Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (19 page)

Another signer, Ellen Du Bois, can be taken as typical of a large cohort of what have become the thoroughly politicized humanities. She is a professor of women's history at UCLA and a militant feminist. She is joined as a signer by other zealots whose academic work has been the elaboration of feminist themes. These include Gerda Lerner, Linda Gordon, Ruth Rosen, Sara Evans, Christine Stansell (Wilentz's wife), and Alice Kessler-Harris. Two months after the
Times
ad appeared, while the House of Representatives was pursuing its impeachment vote, a notice was posted on the Internet announcing that Du Bois would be a speaker (along with two other well-known leftists) at a "Reed College Symposium on the Joy of Struggle." The symposium was a presentation of the Reed College Multiculturalism Center and was co-sponsored by the Feminist Union, the Queer Alliance, Earth First, Amnesty at Reed, the Latino/a Student Association, and the Reed student activities office.

To be sure, not all the signers were ideologues, but the statement they signed reflects the long-standing political corruption of the American academy, and was itself a political deception. By massing four hundred historians "in defense of the Constitution," the organizers implied that these well-known liberal and left-wing academics were scholarly experts defending the document's original intent. Since when, however, had liberals and leftists become defenders of the doctrine of original intent? Were any of the signers on record as opposing the loose constructionism of the Warren Court? Were any of the scholars exercised when the Brennan majority inserted a nonexistent "right of privacy" into the Constitution to justify its decision in
Roe v. Wade
? Were any of them outspoken defenders of Judge Robert Bork — the leading theorist of "original intent" — when a coalition of political vigilantes set out to destroy his nomination to the Supreme Court, even soliciting his video store purchases to see if he had rented x-rated films? Not only was the answer to all these questions negative, but dozens of the same historians, including organizers Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Sean Wilentz, were "veterans of the politicized misuse of history" (as Ramesh Ponnuru put it in a
Nationl Review
article on the episode), having previously signed a tendentious "historians brief" to the Supreme Court supporting abortion.

Concern for the original intent of the Constitution apparently enters these academic hearts only when it can be deployed against Republicans and conservatives. This probably explained why the office address listed at the bottom of the historians' statement was the Washington address of People for the American Way, a national lobby for the political left.

Partisan political pronouncements by groups invoking the authority of a profession are treacherous exercises. They misrepresent what scholarship can do, such as deciding questions that are inherently controversial. More importantly, they cast a chill on academic discourse by suggesting there is a party line for the historical profession. When Jesse Lemisch, a notable left-wing historian, tried to organize a counter-statement favoring impeachment (over Clinton's wag-the-dog policy in the Gulf), he received vicious e-mails from his colleagues.

The kind of politicization reflected in these episodes is, in fact, a fairly recent development in academic life. Its origin can be traced to a famous battle at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) in I969. At that meeting, a "radical caucus" led by Staughton Lynd and Arthur Waskow attempted to have the organization pass an official resolution calling for American withdrawal from the Vietnam War and an end to the "repression" of the Black Panther Party. Opposition to the resolution was led by radical historian Eugene Genovese and by liberal historian H. Stuart Hughes. Four years earlier, Genovese had become a national cause celebre when he publicly declared his support for the Communist Vietcong. He nonetheless opposed the radical call for such a resolution as a "totalitarian" threat to the profession and to the intellectual standards on which it is based. Hughes, who had been a peace candidate for Congress, joined in asserting that any anti-war resolution would "politicize" the AHA and urging the members to reject it.

