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BLACKLISTED PROFESSORS: BACK TO THE FUTURE?
UCLA alum Andrew Jones says he wants a more "fair and bal
anced" university. What he really needs is a time machine. Using
McCarthy-like tactics at UCLA in order to combat what he calls
"a cancer of political radicalism," his Bruin Alumni Association
longs for a past that never was, while seeking to create a future
for academia based on 1950s nostalgia. The group's headline
grabbing attempt at blacklisting professors that challenge Jones'
pre-Civil Rights sensibilities is the latest stab at rolling back time
at universities across the country.
From David Horowitz's Orweilian-
dubbed “Students for Academic
Freedom" to Internet sites such as
Campus Watch to state legislation
that would regulate course syllabi,
Jones is the player of the week in
this revamped version of Pick Up
Sticks, in which so-called "liberal,"
"unpatriotic" and "biased" profes
sors are carefully singled out and
placed into a jar contemptuously
labeled "political radicals."
Like Marty McFly in Back to the
Future, the 1985 blockbuster that
responded to the pressures of Cold
War Reaganomics and suburban malaise by catapulting its protago
nist back to 1955 in a souped-up DeLorean, Andrew Jones and his
crew are searching for a vehicle to transport the university back to
an idealized era. They seek to return to simpler times when white,
heterosexual male students were unthreatened by the presence and
demands of Blacks. Chicanos, feminists and gays, whose respective
struggles for recognition within an educational system that had
historically excluded them resulted in nominal gains during the
last three decades of the 20th century. Departments such as ethnic
and women's studies, founded in order to critically engage and
challenge the knowledge produced by white, male-dominated insti
tutions, are now ironically under attack for not being mainstream
enough. Likewise, Middle Eastern studies programs from Columbia
to Berkeley have been viciously assailed for being "anti-American,"
or for being funded by so-called "blood money"—presumably from
the pockets of fanatical terrorists. Professors of Chicano studies
are "too political." Anti-war statements that even the majority of
Americans would now agree with are grounds for being considered
"biased," while drawing parallels between Iraq and Vietnam is
"heresy." And taped to that timeless touchstone of free speech—
the university professor's door—political cartoons mocking the
president are potential evidence of
"disloyalty."
Doesn't this sound all too fa
miliar? Didn't George Clooney just
make a film about this?
During the 1940s and '50s,
the House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) investigated,
blacklisted and imprisoned labor
leaders and union members, writ
ers and intellectuals, as well as ac
tors and directors for being "reds."
Cultural icons such as Charlie
Chaplin, Arthur Miller, Dorothy
Parker. Richard Wright. James
Baldwin and Orson Welles were
persecuted in the biggest national witch-hunt since Puritan times.
Senator Joseph McCarthy led his now notorious, FBI-backed cam
paign to exorcise suspected "communists" from U.S. society dur
ing a dark chapter of American history that is embossed with his
name. In addition to holding inquisition-like hearings, McCarthy
also established the "Overseas Library Program" that removed
30,000 books considered "un-American" from U.S. library shelves.
Andrew Jones is no Joe McCarthy, but he is a symptom of the
new McCarthyism that employs popularized free-market reasoning
and consumer choice rhetoric in attempts to discredit indepen
dent-minded professors and, ultimately, dismantle programs in the
humanities and social sciences that fail to treat their customers as
always right. By using alumni funds as leverage to influence cur
ricula and the intellectual climate of UCLA, Jones' approach—also
found at Penn State and Hamilton College in upstate Hew York—
mixes Burger King slogans with neoliberal logic to produce the ap
pearance of irresponsible and subversive scholarship. But academia
is not a fast food joint where you can have everything your way;
rather it is one of the few remaining sites of critical inquiry and
debate in a hyper-commercialized society. As Thomas Wortham,
UCLA's English Department Chair—and registered Republican-
commented in response to declining Jones' invitation to join the
Bruin Alumni Association advisory board, "If you don't question
things in a university, where are you supposed to question them?
At a university you have independent thinkers."
Underlying Jones' complaints about the university is the un
fulfilled desire to be the Big Man on Campus, that coveted college
crown that ambitious white, middle-class males have often sought
to acquire in order to assert their control over a student body that
once worshiped their social prowess. After the women's movement
and the opening of university gates to students and professors
of different colors, classes and concerns, the traditional BMOC
has been "de-centered" from the position he still longs to fill.
Frustrated by competing claims to importance and a lack of atten
tion in programs that fail to foreground his experience and expec
tations. BMOC wannabes regress into what Russell Jacoby—one of
the blacklisted "Dirty Thirty"—has called conservative crybabies.
If they weren't spoiled by the persistent inequalities of race, class,
gender and sexuality that they can easily exploit to their own ad
vantage, university administrators, state legislators and the main
stream media wouldn't even listen to their cacophonic swan song.
But despite their claims to the contrary, middle-class straight,
white males still sit at the top of the social hierarchy.
Andrew Jones, David Horowitz and their misguided followers
want to live in an era that never existed. While the popular Back
to the Future version of 1955 imagines a whitewashed society
devoid of any real social conflict, that was the same year in which
Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, initiated
by Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat. The boycott ignited the
Civil Rights movement that would forever change American society.
Now Jones wants the inheritors of that legacy to give up the seats
they've fought hard to gain within academia. If there was ever a
case that proved the absolute necessity of the departments and
scholars under attack by the new McCarthyism, it is Jones' own
myopic vision of the past. He is proof enough that we need more
academics like the "Dirty Thirty." not fewer.
Scott Boehm crossedcullure^yahoo com
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