“Hate” Was Not the Problem at Penn (or Other Universities), Radicalism Was and Still Is

This essay appeared in slightly altered form on the website of Tablet Magazine on April 1, 2024 under the title, “Jew-Hatred Is Not the Problem at Penn (or Other Universities). Radicalism Is.”

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Late last year Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro interjected himself forcefully into the uproar over former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill’s Congressional testimony (in which she failed to say that calling for “the genocide of Jews” would necessarily violate the school’s code of conduct) and the events on the Penn campus that would soon culminate in her resignation. The governor came out strongly against antisemitism in all its forms – never bad in itself. But Shapiro’s widely reported speech on Sunday, December 10, 2023, at Philadelphia’s Rodeph Shalom synagogue, in which he proclaimed, “Hate has no place here,” misnamed the chief problem that had plagued Penn and a number of other universities this past fall. That problem was not the expression of group hatred toward Jews, of which only a handful of examples have existed on most American campuses for many years now, but rather the radical politicization of higher education to the detriment of the free expression of ideas, which constitutes the lifeblood of any college. Threatening in this way to undermine the very idea of a university, political extremism may also predictably endanger the safety and well-being of individuals – Jews among them – who live, study, or work at one.

In the flood of commentary that followed President Magill’s ouster, right-leaning columnists fairly pilloried elite institutions like Penn for their hypocrisy in scrupulously defending the legal principles of free speech on campus concerning criticism of Israel while ignoring years of restrictions on faculty and outside speakers whose views challenged “social-justice” norms on race, gender, religion, and other topics. Meanwhile, left-leaning columnists properly warned of dangers to academic freedom if wealthy donors, politicians, or other self-interested parties can bypass normal university procedures to influence educational content – in this case, in the name of opposition to antisemitism. Neither side in this clash has been keen to acknowledge its own contributions toward undermining academic freedom and diversity of thought at universities, turning the conversation into yet another skirmish in the “culture wars.” A focus on what has provided the stimulus for so many recent campus controversies, the perception of speech and actions that are considered hateful, may offer some clarity toward useful university reforms and an assessment of the current moment’s dangers for Jews.

Incidents of reported antisemitism at Penn this past fall received a boost from two singular events – a high-profile conference showcasing Palestinian literature and political activism, which took place on the campus in late September, and the savage assault by Hamas on Israeli civilians on October 7, precipitating the ongoing war between Israel and the terrorist organization in Gaza. As a result, the record of these incidents (detailed in the next three paragraphs), while at first glance startling in number, on further examination of what’s known about their circumstances suggests somewhat less cause for alarm. Overall, this record comports with the general findings of the Anti-Defamation League for two recent years, which downplay the significance of universities as settings for antisemitic attacks. For both calendar years 2021and 2022, the ADL found that just under 6% of the total number of antisemitic incidents occurring throughout the United States (which rose to its highest number on record in 2022 at 3,697 incidents; no doubt that number will be far higher for 2023) took place on college campuses. And most of the recent ones at Penn, as we will see, are best classified as political in nature.

The record for Penn this past fall is as follows: On September 13 students discovered a swastika painted on an inside surface of Penn’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design, with no apparent leads turning up as to the identity of the perpetrator or the significance of the precise target. On September 21 Penn’s Division of Public Safety apprehended a man for entering the campus’s Hillel building, overturning some furniture, and shouting, “F—k the Jews. They killed JC.” The man, who the Penn police said was “experiencing a crisis,” had been spotted earlier overturning trash cans on a nearby city street. His relationship to the Penn community has never been clarified. (The Washington Free Beacon, citing an unnamed Hillel spokesperson, reports that the intruder was a Penn student, but all other sources refer only to “an individual.”) As part of the three-day “Palestine Writes” conference, held on the campus September 22-24, speakers excoriated Israel from multiple angles [see link at paragraphs 6, 115], including as a nation of “settlers from Europe” who became “occupants of our country.” 

On September 27 the display of a foliage-covered booth for the Jewish holiday Sukkot, erected by Penn’s Chabad organization, was desecrated with unreadable graffiti, but Penn’s police did not consider the incident antisemitic. On October 16 a pro-Palestinian demonstrator, not affiliated with Penn, told students in a pro-Israeli counter-demonstration that they should “leave us in peace or go back to Moscow or Brooklyn.” He later pushed a bystander and ripped down pictures of Israelis held hostage by Hamas, for which he was apprehended by Penn’s police. Two days later a Penn library staffer also tore down pictures of the people assaulted and taken captive by Hamas. When confronted by a Jewish student over what he was doing, words were exchanged and the staffer swore at the student [see link at p. 17]. On October 20 students at the off-campus Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi found the phrase, “The Jews R Nazis,” written on the door of an adjoining empty building (owned by a Jewish landlord). There are no leads as to the perpetrator(s).

On October 28 an Israeli flag was ripped down and taken from an off-campus residence hall for Orthodox Jewish students. The perpetrator was found to be a Penn student involved in the campus’s anti-Israel group, Penn Against Occupation [see link at p. 18]. On the night of November 8 Penn Against Occupation projected pro-Palestinian slogans, including “Let Gaza live,” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “Zionism is racism,” and “Penn funds Palestinian genocide,” onto the faces of a number of campus buildings, messages which President Magill denounced the next day as “vile” and “antisemitic,” promising a full investigation by the Penn Police. Throughout this period (with dates unspecified), according to Penn Hillel’s rabbi, “a small number of Penn staff members” received hateful, antisemitic messages and violent threats that targeted the recipients’ personal identities [see link at p. 21]. And on December 3 in a citywide protest, some 500 pro-Palestinian demonstrators ended a march by spray painting graffiti on several Penn properties and stores that line the campus.

Even a single one of these reprehensible incidents is one too many. But overall, how should we understand this record? Among these roughly ten incidents (leaving aside the “Palestine Writes” conference), two of the perpetrators were identified as Penn students (or a student group), a third as a Penn employee, and a fourth as holding an unspecified relationship to the campus community. A fifth perpetrator was an off-campus community radical. The perpetrators of four more of these incidents remain unknown, and one incident may not have been antisemitic at all. In terms of its content, despite the presence of occasional generic symbols of antisemitism, this record of attacks on Jewish targets is best described as an extremist outgrowth of political radicalism stemming from the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The political character of most of these attacks is underscored by the fact that the Jewish population at Penn, by no means weak at 16% of the undergraduate student body, sponsored a variety of its own public, political stands, most supportive but some critical of Israel, during this same period. None of this interpretation goes to minimize the potential for violence against Jews embodied in the anti-Israeli radicalism at Penn (as I will turn to in a moment). Rather, it serves to name the threat in a manner that connects it to the dominance at so many American colleges today of radical left-wing ideology on behalf of causes said to represent such “oppressed groups” as African Americans, other people of color, and a variety of sexual minorities. At Penn, as at other college campuses, Palestinians, not Israelis or Jews, are considered an oppressed group.

For universities, the fact that these incidents derive more from radical political sentiments than from traditional Jew-hatred points the way toward how these institutions should handle the problem. It is lucky that ethnic hatred per se does not lie at the root of today’s campus woes, because colleges are not – or should not be – in the business of inculcating moral values or teaching civics. Those responsibilities are best left to families, lower-level schooling, religious bodies, and voluntary organizations. Universities exist for the purpose of furthering higher education and fostering the pursuit of truth through advanced research, both of which goals demand wide open forums for the presentation and discussion of ideas. At the same time, universities must proceed with internal rules that enable their mission to go forward and not be impeded by illiberal elements (whether arising from among faculty, students, administrators, or outside parties) who would disrupt their educational and research functions.

For many years now, universities have been doing exactly the opposite of what is required to support these goals. They have restricted the free-flow of ideas by “canceling” presentations they think might offend an “oppressed group,” while allowing protesters presumed to represent “oppressed groups” to take over campus buildings, block pathways, or interfere with quiet learning environments. Examples abound, from left-wing students at Middlebury College in 2017 shouting down sociologist Charles Murray’s guest lecture on cultural and genetic differences among social groups, to Penn’s own ongoing disciplinary investigation of law professor Amy Wax for, among other things, inviting a white supremacist to make a presentation to one of her classes. If anyone believes that radicals on the political right might not act similarly to restrict the speech they dislike, were they to be in control of these same universities, one need only glance at the attempt to institute more conservative tenets of orthodoxy in the teaching of American history at colleges in Florida.

As it happens, the threat to university life posed by political radicalism can best be mitigated by colleges adhering to these twin principles of encouraging wide-open speech – excluding foul language or any true threat of violence or intimidation directed at an individual or group (which would include, for example, any “call for the genocide of Jews”) – and placing strict physical limits on campus protests. There is no reason why, for example, the claim that Israel has committed “genocide” against the Palestinian people, or even that the nation of Israel should not exist as a refuge for Jewish people, abhorrent as these ideas are to me and many others, should be ruled out of order at a university. The best way to discredit such radical misconceptions and convictions is precisely by airing them to reasoned criticism and debate, including by experts in related fields of study, through lectures, classes, teach-ins, and written work. That’s what universities are for. The problem with the “Palestine Writes” conference was not that it was allowed to take place but rather that the faculty who set it up made no effort to seek balance or diversity in the perspectives and expertise that were represented on its panels. Meanwhile, plenty of college rules and criminal laws already exist for prosecuting anyone committing acts of disruption, vandalism, harassment, or personal assault on a college campus. They need to be enforced.

In responding to the recent increase in reported incidents of antisemitism, universities should resist the temptation simply to add “antisemitism awareness” to the list of topics already covered in the mandatory DEI (“Diversity, Equity, Inclusion”) orientation sessions that have become commonplace on campuses. There is little evidence that such efforts at overt moralizing accomplish their stated aims, while they more reliably inhibit the expression of unpopular views. Given that the greatest threat to the universities today stems from political radicalism, a far more effective counter to the ugly manifestations of campus protests lies in demonstrating the shallowness and dangers of the radicals’ ideas and rhetoric.

For Jews, the fact that recent campus actions perceived as antisemitic proceed from left-wing political beliefs as opposed to ages-old myths about the Jewish people, or, for that matter, as opposed to newer, right-wing political ideas like the “great replacement” theory, which holds Jews responsible for encouraging illegal immigrants to come to the United States, may offer little comfort. After all, acts of vandalism, shoving and swearing at individuals, or leaving anonymous, threatening messages are frightening and intimidating regardless of their perpetrators’ motives. Radical beliefs, which so often arise from misplaced anger and poorly understood historical relationships, also have a way of migrating from one side of the political spectrum to the other. Marx, for example, contributed an early, derisive text on Jewish commercialism (On the Jewish Question) that figured in the later evolution of European fascist thought. Additionally, at any point along the way a mentally ill individual might act on these radical ideas to produce terrible violence, or mob psychology might take hold of a portion of a radically engaged crowd, resulting in similar consequences. The latter development never happened at Penn this fall, but it almost did at New York City’s Cooper Union College, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators banged on the glass windows of the campus library, frightening some of the Jewish students inside, as a security guard kept the door closed.

Moreover, in the current era of collegiate-based pro-Palestinian radicalism, which appears to have arrived at Penn as early as 2015 with the rise of groups pushing the goals of the “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” campaign [see link at paragraphs 56-90], there really is an element of hatred involved. This is the hatred of Israel. One has only to witness the fury expressed by so many of the speakers at pro-Palestinian campus rallies to recognize that for most of the leaders, if not the followers, at these rallies, Israel is perceived as an illegitimate nation, whose majority Jewish population is living on stolen land that rightfully belongs to Palestinian refugees. This anger toward Israel not infrequently spills over into attacks on Jews who have no immediate connection to Israel. “[B]ecause you have never known the sanctuary of a home,” one presenter at Penn’s “Palestine Writes” conference put it, “…it’s no wonder you want our land for your own.” Who is the “you” in this sentence if not worldwide Jewry? And how else to explain the Penn rally speaker’s retort, noted above, to American Jews in the crowd to “go back to Moscow or Brooklyn,” or the target of one of the threatening messages, also noted above, in this instance conveying a bomb threat aimed at the Lauder College House, Penn’s newest, large dormitory, which was named for its biggest donors, Jewish family members of the Estée Lauder estate? One cannot read the 84-page civil complaint, filed in December by two Jewish students at Penn, alleging that Penn has allowed a hostile environment for its Jewish students to be created on its campus, without acknowledging the genuine sense of fear that evidently gripped many of these students (over 200 placed their names on one petition), as they watched and heard boisterous displays of anti-Israeli sentiment and received occasional antisemitic slurs week after week throughout the fall [see link at paragraphs 2, 101, 104, 107, 141-145, 161, 165-173, 191]. 

And yet, it would be a mistake to think the recent events at Penn and other American college campuses signify a true resurgence of virulent antisemitism akin to the widespread abuse Jews suffered during the 1930s in the United States, let alone in the cities of Europe. A number of factors serve to limit the current wave of anti-Jewish sentiment, but perhaps the main one is that the hostility at present really is focused on Israel, not on Jewish people as such. (See Eitan Hersh’s valuable observations about this distinction, as revealed in attitudes held by far left-wing as opposed to far right-wing college students.) It is probably not an accident that the lead student plaintiff in the civil lawsuit against Penn is a dual Israeli-American citizen [see link at paragraph 15], for he has reason to fee l particularly vulnerable to attack under these circumstances. And while this young man succeeded in obtaining the signatures of roughly 200 Penn students on a petition to prod the university to curtail pro-Palestinian activism, that number is still a relatively small fraction (about 12%) of Penn’s overall Jewish student population. It is likely that a majority of Jews at Penn did not feel personally threatened by the events of last fall. (Two post-October 7 surveys that purport to show widespread fear and anxiety among Jewish college students have drawn their respondents from those students with particularly strong attachments to Israel, in one case from a pool of young adult Jews who had applied to Birthright Israel, in the other case from students who appear to have been selected by Hillel campus organizations [see note on methodology at end of link]. A more relevant recent survey, one specifically designed not to exclude students with more minimal Jewish identities, found that roughly one third of all Jewish students expressed anxieties about being visibly Jewish on campus, about the same proportion who said they had been personally targeted by antisemitic comments, slurs, or threats. That proportion rose to somewhat less than two-thirds when respondents were asked if they believed Jewish students “pay a social penalty” for supporting Israel as a Jewish state.)

Indeed, some of Penn’s Jewish students conspicuously joined in many of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, either in formal groups or as individuals. One Jewish student group found itself in a confrontation with the university administration, when it insisted on going ahead with showing a documentary film critical of Israel’s West Bank policies despite the university’s decision to delay the showing until passions on the campus had cooled. We should not be surprised by this split among Penn’s Jewish students, because American Jews under the age of forty hold considerably more critical opinions about Israel’s general policies toward Palestinians than do those older than forty. 

The demographic characteristics of the campus protesters, so far as can be determined by second-hand observation, also fit with the demonstrators’ focus on Israel. Palestinian Americans appear to have dominated the protests at Penn, both as the leading speakers at rallies and in the make-up of the supporting crowds. Some are even Palestinians attending American colleges as foreign students – the Penn student who ripped down the Israeli flag from above the Orthodox Jewish student residence hall appears to belong to this category. Many are likely to be in contact with relatives and friends living in the West Bank or Gaza. To some extent, the radicalism of these ethnic Americans, focused on harsh legacies from “the old country” and fueled by the desire for upward mobility in the face of perceived prejudices in their new country, resembles past waves of second-generation immigrant radicalism (among, for example, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Mexican Americans) common throughout our country’s history. Knowing this history, however, doesn’t make anger-driven radical actions any the less worrisome for institutions, such as universities, that require openness and reasonability to operate, or for individuals, who may easily be demonized as “enemies of the people.”

Radical movements tend to suffer from an unwillingness to look inward and to recognize the failings of their own group’s past leadership, choosing instead to place all blame on their historical antagonists and the latter’s perceived representatives in the present. The pro-Palestinian campus radicals clearly suffer from this flaw, as they have uncritically carried forward the tragic failings of past Palestinian leaders to seize numerous opportunities since 1947 to build a Palestinian nation alongside Israel. As today’s pro-Palestinian radicals have attracted support from among young black, feminist, and other radicals, they have allowed themselves to demonize Israel, just as the Black Lives Matter movement and certain gender radicals have demonized white people as “privileged racists” or men as “cis-gendered patriarchs.”

As a species of scapegoating, antisemitism is inherently unpredictable in its trajectory. It is well to be on guard to see if in the future today’s political antisemitism may burst out of its current anti-Israeli boundaries or spread beyond college campuses, their adjacent youthful urban enclaves, and Arab-American ethnic communities. For now, this worry remains muted by the firewall of sorts that exists in the overwhelming support for Israel shown by most Americans after the attack of October 7. However, the threat posed by left-wing political radicalism itself, particularly to college campuses, is real enough and must be countered by reasoned argument and the enforcement of lawful behavior.

What Penn Got Right and Wrong about Antisemitism on Campus Last Fall

Readers may find that six links in this unpublished op-ed are blocked from connecting to their source: https://brandeiscenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/University-of-Pennsylvania-Title-VI-Complaint-1_Redacted.pdf. All six go to a formal complaint filed on November 9, 2023, by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law with the United States Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights under the title, “Civil Rights Violations by the University of Pennsylvania.” These six links appear in the op-ed followed in the text by parenthetical page references to that document. This essay was completed on February 9, 2024.

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A series of incidents occurring at the University of Pennsylvania last fall, culminating in Penn president Liz Magill’s fateful Congressional testimony (in which she failed to say that calling for “the genocide of Jews” would necessarily violate the school’s code of conduct) and her subsequent resignation, brought widespread charges that the university had ignored or even encouraged an outburst of antisemitic “hate” on its campus. As the war between Israel and Hamas continues and students have now returned to campuses throughout the country, it pays to look back at what Penn got right and wrong in its handling of this volatile subject so as to minimize future confrontations.

Even before the savage assault by Hamas on Israeli civilians on October 7, precipitating the ongoing war, the fall semester at Penn began with a provocative event: a high-profile, three-day conference in September showcasing Palestinian literature and political activism. The university took heat for allowing this conference to go forward, because some of the invited speakers had been accused of making antisemitic statements in earlier appearances. But in greenlighting the conference, Penn did something right that was important. Universities exist to promote the pursuit of truth in both research and education. This pursuit, as John Stuart Mill pointed out almost two centuries ago in his classic, On Liberty, requires the widest berth for the free expression of ideas. Only in this way can wrong-headed and even dangerous assertions be shown to rest on erroneous facts or faulty logic, while truthful elements might be discovered within even the most unpopular positions.

As long as speakers did not threaten any individual or group, or use foul language in their presentations, Penn was correct to refrain from stepping in to halt the conference. Some critics said that the Penn administration should at least have rebutted any statements made at the conference that could be construed as antisemitic (see link at p. 12). But this is not the job of a university administration. The academic committees and departments responsible for setting up and endorsing the conference should have arranged in advance for a wide range of views to be represented, thus enabling criticism and reflection to be built into the conference itself. It sounds like these sponsoring bodies did nothing of the sort, which points to a deep, underlying problem at Penn and other universities: the lack of value placed on viewpoint diversity among its academic staff. This was something Penn got wrong, though the fault lay with the university’s faculty more than with its administration.

When Hamas attacked southern Israel on October 7, slaughtering some 1200 people and dragging another 240 people back to Gaza as captives, Penn’s president equivocated before issuing a statement of condemnation (see link at p. 15). Critics pointed to the hypocrisy of university presidents quickly condemning other national or international atrocities, like the killing of George Floyd or the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but then hesitating over what to say about an attack on Jews and others in Israel. Here, Penn walked into a mistake of its own making. Universities should not be in the habit of supporting or condemning any political event, precisely because to do so undermines a university’s special mission of promoting the all-sided pursuit of truth. All viewpoints must feel welcome at a university, and that can’t happen when the top officer of a school – and that goes as well for department chairs and other institutional heads – embraces a political position. (Former president Magill might have spoken as an individual citizen about the Hamas attack, provided she made clear she was not representing Penn in doing so.) 

When a number of incidents of vandalism and harassment hit Penn’s campus – including a swastika found painted inside a campus building; a man entering the school’s Hillel center, overturning furniture and yelling an anti-Jewish obscenity; a pro-Palestinian demonstrator shoving a bystander; a library staffer tearing down pictures of Israelis held hostage by Hamas (see link, at p. 17); graffiti, “The Jews R Nazis,” discovered on a door next to a Jewish fraternity; an Israeli flag ripped down from atop an Orthodox Jewish residence hall (see link at p. 18); pro-Palestinian slogans projected at night on campus buildings; and antisemitic threats left on the voicemails of some Penn staff members (see link at p. 21) – Penn’s campus police acted with swiftness in investigating these incidents and apprehending a few of the perpetrators. Penn got this right, assuming it goes forward with disciplinary actions where merited. However, it should have done more to rein in campus protesters when they blocked pathways, took over a section of the student union, or interfered with the ability of students to study quietly in the library, as was reported (see link at p. 17).

