriyah, near Tikrit, near Fallujah and between Irbil and Kirkuk... enhance airfields in Baghdad and Mosul...'” (cited in Zeese, 2006)
Furthermore, The Christian Science Monitor reported in April of 2006 that
the Pentagon would prefer to keep its bases in Iraq. It has already spent $1 billion or more on them, outfitting some with underground bunkers and other characteristics of long-term bases. Some U.S. bases in Iraq are huge, e.g., Camp Anaconda, north of Baghdad, occupies 15 square miles, boasts two swimming pools, a gym, a miniature-golf course, and a first-run movie theater. The $67.6 billion emergency bill to cover Iraq and Afghanistan military costs includes $348 million for further base construction. (ibid)
Taken in combination with the size of the new U.S. embassy (100 acres) still under construction, it would appear that Baghdad will serve as the center for PNAC’s planned U.S. domination of the Middle East for many years to come.
Scholarship in an Age of Compulsory Patriotism
University professors, along with members of the allegedly liberal media, have long been viewed as the worst purveyors of what neoconservatives call the “Vietnam syndrome.” One of the leading neoconservative intellectuals, Norman Podhoretz has defined this political malady as “the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force” (cited in Chomsky, 1995). Hawkish elements within conservative circles associate the “Vietnam syndrome” with university professors, of course, because what eventually became a populist movement to end the America’s imperialist aggression against Vietnam began on college campuses. To quote what has become a mantra among those who now seek to inoculate universities from the scourge, “the same people who ran anti-war demonstrations in the 60’s are now professors” (Capozzi, 2006). Members of the allegedly liberal media suffer similar attacks because, unlike too many in their field today, they made some effort to uphold the ethical standards of their profession. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, most reporters at least attempted take seriously the charges that journalism’s “first obligation is to the truth” (Kovach, B. and Rosenstiel, T., 2001), and its “first loyalty . . . to citizens” who need “accurate and reliable information . . . to function in a free society” (ibid). Vietnam was the first “televised war,” and journalists did not shy away from bringing the realities of war into the nation’s living rooms. When the Pentagon Papers proved that Lyndon B. Johnson had knowingly committed the U.S. to war under false pretenses, the media actually spent more time examining the evidence than it did trying to smear and discredit the source of that evidence as being traitorous and “unAmerican.” Journalists of that era still sought to maintain some degree of independence from those they covered in order to fulfill their professional missions as “independent monitors of power” (ibid), not stenographers of power.
While the Federal Communication Commission’s 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine that had required media outlets to present multiple perspectives on issues has proven to have allowed corporate interests to make major strides toward weakening the “Vietnam syndrome” in commercial media (see Randall, 2005; and McChesney, 2003), inoculating the universities has proven more difficult for them.
Long before the their media pundits on FoxNews made Ward Churchill their test-case for intellectual suppression and intimidation, however, the neo-conservative movement used the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) to exploit the nationalist public sentiments generated by 9-11 to launch a “Mohawk Valley Formula”–like campaign against dissident intellectuals. On November 11, 2001 ACTA Chairman and President (Jerry L. Martin and Anne D. Neal) posted their coauthored Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It. “In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks,” the report began,
Americans across the country responded with anger, patriotism, and support of military intervention. The polls have been nearly unanimous—92% in favor of military force even if casualties occur—and citizens have rallied behind the President wholeheartedly.
Not so in academe. Even as many institutions enhanced security and many students exhibited American flags, professors across the country sponsored teach-ins that typically ranged from moral equivocation to explicit condemnations of America.
While America’s elected officials from both parties and media commentators from across the spectrum condemned the attacks and followed the President in calling evil by its rightful name, many faculty demurred. Some refused to make judgments. Many invoked tolerance and diversity as antidotes to evil. Some even pointed accusatory fingers, not at the terrorists, but at America itself. (2001, p. 1)
Not surprisingly then, Defending Civilization originated the jingoist phrase “Blame America First” (p. 2) so commonly used today by the chief agents of neoconservative media power (e.g., Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter and others) to demonize anyone who dares criticize the neoconservative and neoliberal policies of the Bush administration.
Martin and Neal would have us believe that they, unlike Iran’s Ahmadinejad, did not intend to threaten academic freedom with their report. They present Defending Civilization as an innocent and honest expression of their disagreement with those scholars who reacted to 9-11 as a moment to reflect on the question why foreign agents could possibly hate America so badly as to commit such vicious acts of terror. For them, George W. Bush had provided America with the answer to that question in his September 20th address to a joint session of Congress. For Bush, as well as for Martin and Neal, 9-11 resulted from the terrorist’s hatred of “what we see right here in this chamber—a democratically elected government. Their (the terrorists’) leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other” (Bush, 2001).
