In the Washington Post this morning, Fred Hiatt writes that amazingly, he's hearing people who were once vociferously against 45 starting to settle in with him a little bit. After all, they say, the economy is humming along, we haven't gone to war with anybody else and, outside of a fierce acceleration of political rhetoric, nothing has changed all that much.
He warns us not to get complacent about all that. America's position in the world has deteriorated signficantly. Our advantage in leadership has eroded. Much good we could be doing is being ignored behind a Why Us mentality.
Bottom line: For heaven's sake, we can't afford his re-election. Not only will these tendencies begin to gallop out of control, but other things that 45 hasn't had the time to focus on quite yet will then get his undivided attention.
One of them will be academia. It's ripe for attack. You know, intellectual elites who some think are smarter than everybody else. 45 will insult professors who do not fit his idea of teaching. He will start calling them "un-American." He will question their loyalty. It might start a new, McCarthyist witch-hunt.
Most of them are liberal. They promote human rights, free speech and press (despite issues on campus that will provide 45 a path for undermining them), women's and reproductive rights, the separation of church and state, and questioning the military-industrial complex: Things such people have been doing for as long as university systems have existed.
It's especially true of public university systems. They can be enormous: Texas, California, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, to name just a few. Their faculties are loaded with liberals. They are represented by unions. They have some control over hiring practices.
Conservatives have complained for a long time that conservatism is being pushed out by these faculties. The playing field should be leveled, they keep saying. Conservatives, they say, are being attacked endlessly for trying to promote their kind of thinking.
I got a dose of this at a conference I attended in Washington, DC, 14 years ago as a member of the NEA Executive Committee. I pretty much invited myself to it, with permission from our president. I wanted to know what went on. A man named David Horowitz, well-known for his opposition to the university system that he claims does little more than breed liberals, conducted it.
Victimization overwhelmed the day. Students were invited to tell of situations in which they expressed their conservative philosophies--mostly religiously flavored, the disingenuousness of which has caught on much more widely now--and, they said, were unceremoniously put down by liberal professors who didn't want to hear of it.
None of those professors were in the room to respond, of course. Some significant pushback was provided, though, by a representative from the American Federation of Teachers during a panel discussion later in the weekend, especially on the topic of academic freedom. (Why the NEA had no one there, officially, continues to be a mystery. But once it was learned that I was in the room, Horowitz took special notice.)
Consider, if you will, a David Horowitz-type, ready to skewer academics, at the top of our government. He'll be in a position to leverage a distinct lack of funding for a bastion of public education in which the U.S. has always been known as the leader. Foreign students, those that still can, of course, continue to flock here to do research. We are known for it. We should be proud of it.
45, if re-elected, will start telling people that we should be ashamed of it and avoid it. It will become one of the new armpits of his angry, pointless, misleading verbiage. Think Mr. F. Gow with fangs exposed: think about what he did to the University of Wisconsin system and its Wisconsin Idea, that research should be utilized to improve society. Taking that apart, he arranged to drain $250 million of it to give to someone wanting a new basketball arena in Milwaukee (the direct link not established, but the two items had the same price tag). In other words, a private entity draining the funding from public education.
Think about that. 45 would be in perfect position to manipulate that in dozens of universities. Federal funding might dry up in a hurry if colleges didn't adhere to some new kind of hiring practices. He could move the money to private institutions of learning--of which there's certainly nothing wrong on paper (I attended one), but there would be another attempt to make the rich much richer, and the commonplace, middle-class students would be out of luck. And unquestionably, he would shift those funds to religiously-connected or established colleges.
All this will be backed by Fox News, just as much as it conjured a report about Baltimore to make House Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings look like he had neglected his constituents. Count on it.
If he's re-elected, this will happen. Count on that, too. Someone else's leader has already done so: Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A feature in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, written by Suzy Hansen, discusses it.
Turkey's Ankara University used to be a bulwark of liberal thinking. Its political science department, called Mulkiye, was particularly known for its cultivation of collective action and government protest. Mulkiye was usually at the center of that.
But Mulkiye was also the source of some of the more distinguished government representatives in the country's history: foreign ministers, ambassadors, and governors. A certain tension existed between those two realms. At times, some professors were harassed. The faculty split into left- and right-wing factions, so it isn't as if conservatism didn't exist there.
But by the 21st Century, fundamentalist thinking began to seep inside. My own experience in Ankara in late 2004 was illustrative. The main teachers' union, Egitim Sen, was hosted a conference while facing a legal showdown with the national Supreme Court over whether or not its members could teach Kurdish children--some of which were in families that had fled from the American-created Iraq War next door--in Kurdish instead of Turkish, which was part of the Turkish Constitution.
Hostility against Kurds, stemming from World War I, has existed in Turkey for a century. "In the political rhetoric of the Turkish state, to be pro-Kurdish is almost to be a terrorist," Hansen writes. The Supreme Court ruled against Egitim Sen, which had to submit or face dissolution.
Except Kurdish students began to attend Ankara University in much larger numbers. The Mulkiye embraced them. The students celebrated the greater ability to make themselves heard in the more liberal, secular atmosphere.
But just about when I had attended that international union conference, Mulkiye began to absorb greater and greater restrictions, spearheaded by Erdogan. Research funding fell into greater scrutiny. Far more students who participated in protests were disciplined. Pro-government media (See above) condemned Mulkiye faculty as being "enemies of Islam," in what's supposed to be a secular state.
Most of all, the word "terrorist" is thrown around like candy at a parade. "Across the country, academics were vilified, threatened and even arrested," Hansen writes.
The results? First, a brain drain. Students don't want to attend a place where their faculty members are harassed. Second, an academic drain. Thousands of teachers and professors have left.
Worse, suppression of critical voices has taken hold. "What the [ruling party] seems to propose for Turkey's future is a country without character," writes Hansen, "a country that can believe itself to be free as long as it does not adopt an identity that threatens [that party]." In other words, a 1984-type 'freedom' that is measured by repression alone.
And there would sit a president 45 who defines anything he wants in any way he wants it. With his continued power to be at the bully(ing) pulpit, backed by a newly-elected Republican Congress (which could still easily happen) which would have already proved itself completely pliant to his every whim and barely able to wait to double-down on destroying any whiff of liberalism, a devastating blow to public education would be at hand. A less-educated public would result--exactly what they, and he, have in mind.
There are advantages to resistance here, as opposed to Turkey: Sheer size. The Mulkiye is just one entity, as harassed and reduced as it is, but many universities exist here with vibrant faculties that would try to stand firm. The battle may boil down to the spreading of an already troubling trend: Adjunct faculties and their dependence on university administrators for their very existence.
It's truly frightening. It's a reason we can't get complacent or normalize this national zombie government, filled with dead ideas like that in Turkey, run by autocrats. Fred Hiatt is right: We must overcome it. We must keep caring enough, difficult as it is to sustain it.
Be well. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment