Month: October 2021

Triumph of the Will

Yesterday, after wrangling with my very patient editor over the results of a user review of a new table of contents for my first-year writing textbook, I spent a few minutes trying to remember the name of a textbook from the early 1990s that George Will had railed against in a column as an example of the evils done by Tenured Radicals™. I never did find it, but I did find an old chestnut from Newsweek about which I’d forgotten, Will’s 1991 “Curdled Politics on Campus.” If I remember correctly, this is the Will column that made an appearance in a few of the essays anatomizing the body of work being committed in the early 1990s decrying what they were calling “political correctness.” It ends with this kicker of a paragraph:

Where did we get the ruinous notion that it is the business, even the bounden duty, of schools to produce sweet-tempered neighbors and politically admirable citizens? There is a connection between the rise of that notion–schools as society’s perfecters–and the decline of schools as producers of graduates who think precisely, write clearly, read complex material and bring historical understanding to today’s conditions. Nice neighbors and virtuous citizens are grand, but first things first, please.

Of course this “ruinous” notion didn’t just rise in the late 1980s–it’s what countless educators and writers on the subject since and before Matthew Arnold have expressly wished education to be. Will and company–Bill Bennett, Lynne Cheney, E.D. Hirsch, Allan Bloom, Harold “No Relation” Bloom, &c.–just didn’t like the turn in what educators thought the nation’s young should be learning, about just what “politically admirable” entailed.

What struck me last night about this column was that it reminds that there’s nothing all that new about today’s backlash against teaching about the US that in today’s parlance is described as “woke.” Then it may have been about teaching Toni Morrison alongside Shakespeare; today it’s about the idea that the country might have a history of racism. But it’s always been about painting any impulse to recognize that the official right wing story of the US leaves things out, things it would be good for people to know about, as disloyal.

What’s also striking me as especially “grand” about this column this morning, on rereading it in the car waiting for a high school soccer game to start, is the tone. It’s not just the unexamined notions that helping students gain a fuller picture of America is somehow opposed to good writing and clear thinking and that the behavior that might spring from that knowledge is merely “nice,” producing “sweet-tempered neighbors.” It’s also the disdain that drips from Will’s pen. It’s the same disdain you’ll hear on the right these days as they inveigh against critical race theory, though expressed with fewer four-dollar words and more fake populist folksiness.

So when you hear Josh Hawley or one of the many other fake populists who have been busy mobilizing racism for the good of their careers railing against what they’d like their voters to believe we’re teaching in school these days, think of the early 1990s and its earlier wave of ginned-up outrage against the crimes allegedly being committed around America’s quads, and don’t buy what they’re selling. Think of George Will and the way he mocks the idea that education has the potential to make better citizens–not citizens who will wave the flag and keep quiet but citizens who will try to make the country be a little better. Ask yourself if this is what your want out of your fellow citizens–blind flag-waving–and remember what that can turn into in the right hands. And then give yourself permission to take a break from being a nice neighbor and remember how silly his writing about baseball was.

For What It’s Worth

What have I been up to, nobody asks? For an hour or so yesterday morning, here’s where I was:

The protest took place across the street (in an Approved Protest Zone, natch) from this:

The “grand opening” of this $200-something-million dollar building–planned on the promise of state funding that largely never materialized (the absence of which necessitated a giant loan that drove up the cost of the building considerably) and with hopes that it will be a model of the kind of partnership with business that is supposed to save universities from the precipitous loss of state funding (a decline actually only made steeper by privatization, but that’s another conversation)–provided the occasion to protest a just-expired-with-no-request-from-upper-administration-for-the-board-to-vote-on-an-extension classroom mask mandate: no masks and no vaccination requirement in the middle of a pandemic does not exactly seem like Precision Health. Of course, stuck far across the street thanks to rules restricting protest created after the campus protests of 2015 got nationwide attention and not the good kind, the Coalition of Graduate Workers and a few fellow travelers were easily ignored by the administrators, state politicians, and local businesspeople celebrating this future white elephant, back-slapping while they schmoozed on the grave of public higher education.

The state politicians who were asked to stand and be recognized would not characterize the occasion in this way, just as the members of the administration and the local business community wouldn’t. Who wouldn’t support advances in medicine (though of course many of them didn’t)? What could be better than private support, for everything, always? And many of them would hear the protests and commentary such as this, should it ever reach them, as ingratitude and disloyalty and more evidence of why, as in 2015, faculty and students can’t be trusted to have a say in the way public universities are run. And not a few of those would have feelings best expressed by some of the vocally disapproving who drove by, including the young gentleman who gunned his engine after shouting “this isn’t California” at us and the slightly older truck driver who tossed his paper mask out the window with a laugh. The politics that have contaminated public health and resulted in untold additional unnecessary deaths and long-term illness, like the politics that have so harmed the standing of higher education and the treatment of workers–this way of seeing the world, this morphing of the already unjust country-club conservatism into the deadly far right we have today–has become a pandemic. And if it doesn’t kill us, there’s no escaping that we will be seeing long-term effects.