When a Jewish student group tried to show a documentary film critical of Israel, Penn told them to wait several months until tensions had cooled. This was a mistake. Not only was there little reason to believe that the film showing would have resulted in violence, but even if that threat were real, it’s the university’s job to provide police to safeguard any legitimate educational function and, if necessary, to bar outsiders from attending a campus event.

In response to criticism from organizations like the Anti-Defamation League concerning some of these instances, former president Magill agreed before she resigned to add “antisemitism awareness” to the topics already covered in Penn’s mandatory diversity orientation sessions. This, too, was a mistake. Colleges should not be in the business of teaching morals or civics. That job is best left to families, religious bodies, primary and secondary schools, and voluntary organizations. There is little evidence that so-called diversity training can accomplish its stated goals, while it more reliably puts a chill on the voicing of unpopular views. There is no reason, in the case at hand, why, for example, such propositions as that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, or even that the nation of Israel should not exist as a refuge for Jewish people, abhorrent as these notions are to me and many others, should not be civilly voiced and debated at a university. Teach-ins, provided they make every effort to present a wide range of contexts and views, offer ideal settings for universities, led by their faculties, to take up even the most controversial subjects.

Finally, President Magill’s resignation itself did not need to happen. No doubt she answered the question posed to her toward the end of a grueling Congressional hearing poorly, for which she did try to make amends in the days that followed. (She is certainly no antisemite.) Her confusion at the time, as at many other times throughout the fall semester, however, reflected a fundamental failure, common to university leaders today, to understand and articulate just how free speech and academic freedom should function when confronted by radical political passions. This failure has been evident for years, leaving Penn and many other universities open to the charge of hypocrisy in defending free speech only when it fits with the left-leaning political views shared by those who currently dominate these campuses. A college president who was more sure of the proper boundaries separating academic freedom from politics might have been able to stand up to the forces that drove her out of office.

In going forward, the general rule for Penn and other colleges should be that universities need to become less permissive about disruptive behavior and more permissive about unorthodox ideas.

Compromise is possible in Central Bucks Pride flag conflict

This article appeared first on the website of the Bucks County Herald on February 2, 2023 (without links), and then on the Broad and Liberty website on March 16, 2023.

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As readers of Philadelphia area newspapers know, a battle has been raging in the Central Bucks School District over how a number of sensitive cultural topics should be handled in the classrooms and school libraries. While subjects concerning race, ethnicity, religion, and political party leanings have all merited mention as examples of thorny challenges to district-wide policy, no single issue has proved as explosive as the question of whether to permit teachers to display the rainbow-colored Pride flag, signifying dignity and rights for sexual minorities, in their classrooms. If compromise can be found for that conflict, it seems safe to say that a similar approach might be applied to the remaining areas of discord.

On January 10, 2023, the school board voted 6-3 to ban the display of “any flag, banner, poster, sign, sticker, pin, button, insignia, paraphernalia, photograph or other similar material that advocates concerning any partisan, political, or social policy issue.” The board exempted from this ban such display if it were part of a curriculum unit; if flags were those of the United States, Pennsylvania, or a federal or state military branch; or if school personnel wore a small piece of jewelry representing an individual’s personal beliefs (see Policy 321). The board majority argues that education proceeds best when teachers check their politics at the classroom door, thereby encouraging students to develop and express their own views. The majority acknowledges that its ban would prevent the hanging of a Pride flag but adds that it would similarly prohibit, for example, a pro-Life banner, signifying opposition to abortion.

The three minority members of the school board counter that the new ban on partisan, political or social advocacy is really a smokescreen for eliminating views from the classroom with which the majority disagrees, especially, they write, “positive representations of diversity that reflect the beauty in our society.” Education proceeds best, in the minority’s view, when students feel they belong in their schools. “[F]or historically marginalized groups, most notably the LGBTQ community,” achieving this goal requires a welcoming environment fostered through the display of such symbols as the Pride flag. As one poster at a recent protest on behalf of the minority’s position put it, “Pride is not political.”

So far the battle has remained nonviolent, but angry statements, name-calling (“indoctrination” vs. “censorship”), and protest actions by parents, teachers, and students threaten to turn the conflict in an uncivil direction. A pending investigation by the U.S. Department of Education into a formal complaint brought by the ACLU against the district for creating a “hostile environment” for gay and transgender students has also caused the school board to begin to spend large sums on legal advice. For these reasons, a compromise acceptable to both sides could head off a waste of future resources or worse troubles.

Here’s how a compromise could work. The school system would replace the Pride flags with a conspicuous sign placed at the front of every classroom. The sign would read, “This school does not tolerate discrimination against or bullying of any student.” Teachers would be required to talk about the sign to their classes when the sign first appears and periodically thereafter, explaining why its addition to the classroom environment came about, how it is meant to make the classroom feel safe for all students, including but not limited to members of historically stigmatized minorities. Teachers would also be charged with remaining on the lookout for any acts of discrimination or bullying that occur within their purview, taking steps established by the school administration to bring an end to such acts.

The school board should take the further initiative of establishing a well publicized mechanism, with protections of privacy and due process for all parties, that encourages students to come forward to report any acts that they believe constitute discrimination or bullying. These reports, like those originating from teachers about student behavior, should be subjected to a transparent procedure for remedying the situation. As the school district shows through its actions its determination to end any discrimination and bullying, the claim made by the ACLU that it represents seven unnamed students who have suffered such treatment is likely to be dismissed, and the district can in turn dispense with its costly attorneys’ fees.

In this dispute both sides make valuable points. The school board majority is fundamentally correct that education needs to be kept distinct from advocacy. The minority is also right to be concerned about the emotional needs of vulnerable students. There is a way forward that can satisfy both these positions.

What Elizabeth Johnson's Exoneration Teaches about the Salem Witch Hunt

This essay appeared first on Witches of Massachusetts Bay on June 6, 2022, and then in slightly altered form on History News Network on August 22, 2022. I include here the latter version, with three changes made to indicate Elizabeth Johnson Jr’s relatives with greater precision.

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On July 28, 2022, the state of Massachusetts formally exonerated the last innocent victim of the infamous seventeenth-century Salem witch hunt. Elizabeth Johnson Jr., known to her contemporaries as Betty, was a twenty-two-year-old resident of Andover, Massachusetts, when she got swept up in the frenzy of accusations, judicial examinations, jailings, trials, and executions that convulsed the communities of Essex County in 1692. All of the witch hunt’s other victims had already been exonerated by previous legislation. For some the process began shortly after the trials ended. By 1711 fourteen of the twenty who were executed at Salem had had their names cleared and their legal rights restored for purposes of inheritance. A 1957 state law added the name of one more person to this list, and the act’s 2001 amendment brought the remaining five executed suspects under its purview.

But Betty Johnson fell into a different category of victims. She was one of eleven individuals who had been convicted of witchcraft but, for a variety of reasons, never executed. Betty’s trial occurred in January, 1693, at the first proceedings of a new court that was established to take the place of the original but now discredited witchcraft court and to dispense with the remaining witchcraft accusations. Just three individuals were convicted under the revised rules of this later court, but the governor granted them last-minute reprieves, and they were soon pardoned and released along with those convicted by the earlier court who were still alive. In subsequent years, two of the three witchcraft suspects convicted in January 1693, along with the other eight convicted by the earlier court, had their names cleared and their legal rights restored. Despite petitioning herself to the Massachusetts legislature for legal restitution in 1712 (paralleling a claim filed two years earlier by her brother, Francis, for monetary compensation for her six months spent in jail), Betty Johnson, alone among all those convicted at Salem, never did receive such a simple declaration of justice – until now.

But what larger lessons does Betty Johnson’s story hold for understanding the Salem witch hunt? The most interesting one for me stems from the fact that Johnson had confessed. Over the course of roughly a year, the panic yielded over 150 suspects who were formally accused of witchcraft, fully one-third of whom confessed to the crime, some before they were even arrested. Since it is well established that nobody in eastern Massachusetts at that time was practicing witchcraft in any meaningful sense of the term (attempting to harness supernatural power to harm others), the question arises why so many of these individuals falsely admitted to committing a felony that carried the death penalty.

In Betty’s case her two statements of confession were made back to back on August 10 and 11, 1692, the first to the local Andover justice of the peace, Dudley Bradstreet, and the second to an examining board led by John Hathorne, the Salem town magistrate who sat on the colony’s special witchcraft court and who was certainly one of the prime movers in the witch hunt. What is most striking about Betty's confessions is how stereotypical they are. She simply drew from the known lore about witchcraft, including being baptized by Satan, who also appeared to her in the form of two black cats, in order “to pull down the kingdom of Christ and to set up the Devil’s kingdom,” taking these common notions on herself as if she were an avid follower. She claimed she had hurt a number of her neighbors by having her invisible specter sit on one’s stomach, by pinching or sticking pins in cloth likenesses of several others, and by invisibly attacking yet another with a spear made of iron or wood (though she wasn’t sure which). She said she had a “familiar” (left undescribed but typically thought to be an invisible animal) who nourished itself by sucking on her knuckle and at two other places, one behind her arm, that examining women corroborated by noting two little red specks on her body. Throughout her confessions she cited as her criminal accomplices individuals who had already been named as suspects, including her relative (first cousin, one generation removed) Martha Carrier, the most prominent of the Andover suspects, a woman long believed to be a witch by many of her neighbors, and George Burroughs, the former minister from Salem village, who was widely regarded during the panic to be the witches’ ringleader. Carrier and Burroughs were both tried and convicted in early August, just one week before Betty’s confession, and both were executed on August 19, a little more than a week after Betty turned herself in.

Why did she take this step of falsely accusing herself? Although Betty came from a prominent Andover family -- she was the granddaughter of the town’s elder minister, Francis Dane -- the extended Dane family, itself part of the larger and more significantly targeted Ingalls clan, had already been attacked by the young and middle-aged people who began accusing their Andover neighbors of witchcraft starting in mid-July. Even more directly, Betty's confession was preceded (on the same day, August 10) by those of two of Martha Carrier’s children, eight-year-old Sarah and ten-year-old Thomas, both of whom implicated Betty Johnson as a member of the witches’ “company.” Most likely, Betty knew that she would be named by her second cousins, the Carrier children, and all three may have thought, in the context of accusations that were wildly whipping around their community, that by confessing they might increase their chances of being treated with leniency. This was not an unreasonable assumption, since the Puritans valued repentance, even as they also showed determination to rid their communities of those they believed had allowed the Devil to grant them the power to practice witchcraft. Twenty were executed before the witch hunt effectively came to an end in mid-October, but none of these twenty came from the ranks of those who had confessed, even though this association was probably not discernible until mid-July and, even so, could never be guaranteed.

