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href="https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/2017/7/28/isolating-radicals-americas-new-academic-blacklisting">https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/2017/7/28/isolating-radicals-americas-new-academic-blacklisting</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">Isolating radicals: America's new academic
blacklisting</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Steven Salaita - July
27, 2017<br>
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<p>The outrage is helped along by a profound
misunderstanding of the offending critiques. What many
conservatives interpret as atavistic dislike of
innocent whites, akin to - if not worse than - racism
against black people and other ethnic minorities,
isn't a rejection of their humanity, but of a system
that reifies whiteness in order to maintain
inequality. </p>
<p>By treating whiteness as an ethnic category rather
than a political identity, those conservatives uphold
racial hierarchies that provide them a plethora of
tangible benefits. That black intellectuals face
recrimination for challenging whiteness as a political
invention merely validates their critical enterprise. </p>
<p>US academe has never been hospitable to radicals, as
evidenced by the kinds of speech most likely to land a
professor in trouble: Criticism of the police and/or
military, condemnation of Israel, analysis of
structural racism, and rejection of capitalism. While
the right has marketed itself as uniquely oppressed on
campus, those on the left, particularly women and
people of colour, most frequently suffer violations of
academic freedom.</p>
<p>Conservative scholars certainly provoke controversy,
but it's almost always for unambiguously racist speech
or unethical behaviour. Anyway, as the <a
href="http://www.hoover.org/profiles/condoleezza-rice"
target="_blank">war criminals</a> who have found <a
href="http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/albright/" target="_blank">prestigious
teaching</a> gigs <a
href="https://www.law.berkeley.edu/our-faculty/faculty-profiles/john-yoo/"
target="_blank">illustrate</a>, some controversy is
negligible or beneficial. It depends on who's
complaining. On both the left and right, affirming
state power isn't a problem. </p>
<p>Recent controversies at <a
href="http://www.philly.com/philly/news/Drexel-professor-ciccariello-maher-new-twitter-storm-March-31-2017.html"
target="_blank">Drexel</a>, <a
href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4629820/Outrage-professor-s-rebuke-self-identified-whites.html"
target="_blank">Trinity</a> (Hartford), <a
href="https://www.thefire.org/regarding-the-firing-of-jonathan-higgins-at-the-claremont-colleges/"
target="_blank">Claremont</a>, <a
href="https://townhallseattle.org/event/keeanga-yamahtta-taylor/"
target="_blank">Princeton</a> and <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/06/26/professor-fired-after-defending-blacks-only-event-on-fox-news-i-was-publicly-lynched-she-says/?utm_term=.96ab39e590cc"
target="_blank">Essex County College</a> arise from
the race politics that animate Trump's popularity
among many self-identified white people. These days,
whiteness doesn't signify the overconfidence of
normality as much as it does the paranoia of a
declining majority. </p>
<p>Few groups are more capable of hostility than those
anxious about an imminent decline of their inherent
advantages. </p>
<p>In any case, the misunderstandings don't justify the
vitriol. </p>
<p>Targets of these public inquests face racist abuse,
including death threats. Johnny Eric Williams, a
sociologist at Connecticut's Trinity College, had to <a
href="http://www.courant.com/education/hc-trinity-williams-facebook-furor-20170622-story.html"
target="_blank">flee</a> his home because of such
threats. Trinity ended up briefly shutting down
campus. <br>
</p>
<p>Inundated by promises of harm, Keeanga-Yamhatta
Taylor had to <a
href="http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/05/31/25180859/keeanga-yamahtta-taylor-cancels-west-coast-tour-after-a-fox-news-report-spurs-death-threats"
target="_blank">cancel</a> a speaking tour in the
Pacific Northwest. Saida Grundy, of Boston University,
had to work amid condemnatory <a
href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/08/24/saida-grundy-discusses-controversy-over-her-comments-twitter-her-career-race-and"
target="_blank">flyers</a> posted by a neo-Nazi
group. </p>
<p>Jonathan Higgins, a student affairs professional, was
fired for deploring structural racism by an
institution reputed to be liberal. </p>
<p>We tend to think of these right-wing offensives as
fundamentally ideological - that is, as the product of
irrational fervour set on destruction - but they're
not as mindless as we might imagine. They follow
strategic principles that have proven effective,
partly because university management provides them
latitude. </p>
<p>Grundy and Williams, for example, were reprimanded by
their employers, while Taylor's remained silent, which
can be read as indifference or tacit approval, neither
option helpful in a moment promising racial violence. </p>
<p>The goal of conservative media luminaries who whip
their audiences into frenzies isn't merely to punish
radical scholars, but to render themselves
indispensable to campus governance. They have
succeeded insofar as they define the parameters of
public debate and mark their targets as deviant.</p>
<p>Controversy isn't an event, but a condition. In
academe, overcoming that condition is remarkably
difficult. Upper administrators loathe controversy, a
sentiment that bleeds into the faculty who control
systems of merit and promotion. In this industry,
punishment is often a lifetime proposition. </p>
<p>Agitators exploit this feature of academe to
interject themselves into spaces where they normally
have no influence, rendering themselves omnipresent
despite their formal absence. Dozens of websites
profile offending faculty, warning universities that
the listed individuals come with the potential for
trouble and providing guidance to patriotic types
eager to share feedback with seditious professors. </p>
<p>They limit mobility within and beyond campus. The
situation amounts to blacklisting because conservative
mobs generate a permanent state of disputation even
when they fail to get their targets fired. </p>
<p>Management normally doesn't take a firm stand against
conservative attempts to punish faculty. Not a single
university president, for example, has condemned
Canary Mission, a website devoted to ruining the
career prospects of students and faculty deemed to be
inadequately enamoured of Israel, and none has stood
up to <em>Fox News'</em> Tucker Carlson, a principal
purveyor of right-wing agitation. </p>
<p>It's easy to attribute this inaction to cowardice,
but doing so absolves senior administrators of their
role in promulgating anti-intellectual cultures. </p>
<p>Most deans and provosts are too genteel to embrace
Republican operatives, frequently stereotyped as
uneducated rubes, but those operatives provide cover
for universities' less pastoral commitments: Dirty
real estate transactions, awful labour practices,
obscene administrative salaries, complicity in
imperialism and settler colonisation, cooperation with
the surveillance state, cover-ups of sexual assault.
</p>
<p>That administrators often tolerate reactionaries who
profess a desire to destroy higher education shouldn't
be a surprise: university management and reactionary
politicians often share the same class interests. In
the past month, <a
href="http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/09/mills-college-to-lay-off-at-least-8-professors-cut-philosophy-program/"
target="_blank">two colleges</a> have <a
href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/17/faculty-members-who-have-been-lead-critics-administration-lose-jobs-sierra-nevada"
target="_blank">laid off</a> tenured faculty,
something that promises to become a regular
occurrence. </p>
<p>In both cases, the scholars put on the chopping block
had been critical of their administrations. Fancy
vestments can't conceal the resemblance of campus
luminaries to right-wing demagogues who peddle visions
of an authoritarian social order. </p>
<p>Scholars who challenge nationalistic orthodoxy can
expect the same tacit approval from their bosses.
Management rarely condemns vitriol and death threats
against its employees unless doing so enhances their
brand. </p>
<p>They're too beholden to the corporations,
legislatures, and foundations from which they derive
significant income, not to mention wealthy individual
donors. It's lucrative, if only by negation, to bemoan
the unhinged and pampered radicals they have to put up
with. </p>
<p>Senior administrators would do well to heed the words
of Simran Jeet Singh, who faced <a
href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/21/sikh-scholar-harassed-over-photo-another-man-front-trump-tower"
target="_blank">calls for dismissal</a> over a phony
allegation. Noting that his employer, Trinity College
in San Antonio, had his "back in every single moment
like this," he provided the solution to the problem of
right-wing agitation: "I wish that other universities
would do the same for their educators."</p>
<p>Many commentators in the West hesitate to raise this
point, but pro-Israel groups pioneered the tactics now
deployed with increasing success by alt-right
agitators. They have also been the most vigorous in
enforcing blacklists, which have a long tradition in
the United States, in part because capitalist
societies maintain obedience through strict regulation
of livelihood. </p>
<p>Norman Finkelstein never got another job in the
United States. Neither did <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/legal-battle-ends-larger-struggle-continues-professor-denied-tenure"
target="_blank">Terri Ginsburg</a>. Dozens of
Palestinian scholars exist in job market purgatory,
known to be troublemakers by virtue of claiming an
ethnic identity. Being hated by reactionaries is
seemingly their most notable accomplishment, and no
amount of distinguished teaching, scholarship, or
service will change that reality. </p>
<p>Instead of bemoaning the stupidity of conservative
zealots, faculty ought to consider how they
unwittingly maintain that zealotry on campus.
Blacklists require the consent of people who claim to
deplore them. Faculty can diminish the power of
controversy by refusing to abide what they imagine to
be administrative preferences. </p>
<p>Allowing public shaming to dictate curricular
priorities can expedite institutional anxiety and
augment the tabloid undertones of academe. Let's quit
pandering to managerial sensibilities and recruit
faculty who will upset the bosses. </p>
<p>In other words, faculty abet blacklists when they
accept controversy as an insurmountable reality.
Blacklists work only if they become self-regulating
through a collective observance of common sense
("she's un-hireable"; "our administration will never
go for it"; "I don't want to deal with controversy";
"our department's reputation will take a hit"; "he's
too polemical"; "groups X, Y, and Z on campus will
complain"; "I'm afraid of getting into trouble"). </p>
<p>We cannot defeat the right if we allow its operatives
and managerial enablers to mediate our professional
conventions. We're also helpless to overcome the
threat if we don't expunge whatever affinity we have
for the racism at the heart of today's alt-right
enterprise. I suspect this task will be more difficult
for faithful liberals than they might care to admit.</p>
<p>Whether a reactionary ethos forces itself onto campus
or actually corresponds to extant professional
ideologies, that ethos informs some of academe's most
enduring truisms. </p>
<p>"Don't be political" becomes a pragmatic mantra, the
sage advice seasoned elders give to young firebrands
who don't yet know the business. But being political
is fine as long as it doesn't interfere with sites of
power, in which case the politics can acquire the
gravity of dispassion. </p>
<p>"Political" is reserved for words and actions that
challenge capitalist and colonialist orthodoxy. "Don't
be political" really means "Don't be committed to
justice". </p>
<p>And if we cannot be committed to justice, then
abandoning any pretence of critical thinking or
compassionate pedagogy becomes the only ethical
option. When reactionaries are in a constant state of
apoplexy, we needn't accept it as a source of anxiety,
but as affirmation of a job well done. </p>
<p><strong>Steven Salaita is an American scholar, author
and public speaker. His latest book is <em>Uncivil
Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic
Freedom</em>. Follow him on Twitter:</strong> <a
href="http://www.twitter.com/stevesalaita"
target="_blank">@stevesalaita</a> </p>
<p><em><strong>Opinions expressed in this article remain
those of the author, and do not necessarily
represent those of The New Arab, its editorial
board or staff.</strong></em> </p>
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