Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (20 page)

During the week of non-activity that his
Social Text
article reviews, Monday and Wednesday are the days devoted to writing a piece for the
Nation
on "the future of the left," and of course the article for
Social Text
on what a good job he has — and the pay is not too bad either. Of course, Aronowitz discloses this coyly, positioning himself as a social victim: "I earn more by some five thousand dollars a year than an auto worker who puts in a sixty-hour week." The last time I checked, an auto worker made forty dollars an hour, which factors out to twenty-four hundred dollars a week (not including overtime) or over 120,000 dollars a year — and one can be sure the auto worker does not make cars only two hours a week for only nine months out of the year.

For nearly three decades, Aronowitz and other academic leftists have been escaping the reality of their failed revolution in America's streets during the 1960s by colonizing the American university, subverting and debasing its curriculum. In the course of this self-absorbed intellectual destruction, they have abused the educational aspirations of unsuspecting students, poor and well-fed alike. And even while this equal opportunity exploitation goes on, they never lose the ability to see themselves as the victims of vast conspiracies of the political right: "We know that the charges against us — that university teaching is a scam, that much research is not 'useful,' that scholarship is hopelessly privileged — emanate from a Right that wants us to put our noses to the grindstone just like everybody else." And why not?

The Gucci marxists of the tenured left are certainly not lacking in chutzpah. The conclusion to Aronowitz's memoir is, naturally, a call to arms, but phrased in the form of a reproof to his comrades for not advancing their struggle militantly enough: "We have not celebrated the idea of
thinking
as a full-time activity and the importance of producing what the system terms 'useless' knowledge. Most of all, we have not conducted a struggle for universalizing the self-managed time some of us still enjoy." Loafers of the world unite!

^*
The article and subsequent controversy are reported in Alan Sokal and Jean Briemont,
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998).

T
HE LOUISIANA DEMAGOGUE HUEY LONG was once asked whether he thought fascism could ever come to America. His answer was "Yeah, but it'll come calling itself anti-fascism." America is not close to such a future, but it is hard not to recall Huey Long's observation in connection with an episode that occurred recently at Columbia University.

The occasion for this episode was a conference at Columbia organized by a conservative group called Accuracy in Academia. The title of the conference was "A Place at the Table: Conservative Ideas in Higher Education," and its purpose was to highlight the lack of intellectual diversity in the politicized academic environment.

Among the announced speakers were two university trustees, Ward Connerly and Candace DeRussy, and the author Dinesh D'Souza, whose book
Illiberal Education
was one of the first to draw attention to political correctness in academic life.

The ceremonies were scheduled to begin with a Friday evening dinner, addressed by Connerly, who is currently heading a national civil rights campaign to end racial preferences. Connerly was coming off an electoral victory in Washington, which had become the 159 second state after California to ban such preferences. According to Accuracy in Academia president Dan Flynn, who wrote a report on the event, a hundred and forty students and professors attended the dinner, which was held in the East Room of Columbia's Faculty House.

These were not the only people in attendance, however. The mere presence of someone like Ward Connerly, expressing ideas the campus left does not want to hear, was enough to rouse a hundred raucous radicals into action at the conference site. They threw up a picket line outside the dinner and hurled obscenities and racial epithets at those entering Faculty House. Bear in mind that these same students, like Columbia itself, had previously welcomed such rabid anti-Semites and racial demagogues as Nation of Islam spokesman Khalid Muhammad and rap star Professor Griff, and that Columbia's history department had honored unrepentant communists like Herbert Aptheker and Angela Davis.

Columbia not only welcomes such race-haters, but pays them handsomely out of student funds to propagate their bigotry. By contrast, the conservative conference organized by Accuracy in Academia featured no rabble rousers, no hate-agendas, and actually paid the university a fee of eleven thousand dollars to hold its event on campus and showcase Connerly speaking in behalf of a single standard for all Americans and against racism in all its manifestations.

In a healthy academic environment, a university administration might be expected to respond to the outrage that took place at Columbia by disciplining the students who abused the free speech privileges of others, who hurled racial epithets at those they disagreed with, and who posed a threat to public safety. But these days such thoughts are far from the minds of university administrators whose profiles, as Peter Collier once observed, are a cross between Saul Alinsky and Neville Chamberlain.

In fact, the decision Columbia president George Rupp made the first night of the conference was exactly the opposite. Rupp is the chairman of the Association of American Universities, and his solution to the problem created by the demonstrators was to ban those students who had registered for the conference and whose only offense was their desire to hear the speakers, from attending the sessions the following day. As security guards were placed at the entrance to Columbia's Faculty House, its director, John Hogan, piously explained that the action was wholly consistent with free speech because only the audience and not the speakers were subject to the order. It was a nice distinction: you can speak, but nobody will be allowed to listen.

With their event effectively closed down by the university, the organizers decided to move the conference to neighboring Morningside Park. But the Ivy League mob followed them. The first speaker of the day, Dinesh D'Souza, was shouted down by chants of "Ha! Ha! You're Outside/We Don't Want Your Racist Lies." (It was a pure libel against D'Souza, an Indian immigrant.) Demonstrators held up signs that said ACCESS DENIED, WE WIN: RACISTS NOT ALLOWED AT COLUMBIA and THERE'S NO PLACE AT THE TABLE FOR HATE, which shows just how out of touch the protesters were with their own reality. But then, so was the Columbia administration. An official brochure tells visitors that "Columbia University prides itself on being a community committed to free and open discourse and to tolerance of differing views." Orwell could not have constructed it better.