Confessions also tended to deflect blame. In Betty’s case, she made clear that it was the forty-two-year-old Martha Carrier who had “persuaded her to be a witch." Carrier, Betty said, had also "threatened to tear [her] in pieces,” if she did not do as she was told. Betty probably hoped that this aspect of her statements would also be protective, even as she must have equally known that confessions were regarded as the highest form of legal proof of actual witchcraft.

Beneath all these likely strategic motives, however, lies the fact that members of the Puritan communities of early Massachusetts could readily convince themselves that in some way or other, perhaps at a moment of weakness, they really had allowed Satan into their lives. A form of strict Calvinism, Anglo-American Puritanism held out virtually impossible standards of piety for its followers to live up to. Puritans sought to live in the truest, loving fellowship of Christ but one in which even a stray thought to get back at someone for a perceived grievance or to fail to carry out one’s dutiful role as husband, wife, parent, or child might occasion deep anguish. There is no explicit sign of such religious self-doubt in Betty’s own confessions, but other confessions during the witch hunt were filled with such self-recriminations. Fourteen-year-old Abigail Hobbs, for example, began her witchcraft confession with the admission, “I have been very wicked. I hope I shall be better if God will help me.” Collateral evidence suggests that Hobbs was referring to having been disobedient to her parents, lying out in the woods at night, pretending to baptize her mother, and not caring what anybody said to her. When Abigail Dane Faulkner, Betty’s aunt, confessed at the end of August, she acknowledged that all the accusations made against her kinsfolk had led her to “look with the evil eye” on those doing the accusing, “consent that they should be afflicted,” and “kn[o]w not but that the Devil might take that advantage,” even as she asserted that it was he, not her, who had done the afflicting. In one of the saddest examples of self-recrimination leading on to a witchcraft confession (though this episode was not part of the Salem events), Mary Parsons of Springfield, Massachusetts, imagined that she had entered into a pact with the Devil so she could see her deceased child again.

As the power and momentum of the Salem panic began to recede, many of those who had confessed to the crime of witchcraft recanted their earlier confessions. While there is no remaining record of Betty taking this step, as there is for many of the Andover confessors, we do know that she pleaded not guilty at her January trial, proof that she no longer held to her confession of August 10-11. The people of Essex County were coming back to their senses. Historical records suggest that Betty may have done well in her later years, successfully selling lands in 1709 and 1716 that she had inherited from her father and likely living until the age of 77. By that time – the 1740s – Puritanism itself was well on its way toward softening its spiritual message by moving in two directions, on the one hand toward the more compassionate piety of the evangelical movement and on the other hand toward the version of the Enlightenment’s rational faith that would soon be called Unitarianism.

Review of “The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844-1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent,” by Thomas Tweed

This review appeared in Critical Review of Books in Religion 7 (1994): 280-282, an annual publication sponsored by the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and the Journal of Biblical Literature.

Is Freemasonry a Religion? Learning from a Nineteenth-Century Masonic Debate

This article was published in Heredom: The Transactions of the Scottish Rite Research Society 15 (2007): 167-177. I have made a few corrections in pen to errors or omissions that appeared in the published version.

Is Freemasonry a Religion? Learning from a Nineteenth-Century Masonic Debate (Video)

This video presentation is part of the Worldwide Exemplification of Freemasonry, a Masonic lecture series produced by the Grand Lodge of Indiana. It was first shown on December 24, 2011. 

Religious Assimilation in a Fraternal Organization: Jews and Freemasonry in Gilded-Age San Francisco

This article was first published in American Jewish History 74.4 (June 1985): 369-403. It was reprinted in Freemasonry on Both Sides of the Atlantic: Essays Concerning the Craft in the British Isles, Europe, the United States, and Mexico, edited by R. William Weisberger, Wallace McLeod, and S. Brent Morris (East European Monographs, Boulder, distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 2002): 621-656.

The "Non-Evangelical Alliance": Freemasonry in Gilded Age San Francisco

This article was published as chapter 10 in Religion and Society in the American West: Historical Essays, edited by Carl Guarneri and David Alvarez (Lantham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1987): 221-253.

A Compromise Is Possible on CRT in the Schools

This article appeared on American Purpose on January 17, 2022. The subheads (printed bold below), supplied by the website’s managing editor, are somewhat at odds with my intent to propose a solution to this conflict that stands as a true middle ground between the two sides.

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We need impassioned, even radical voices as we teach race relations, just not to the exclusion of all others.

Fierce argument has recently broken out over whether and how to teach secondary school students about race relations—or CRT, for critical race theory. Here in southeastern Pennsylvania, where I live, White parents at a number of school board meetings have expressed worries that their children will be made to feel guilty for the past racist practices of earlier Americans. These parents have demanded to know what is being taught. Administrators trying to protect coverage of racial prejudice within the school curriculum have sometimes abruptly cut off discussion. In one school district, months-long conflict reached a point in mid-November at which a federal district judge granted a preliminary injunction against the school board for curtailing free speech at its meetings.

Predictably, these battles have degenerated into slogans hurled from the right and left: “indoctrination” vs. “historical reckoning.” But compromise is possible on this important subject if educators and parents can be persuaded to draw a distinction between the disciplines of history and political thought, both of which deserve respect within the secondary school curriculum.

Debates about CRT often suffer from a failure to specify exactly which texts—or videos, or field trips—proponents and opponents are talking about. A good place to start is the lead essay in the 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones. Originally published in the New York Times in 2019 and now part of a larger anthology, this essay has probably reached the widest audience and prompted the greatest controversy among the new writings about race in American history. Engagingly written and only about twenty-five pages long, it could readily be assigned in high school classes.

But in which classes should it be assigned?

Soon after the essay first appeared, criticisms by leading U.S. historians flagged many misleading statements of fact and unbalanced judgments in its account of American history. As someone who taught the introductory course in U.S. history to college students for over thirty years, I can attest that it doesn’t take a specialist to recognize the essay’s shortcomings as history.

The essay mistakenly implies that the American colonists fought for independence from Britain in order to protect the institution of slavery from British abolitionists. In reality, the primary motivation behind the Revolution was the colonists’ perception that increases in British taxation, imposed without the consent of the colonial assemblies, signified an entering wedge of British tyranny. Similarly, the essay treats the Constitution at its writing as simply a pro-slavery document; instead, it was deeply ambiguous, even contradictory on the subject of slavery, not surprising in a practical plan of government that aimed to hold together in a single union states that were completely reliant on the institution of slavery and other states that were already doing away with it.

Hannah-Jones’ essay also misstates the principal cause of the Civil War, which was initially fought by the North not simply to prevent the South from seceding but equally to stop the spread of slavery to new territories in the West (the reason why the South seceded in the first place). In her essay, Lincoln emerges as more racially prejudiced than in fact he was. Hannah-Jones also minimizes the role played by White supporters of racial equality throughout U.S. history and oversimplifies the American record on suffrage and immigration. Such lapses as these are enough to disqualify the use of the 1619 essay as a text in the average eleventh-grade U.S. history course.

But if we see Hannah-Jones’ essay as a piece of political literature, we get a much more positive picture. It is worth recalling that the author is a journalist, not a historian. Her essay uses powerful figures of speech to advance an important argument: that the United States owes much of its success, not simply as a nation but as a democracy, to the unrecognized labor, suffering, creativity, and perseverance of its African-American population.

“Now is not the time to exclude thoughtful, impassioned political voices from any discussion of race relations in American history.”

Hannah-Jones uses the metaphor of 1619, the year in which the first African slaves were brought to the English colonies that would eventually become the United States, as an alternative to 1776 as a point of origin for some of our nation’s leading characteristics—both bad ones, like racial prejudice, and good ones, like cultural expressiveness. She employs hyperbole in referring to plantations as forced-labor camps in order to evoke the coercion and terror that so often confronted the lives of slaves.

She movingly begins her essay with reflections on her father, who served in the U.S. Army and kept an American flag raised in the family’s front yard in Waterloo, Iowa, despite having endured the indignities of residential segregation, job discrimination, and police harassment. She ends the essay, again, with the image of the American flag, this time claimed for herself, as she declares Black people to be the most devoted patriots to America’s twin ideals of liberty and equality that the country has ever produced.

At its best, Hannah-Jones’ 1619 essay recalls the strengths of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (2015). All three works are impassioned, angry pleas for recognition and justice. All three are deeply personal accounts, moving back and forth between biography and sociology or history. All three reject despair and conclude, despite their anger, by embracing America. Like the two earlier works, Hannah-Jones’ essay deserves a place in the curriculum of a twelfth-grade class on civics or government, where it could be fruitfully paired with the more moderate voices of Black thinkers like John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, or Shelby Steele to offer students a window into the urgent political debates now energizing the Black community and America as a whole.

Now is not the time—there is never such a time—to exclude thoughtful, impassioned political voices, even radical ones, from any discussion of race relations in American history and current life, as our most anxious parents of school-age children (and a few state legislatures) are inclined to do. But neither is it proper for any one political viewpoint to dominate the teaching of racial issues to such a degree as to crowd out all opposing views, much less to sacrifice the disciplinary standards of history along the way, as our most morally driven school personnel seem prepared to do. The aspirations and fears of both sides in these conflicts can be accommodated through compromise, by separating the teaching of history from the teaching of political thought and going forward with both.

Anti-racist Lens Distorts History on New Jersey "Freeholders"

This opinion essay was published on History News Network on September 27, 2020. Internal citations for this article are available on request. Contact Tony Fels.

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I grant there is no compelling reason for New Jersey’s counties to retain the traditional term “chosen freeholders” as the name for their elected officials. In a bill signed into law by Governor Phil Murphy on August 21, the title of these lawmakers will become “county commissioners” at the beginning of 2021. The new term certainly conveys better than “chosen freeholder” what these elected representatives do.