Ironically, of course, we know the Bush administration was never “democratically elected,” and we could just as easily question the number of Republicans in Congress who also benefited from the vote-rigging in the 2000 and 2004 elections that put and kept Bush in office (see Miller, 2005; and Kennedy, 2006). We also know that the enactment and enforcement of the Patriot Act (I and II) and other measures taken in the name of “Homeland Security” have eroded the very things – the “freedom of speech” and the “freedom to assemble” – that Bush alleged to have motivated the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centers (see Cole, 2003; Cole, 2005; ACLU, 2005; and Democracy Now!, 2005). Further, we know that Bush and the neoconservatives have compromised our “freedom of religion” by manipulating and courting religious extremists from among the fundamentalist Christian community to secure a populist electoral base for their otherwise decidedly anti-populist, plutocratic, and imperialist agenda (see Scherer, 2005; and Olsen, 2005). But the point here is that the none-too-subtle message communicated by Martin and Neal goes beyond disagreeing with those who would challenge Bush’s portrayal of America as the innocent victim of some totally irrational hate-crime. Their message goes beyond disagreeing with those who would point to the arrogant hypocrisy of an American President’s proclamation that “If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they (sic) have become outlaws and murderers, themselves” (cited in Martin and Neal, 2001, p. 2).
If Martin and Neal genuinely wanted to express disagreement, they would have articulated some basis for that disagreement, some evidence to support their side in a debate. They would have to present evidence that refutes the historical record of the American government’s involvement in the killing of “innocents” that dates back to the genocidal policies effected in the name of what public school textbooks continue to whitewash as “Westward Expansion” or “Manifest Destiny.” As in a court of law, they would have to build a case to disprove the claim that, by Bush’s own standards, the U.S. government has long been an outlaw and murderer. This would not be an easy task. On one hand, the U.S. government has an established record of sponsoring “outlaws and killers.” For example, in the early 1980s, the man whom Bush appointed as the first U.S. ambassador to post-invasion Iraq and who now heads the government’s intelligence community, John Negroponte, helped coordinate Death Squads in Honduras and El Salvador (see Democracy Now!, 2004; and Buzzflash, 2004). He also aided the same neoconservatives now at the helm in supporting the terrorist operations of the Contras in Nicaragua with funding from illegal arms sales to Iran, who was then fighting a war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, to whom they were also selling arms – including weapons of mass destruction (i.e., chemical and biological weapons). On the other hand, the U.S government has also killed tens and hundreds of thousands of “innocents” through its own direct military actions in North America, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Panama, and, most recently, Iraq.
Moreover, Martin and Neal offer no evidence that would discredit the factual record that supports those of us who, if we suspend all doubts and simply accept the official story on the events of 9-11, recognize that the foreign policies of the U.S. government have given many peoples a variety of reasons to “hate us.” If an international court of law were to apply the U.S. government’s definition of terrorism – “the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature...through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear” (U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, 1997) – to the government’s own militarist actions over the course of its entire history, that court of law would win multiple convictions. For this reason alone, the U.S. has consistently refused to subject itself to the rule of any international court, just as it has historically refused to become a full signatory to the United Nations’ Genocide Conventions (see Gabbard, 2006). Martin and Neal have no interest in debate, however. That’s not the function of ACTA; it’s not a debate club.