A distressing aspect of the Columbia incident was the absence of almost any public commentary on the event from civil libertarians, from public officials, or from the nation's press. Imagine the uproar if Randall Terry and his Operation Rescue squads had surrounded a campus abortion clinic, blocked its entrance, and attempted to harass and intimidate those who entered, and the President of an Ivy League school had ordered his security forces to block the entrance to the clinic, while a college official explained that no one was interfering with anyone's right to perform an abortion, just barring those who wanted one from entering.

Judging by the results of their actions, the demonstrators knew what they were doing. The attack was intended to strike fear into the hearts of the student community, and to further marginalize the ideas of conservatives in the academic world. These goals were effectively accomplished. One student who registered for the event, but decided not to attend, explained to the organizers that "I did not attend the conference for a number of reasons, the most important being that I did not feel it would be good for my academic future and safety."

Elsewhere, similar intimidations have produced similar results. Among the public at large, those who support the civil rights initiatives that Ward Connerly has promoted are in the overwhelming majority, but support for Connerly's initiatives on college campuses has been muffled. While 55 percent of Californians voted to end racial preferences in the state two years ago, the faculty Senate of the University of California at Berkeley lined up 152-2 in support of such discrimination. Does anyone imagine that fear of collegial ostracism did not play a large role in this otherwise unfathomable ratio?

The incipient fascism that erupted at Columbia did not spring
de novo
from the heads of a few campus idiots. It is a logical consequence of decades of university pandering to intellectual terrorists and campus criminals who regularly assault property, persons, and reputations, and almost always get what they want. In the last thirty years, under the pressures of the left, campuses have moved a long way down the road of ends justifying means. If the cause is perceived to be just, it is all right to ruin reputations with loose charges of racism or sexual harassment or even rape to achieve it.

If the goal is racial equality, it is all right to discriminate. If "progressive" ideas are the wave of the future, it's okay to silence anyone who disagrees.

This brown-shirt activism is supported intellectually by the spread of anti-liberal ideas in university curricula. The most powerful intellectual influences in the academy derive from the intellectual traditions of marxism and European fascism. Identity politics, coupled with fashionable Nietzschean clichés about the will to power, form the core of current ideological fashions among campus radicals. But what are these postmodernist and multicultural trends but the fascist politics of the
Volk
that swept German and Italian universities in the 1930s? The intellectual left of the 1990s owes more to Mussolini than to Marx.

A schism has even developed within the left over these issues between the identity racialists and "postmodern" irrationalists on the one hand, and an older generation of "neo-Enlightenment" leftists who have been bravely defending class analysis and — mirable dictu — reason itself. The most prominent of these critics are Alan Sokal, Todd Gitlin, Eric Hobsbawm, and Michael Tomasky. They are a beleaguered force, balding Cassandras crying in the wilderness amidst the fiercer and more numerous passions of the radical young. In the ideological war zone, as the Columbia outrage shows, the new identity politics rules. And identity politics, based on racial and gender categories, and on nihilistic assumptions that power is all, culminate in a posture in which the rules of civility and democratic process, not to mention the principles of academic freedom, are dismissed as so much social mystification. Objectivity, reason, color-neutrality, and truth are illusions that obstruct the coming social redemption. This is the stuff that totalitarian dreams are made of.

In an ironic way, and despite the continental provenance of much of its worldview, identity radicalism also incorporates a profound element of American mischief. At its heart is an American individualism — solipsistic, arrogant, community-be-damned,
le monde c'est moi
— run amok. The intellectual currents of identity politics began to blossom during the "Me Decade" of the 1970s, so it should hardly be surprising if they give expression to the desires of a conquering, devouring American Ego unrestrained by any social contract. Me, me, my, my-my rights, my pain, my rage
uber alles
.

So blinded are these campus bands of the self-righteous and the self-absorbed, they do not even notice the cognitive dissonance when a bunch of over-privileged, under-disciplined white guys hurl racial epithets at a Ward Connerly-in origin a poor black from the segregated South. And all in the name of promoting social justice for people of color. Huey Long would have approved; George Orwell would have understood.

T
HE STORY OF RIGOBERTA MENCHU, a Quiche Mayan from Guatemala, whose autobiography catapulted her to international fame, won her the Nobel peace prize, and made her an international emblem of the dispossessed indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere and their oppression by European conquerors, has now been exposed as a political fraud, a tissue of lies, one of the greatest academic hoaxes of the twentieth century.

During the last decade, Rigoberta Menchu had become a leading icon of university culture. In one of the more celebrated "breakthroughs" of the multicultural left, a demonstration of left-wing faculty and students at Stanford University led by the Reverend Jesse Jackson had chanted "Hey, hey, ho, ho, western culture's got to go!" The target of the chant was Stanford's required curriculum in Western Civilization. University officials quickly caved before the demonstrators, and the course title was changed simply to "CIV," removing the offensive identification with the West. Works by "Third World" (mainly marxist) authors previously "excluded" were now introduced into the canon of great books as required reading. Chief among these was an autobiography by an indigenous Guatemalan 165 and sometime revolutionary,
I, Rigoberta Menchu
, which now took its place beside Aristotle, Dante, and Shakespeare as the Stanford student's introduction to the world.

Published in 1982,
I, Rigoberta Menchu
, was actually written by a French leftist, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, wife of the Marxist, Regis Debray, who provided the
foco
strategy for Che Guevara's failed effort to foment a guerilla war in Bolivia in the 1960s. The idea of the
foco
was that urban intellectuals could insert a military front inside a system of social oppression and provide the catalyst for revolutionary change. Debray's misguided theory got Guevara and an undetermined number of Bolivian peasants killed, and is at the root of the tragedies that overwhelmed Rigoberta Menchu and her family which are (falsely) chronicled in
I, Rigoberta Menchu
.