But there is little basis for tying the older term to the history of slavery or racial prejudice, as many of New Jersey’s political leaders have done. Governor Murphy, for example, lent his support to the legislation by tweeting, “let us tear down words born from racism”. State Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D., Gloucester) claimed the title “is mired in the language of slavery”. And Felicia Hopson, Director of Burlington County’s Board of Freeholders, linked retiring the term to the goal of “[c]ontinuing our work to end systemic racism…by eliminating an antiquated title from an era when slavery and racism [were] tolerated…”. 

The term “freeholder,” first brought to the American colonies from England in the early seventeenth century, meant only a person who owned land (or other property) free of debt. The holding did not have to be a particularly large estate; by the mid-eighteenth century farms as small as half an acre were likely adequate to qualify. The idea was that such people, by virtue of their property ownership, would have the economic independence to be free from the influence of more powerful figures and could therefore be trusted with the vote. The “chosen freeholders” were simply the people selected by the freeholders at large to make the administrative decisions for a county until the next election came around.

The freeholders had a profoundly positive effect on the early development of liberal democracy, and nowhere more so than in New Jersey. A remarkable document, “The Concessions and Agreements of the Proprietors, Freeholders and Inhabitants of the Province of West Jersey in America” (1677), for example, established for the new settlements around Burlington the principle of rule by consent of the governed. Signed by 150 individuals, this early constitution contained a bill of rights, guaranteed religious liberty, and proclaimed it had “put the power in the people.” On its basis, the province’s first representative assembly, elected by the freeholders, convened at Burlington in 1681. Two other elected assemblies had begun even earlier in East Jersey. Once East and West Jersey came together to form the Crown colony of New Jersey in 1702, the freeholders continued to stand up for their rights against the royal governor and his council all the way until the American Revolution.

Who were the freeholders? Certainly, nearly all were men. And because Europeans had founded the colonies, the freeholders were overwhelmingly white. By the mid-1700s, Black Africans comprised about 7% of New Jersey’s population, the great majority of whom were enslaved, including by some of the freeholders.

But another unique feature of New Jersey’s history points to a way in which the ideal of freeholder democracy challenged even these limitations. New Jersey holds the distinction of being the only state, just after the start of the American Revolution, to have allowed both some white women (single and with a certain amount of property) and some Black men and women (those who were free, owned property, and, if female, unmarried) to vote. This unusual development in the history of American suffrage, which lasted for about thirty years, began without fanfare, indeed without any special notice at all – which in turn suggests that single, propertied women, both free Black and white, and free Black men of property had likely joined the ranks of the freeholders for some stretch of years prior to the Revolution.

The world of the colonial period was not the same as ours today. Their world was one based on a principle of social hierarchy that remained largely unquestioned. Racial distinctions, at least in the northern colonies, did not lie at the center of this social system. A sizable minority -- including the wealthy and the middle-class freeholders – occupied positions of independence. Beneath them stood a number of dependent classes: married women, tenant farmers, wage workers, servants, slaves, and the poor. And just as today we cherish the principle of freedom from arbitrary arrest (what came to be known as habeas corpus) that a group of English lords, who probably cared little about anyone other than themselves, won from their king back in 1215 with the Magna Carta, we can similarly pay tribute to the significant, if still limited, gains the freeholders of New Jersey made toward the expansion of popular participation in government.

Sex and The Crucible: A Look into Arthur Miller's Inspiration with Tony Fels

This article was originally published on the Johns Hopkins University Press News and Events Blog on January 26th, 2018

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WHERE DID ARTHUR MILLER GET THE IDEA FOR THE SEXUAL THEME IN THE CRUCIBLE?

In doing the research for my book, Switching Sides: How a Generation of Historians Lost Sympathy for the Victims of the Salem Witch Hunt, I came across a surprising realization. Not only did Arthur Miller take nearly the whole story of the Salem witch hunt for his famous play, The Crucible (1953), from his having read Marion Starkey’s The Devil in Massachusetts (1949), but he very likely drew the play’s central dramatic tension, concerning a former affair between the accuser, Abigail Williams, and the accused protagonist, John Procter, from Starkey’s history as well.

Two famous literary archives, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, are currently jousting over custody of Arthur Miller’s voluminous private papers, including 160 boxes of materials and another 8,000 pages of private journals (see Jennifer Schuessler’s article, “Fight for Arthur Miller’s Archive,” New York Times, January 10, 2018).  When scholars gain access to these documents, longstanding mysteries concerning the central plot line of The Crucible may finally be solved.  In the play Miller reduced the real age of tavern-owner and farmer John Procter from sixty to the mid-thirties, elevated Abigail Williams’s age from eleven to seventeen, and posited a sexual liaison – wholly made up, as best as the Salem primary documents reveal – when Williams was said, erroneously, to have lived as a servant in the Procter household.  In reality, Williams, along with her nine-year-old cousin, Betty Parris, lived in the parsonage of the Salem village minister Samuel Parris.  Williams and Betty Parris were the two young girls whose contorted bodies and catatonic states led to the first accusations of witchcraft in the village.

Miller himself obscured the sources for his play.  In the 1950s he would only say that he had traveled to Essex County, Massachusetts, and combed through the manuscript records of the trials to find his story, even though we know from Miller’s leading biographer, Christopher Bigsby, that the playwright only allotted seven days for this journey, far too short a time within which to have constructed The Crucible from scratch.  Only much later, in his autobiography, Timebends (1987), did Miller for the first time, it appears, acknowledge his debt to Starkey’s history, which he now revealed had served as the model for the play.  “In fact, there was little new [beyond Starkey’s account] I could learn from the court record,” he conceded, now explaining his trip to Salem as a way of hearing the sort of language that his seventeenth-century Puritan characters would have spoken.

Yet Miller never disclosed his source for the play’s central drama, in which John Procter must reveal his former affair with the Procters’ “servant” Williams in a failed attempt to save Procter’s wife, Elizabeth, whom Williams had earlier accused of witchcraft.  Indeed, Miller did much to throw researchers off the trail.  In the 1950s he said he had found the evidence for this sexual relationship in the witch hunt’s examination records themselves.  In his later autobiography Miller stated he had discovered evidence for the affair in the leading nineteenth-century history of the witch hunt, Charles W. Upham’s Salem Witchcraft.  Neither of these claims has been corroborated by any researcher into these same sources – not surprising, because Williams was only eleven at the time of the witch hunt and was never a servant in the Procter household!  However, a hint of exactly the sort of personal situation, entailing extra-marital sexual attraction and jealousy, that Miller developed into his play’s plot line can be found again in Starkey’s history, when she describes the relationships between the Procters and their actual servant, twenty-year-old Mary Warren.  Starkey’s hint may have struck Miller with particular force, because the playwright’s own marriage was dissolving under the impact of his affair with Marilyn Monroe just in the years when he was writing The Crucible.

The Devil in Massachusetts would thus seem to have supplied virtually everything Miller needed to produce the plot of his famous play.  And, as I show in my book, Starkey’s account offered Miller something even more important than this: the moral lessons to be drawn from the Salem witch hunt – how when a group of people fear something in themselves, they can run roughshod over all restraints in an effort to externalize blame onto scapegoats.  Under these circumstances, the call of conscience to speak the truth is extremely hard to follow, because it threatens the competing desire of each person to belong to a community, not to mention evade accusation themselves.

Traditional Understanding Overshadows Academic Explanations at Rebecca Nurse Commemoration

This article was originally published on Witches of Massachusetts Bay on June 28th, 2021

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On June 7, 2021, the NPR show, “Here and Now,” aired a segment on the 400th birthday of Rebecca Nurse, broadcast from the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers (formerly Salem Village), Massachusetts. Readers of Witches of Massachusetts Bay will doubtless recognize Nurse as one of the most well-known of the 20 individuals executed at Salem for alleged witchcraft.

The radio program struck my interest for revealing the enduring strength of what might be called the “traditional” understanding of the Salem witch hunt over more recent explanations advanced by some of the many scholars who have studied the tragedy. By the “traditional” understanding, I mean the one made famous by Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, The Crucible, though Miller’s play in fact owed practically everything to journalist-historian Marion Starkey’s The Devil in Massachusetts, which appeared four years earlier. As Starkey (and then Miller) saw it, the witch hunt was a product of social hysteria, brought on by a lethal combination of extreme religious values, calling on people to live up to impossible standards of piety, and ages-old communal scapegoating based on personal enmities. When individuals can’t meet their own community’s norms for a life of rectitude, their sense of guilt may lead them either to imagine they have committed terrible transgressions or else to deflect the blame onto others. Intolerance toward oneself in effect breeds intolerance of others. The heroes in both accounts (Starkey’s gripping narrative and Miller’s equally chilling drama) were the 20 martyrs, who, like Rebecca Nurse, went to their deaths rather than confess to the falsehood that they had made a compact with the Devil.

In an early part of the 11-minute segment, “Here and Now” host Robin Young discusses some recent academic explanations for the witch hunt with Kathryn Rutkowski, curator and president of the Rebecca Nurse Homestead. “Historians say the witch trials were to keep women in line,” Young suggests, referring, without naming the source, to the feminist argument advanced especially by Carol F. Karlsen in The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (1987). Young, however, omits the fact that Karlsen’s study actually showed little interest in Rebecca Nurse or any of the other courageous Salem martyrs (14 were women, 6 were men) in favor of concentrating on the young women who, out of the anguish Puritans are said to have foisted onto women in general, did the accusing.

Rutkowski responds by referencing two other recent scholarly interpretations (again without mentioning the names of authors). One, set forth by Mary Beth Norton in her book, In the Devil’s Snare (2002), argued that the Puritans’ continuing conflicts with Native Americans to the north brought on the witch scare, by depositing orphaned victims of Indian attacks in Salem Village, where they reenacted their childhood traumas by accusing other people of attacking them through witchcraft. Another, advanced by Emerson Baker in his A Storm of Witchcraft (2015), proposed a catch-all explanation for the witch hunt under the phrase, “a perfect storm,” said to include the Native American context, the insecurities of a new colonial charter, a harsh winter, village factionalism, and the local pastor Samuel Parris’ rigid orthodoxy. In truth, no such extraneous circumstances or “perfect storms” are needed to account for witch hunting, which occurred with deadly commonality across nearly 300 years of history throughout western Europe, including in its colonial outposts like New England. Indeed, Hartford, Connecticut, was the scene of a lesser version of the Salem events in 1662, when another witch panic led to 14 indictments and four likely executions.

