The global war against teachers

Radical History Review

Volumn 95, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 9-20

  Prashad, Vijay ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 73949118884     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2006-95-9     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. 2 for Global War against Teachers. But since the U.S. education secretary Roderick-Paige called the 2.7 million member National Educators Association (the country's largest teachers' union) "a terrorist organization," it might not be inappropriate for Horowitz's actions to be part of GWOT itself. For Paige, see Amy Goldstein,"Paige Calls NEA a 'Terrorist' Group," Washington Post, February 24, 2004.
2. David Horowitz, Uncivil Wars: The Controversy over Reparations for Slavery (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002).
3. Amanda Paulson, "A Bill to Protect Campus Conservatives?" Christian Science Monitor, January 8, 2004;
4. and John Sanko, "Colorado Academic Showdown," Rocky Mountain News, September 2, 2004. The bill can be viewed at a Web site that collects many of the central texts of this movement, the Students for Academic Freedom, www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org (accessed October 1, 2004).
5. Well, Stanley Fish. He maintains that the academy is a space for "teaching and research," and not for the development of "creative individuals and productive citizens." Stanley Fish,"Intellectual Diversity: The Trojan Horse of a Dark Design, " Chronicle of Higher Education, February 13, 2004.
6. Horowitz's agenda is similar to the assault waged in India, the UK, and elsewhere against teachers' unions and the broad liberal and left-leaning philosophical bent of much of the curriculum in a world that has benefited from socialism's goals (after all, public education is a child of socialism).
7. Brown Daily Herald, November 18, 2003. Horowitz's controversy at Brown is now well known. He goes over his side of the story in Uncivil Wars, 54-69. For a more balanced and less caustic approach, see Norman Boucher,"The War Over Words, "
8. Brown Alumni Magazine, May-June 2001, www.brownaIumnimagazine.com/ storyDetail.cfm?lD=169.
9. Here is Horowitz himself: "We do not go to our doctors' offices and expect to see partisan propaganda posted on the doors, or go to hospital operating rooms and expect to hear political lectures from our surgeons. The same should be true of our classrooms and professors, yet it is not." David Horowitz," In Defense of Intellectual Diversity, " Chronicle of Higher Education, February 10, 2004, www.frontpagemag.org/ articles/ReadArticle .asp?ID=12116.
10. American Council of Physicians/American Society of Internal Medicine, No Health Insurance? It's Enough to Make You Sick (2000), www.acponline.org/uninsured/Iack-contents.htm (accessed October 3, 2004).
11. Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberle Crenshaw, Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993).
12. To make such room for a discussion available to students does not mean that the classroom becomes a "neutral, value-free" space. Moishe Postone raises some important issues with Jürgen Habermas s The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) in "History and Critical Social Theory, " Contemporary Sociology 19 (1990): 170-76.
13. Horowitz's various organizations and publications rely on anecdotal evidence to base their supposition that the campus is hostile to conservative students. There is no systematic, survey-based study that affirms the Horowitz position. The study, Political Bias in the Administrations and Faculties of Thirty-two Elite Colleges and Universities, authored by Horowitz and Eli Lelirer, is based on a comparison between lists of faculty and administration with voting records. The fact that Democrats outrank Republicans at these institutions by ten to one leads to the conclusion that the academy does not sufficiently teach conservative thought. The methodology is deeply flawed because it makes claims about the general campus culture based on a study of voting records and not on the basis of the campus culture itself - by surveys, for instance, that look at student satisfaction with intellectual and political diversity on campus. Study available at www.frontpagemag.com/Content/ read.asp?ID=55 (accessed December 16, 2005).
14. Fish, "Intellectual Diversity."
15. CAE is a subsidiary of that old cold warrior, the RAND corporation.
16. Dionne was the CEO of McGraw-Hill, an interested party in the deliberations: they produce the textbooks for McEducation.
17. Statement by Joseph L. Dionne, U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Education, Arts, and Humanities of the Committee on Labor and Human Resources, February 2, 1995.
18. Jeri O'Donnell, ed., Breaking the Social Contract: The Fiscal Crisis in U.S. Higher Education (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1997).
19. Linda Ray Pratt, "Disposable Faculty: Part-Time Exploitation as Management Strategy, " in Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis, ed. Cary Nelson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 264-77;
20. and Karen Thompson, "Alchemy in the Academy: Moving Part-Time Faculty from Piecework to Parity, " in Nelson, Will Teach for Food, 278-90.
21. The increase in tuition, as many studies show, has gone toward a bloated administration, a building spurt, and toward a technological makeover on campus, another way to increase productivity without bodies. See Raymond Garcia, "Back to the Middle Ages: The Rise of the Lumpen Teacher, " Counterpunch, May 1-15, 1998;
22. and Ellen Schrecker, "Will Technology Make Academic Freedom Obsolete, " in Nelson, Will Teach for Food.
23. James D. Sullivan, "The Scarlet L: Gender and Status in the Academe, " in Nelson, Will Teach for Food, 254-63;
24. and Margie Burns, "Service Courses: Doing Women a Disservice, " Academe, May-June 1993.
25. I lay this out in the introduction to my Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Debt, Prison, Workfare (Boston: South End Press, 2003).
