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<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been a bad year.<\/p>\n
Not just for higher education. And not just at it winds down.<\/p>\n
The coming 2018 does not bode well for American colleges and universities. For one thing, the\u00a0Janus<\/em>\u00a0case against agency fees (when unions can assess non-members for fees as a result of gains and benefits the unions have won for them) heading to the Supreme Court may prove to be the final straw that breaks the back of unions in this country, including those protecting faculty rights such as academic freedom. We all need to be ready for this contingency, ready to help our unions survive this new attack, propping them up, supporting them more than ever before, because new straws will come even if our unions\u2013and (and including) the AAUP\u2013survive this.<\/p>\n According to Sarah Jones,\u00a0writing for the\u00a0New Republic<\/em><\/a>, the Koch brothers have \u201cbeen trying to get a case like\u00a0Janus<\/em>\u00a0before the Supreme Court for years, and if the court rules in their favor\u2014with Neil Gorsuch on the Court this is a likely possibility\u2014it\u2019ll strike a blow to unionization and effectively transform portions of the public sector into right-to-work territory.\u201d And it will only get worse. As Risa Lieberwitz\u00a0writes for\u00a0Academe<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n No matter what the outcome is\u2026, we can expect more attacks on unions in the courts and legislatures. Twenty-eight states have enacted so-called right-to-work laws that prohibit agency fees. As we continue to fight against these attacks, it is important to remember that in the face of adversity, employees can and do organize. We must remain focused on the power of organizing to build union membership and expand the labor movement to work for social justice and fairness for all employees.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n As if that weren\u2019t enough to scare those of us who care about the quality and integrity of higher education, there is also the concerted attack on academics through social media, especially when faculty attempt to assert their own rights to free expression (not to be confused with academic freedom). This is no small thing. As Hank Reichman\u00a0writes on this blog<\/a>:<\/p>\n The entire academic profession must condemn<\/a>\u00a0the burgeoning epidemic of targeted harassment of faculty \u2014 and of students.\u00a0 Professor [George] Cicciarello-Maher [who recently resigned as a tenured associate professor at Drexel University as a result of his own activity on social media and the responses it engendered] bravely stood up to this onslaught for as long as he could.\u00a0 It is now up to the rest of us to pick up that banner.\u00a0 Whether or not your political views are consistent with those enunciated by Professor Cicciarello-Maher, it is the duty of all of us to heed his advice to \u201cdefend our universities, our students, and ourselves.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Janus and\u00a0<\/em>the social-media attacks are, of course, related. They stem from an on-going attack on colleges and universities whose roots go back at least to the 1960s (though, I would argue, those roots dig deep and back into the attitudes Richard Hofstadter outlines in\u00a0Anti-Intellectualism in American Life<\/em>). Their most prominent sponsor, over the past few decades, has been David Horowitz, someone who likes to write about higher education for people with little exposure to it and from a vantage point of no real experience of it (he was last a student in the early 1960s and has never really been a teacher).<\/p>\n One of Horowitz\u2019s acolytes, Jack Kerwick (who actually is an academic with a PhD and who, at least, teaches), recently posted on Horowtiz\u2019s\u00a0FrontPageMag<\/em>, \u201cIs Academic Rigor Racist?<\/a>\u201d Toward the end, he writes this:<\/p>\n The Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC) is a sprawling industry with tentacles reaching into practically every area of our culture.\u00a0 There is no place that it has impacted to quite the degree that it has impacted academia.\u00a0 In fact, the emergence and growth of RIC has corresponded to and fueled the emergence and growth of the\u00a0Academic-Industrial-Complex. \u00a0The two intersect and blend with one another.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n He is responding to attempts to fight racism through academia, something the right, which relies on racism (the new \u2018opiate of the masses\u2019) to gain and maintain power, does not want to see. This particular instance is an academic article by Purdue University\u2019s Donna Riley, who wants fellow academics to understand that \u201crigor\u201d can have the result of narrowing academic pursuits with its generally unspoken adherence to the ways of the power structure. In the\u00a0abstract with her article<\/a>, she writes, \u201cUnderstanding how rigor reproduces inequality, we cannot reinvent it but rather must relinquish it, looking to alternative conceptualizations for evaluating knowledge, welcoming diverse ways of knowing, doing, and being, and moving from compliance to engagement, from rigor to vigor.\u201d As citizens of a racist patriarchy, this is something we need to consider; as academics, \u201crigor\u201d is something we need to constantly re-examine.<\/p>\n Kerwick goes on to argue that Riley is simply trying to replace one power structure with another, that her \u201cargument is powered by the leftist\u2019s singular obsession with realizing his\u00a0or her<\/em>\u00a0vision of Equality.\u201d This is odd, because Kerwick shows the same obsession, if that\u2019s what either is.<\/p>\n Snark aside, what Kerwick is trying to do has nothing to do with Riley and everything to do with creating a popular image of American higher education as out of step with the general (read, \u201cwhite\u201d) population. His post starts, \u201cIf you\u2019re a parent who is giving consideration to refinancing your home for the sake of sending your child off to a university, you may want to reconsider\u201d and ends with \u201cParents with college-bound children, particularly (but certainly not only)\u00a0white\u00a0<\/em>parents, should bear this in mind.