Hughes and Genovese narrowly won the battle, but eventually lost the war. The AHA joined other professional academic associations in becoming organizations controlled by the political left. A recent memoir by a distinguished academic scholar and administrator, Alvin Kernan, sums up the developments this way: "But while Marxism may have failed in Moscow, class conflict thrived on the American campus, where gender, race, and class politics increasingly drove academic debate. If the 1970s had been the time of radical theories, then the 1980s were the time when politics began increasingly to replace professionalism in the universities. Government lent powerful reinforcement to the new concept of university regulations and funding that favored social justice over knowledge or merit. Women and minorities could now openly use their subjects to argue for the purposes of their cause."
^*

The politicization has gone so far that a few years ago the philosopher Richard Rorty smugly applauded the fact that "The power base of the left in America is now in the universities since the trade unions have largely been killed off." As if to confirm this claim, a
Nation
editorial written by one of the signers of the historians' statement, boasted that "three members of the
Nation
family" have just been elected to head three powerful professional associations-the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and the Modern Language Association (MLA) — with a combined membership of fifty-four thousand academics.
^†

The president-elect of the AHA, Columbia professor Eric Foner, is indeed the scion of a family of well-known American communists, a die-hard proponent of the "innocence" of the Rosenberg spies, a sponsor of university events honoring Communist Party stalwarts Angela Davis and Herbert Aptheker, a lifelong member of the radical left and recently even an organizer of the secretaries' union at Columbia with an eye towards re-forging a 1930s-style Popular Front between radical intellectuals and organized labor. David Montgomery, the new president of the OAH, is described in the
Nation
as "a factory worker, union organizer and Communist militant in St. Paul in the Fifties. . . . Montgomery's ties to labor remain strong: He was active,in the Yale clerical workers' strike and other campus and union struggles." Edward Said, the new president of the lWLA, is a former member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) governing council and was the most prominent apologist in America for PLO terrorism until he fell out with Yassir Arafat over the Oslo peace accords, which Said regards as a "sellout" to Israeli imperialists.

That is the bad news. The good news is more modest. The historians' statement was not an official resolution of either the AHA or the OAH, and neither Montgomery nor Eric Foner signed it. When asked, Foner said he did not think it was appropriate for him to do so because of his position as head of an organization representing fifteen thousand members, many of whom might not agree with its sentiments. That was the right idea, but unfortunately he was unable to extend it to the issue at hand. Thus he did not think the volatile political statement by four hundred professors, invoking the authority of their profession, was itself inappropriate, even though almost all of them lacked competence in the subject.

The deeper problem revealed by this episode is the serious absence of intellectual diversity in university faculties. Such diversity would provide a check on the hubris of academic activists like Wilentz and his co-signers. The fact is that leftists in the university, through decades of political hiring and promotion, and through systematic intellectual intimidation, have virtually driven conservative thought from the halls of academe.

A call made to one of the handful of known conservatives allowed to teach a humanities subject at Princeton confirmed the following suspicion: in Sean Wilentz's history department not a single conservative can be found among its fifty-six faculty members. If Wilentz believes in the original intent of the Constitution to create a pluralistic society, that lack of diversity is something for Professor Wilentz to be more concerned about than the fact that House Republicans differ with his interpretation of constitutional issues.

As it happens, the hero of the lost battle for scholarly neutrality, Eugene Genovese, has formed a new organization, the American Historical Society, to take politics out of the profession. Already one thousand historians have joined. On the other hand, several signers of the historians' statement are already charter members, including Wilentz himself. If Genovese's organization is serious, it will eventually have to chasten politicians like Sean Wilentz and promote a scholarly distance from partisan line-ups. Even more importantly, it will have to press for the systematic hiring of professors with under-represented conservative viewpoints. This is a daunting task, but without such a commitment to intellectual diversity, the profession can hardly hope to restore its damaged credibility.

^*
Alvin Kernan,
In Plato's Cave
, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999

^†
Jon Weiner, "Scholars on the Left, "
Nation
, February 1, 1999.