But all these considerations fall by the wayside as soon as the program turns to Beth Lambright, one of a large number of proud Rebecca Nurse descendants who live throughout the United States. As Lambright tells Robin Young, Nurse, age 71 at the time of her death, lived a quite ordinary colonial life, raising eight children and helping with the work on her family farm. “Yet this ordinary life became an extraordinary moment of, really, heroism,” Lambright explains, when by “standing in the truth, [Nurse] paid for that with her life.” Lambright took her family to visit the Danvers homestead a few years ago because she wanted to pass on to her children the important lesson of what their colonial ancestor had accomplished. As Lambright puts it, “No matter what your community might say about you, if you do not believe it’s true, you stand in what you know to be true.” These are lines that Arthur Miller might have included in The Crucible, a work that Lambright knows well, both from having read it and from having watched her daughter perform in a high school production of the play.

Hoping to draw out a political lesson for today’s times, Young asks Lambright if she doesn’t see some parallels to what’s been happening lately, with America menaced by “conspiracy theorists” and “angry mobs” with “pitchforks.” It’s clear from Young’s left-leaning political perspective that she sees these Trumpian manifestations as the equivalent of 1692’s witch hunters. Lambright appears to agree, but I’m not so sure. She observes, “We’re seeing loud voices. They might look like the majority for a while, but it doesn’t mean that they’re always speaking truth. We have to be really careful that we understand who we are and what our truth is.” Most recently, it’s the Democrats, not the Republicans, who have been in the majority. And antiracist zealots on the left are just as capable of trying to enforce conformity of belief on a particular community through scapegoating as are extremists on the right.

Arthur Miller himself might similarly have seen threatening “pitchforks” coming from the margins of both ideological extremes. While it is well known that The Crucible offered up the Salem witch hunt as an allegory for Senator McCarthy’s red scare of the 1950s, in his later life the playwright acknowledged that the lessons of the Salem witch hunt fit the murderous excesses of the Chinese Communists’ Cultural Revolution just as well. The Salem story for good reason continues to resonate with Americans now nearly 330 years after it drew to a close.

(The NPR program may be heard at https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/06/07/rebecca-nurse-salem-witch-trials. A popular show like this one naturally comes with some factual errors. In the introduction, Robin Young speaks of about 200 people who were tried at Salem, when she means the number who were accused. The Salem Court of Oyer and Terminer (the special witchcraft court) tried 27 suspects, while the later Superior Court of Judicature (which produced no lasting punishments) handled about 70 remaining cases. Later in the show, Young refers to “one man” who was executed at Salem, when actually there were six men. Beth Lambright meant to say that George Jacobs Sr.’s body, not George Burroughs’, is also buried on the Rebecca Nurse Homestead grounds.)

Confessions of Accused Witches

This exchange was originally published on Witches of Massachusetts Bay on July 30th, 2021. The speaker in the first paragraph is Robin Mason, creator of the Witches of Massachusetts Bay website. Credentials for Salem researcher Margo Burns appear at the conclusion of the article.

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After publishing “Traditional Understanding Overshadows Academic Explanations at Rebecca Nurse Commemoration” by Tony Fels, a fascinating discussion ensued in the Comments section between Tony Fels and Margo Burns. Since readers often skip the Comments section, I wanted to share this important conversation about the meaning of the Salem confessions. As Tony put it, “The Salem witch hunt is one of those subjects that simply crosses the boundaries between what interests academics and what interests the general public. We’re all involved in its meaning simply as people, as evidenced again and again by events like the 400th anniversary of Rebecca Nurse’s birthday.”

Margo Burns responds to original post:

Something that I can’t get through to people, both those who adhere to the traditional understanding as well as academic explanations, is that the notion that confession somehow spared people is simply not accurate. Just because no confessors were hanged does not mean it was the intention of the Court to spare confessors—that’s a historian’s fallacy. The Chief Magistrate wrote a warrant for the execution for several confessors in January, but they and the rest of the people sentenced to die then were all spared by the Governor.

Confession was the gold standard of convictive evidence in witchcraft cases in that era, mentioned in all the contemporary books about witchcraft, and it was not controversial legally the way spectral evidence was. The belief that a confession, even a false one, could spare one from being hanged in 1692 makes it easier to then cast those who were executed as martyrs. They had a way to save themselves but they refused to tell a lie even though it would save them from hanging. So noble! It’s a nice story, but it is not based on historical facts.

Tony Fels responds:

I can’t agree with Margo Burns on this point. She’s technically correct: Confession was the best of all evidence of witchcraft, and those who confessed would have had no assurance that they would not ultimately be hanged for the crime. Indeed, six confessors were convicted by the first witchcraft court and three later on by the second court. But all those trials and convictions occurred late in the witch hunt (mid-September 1692 and then January 1693).

Meanwhile, Tituba had confessed back in March 1692, followed by Abigail Hobbs in mid-April, Deliverance Hobbs a couple days later, Margaret Jacobs in May, Ann Foster and her daughter Mary Lacey Sr. in mid-July, and then a great many more from Andover. A pattern must have been discerned that the confessors were at least being held temporarily without trial in order to name others or to rid the community of the more dangerous, recalcitrant suspects first. Thus, to confess at least bought a suspect time.

By contrast, those suspects who early on proclaimed their innocence, even as they were brought to the first trials in June, July, and August, refused to take that step of falsely confessing. We can surely sympathize with those who were intimidated into confessing, but the actions of those who resisted such pressures do present us with a noble story!

Margo Burns responds:

Tony, respectfully, it’s necessary to look at the historical data more closely—per case and on a timeline—before making claims about patterns that may have been discernable by the accused at the time they were accused. It’s simply not possible that the 11 people who confessed between February and May could have discerned any “pattern” about how their cases would be handled and made choices to confess. The magistrates easily forced confessions out of these people, people who were vulnerable and easily manipulated to say anything the authorities demanded of them—youths, people with low social status, or with some mental defect. And hardly people who were looking at some “big picture” or as some kind of “legal strategy.” No one knew anything about the plans or timing for prosecution anyway, or for certain who the Crown’s attorney or Chief Magistrate would be. At that point, June 2, over 70 people were in custody and 11 had confessed. Before then no one could have thought that confession might be some kind of get out of jail free card, especially considering that in the most recent witchcraft case in Boston, just three years earlier, with Stoughton on that bench. Goody Glover confessed and was hanged. Why would they think it would be different for them?

The first mittimus, in late May, to bring accused people back to Salem from jail in Boston for trial comprised a list of eight people who would ultimately put on trial that summer, plus Tituba, a confessor. While Tituba was the only one not tried that summer, she completely disappears from the legal record until she pops up again a whole year later to have her case dismissed. There is no way to figure out why. She is not part of any of the trials, including Sarah Good’s, for which she should have been a prime witness but she’s not there. The second best convictive standard as evidence in a witchcraft case was the testimony of a confessed witch—so why wasn’t Tituba called as a witness? By mid-July, this is all anyone knew about how things were going to unfold. A single data point, Tituba, does not make a pattern, and she wasn’t used as a witness against anyone.

By late June, before the court hanged 5 more people, the first prosecutor left, and frankly, a lot of things were up in the air about how the following cases would be handled. Ann Foster was interrogated five separate times in mid-July to produce a pretty amazing confession. How could she have concluded anything except that the authorities demanded a confession from her and would not stop until she had? And so she did. That is the purpose of interrogation: to elicit a confession to make prosecution easier. It’s hard to argue with evidence of someone speaking against their own self-interest. Before the Court had even convened in early June, only those 11 people had confessed. ALL the rest of the confessions, 43 of them, starting with Ann Foster’s, came from Andover residents or those who lived near enough to attend the church in Andover or were part of a family from Andover. You’d think that if there was a pattern to be discerned, people in other towns would have figured it out, too, to save themselves. Maybe you’d have some people who were already being prosecuted who would have caught on to the “deal” and recanted their claims to innocence at trial and thrown themselves on the mercy of the court, but no one did.

It’s also important to look at the recantations from several fully covenanted members of the Andover church who confessed in August under pressure and immediately recanted when the interrogations ended. Why would they recant? None of them claimed they’d confessed because they knew it would help them in any way, despite what they may have been told during the interrogations. For the rest of that summer, the interrogators used high-pressure interrogation tactics to coerce false confessions. The case of Samuel Wardwell in September is telling. He was the first confessor to be tried, and was hanged. When the time came for him to acknowledge his confession, he refused. He had discerned a pattern: everyone who was indicted end up being hanged. He knew that it didn’t matter if he confessed or not, and he knew his confession had been coerced. The court was going to hang him either way, so he recanted it.

In September, Dorcas Hoar possibly made a legal last-ditch effort to get some extra time before certain execution by confessing after she was sentenced. She probably did see that the four confessors sentenced to die got temporary stays, but it seems really unlikely that she was in a position to leverage four ministers to come to her aid to close the deal, unless it was in their best interest somehow, perhaps to show that it was still possible to save one’s soul.

I appreciate your effort to make the people who were executed “noble” for not confessing, but it’s revisionist history.

Tony Fels responds:

Margo, I’m afraid you have posited a straw argument concerning the confessors in order to knock it down. No serious historian of the Salem witch hunt believes that the confessors thought that, in confessing, they had obtained a “get out of jail free card” or had “caught on to the deal” about how to handle the witchcraft interrogators. Nor would any serious historian contend that simply because no suspect who confessed was executed, that this fact alone meant the authorities had decided on a policy to spare those suspects’ lives. Indeed, we know that the witchcraft court convicted five confessed suspects (leaving aside Samuel Wardwell, who recanted his confession) at the court’s fourth and last session in mid-September. These individuals might have met their deaths if events had turned out differently.

The whole Salem witch hunt process was a terrifying ordeal that unfolded without any certain outcome. As you point out, confession was nothing anyone would take lightly, since the last person who had confessed to witchcraft, Goody Glover in Boston just four years earlier, had been put to death for the crime. For strictly religious reasons alone, no pious Puritan—and nearly all of the adult confessors could be classified as such—would have casually acknowledged such terrible acts of blasphemy in their own behavior. And yet, of the 150 or so accused in the Salem witch hunt, roughly one-third of these suspects confessed to the crime, and none of these confessors was ultimately executed. Plenty of evidence, much of which is included in your own 2012 article (“‘Other Ways of Undue Force and Fright’: The Coercion of False Confessions by the Salem Magistrates,” Studia Neophilologica 84: 24-39), suggests why this outcome was not purely coincidental: confessing increased one’s chances of survival.