\u201d<\/p>\n Kerwick\u2019s is a typical tactic of the right against higher education. The goal is to create a divide between what goes on on campus and what goes on in \u201cregular\u201d American lives and the tactic is to balloon a single person, purpose or effort within academia into a representation of the whole. This is extremely difficult to counter, for colleges and universities, for the most part, really do foster diversity of individuals, ends and means. Yes, academics do tend to be liberal, but that has no more significance to what goes on there than does the fact that most in corporate America tend to be conservative has on the ways of doing business.<\/p>\n When Catherine Rampell, writing for the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>, asks \u201cWhy do so many Republicans hate college?<\/a>\u201d the answer should be obvious: Because they have been taken in by decades of drumbeat propaganda of the sort of Kerwick\u2019s post. Rampall understands this. Speaking of Arizona, she writes, \u201cRepublican politicians clearly view beating up on colleges as a way to prove their conservative bona fides.\u201d This has worked for a generation and there is no sign it is lessening. So pervasive has the anti-academia feeling become that even a liberal like New York\u2019s governor Andrew Cuomo can beat up upon the City University of New York without repercussion.<\/p>\n The aim of the right, concerning public higher education, is to create a milieu in which continuing reduction of funding is acceptable to the large conservative block of American votes so that private, conservative funders can be stepping in and, as Rampall says, \u201creplacing dwindling public dollars with private ones, especially those that will appease suspicious conservatives.\u201d They want to make American higher education responsive to their own political philosophy solely, doing so by claiming that it is now responsive only to another political philosophy, the dreaded \u201cMarxism.\u201d That this is untrue, as anyone who spends real time on campus knows, is irrelevant.<\/p>\n Over the coming year, we who are fighting to preserve American higher education (the greatest system of higher education the world has ever seen) are going to have to start finding ways of effectively countering people like Kerwick, Horowitz and the battalions of politicians who make up the Koch army. One thing we are going to have to do is show that we can disagree without trying to demolish our opposition. That\u2019s going to mean that we stop allowing careers to be destroyed because of political forces, be they George Cicciarello-Maher or someone on the right whose ideas are out of step with those of fellow academics. The AAUP is always willing to support faculty when they are wronged in ways relevant to their academic pursuits no matter which side of any political divide a particular scholar may fall upon. The rest of us need to follow suit.<\/p>\n We need to start being extremely careful when we react to what other academics say, even when they are attacking even another academic whose opinions are similar to our own. Otherwise, we get caught up in messes like\u00a0the McAdams\/Abbate<\/a>one at Marquette University. Marquette suspended John McAdams because of his criticism of a teaching assistant, Cheryl Abbate. This is one that conservative columnist George Will\u00a0is now using<\/a>\u00a0to further the right-wing attack on academia.<\/p>\n Will describes Abbate as having \u201ca precocious aptitude for academic nastiness\u201d and describes her as an \u201caspiring philosopher\u201d whose \u201cargumentation skills can be inferred from her reliance on epithets\u201d and as someone who \u201cclaimed for herself the coveted status of victim.\u201d When she left Marquette, according to Will, she left wreckage in her wake, so much so that prospective \u201cMarquette students, and Marquette alumni, must decide whether this school, awash with the current academic hysteria and corruption, merits their confidence and support,\u201d using this situation, just as Kerwick did with Riley, to further increase the divide between the conservative bloc of American votes and American higher education.<\/p>\n Instead of wishing situations like these away or of helping remove from campus whichever side we see as the bad guy, we need to start embracing, in the public sphere, the difficulty such incidents raise, discussing them calmly even when others are shouting in our faces. However, we should be careful to know just who we should be addressing. We are not going to convince Will any more than we would Horowitz and Kerwick\u2014the gain they now gather is greater than either logic or academia could offer them. It is not in their interest to even listen to the other side. They are not who we should be talking with.<\/p>\n No, what we need to be doing is engaging those who can gain through higher education, showing just what that is and how it is achieved. The right never has been addressing us, but we have made the mistake of responding to the right rather than to their real audience, the white American voting bloc now so heavily invested in Donald Trump. As a result, we have lost the fight.<\/p>\n So far.<\/p>\n This year, we need to start speaking farther abroad than normally we do, engaging with people way beyond academia\u2019s walls\u2014not to the politicians and pundits, but to the very people that many of us, after the events of the past 13 months, are loath to speak to at all. And we need to listen to them patiently, hearing out even nonsense conspiracy theories. Then we need to show them something different from what they imagine, inviting them onto our campuses and even into the meetings of our organizations (why can\u2019t we find a way to allow members of the general public to attend our sessions for free\u2014and why can\u2019t we invite them?).<\/p>\n If we are to turn things around, we are going to have to do it through new types of weapons. We need to hear what Will, Kerwick and Horowitz are saying and see who their real audience is and why it is responding so positively. We can\u2019t fight them directly (that won\u2019t help) but we can find ways of countering their influence. As Riley says in a quote far above, we need to welcome \u201cdiverse ways of knowing, doing, and being\u201d\u2014even if that means listening to our opponents and learning from what they are doing.<\/p>\n Otherwise, next year will be a bad year, too. Or worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"