Thorazine, Stat

by Cliopatria

Anthony Grafton, writing this week at the New Yorker:

"Conservative pundits and operators do their best to silence any professor who ventures into the public realm with the kind of unwelcome facts that scholarly and scientific expertise can produce."

Well good lord, yes. This is why poor Eric Foner never managed to catch on anywhere. This is why Manning Marable died in obscurity, unable to get anyone to publish his work, his death spoken of only in whispers. This is why, all over academia, people on the political left have been driven to the very margins, ostracized and unable to speak in public. This is why, after the terrifyingly effective David Horowitz named the 101 most dangerous radical professors in America, you never heard from any of those people again. (Todd Gitlin was last believed to have been sighted outside a truck stop in Pierre, South Dakota, digging in a garbage can for discarded sandwiches.) And we all remember how Lynne Cheney's devastating attack on the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA drove that university's history professors underground -- not one had the courage to respond, because of the ruin they would have faced. The name"Appleby" hisses across the sands of the gutted university, briefly heard before it fades into the emptiness of lost time. You know not of her, reader -- she has long since been silenced.

Almost as wonderfully, Grafton wrote this last week:

"Once upon a time, professors led quiet lives, walking slowly from seminars to tea in panelled rooms. Nowadays they wake up in the middle of media storms."

Yes, true! All of them."Professors" now stagger, silenced, from media storm to media storm, unable to find quiet in the daily tumult of their silencing. The whole nation fixates as one on its professors, carefully watching their every move -- what other thing could so perfectly define American society but this unrelenting mass media fixation with scholarship? I hear Eastern Kentucky University had to cancel all of its philosophy classes last week, because the glare of the spotlight just became too intense.

Imagine what America could have been, friends, if only we had ever been able to hear any academic voices from our political left. Maybe one day we could even have had a professor in the White House.

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chris l pettit - 4/5/2011

I think that maybe there exists a bit of myopia in the posts. My thought would be that, although the observations about the personal lives, work and experiences of the professors mentioned may not change much, that perspective completely misses the point. The individuals exist merely as part of a larger political and sociological narrative. Therefore, the target is not a history professor in Wisconsin, it is the utilization of the professor and the demonization of what he says, the perceived intimidation, and the furtherance of the opposition position to achieve larger political and social goals. That is what was so inherently invidious about Horwitz and his ilk. not whether he was effective in "disappearing" those professors he identified or their works, but rather how was the demonization effective in implementing or promoting a broader policy tack. Given the ignorance of the American public, the hyperpartisan nature of current political discourse, the ability of politicians to deceive and bend us over barrels with straight face, and the implementation of some of the more destructive policies we have seen in the past few decades (on both sides of the aisle)...I would say that many of the more narrowly targeted attacks on several different fronts have made it easier to implement large scale policies that are much more problematic than that which you criticize. For the most part, those that have been identified have come from the right, and that sector of political groups certainly seem to be more effective (and maybe their followers buy into it a bit more). I would just ask that you consider that in your ruminations on the topic.

Chris Bray - 4/4/2011

This post references some of the most aggressive academic witch hunts of the last decade or so. They didn't work. I personally know some of America's "most dangerous professors." I never saw them lose any sleep over that one.

The point is not that there are no witch hunts. The point is that most of the witch hunts are a joke, undertaken by dolts, but we treat them as a dire threat.

Ralph M. Hitchens - 4/4/2011

Without sweeping generalizations, where would political discourse be? Satire is always welcome, but the fact is that there have been some noteworthy, high-profile witch hunts of late.