Among these effects we can count last week’s passage of a bill that would effectively gut tenure in the Georgia state system and the new addition to the collected rules and regulations of the Missouri system, snuck in under cover of the alleged COVID-caused need for pay cuts, that essentially strips away the protections of tenure. We can also count the astroturf “movement” noisily imposing itself in state houses and school boards across the country, fighting against critical race theory, which they don’t understand and don’t care to, as long as they can paint those who want to teach the unsightly history of race in this country as, well, disloyal ingrates.

I wrote this tweet the other day, thinking not of my university administration’s decision not to protect its workers and students because (we are left to assume) the political cost would be too great but of all of the other ways in which the educational and scholarly missions of higher ed were being undermined and faculty pointing that out were being made to feel disloyal and ungrateful:

For what it’s worth, the same goes for countries. (And, as was pointed out to me, this is true for students and alumni, staff and retirees, librarians and university press workers.) Under the current ideological undertow we’re experiencing, in which the outgoing tide of the far right attempts to pull us under as it goes, there’s no such thing as loyal dissent. “If you don’t like it here, leave” is somehow still a thing people think and say. What if we said, with patience but with volume, If you love it here and don’t like what’s happening, work to change it. If you value the university and its workers and feel they are being undervalued and mistreated, fight for them. If you love the country and don’t like what it’s becoming, fight for it. We can say these things. We should say them as often as we can, in public. We should speak up for public goods–for public education, not just higher but primary and secondary. We should speak up for all of the things that should be public goods–health, education, workers’ rights. Because really, it, all of it, is about public health in the end.

Signs

Tonight a neighbor sent a group text to say that she had been out walking her dog and had seen an unfamiliar pickup truck drive up and down our dead-end street, removing Black Lives Matter signs from the front yards. A number of us texted back that our signs were gone. One neighbor’s front-door camera captured a short movie of the truck rolling down the street while somebody ran from sign to sign, pulling them out of the lawns. The neighbor who’d seen this happen was rattled–it was later in the evening, the street was dark–and I imagine we all were, hearing about it. When I went outside to check on our sign, I walked up and down the street, and I don’t know what I expected to see, but everything looked different.

Last night at my city’s school board meeting, the agenda for which included a vote on extending the mask mandate, the board president had to ask police to clear their meeting room after the board’s rules of decorum for public comment were violated. The woman whose behavior led to the meeting being stopped is anti-vaccine and anti-mask, as her frequent comments on the city health department’s social media posts have made plain. She’s captured on the livestream of the meeting wearing a thin blue line t-shirt and a Trump mask. On local radio this morning she repeatedly claimed that she was being “silenced.” Her shirt and mask spoke volumes.

Not to put too fine a point on it: these events are signs of the times. The country is falling apart. The worst president we’ve had could be back in the White House in four years, if he’s not in jail. There are governors who are mandating that there be no mandates in their states, trading the safety of their constituents for their votes. It’s just a few feet of ground in the culture war the GOP is fighting nationwide, from the Capitol to local school boards. Schoolteachers are being told they can’t teach the history of race in the country. Texans are being deputized to arrest fellow Texans if they exercise their right to make their own reproductive health care decisions. The battles in this war are less and less tactical and more and more scorched earth. It’s far from inconceivable that the peaceful transfer of power will be a casualty, and with it, our democracy.

Signs matter. In times like this, they matter even more. Two strangers came on my street tonight and stole my sign out of my yard, and did it up and down the block. This isn’t just an annoyance or even a disconcerting violation of my property. In the words of the woman who disrupted the school board meeting, it’s an attempt to silence. I know that people on both sides of the cultural divide (I was going to say widening cultural divide, but I don’t actually think that’s true) have signs that proclaim their beliefs, and that many on both sides believe that what their signs say is correct. I also know that, despite the disingenuous cries of cancel culture, the right in this country wields the rhetoric of silencing far more frequently and viciously than the left, and that it’s not just a tactic, it’s the point. The Attorney General of my state would like to make the teaching of whatever he wants to pretend is critical race theory illegal. He’s sending a signal to voters that he’ll work to silence the voices talking about race in America, in the past and the present.

Some see yard signs and t-shirts and bumper stickers as empty gestures, signals of virtue but hardly action. The shadowy figures seen in my neighbor’s front-door camera recording must think otherwise or they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of stealing our signs. Just like the neighbor who just texted us to ask if anybody knows where to buy more signs so we can get them back up.