Harvard today released two reports about the state of life on campus. One is on Islamophobia and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias at Harvard. The other is about what has come to be called antisemitism, but which often includes or is nothing more than pro-Palestine or anti-Zionist sentiment and action. Before I say anything else, and because I might lose you as I get into this more, I want to highlight two critical paragraphs from the New York Times article on the two reports. The paragraphs get buried almost two-thirds of the way into the piece: The two task forces worked together to create a campuswide survey that received nearly 2,300 responses from faculty, staff and students. It found that 6 […]
Last month, the Republican-controlled Ohio state legislature passed a bill requiring all institutions of higher education to institute a mandatory course in “American civic literacy.” The bill specifies that this course: I can’t tell if the Republicans are serious about this stipulation regarding students’ reading “all the following”: The complete writings of Adam Smith alone come to 3,529 pages, which, over the course of 13 weeks of instruction (the typical number of weeks at Ohio State University), works out to 271 pages per week. Throw in the other writings the legislature is requiring on top of that, and well, that’s a lot of reading for one class. But I’m a believer in the great books, and the more reading students […]
According to the Yale Daily News, nearly 900 faculty at Yale have signed a letter calling on the president and provost to protect academic freedom at Yale. It’s a strong letter, organized by the faculty senate and a local chapter of the AAUP, but I couldn’t help noticing a glaring omission in it. The letter identifies four threats to academic freedom at Yale (and calls upon the university to take two affirmative steps for academic freedom), but all four of the threats come solely, in the letter’s formulation, from the government. This seems like an odd position, to me, because since Trump’s second ascension to power, the most severe violation of academic freedom at Yale has come from the University […]
The United States Navy announced tonight that, following Trump’s anti-DEI orders, it has purged 381 books from the US Naval Academy Library. The press coverage focuses on some familiar titles: Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and so on. I went through the entire list, and noticed something quite different. First, to call this a DEI purge is to miss the forest for the trees: This is a wholesale assault on knowledge as we know it. Charles Mills’s book is purged. Two books on Henry James are purged. A book on Eliot, Joyce, and Proust is purged. Books on Elizabeth Bishop, on Thomas Pynchon, on Richard Wright: purged. Barbara Fields’s and Karen Fields’s Racecraft is […]
In chapter 8 of Capital, Marx wrote: The working day does have a maximum limit…Not only do purely physical needs limit the extension of the workday; moral limits play a role here, too. A worker requires time to satisfy his intellectual and social needs, which are determined…by the general state of the culture. Curious what the general state of the culture has to say about workers’ intellectual needs, I turned to the news, and stumbled on this report. One could say a lot more about all this, but beyond the simple and obvious point, I’d point out that discussions of culture in this country are often removed from discussions of the economy. There’s one conversation about the assault on the […]
Tonight, I read two academic letters of public protest against What Is Going On—one from 2,000 of the nation’s top scientists and one from more than 80 Harvard Law School professors. The first letter is about the threat to scientific research, the second about the threat to the rule of law. Despite being in a discipline adjacent to the teaching and study of law, I felt that it was the letter of the scientists that truly spoke to me about what is politically at stake in this moment. And that was because it was the scientists who spoke the clearest, most direct, most forceful, and least artful, language of political alarm. At the simplest level, the scientists know how to […]
My friend Alex Gourevitch alerted me to Columbia’s statement on combatting discrimination, harassment, and antisemitism, which I had somehow missed. Alex points out how it’s essentially DEI from the right—new sensitivity trainings, for what the university calls antisemitism; new diversity hiring initiatives, for pro-Israel scholars; new administrators, to oversee the hiring—with a lot more coercion. On that question of coercion, have a read of the statement and simply count how often words like “sanction” (as in punish) and “suspension” and “expulsion” appear. It’s hard not to read this as new constitutional order for universities, in which the onerous apparatus of crime and punishment that this country has veered to over the decades is simply dropped onto the university campus. Is […]
Earlier this week, Yale professors Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley announced that they were leaving the United States to take up academic positions in Canada. Ordinarily, this would not be considered news. Academics move all the time. Sometimes from the United States to other countries. But since both Snyder and Stanley have been, since 2017, the two leading proponents of the thesis that the United States is sliding precipitously toward fascism or authoritarianism, if we’re not already there, their announcement has attracted a considerable amount of attention. Snyder’s reason, and the timing of his decision, has been somewhat murky. But Stanley has been forthright: He’s moving his family out of the country because the political climate has grown intolerable, and […]
Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, May 13, 1953: You probably know a lot [about the Second Red Scare] from the papers. Can you see from them how far the disintegration has gone and with what breathtaking speed it has occurred? And up to now hardly any resistance. Everything melts away like butter in the sun….It is essentially impossible to consider any specific parts of the society as set apart from it, for even where the Congressional investigating committees aren’t sticking in their dirty noses, an extremely effective self-censorship takes place. The editor of a newspaper or a magazine, for example, or the director of a business or the professors at a university will quietly conduct a purge….It all functions without […]
About thirty years ago, I had a conversation with one of America’s great labor leaders, who told me that people at elite universities always misunderstand the power structure of their institutions. When you’re at a university, you imagine the place as a pyramid, with the students at the bottom, faculty in the middle, deans and provosts and such in the upper section, and the president at the top. You imagine, in other words, the power structure of the university to reside entirely on and within the campus. The real power structure of an elite university, he told me, is an upside-down pyramid. The president—the only person within the pyramid representing the campus—is at the bottom of the pyramid, the board […]
In his classic lecture, “Science as a Vocation,” which he delivered in Munich in November 1917, the sociologist Max Weber had this to say about the university scene in the United States: The American sees a teacher at the front of the room and thinks: This man is selling me his knowledge and methods for my father’s money, just like the woman in the grocery store sells my mother her vegetables. Fast forward a century, and it’s no longer students who think of professors as corner grocers; it’s the professors themselves. Here’s our old friend Columbia professor Brent Stockwell—last heard expressing terror in the NYT over the prospect of being reduced to the status of a community college instructor “teaching […]
“The academy did not fight McCarthyism. It contributed to it.” That was historian Ellen Schrecker’s devastating conclusion in her classic study, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, which came out in 1986. Columbia University, while not the worst in Schrecker’s account, was certainly not the best. Today, as the New York Times has revealed, it’s probably the worst. At the height of the Second Red Scare, just as HUAC was beginning its first of many hearings on the threat of communism in higher ed, a group of 37 university presidents, from the nation’s most prestigious and elite institutions, including Columbia, gathered to make a statement of principles on academic freedom and the Cold War. The year was 1953. The […]
Last night, on Chris Hayes’s show, I learned about Sarah Inama, who teaches 6th grade in Idaho, and has a poster on her wall that says, “Everyone is welcome here.” Inama’s school administration told her to take down the poster because…not everyone agrees with that principle. No one ever complained about it or spoke against the principle. But the administration fears that…not everyone agrees with that principle. At a public school. So they told her to take it down by the end of the day. Here’s where the story gets interesting. Inama did as she was told. She took the poster down. For a few days. But then she thought about it and decided, no, I can’t live with this […]
It’s amazing to me—though it shouldn’t be—that at a moment when anyone and everyone who teaches or works or studies at an educational institution is under threat, that a professor at Columbia would formulate the threat in the New York Times in this particular way: “Ultimately, the university cannot exist without research,” said Brent R. Stockwell, the chair of biological sciences at Columbia. “It would be really, really more akin to a high school or a local community college where you’re just teaching some classes without world-class researchers bringing the frontier of knowledge into the classroom.” I don’t doubt that Stockwell sees his lifeworld in this way and that it would in fact be threatened in the way he says […]
If you’re like me, you’re probably all-petitioned and all-statemented out. But if you are Jewish, and in academia, whether as a teacher, student, worker, staffer, or any kind of employee, I ask that you read and sign on to this statement. The statement denounces the cynical and terrible use of Jews and spurious charges of antisemitism “to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities” and “to concentrate power and exert ‘existential terror’ on our institutions and our communities–in part by threatening and slashing federal funding.” The statement has been signed by more than 2000 Jewish members of the academy, including noted Israeli scholar of the Holocaust Omer Bartov, the political theorists Wendy Brown and Seyla Benhabib, and […]
At the height of the Second Red Scare, Yale University covered itself in glory when Yale president Charles Seymour declared, “There will be no witch-hunts at Yale because there will be no witches.” In other words, no McCarthyite congressional committee is going to investigate our professors because…we’ll make sure not to hire any professors who’d be investigation-worthy. That’s what they called protecting academic freedom—I kid you not—during the 1950s.* I was reminded of old Charles Seymour when I read in the New York Times that Yale Law School has suspended Helyeh Doutaghi, deputy director of the Law and Political Economy Project, whose work and affiliated faculty and staff I’ve long admired and spoken with. Why was Doutaghi suspended, which, the […]