26. So when Horowitz says that he is in favor of intellectual diversity rather than political diversity, it is odd that his main claim is that there are more Democrats on the campus than Republicans - this is about political affiliation in the ballot box, not about intellectual diversity. See Sara Hebel, "Patrolling Professors' Politics, " Chronicle of Higher Education, February 13, 2004, www.chronicIe.com/free/v50/123/23ao1801.htm. Brett O'Bannon asks why there are fewer conservatives in higher education and offers this answer: "The problem lies, therefore, not with university hiring practices and certainly not with the evil machinations of liberals bent on ruining our youth. In fact, there is no problem here. The absence of larger numbers of conservative faculty members is, to a great extent, explained by the very correlation between education and ideology. Other explanations might relate to the different choices that liberals and conservatives, especially those with advanced degrees, make about education, careers and income. Simply put, more conservatives with a bent for higher education are going to have to opt for smaller salaries if their presence in the academy is to grow." Brett O'Bannon, "In Defense of the 'Liberal Professor, '" Indianapolis Star, August 27, 2003.
27. On his fealty to Horowitz's crusade against the campus, see Stanley Kurtz, "Clouded by Bias, " National Review, June 5, 2001, www.nationaIreview.com/contributors/kurtzo60501 .shtml. On his general view that there are too few conservatives and hawks on the college campus, see Kurtz, "Ivy Change, " National Review, October 29, 2001, www.nationalreview .com/contributors/kurtz1029o1.shtml. Here he uses 9/11 to do his work, although he has proposed much of this before 9/11, such as in "Taking Back the Academy, " National Review, February 9, 2001, www.nationalreview.com/comment/commento20901b.shtml.
28. "Statement of Stanley Kurtz, Research Fellow, Hoover Institution; Contributing Editor, National Review Online. Testimony before the Subcommittee on Select Education, Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives, June 19, 2003, " edworkforce.house.gov/hearings/108th/sed/ titlevi61903/kurtz.htm.
29. Max Boot, former editor of the Wall Street Journal, led the way ("The Case for American Empire, " Weekly Standard, October 15, 2001)
30. and stayed ("The Case for Wise Liberal Imperial Rule, " Financial Times, July 14, 2004) in the fight to redefine U.S. self-perception of its global role. He made the case in bis book Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the American Rise to Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002),
31. whose title is drawn from Kipling's poem. In the Kipling vein came the "fully paid up member of the neo-imperialist gang, " Niall Ferguson with his "The Empire Slinks Back, " New York Times Magazine, April 27, 2003.
32. By far the doyen of this line of thought, because of his impeccable liberal credentials, is the Carr Professor of Human Rights at Harvard, the Canadian scholar Michael Ignatieff, who put the case before the Iraq war with "Nation-Building Lite, " New York Times Magazine, July 28, 2002,
33. and then returned with Kiplingesque flourish in "The American Empire: The Burden, " New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003.
34. Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 369-70. Also see his "The Empire Slinks Back."
35. Yale's K. S. Latourette founded East Asian studies - his book is History of the Christian Missions in China (New York: Macmillan, 1929);
36. Berkeley's H. E. Bolton pioneered Latin American studies with his The Rim of Christiandom: A Biography of Eusebio Francisco Kino, Pacific Coast Pioneer (New York: Macmillan, 1936);
37. and A. C. Coolidge developed the contours of Slavic studies in The United States as a World Power (New York: Macmillan, 1927).
38. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), 285.
39. Robert Hall, Area Studies: With Special Reference to Their Implications for Research in the Social Sciences (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1951), 2, 22-23.
40. For more, see Wendell C. Bennett, Area Studies in American Universities (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1951), and Robert E. Ward, "The Presidential Address: A Case for Asian Studies, " Journal of Asian Studies 32 (1973): 391-403.
41. Said, Orientalism, 301.
42. "Office of the Director of Special Research Operations Office, Document 1, December 4, 1964, " in The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship between Social Sciences and Practical Politics, ed. Irving Horowitz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 48.
43. The documents are collected in I lorowitz, The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot.
44. "Lamentably, there has been no demonstrable effect - if there has been a challenging gesture at all - made by Islamic or Arab scholars' work disputing the dogmas of Orientalism; an isolated article here or there, while important for its time and place, cannot possibly affect the course of an imposing research consensus maintained by all sorts of agencies, institutions and traditions, " Said, Orientalism, 301. Nevertheless, there is now a radical rightist academic militia, much of it provoked by the impact of Said's work, that patrols Middle East studies. Martin Kramer not only produced a book to denounce the field, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, 2001), but also created an organization called Middle East Forum (directed by Kramer's comrade-in-arms, Daniel Pipes) and a Web site, www.campuswatch.org, to monitor the field.
45. The business implications of internationalization came to the fore in 1990, when the National Governors' Association bemoaned the lack of international education for college graduates in a globalized world. "The best jobs, the largest markets and the greatest profits will flow to the workers and firms that understand the world around them, " said the governors. Their analysis of recent history led to the assessment that "a lack of understanding and inability to communicate contributed to such events as the war in Vietnam, the hostage crisis in Iran, the OPEC oil crisis, and the political consequences of the Bhopal industrial disaster." The motives of power and profit are freed of any responsibility for this litany of ills - we are left with E. M. Forster's dictum, "Only Connect, " from Howard's End (1910).
46. Bruce Cumings, "Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies during and after the Cold War, " in Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War, ed. Christopher Simpson (New York: New Press, 1998), 177.
47. International Studies in Higher Education Act of 2005, HR 509, Sec. 2, (a) (4), 109th Cong., 1st sess., thomas.loc.gov/egi-bin/query/F?c109:1:. /temp/∼c109HgJLTv:e1288 (accessed December 29, 2005).
48. "National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, Section VI, " www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss6.html; and "Press Briefing by Scott McClellan, Office of the Press Secretary, White House, July 28, 2005, " www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/07/20050728- 3.html.
49. Fish, "Intellectual Diversity." All this, indeed, is already the case - www.eampuswatch.org is a case in point.