I agree with you that such a likelihood could not have been discerned before the trials themselves got underway with the court’s first session on June 2-3. Eight people had confessed by this point (Tituba, Dorothy Good, Abigail Hobbs, Deliverance Hobbs, Mary Warren, Sarah Churchill, Margaret Jacobs, and Rebecca Jacobs). In your post, you mention 11 confessors before the first trial, but I’ve never seen the names of the three additional people you are referring to. You know the examination and related records better than I do, and these additional names may have surfaced since the publication of your own article. But just focusing on these eight, while one (Good) was a young child and two (Warren and Churchill) quickly recanted their confessions, the other five were all people who could have been selected to be tried at the court’s first session (June 2-3) or its second session (June 28–July 2), but none was. Instead, one non-confessing suspect (Bridget Bishop) was tried and convicted at the first session and on June 10 hanged, followed by five non-confessing suspects (Sarah Good, Susannah Martin, Rebecca Nurse, Elizabeth How, and Sarah Wilds) tried and convicted at the second session and hanged on July 19. At this point (roughly mid-July; there were no confessions in June) it seems possible to imagine that some of the remaining suspects and others still to be named might have begun to see an advantage to confessing.

One (the Salem slave Candy) did so on July 4, followed by five people (Ann Foster on July 15, and then Mary Lacey Sr., Mary Lacey Jr., Richard Carrier, and Andrew Carrier, all on July 21-22), all from Andover, the town to which the witch hunt had by now spread. These latter five were all linked to Martha (Allen) Carrier, an Andover woman strongly suspected of witchcraft by many of her neighbors and who had been accused and arrested at the end of May. It is reasonable to believe, though we have no direct evidence to this effect, that all five, which included two of Carrier’s children, confessed in the hope that their confessions might insulate them from sharing in what appeared to be the impending fate of Martha Carrier. The non-confessing Carrier was indeed tried first at the court’s third session (August 2-5) and was hanged along with the session’s four male convicted suspects, all also non-confessors (John Willard, George Jacobs Sr., John Procter, and George Burroughs) on August 19.

The approach and aftermath of the court’s third session opened a floodgate of further confessions coming from Andover or Andover-related suspects: two more relatives of Martha Carrier on July 23 (niece Martha Emerson) and July 30 (sister Mary Allen Toothaker); a middle-aged woman (Mary Bridges Sr.) on July 30 and her five daughters on August 3 (Mary Post) and August 25 (Mary Bridges Jr., Sarah Bridges, Susannah Post, and Hannah Post); two more of Martha Carrier’s children (Sarah and Thomas) on August 11; Rebecca Eames on August 19; and at least seven more Andover individuals (Elizabeth Johnson Jr., Mary Barker, William Barker Sr., Mary Marston, Elizabeth Johnson Sr., Abigail Johnson, and Abigail Dane Faulkner) by the end of the month. September brought perhaps another 22 confessions along with the court’s fourth session (September 6-17), during which some of the first confessing suspects (Abigail Hobbs, Ann Foster, Mary Lacey Sr., Rebecca Eames, and Abigail Dane Faulkner) were convicted based either on their guilty pleas or by a jury’s decision after a trial. Still, even these convicted confessing suspects avoided execution on September 22, on which date eight more convicted non-confessors (Martha Cory, Mary Esty, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Margaret Scott, Wilmot Redd, Mary Parker, and Samuel Wardwell) were hanged.

(I have checked all of the above names and dates with the authoritative Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, ed. Bernard Rosenthal, Margo Burns, et al., 2009. The same information may be found in Margo’s article, referenced above. Most historians, including Margo, seem to use Thomas Brattle’s assertion, written on October 8, 1692, that there were 55 confessors among the accused. Nobody, so far as I know, has published a complete list of these names. Based on data found in Records, I include Abigail Dane Faulkner among the August confessors. When she, along with Elizabeth Johnson Sr., and Abigail Johnson, are added to the other August confessors, the total for that month reaches 15, not 12, as noted in Margo’s Table 2 on p. 26 of her article. If 55 is the correct total for the overall number of confessors, then 22 additional suspects must have confessed in September.)

Why did all these individuals confess to crimes we know now they had never committed? We cannot expect the suspects themselves to have explained their motives at the time, because a confession by definition offered an admission of guilt. To the examiners and their surrounding communities, these people acknowledged they had entered into a pact with the Devil to hurt others through witchcraft. In your own article on the subject, Margo, you have emphasized the role played by judicial intimidation, which included everything from intense questioning and incarceration under harsh conditions to the occasional use of physical torture. This is undoubtedly a part of the story. For myself, I would emphasize the role played by guilt for these highly religious people. Under the frenzied conditions of a witch hunt, it was not hard for many of them to imagine that in some way or other they had allowed Satan to enter into their lives by wishing someone harm or hoping to gain personal advantage in some way that the Puritan community frowned upon. There is explicit evidence of this motivation in the confessions of Abigail Hobbs, Margaret Jacobs, Abigail Dane Faulkner, and others.

But confession also carried the hope that the Puritan belief in public repentance might take precedence over the Biblical injunction to “not suffer a witch to live.” Most confessions, beginning with Tituba’s, included anguished portions in which blame was shifted to someone else, typically to suspects who had previously been named. Confessors claimed that these other persons—for example, Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn for Tituba, Martha Carrier for many of the Andover confessors, George Burroughs for nearly all of them—had forced them to carry out the Devil’s wishes. In so doing, they likely hoped to elicit some sympathy for their plight as victims. Family members and friends also played key roles in exerting pressure on suspects to confess, believing that this might be the only way to save their lives. Andover resident Mary Tyler’s brother insisted repeatedly that she do so, both because he thought she must be a witch if so many people had said so and also because “she would be hang’d, if she did not confesse.” A petition submitted in January 1693, urging the newly reconstituted court to ignore the confessions made earlier by some of the Andover suspects, acknowledged the same motivation when it stated, “Confessing was the only way to obtain favor, [and] might be too powerful a temptation for timorous women to withstand, in the hurry and distraction that we have heard they were then in.” That these desperate strategies probably worked to some degree is suggested by the facts that it took until the witchcraft court’s fourth session before any of the confessing suspects were brought to trial, and that when the first group of confessors were finally convicted, this step seems to have been forced on the justices, who were coming under criticism for apparent hypocrisy in overlooking such “obviously” guilty suspects in favor of going after only those who had forthrightly proclaimed their innocence. Even after their conviction, these confessed suspects were still shown a final, and, as it turned out, decisive bit of leniency in receiving temporary stays of sentencing or execution, which Thomas Brattle stated, “for two or three [of them] because they are confessours.” (Abigail Faulkner received a stay of execution by reason of her pregnancy, and Dorcas Hoar, convicted during the same fourth session of the court, also received an unusual stay of execution following her confession just after her sentencing.)

Confession also had a larger impact on the overall course of the witch hunt. From Tituba’s admission of guilt at its start all the way up through the first group of Andover confessors in mid-July, confessions gave credence to the accusations of witchcraft and accelerated the drive to uncover more witches in the communities. Only toward the witch hunt’s end did the sheer number of confessions serve to undermine the credibility of the charges and help bring the panic to a close.

As I see it, the crux of the dispute between you, Margo, and me, lies, as with so many of the controversies generated by the study of the Salem witch hunt, in the question of where blame should be placed. In rejecting what you see as a “nice [but fictitious] story” that draws a moral distinction between those suspects who went to their deaths upholding the truth that they were not witches and those suspects who confessed to crimes they had not committed, you appear to want to concentrate all of the blame for the witch hunt on the Puritan judicial establishment, making sure that nobody gets distracted into thinking that confessors bear at least part of the blame. Hence your emphasis as well on the coerced nature of these confessions. There really was no meaningful choice for a suspect to make, you assert, since all were headed for execution anyway. Confessors did no greater harm than truth-tellers at Salem.

But the Salem magistrates, it’s worth remembering, were not autocrats but elected officials. The Puritan colony of Massachusetts, from top to bottom, fully supported the witch hunt when it was at its height, and even after the English-appointed governor in early October had abolished the first witchcraft court (which the Massachusetts House of Representatives endorsed only in a very close vote of 33-29), it took years for most residents to recognize that a serious miscarriage of justice had been done. In 1695, three years after the witch hunt’s end, a majority of Salem villagers could still sign a petition in support of Rev. Samuel Parris, perhaps the chief instigator of the panic.

In my view, the colony as a whole bears the lion’s share of the blame for the witch hunt, chiefly because of the extremism of its religious views, which lent themselves to picturing the world as a Manichean struggle between Christ and Satan, good and evil. In this context, the determination of thoroughly average people like Rebecca Nurse, Martha Carrier, and George Jacobs Sr. to tell the truth about themselves at all costs—itself one of the great virtues taught by Puritanism—may be seen as genuinely heroic, because it was the accumulated truth-telling of those 20 martyred individuals that did more than anything else to put an end to the catastrophe Massachusetts had brought on itself. The confessors, too, ironically testified to the great power of telling the truth, because when they later recanted their confessions after the witch hunt was over, the aspect of their behavior that they regretted most was that they had “belied themselves” before God.

Margo Burns responds:

Tony: Thanks for your thoughtful reply, but I still don’t accept your claim that my argument is based on the “straw man.” It is very common in popular explanations of the trials to claim that people consciously confessed to save themselves. As for “No serious historian of the Salem witch hunt believes that the confessors thought that, in confessing, they had obtained a ‘get out of jail free card’ or had ‘caught on to the deal’ about how to handle the witchcraft interrogators,” here are four—Norton, Rosenthal, Baker, and Ray—who suggest that the confessors themselves believed that confession would spare their lives:

1) Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare, p. 303: “By [August and September], as other scholars have pointed out, it had become clear to the accused that confessors were not being tried.”

2) Bernard Rosenthal, Salem Story, p. 151: “Some did manage to escape; those who could not generally opted to save their lives by confession.” p. 155: “On September 1, [Samuel] Wardwell, in a move that he had every right to believe would protect him, confessed to his witchcraft.”

3) Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft, p. 154: “So when [Samuel] Wardwell was questioned about witchcraft on September 1, he and others appear to have believed that confessing would at least delay their trial and execution, and might possibly even spare their lives.” p. 155: “[B]y the time [George] Burroughs was executed on August 19, it was clear that straightforward denials would be no use. Anyone who had pled not guilty was quickly convicted and executed .… Confession and cooperation at least gave the advantage of delay and offered some hope that the individual might ultimately be spared.”