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Categories
Education, Labor/Workplace, Palestine and Israel, The State
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Tags Charles Seymour, Harvard, Helyeh Doutaghi, James Bryant Conant, James Joyce, McCarthyism, Ulysses, Yale
It says something that I learned of the death of Nick Xenos, a recently retired professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, not from an official announcement or an article in the newspaper but from the dozens of phone calls and texts I received, within just a few hours of his death, from his former students and current colleagues. Nick died, in other words, the way he lived, amid a beloved community of the most steadfast friends. That’s rarer in academia than we might think. I can’t exactly remember when I first met Nick or came into contact with him, though it was more than 20 years ago. I had known his name forever, and always associated it […]
Three days ago, the New York Post reported that Hunter College was looking to hire a scholar in Palestinian Studies. The job ad read: We seek a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, and sexuality. It took less than a New York minute for Governor Hochul to order the job listing taken down and for CUNY leaders to comply. According to Hochul’s office, “Hateful rhetoric of any kind has no place at CUNY or anywhere in New York State.” The hateful rhetoric in question? These words and phrases: “settler colonialism,” “genocide,” and “apartheid.” If […]
Joan Robinson, one of the greatest economists of the twentieth century, never won a Nobel Prize. Here she is, in 1962, writing to Robert Solow, a very good economist in the 20th century, who did win the Nobel Prize: Dear Bob, To me you are a fascinating study—A clever man who cannot see a simple point. Here is Robinson, also writing in 1962, in a prescient piece for the New Left Review on what we now call the care economy and Baumol’s cost disease: The services to meet basic human needs (particularly healthcare and education) do not lend themselves to mass production: they are not an easy field for making profits, especially, as with our egalitarian democratic notions, they have […]
In the face of a spate of executive orders about education and what we can and cannot teach about the United States, particularly with regard to race, I’m posting here the course description for my American Political Theory class that I’m teaching this term. It’s high time that those of us, particularly with tenure, who teach American history or American politics or American political thought or anything in that realm, stand up and speak out on behalf of what we teach. Not in a defensive or apologetic crouch, but proudly and loudly, affirming that we offer students an in-depth approach to central problems of the American experience. My course opens with readings from Aristotle and the Hebrew Bible on slavery, […]
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Categories
Economies, Education, Race
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Tags abolition, Alexander Hamilton, Aristotle, capitalism, Frederick Douglass, Jim Crow, slavery, Thomas Jefferson, W.E.B. Du Bois
Harvard has hired Ballard Partners, one of the top lobbying firms in DC, to defend its interests against Trump. Ballard former lobbyists include Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief-of-staff, and Pam Bondi, Trump’s Attorney General. When the great American sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen was casting about for a subtitle for his study of the American academy, one of the ones he came up with was: “A Study in Total Depravity.”
The older I get, the more I love teaching. When I was starting out as a professor, teaching wasn’t my main concern. I was a good teacher, I’d like to think. I always put a lot of time into it. I spent hours prepping for lecture. I spent even more hours reading rough drafts of student papers and then grading them. I supervised dissertations. I was dedicated to the job and wanted to do it well. But these were secondary to my main ambition, which was to make my mark as a scholar and a writer. When I turned 50—that was seven years ago—things began to change. I became more careful about my time and relationship to academia as a […]
One of Marx’s most persistent points, from On the Jewish Question forward, is that despite the formal freedoms that we enjoy in a liberal state—the right to freedom of speech, for example, or freedom of religion—we are socially and in fact unfree. (As Bruno Leipold reports in his Citizen Marx, a lot of Marx’s evidence for this claim, particularly about religion, came from travelers’ reports to America, which Marx read assiduously.) That is what it means to live in a liberal society, says Marx: formally free, actually unfree. But lately I’ve been wondering whether we are not living in the reverse. Despite the efforts of right-wingers to bend the state in a repressive, less free direction, society seems more and […]
Three items that might be of interest. First, over at Balkinization, I participated in a symposium on Rogers Smith and Desmond King’s book America’s New Racial Battle Lines, which came out earlier this year. Rogers was my adviser in graduate school who taught me a lot of what I know about the American right. So I was thrilled to be invited to participate in this discussion, even if I disagree with some of his and King’s claims about where things stand with the right and racial politics in the US. From the conclusion to my post: While cultural battles are critical, it may be that they don’t require, on either side, new racial orders for their fighting. Existing languages, paradigms, […]