H
IGHER EDUCATION TODAY is a good news-bad news story. The good news is that a university degree can provide a pass to all to the prodigious bounties of the American economy. The bad news is that the price of the pass can be the equivalent of a Ferrari, putting the average student into hock for a good chunk of his or her working life. As the price tag of a degree has gone up, moreover, the quality of the educational product has declined in a parallel arc. At universities that charge more than one hundred thousand dollars for a Bachelor of Arts degree, professors of English have taken to teaching courses on racism and imperialism, instead of writing and literature. Meanwhile, sociologists now discourse on the "social construction" of scientific truths of which they are as ignorant as their students. In liberal arts and social science courses generally, the discredited doctrines of Marx and his communist disciples abound. Meanwhile, under the gale of real world economic forces, the university is everywhere in the process of restructuring and redefining itself. Credentialed professors are more and more inaccessible to students, as more and more teaching chores are being transferred to less qualified graduate assistants whose labor cost is smaller. New corporate colleges and technical schools have become an educational growth industry in response to the declining significance of the academic degree.

The source of these developments is obviously complex, but a recent article in the prestigious academic journal
Social Text
offers testimony worth pondering. Couched as a personal memoir and written by one of the magazine's principal editors, "The Last Good Job in America" is a self-portrait of today's liberal arts professor as slacker-in-residence. Its author, Stanley Aronowitz, is one of the leading figures of the academic left. Aronowitz was a labor organizer in the 1960s who received his doctorate from a college extension program and was recruited to the Graduate Center of City University of New York (CUNY) by one of his 196os comrades already on the faculty.

City University is New York's publicly-funded higher-education opportunity for minorities and children of the working classes. Like other over-burdened educational institutions, it is in the process of academic "downsizing," replacing full professors like Aronowitz with less qualified and lower paid teaching assistants in an attempt to match revenues with costs. Twenty years ago, CUNY hired Aronowitz "because they believed I was a labor sociologist." In fact, as he admits in
Social Text
, this was just a scam: "First and foremost I'm a political intellectual. . . . [I] don't follow the . . . methodological rules of the discipline." After being hired as a sociologist, Aronowitz enrolled in the hottest new academic fad.and created the Center for Cultural Studies to escape the rigors of his professional discipline. "Cultural Studies" provided him with a broad umbrella under which to pursue his marxist politics and pass them on to his unsuspecting students.

As an editor of the fashionable left-wing journal
Social Text
and head of the Center for Cultural Studies, Aronowitz is more than just a professor. He is an academic star with a six-figure salary and a publishing resume to match. In today's politicized university, it is thoroughly in keeping with Aronowitz's elevated academic status that his chef d'oeuvre is a book called
Science As Power
, whose core thesis is the Stalinist proposition that science is an instrument of the ruling class. Of Aronowitz's book, a reviewer for the
Times Literary Supplement
said: "If the author knows much about the content or enterprise of science, he keeps the knowledge well hidden."

Non-leftist readers of Aronowitz could hardly have been surpprised last year when he and his fellow editors at
Social Text
were snookered by Alan Sokal. Sokal, a physicist, submitted a phony paper on quantum mechanics and postmodernism to demonstrate that the magazine would publish pure nonsense about science if the nonsense was politically correct. Although the Sokal article was an international scandal,
^*
Aronowitz's own university seems not to have noticed that its professor had been exposed as an intellectual fraud or. that, by his own admission, he has long since abandoned the discipline that he was hired to teach. Shortly after the publication of "The Last Good Job in America," Aronowitz was made "
Distinguished
Professor of Sociology" at CUNY.

The "last good job in America" turns out to be the job that Stanley Aronowitz has created for himself at the expense of New York taxpayers and the economically disadvantaged minorities who make up the CUNY Student body: "What I enjoy most is the ability to procrastinate and control my own work-time, especially its pace: taking a walk in the middle of the day, reading between the writing, listening to a CD or tape anytime I want, calling up a friend for a chat." It turns out that Aronowitz teaches only one two-hour course a week. This is a seminar — no surprise here — in Marxism. On Mondays and Wednesdays, Aronowitz does not even leave his house.