ACTA (originally called the National Alumni Forum) was established in 1995 by Lynne V. Cheney, wife of the current Vice-President, after she left her chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1986–1993) where Martin and Neal had served under her. ACTA functions as one of a plethora of overlapping, right-wing think tanks, institutes, and foundations created since the early 1970s that coordinate with the corporate-created stable of right-wing media celebrities to advance a neofascist agenda stemming from the convergence of the neoliberal and neoconservative projects. As David Harvey (2005) explains, neoliberalism constitutes a project aimed at the restoration of class power, and neoconservatism has functioned to militarize that project. Apart from the previously discussed Project for a New American Century, which seeks to overcome the Vietnam syndrome in using military force to effect a global American empire, this neofascist agenda’s domestic goals include eliminating all New Deal legislation and programs from the 1930s as well as most of the civil rights laws created since the 1960s. In order to overcome the Vietnam syndrome’s “sickly inhibitions against the use of military force” (cited in Chomsky, 1995), neofascism demands the suppression of any remaining vestige of critical, democratic, and egalitarian (i.e., liberal) thought and speech on America’s campuses. This would appear to contradict Martin and Neal’s statement that
This is not an argument for limiting free speech on college campuses. The robust exchange of ideas is essential to a free society. But academic freedom does not mean freedom from criticism. If some faculty are inclined to criticize America, it seems only reasonable to insist that colleges and universities transmit our history and heritage to the next generation so that students can decide for themselves. (2001, p. 8)
Notice, however, how they frame the issue. They counterpose “criticisms of America” to “our history and heritage” that needs to be transmitted “to the next generation so that students can decide for themselves.” So, we have a duality. On the one hand, there are “criticisms of America” that are not part of “our history and heritage,” implying that such criticisms are not as true or, at least, not worthy of being transmitted to “the next generation.” On the other hand, there is “our history and heritage” that is true and essential to students’ learning. Lynne Cheney (2001) struck the same chord a month earlier in an address to the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture where she shared her thoughts “about our schools and about what we should be teaching our children in the wake of the September 11th attacks on our country. . . . At a time of national crisis, she said:
I think it is particularly apparent that we need to encourage the study of our past. Our children and grandchildren--indeed, all of us--need to know the ideas and ideals on which our nation has been built. We need to understand how fortunate we are to live in freedom. We need to understand that living in liberty is such a precious thing that generations of men and women have been willing to sacrifice everything for it. We need to know, in a war, exactly what is at stake. (Cheney, 2001)
Among the many things she says students should learn, Cheney emphasized the importance of letting students know “how hard the establishment of this country was,” citing Benjamin Rush’s account of the “‘labors and fears and sorrows and sleepless nights’ they all (the signers of the Declaration of Independence) suffered, and of ‘the pensive and awful silence’ as they stepped forward to sign what was believed by many of them to be their death warrants.” But would Ms. Cheney also have our students read Rush’s thoughts on education? In “Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic” (1786), Dr. Rush, the “father of American psychiatry”, stated that “the principle of patriotism stands in need of the reinforcement of prejudice, and it is well known that our strongest prejudices in favor of our country are formed in the first one and twenty years of our lives. . . . Our schools of learning,” he argued, “by producing one general and uniform system of education, will render the mass of the people more homogeneous and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government.” The quotes below come from the same document:
In order more effectually to secure to our youth the advantages of a religious education, it is necessary to impose upon them the doctrines and discipline of a particular church. Man is naturally an ungovernable animal, and observations on particular societies and countries will teach us that when we add the restraints of ecclesiastical to those of domestic and civil government, we produce in him the highest degrees of order and virtue. . . .
Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it. . . .
In the education of youth, let the authority of our masters be as absolute as possible. The government of schools like the government of private families should be arbitrary, that it may not be severe. By this mode of education, we prepare our youth for the subordination of laws and thereby qualify them for becoming good citizens of the republic. I am satisfied that the most useful citizens have been formed from those youth who have never known or felt their own wills till they were one and twenty years of age, and I have often thought that society owes a great deal of its order and happiness to the deficiencies of parental government being supplied by those habits of obedience and subordination which are contracted at schools. . . .
From the observations that have been made it is plain that I consider it as possible to convert men into republican machines. This must be done if we expect them to perform their parts properly in the great machine of the government of the state. (ibid)
Further, Cheney sorely laments the fact that less than 25% of our students “knew that James Madison was the “father of the Constitution.” Would she also find it lamentable if students didn’t learn that, in deliberating on writing that document, Madison asserted that “our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation, putting in place checks and balances in order to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” She might also find it lamentable that today’s students know so little of one of the patron saints of today’s neoliberal/neoconservative movement, Alexander Hamilton. In Hamilton’s words,
all communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are rich and well born; the other, the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second; and as they cannot receive any advantage by change, they will therefore maintain good government. (cited in Parenti, 2006).
We might ask Cheney, as well as Martin and Neal, whether these direct quotations from our “founding fathers” constitute “criticisms” or whether they stand as part of our “history and heritage?” Where do they fit within the “ideas and ideals on which our nation has been built?” Should we include or exclude them from our curriculum? While we should agree with Martin and Neal that “academic freedom does not mean freedom from criticism,” we must wonder what criticism they would level against us for presenting them to our students? Would their criticism be based on Rush’s assertion that “the principle of patriotism stands in need of the reinforcement of prejudice,” particularly, to borrow from Cheney “at a time of national crisis?” What purpose would such “prejudice” serve? Would it satisfactorily foster the “habits of obedience and subordination” demanded of “republican machines?”
In its Statement of Professional Ethics (1966), the American Association of University Professors declare that, “as teachers, professors encourage the free pursuit of learning in their students. They hold before them the best scholarly and ethical standards of their discipline.” In meeting those standards,
professors, guided by a deep conviction of the worth and dignity of the advancement of knowledge, recognize the special responsibilities placed upon them. Their primary responsibility to their subject is to seek and to state the truth as they see it. To this end professors devote their energies to developing and improving their scholarly competence. They accept the obligation to exercise critical self-discipline and judgment in using, extending, and transmitting knowledge. They practice intellectual honesty. Although professors may follow subsidiary interests, these interests must never seriously hamper or compromise their freedom of inquiry. (ibid)
Based on this statement, cultivating the prejudices demanded by patriotism would violate scholars’ professional ethics and their commitment to the “critical self-discipline and judgment” demanded by intellectual honesty in seeking and stating the truth as they see it. Herein lies the unstated criticism that Neal and Martin direct at their targets. They provide no scholarly grounds for criticizing, for example, Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whom they cite as having said “[i]magine the real suffering and grief of people in other countries. The best way to begin a war on terrorism might be to look in the mirror” (2001, p. 12). Therefore, they leave us to conclude that the basis for their “criticism” of Gusterson’s remark stems not from any scholarly failures on his part, but from him failure to satisfactorily promote the patriotic prejudices demanded of “republican machines.”
If Martin and Neal expressed their views on the comments made by scholars in the wake of 9-11 as private individuals, we could easily dismiss them with little concern. That, however, is not the case. They speak not as private citizens, but as the Chairman and President of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) and its “Defense of Civilization Fund.” As stated previously, ACTA represents just one of a network of various neoliberal/neoconservative think tanks, institutes, and foundations that is so vast that some refer to it as “the labyrinth” (National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy, 1997). Those dedicated to inoculating universities from the Vietnam Syndrome include not only ACTA, but also Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch, and David Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture which supports the Orwellian-named Students for Academic Freedom, among others. The Labyrinth also includes the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the Manhattan Institute, and a litany of over 200 other such right-wing neofascist organizations dedicated to restoring unbridled corporate control over government and society. Among their many functions, these groups provide “talking points” to such right-wing media pundits and authors as Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter, as well as FoxNews. Members of these various groups also occupy key positions with the Bush administration itself. Karl Zinsmeister, for example, who has just replaced Karl Rove as Bush’s top domestic policy advisor, came from the American Enterprise Institute.
The Labyrinth receives its funding from four primary sources, known as the “four sisters” because their philanthropy overlaps across so many of the same organizations. They include the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and foundations of Richard Mellon Scaife. These same four sisters that fund ACTA and its Defense of Civilization Fund, also fund another of groups that has figured prominently in this analysis of 9-11 as a “New Pearl Harbor” designed to liberate corporate militarism from the “Vietnam syndrome.” Namely, they fund the Project for a New American Century.
Conclusion: Horowitz & The Academic Bill of Rights
Before resigning her post as president of the University of Colorado, Elizabeth Hoffman expressed fears of a “new McCarthyism that endangers academic freedom.” These fears stem from pressures mounted by Colorado Governor Bill Owens and others for Hoffman to fire Professor Ward Churchill for having drawn an analogy between those persons working at the World Trade Center whose jobs contributed to the reproduction of impoverishing and oppressive conditions throughout the world to Adolph Eichman’s complicity in the genocide of Nazi Germany.
For her part, Hoffman deserves praise for not bowing to those pressures, particularly given the timing of the attacks on Churchill. Though Churchill’s “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” originally appeared on September 11, 2001, the attacks against him did not begin until early 2005, a time when many state legislatures (California, Massachusetts, Ohio, Indiana, Washington, Florida, Maryland, Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia, Oklahoma, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and as many as seven others) began considering passage of “Academic Bill of Rights” legislation modeled on a proposal developed by David Horowitz’s reactionary group Students for Academic Freedom. The assault on Churchill was timed to soften up those states’ legislatures to receive those bills. (At the time of this writing, Georgia has already passed its version of the bill and it virtually mirrors the one developed by Horowitz).
Though framed in terms of a student’s right to hear a variety of opinions while not being punished for adhering to their own views, these legislative proposals amount to a thinly veiled affirmative action program for neo-conservative ideologues whose work, until now, has been confined to corporate-funded foundations and think tanks where they are paid to generate ideas and reports in keeping with the views of those who sign their paychecks. Playing on our sensitivities to promote diversity, the neo-conservative movement shamelessly exploits students, with the help of David Horowitz and others, to get their foot in the door of universities, which they consider to be the bastion of “anti-business ideology.” Now that they’ve got public schools chasing test scores and have intimidated the mainstream media into submission, they’ve set their sights on the academy.
If universities can be accused of holding a liberal bias, that’s because enlightenment liberalism, from which the modern university was born, was committed to the pursuit of truth, regardless of how uncomfortable the pursuit of that truth made those in power. This explains why neo-conservatives want to extend their growing hegemony over institutions of higher learning—to eliminate the discomfort we (well, some of us) bring to the powerful.
In academia, we have always tried to protect that pursuit of truth through various peer review processes. Though they do not work perfectly, peer academic review processes for publications and grants have worked reasonably well to ensure that the theories or arguments submitted adhered to professional standards. This has always been especially important within the natural and physical sciences where it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for academics to blatantly falsify (i.e., lie about) their findings. (Yes, there are cases [e.g., eugenics] when those processes did not work very well.) In the social sciences things may be a bit more complicated, but—particularly in the mainstream humanities, social sciences, and professional schools—the right wing would be hard pressed to claim that their professional journals reflect leftist ideology.
While the Academic Bill of Rights defines the mission of the university as “the pursuit of truth, the discovery of new knowledge through scholarship and research, the study and reasoned criticism of intellectual and cultural traditions, the teaching and general development of students to help them become creative individuals and productive citizens of a pluralistic democracy, and the transmission of knowledge and learning to a society at large,” we need to recognize that the neo-conservatives behind this deception don’t play by these rules. If their regard for academic standards even comes close to being as low as their regard for journalistic standards (e.g., Limbaugh, Coulter, Savage, O’Reilly, Hannity, Liddy, and most recently Gannon/ Guckert), we should not allow our tendency to value difference get the best of us. Again, their training within the vast network of foundations, think tanks, and institutes has not prepared them for a world traditionally bound to the objective pursuit of truth. The Bradley Foundation was paying Charles Murray $100,000 a year while he was writing The Bell Curve, which basically argued that the ongoing poverty among African Americans and Latinos can be attributed to their genetically determined intellectual deficits. This argument had a policy implication. Since their poverty was argued to be biologically determined, we should stop spending money on social programs aimed at eliminating poverty among minorities, includ- ing affirmative action.
On this last count, we must recognize the irony that those groups who oppose affirmative action programs for women and minorities now want one for themselves. The first principle of the ABR declares, “All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise and, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives. No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs.” How would Fox News respond should the public demand the same standard be applied to journalism by the Federal Communications Commission?
Of course, all of this begs a more fundamental question. If conservative/neo-conservative “scholars” share the same commitment to the pursuit of truth as other university faculty, why would they need an affirmative action program to begin with? The answer is obvious. They don’t share that commitment. Just ask members of today’s scientific community who must now compete with corporate-funded research in shaping state and federal policies on issues as great as global warming. Furthermore, how seriously can we take the ABR’s belief that “academic freedom and intellectual diversity are values indispensable to the American university,” when they demonstrate so little commitment to those same values in neo-conservative media outlets such as Fox News and the Washington Times?
We also find ourselves perched on the edge of a descent back to the Middle Ages and the struggle between faith and reason. While reason may appear to be losing the political battles in the world beyond academe, placing democracy at risk, we can’t afford to lose this battle. While Ward Churchill’s spontaneous thoughts after the tragic events of 9/11 may have left himself (and us) vulnerable to these attacks, we should not be so naïve as to see those attacks against Churchill as isolated and disconnected from these “Student Bills of Rights” currently under consideration in many states.
At the same time, we must remember that we can never require any student to believe anything that we say in class or anything we have them read for class. All we can ask of them is to demonstrate that they understand the arguments and evidence presented to them. Ultimately, we are not responsible for their consciousness. They are. It’s our job to provoke thought, to have students question conventional wisdom (e.g., the sun does not revolve around the earth). In kind, it’s the job of students, in their reactions to us, to provoke our own thought and challenge our conventional wis- doms without fear of recrimination on our part. The intended result of this back and forth process (Socratic dialogue) is intellectual growth. That’s our mission. We’d better get prepared to defend it vigorously because it’s under assault. See you on the front line.
References
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