4) Benjamin Ray, Satan & Salem, p. 123: “[Sarah] Churchill never formally retracted her confession. She almost certainly realized that to have done so would have forced the judges to put her on trial.” p. 125: “Hobbs and [Mary] Lacey clearly believed themselves to be free from trial because of their confessions.”

When I return to my original post in this thread, the point I was trying to make is that I do not accept the popular portrayal of those executed as martyrs. A martyr, by definition, is “a person who sacrifices something of great value and especially life itself for the sake of principle.” For this to be true, those who hanged would have felt or known that they had a choice that could affect whether they lived or died. That is just not true. This is all part of the general origin myth of America portraying our ancestors as noble. Then of course there had to be a reason why the condemned didn’t confess and save themselves, right? Maybe they were really principled Puritans, not willing to “belie” themselves. Really? This is not the case. Part of dismantling this whole portrayal is careful examination of what the accused could actually have known and when they could possibly have known it. The timelines of prosecutions and confessions don’t have any correlation, then or now. The confessions were coerced, which removes the possibility that the confessors knew what they were doing. The people who were executed are not martyrs, including my own ancestor, Rebecca Nurse. They were victims and it was tragic what happened to them, but they had no more agency in the outcome than the people who confessed had.

You are correct, Tony, that I put the blame and responsibility for the whole episode on the judges, because they controlled everything. They decided which legal precedents to follow and which to reject. From the start, local magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin made multiple decisions to accept all accusations. They entertained spectral evidence as valid, and then held everyone over in jail without the option of being released on bond, against legal precedent. These and other local magistrates were the ones coercing the false confessions. As for the assertion that the judges were all elected, that was not the case. William Phips and William Stoughton received their commissions as Governor and Lt. Governor from King William & Queen Mary in the new charter. Phips handed the management of the legal system over to Stoughton—when precedent would have had put the Governor himself in charge of such a court. Stoughton processed all these cases rapidly and left no opportunity for the convicted to appeal their sentences to the General Court, again, against precedent. Stoughton had been a judge on a variety of courts across Massachusetts and Maine for two decades and had served on the bench during numerous witchcraft cases before this, and he chose to handle things differently in 1692.

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Margo Burns is the associate editor and project manager of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (Cambridge University Press, 2009), the most complete compendium of the trial documents. She’s been the expert featured on several Who Do You Think You Are? TV episodes and regularly speaks on the Salem witch trials at History Camp, historical societies, and libraries. Check out her 17th-Century Colonial New England website.

The Return of the “Witch Hunt” Analogy

This article was originally published in Quillette on October 27th, 2019. Internal citations for this article are available on request. Contact Tony Fels.

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The political slur “witch hunt” is back. After continually using the term to discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation—84 times over a seven-month period of tweets, by one reporter’s count—President Trump has invoked the term anew to defend against the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry. Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, went one step further in an interview on October 8, 2019, with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. Referring to the Salem witch trials of 1692, Giuliani said that the impeachment inquiry is “worse than a witch hunt.” The accused witches back then “had more rights”; the court “required witnesses to face the witch and some witches were acquitted.”

Giuliani claimed he was so angered by the House Democrats’ recent actions that he “went back to read two books about the Salem witch trials.” If so, he either picked deficient accounts, or else he failed to read them very carefully. In truth, all twenty-three individuals who were tried by the specially empowered witchcraft court at Salem were convicted. Nineteen of these were executed by hanging (along with one other accused suspect who was pressed to death under heavy stones for resisting the proceedings), two avoided execution by reason of pregnancy, one was later pardoned, and one escaped. Dismissal of charges, acquittals, or reprieves for the approximately 130 additional suspects came about only after the colonial governor disbanded the original court. The court’s use of “spectral evidence”—ethereal likenesses of the accused, visible only to the accusers—had been discredited by the dawning realization that at least some innocent people were being put to death. As for the accused having the opportunity to face their accusers, this feature of seventeenth-century jurisprudence did the defendants little good, since the accusers fell into fits of torment at the sight of the accused, results that were taken to corroborate the suspects’ powers of bewitchment.

Clearly, whatever deficiencies exist in the Democrats’ handling of the impeachment inquiry—and there appear to be some, addressed below—they pale next to the legal inadequacies of the witch hunting era, when criminal defendants did not yet have the right to counsel, judges felt no obligation to remain neutral, and crowds of onlookers could influence the legal process. And yet, despite its obvious flaws, the “witch hunt” analogy’s reintroduction into today’s partisan battle in Washington does provide the opportunity to explain why the president and his supporters have reached for this particular epithet and why it can be effectively employed, just as it was when defenders of Bill Clinton used it in the 1990s against Kenneth Starr and the Republicans in their own quest to remove a president through impeachment.

*     *     *

The term “witch hunt” itself gained currency at the outset of the twentieth century, used to denote an incident in social psychology in which individuals are punished by a group, with or without official backing, for committing an alleged offense but without any procedures of due process involved. Suspects are presumed guilty as soon as they are accused. They stand little hope of exonerating themselves, even if innocent, because the crowd and whatever judicial apparatus exists provide them no fair and impartial means to mount a defense and clear their names.

Guilty consciences play a critical role in the genesis of a witch hunt. In the first instance there has to be a trait that the community at large regards with such stigma that most people are prepared to shun anyone who may be seen as openly tainted by its presence. But equally important, this same trait must be thought to exist to a lesser degree or just beneath the surface in enough people, so that when accusations begin to fly, the average person has an interest in clearing his or her own guilty conscience by denying the trait in themselves and foisting all of its blame on the named suspect or suspects. This is the mechanism of scapegoating, which always comes into play in a witch hunt. Personal guilt provides the fuel, ignited by the fear that one’s own sharing in the stigmatized trait will be discovered.

The American prototype for witch hunting (though without the name) took place in and around Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. In this colonial Puritan outpost, twenty people accused of witchcraft were executed, five more died in custody, and over 150 people were jailed for months, including over forty whose false confessions helped seal the fate of those who were convicted. The twenty who were executed went to their deaths proclaiming their innocence in the face of judicial badgering and enraged public opinion. These individuals, fourteen women and six men, refused to “belie themselves” before God by confessing to crimes they had never committed.

Because most people today no longer believe that witchcraft is real, it is sometimes thought that the essence of a witch hunt lies in persecuting people for entirely made-up crimes. This is a misunderstanding. In the context of seventeenth-century cosmology, in which nearly everyone believed they lived in a world of spirits and demons, it was entirely reasonable to think that certain individuals could be enlisted by Satan to draw on supernatural powers to inflict harm on other people or tempt them away from the Puritans’ utopian experiment. And who better for Satan to designate as witches than those who appeared on the outside to be pious members of Puritan congregations? This is why most of the people who falsely confessed to the crime of witchcraft (and often implicated others) were actually among the most, not the least, pious Puritans. These were the sensitive ones who, when they examined their own behavior and saw occasional signs of malice or greed or envy, were consumed by guilt and imagined that their sinfulness had already turned them in the direction of becoming witches. The Salem witch hunt did not manufacture the crime of witchcraft; it exaggerated the presence of a stigmatized trait that most everyone in the community believed really existed.

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These days Americans on the left of the political spectrum are most given to engaging in the social psychology of witch hunting—our first hint about why Trump and his supporters have seized on the term in their own defense. The fear of harboring “racist” or “sexist” thoughts or of being discovered to have engaged in behavior that can be so labeled by the community has produced numerous rushes to judgment (witch hunts) that have unduly injured a number of both famous and ordinary Americans. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam briefly supplied a recent example of a witch hunting suspect. Why was a sincere apology for his insensitive racial behavior (of appearing in blackface) thirty-five years ago insufficient to end the controversy, considering the man’s subsequent record as a physician and public servant lacking in racial prejudice? Why did so many Democrats believe he needed to resign, that nothing short of such drastic punishment would do? A similar situation confronted Minnesota Senator Al Franken two years ago in the wake of sexual misconduct charges that stopped well short of assault. Angry Democratic leaders forced Franken to resign before the authorized Senate Ethics Committee could carry out an investigation of the incidents in question. Franken had denied most of the charges, while apologizing for his actions in some of them.

A particularly striking small-scale example of the same phenomenon occurred in Albany, California, in 2017. In this San Francisco Bay Area community, enraged white and black high school students, over one hundred in number and backed by parents and teachers, yelled epithets at several white and Asian-American students and chased them off the campus when they returned to school after serving a suspension for having endorsed derogatory images posted about African-American students and a coach at the school. The crowd apparently deemed the school’s own disciplinary procedures insufficient. One of the targeted students was injured in the melee. In a similar way, local communities and anonymous internet users hounded various Americans, given scornful names such as “BBQ Betty,” “Permit Patty,” and “Cornerstone Caroline,” for alleged acts of racial prejudice before anyone cared to learn the details of their transgressions or their own explanations for their actions. Meanwhile, certain liberal universities—Middlebury College and Evergreen State College are two leading examples—have become notorious for permitting students and faculty to stifle the speech of those accused of holding “racist” views, even when such views are either noninflammatory or entirely lacking in prejudice.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s right-wing Americans took their turn at witch hunting. The stigmatized trait at that time was to be a communist sympathizer. Several thousand Americans lost their jobs as teachers, engineers, actors, film directors, and especially government employees for fear that they would undermine the resolve of the United States in its cold war with Communist Russia. As at Salem and as again today concerning what is taken to be insensitive racial and sexual behavior, confessions of guilt played a central part in the “Red Scare” of the era, adding to the seeming truthfulness of the charges and contributing to their spread. Here, too, the existence of communist sympathizers among professionals and within the government bureaucracy was not made up. A significant portion of Americans had developed anti-capitalist leanings during the Great Depression and the period of the World War II alliance between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. A small number of these individuals (perhaps a little over 300, according to historians Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes) carried such leanings to the point of spying for the Russians. But the witch hunt of the 1940s and ’50s exaggerated the threat posed by all these people, the vast majority of whom were loyal and idealistic Americans whose chief fault lay in their ignorance and naivete about what life under communism was really like.

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Knowing the propensity of Americans to engage in these extreme sorts of moral and political purges, especially the most recent crusades against racism and sexism, allows us to understand why a number of conservative politicians have lately fancied themselves the victims of witch hunting. President Trump’s repeated charge that the Mueller investigation was a “witch hunt” offers the most prominent example, but similar charges were voiced in defense of former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens when both of these Republicans faced allegations of wrongdoing. In fact, not one of these cases constituted an example of a witch hunt, since the ensuing investigations or trials operated in line with customary legal proceedings and respected the principle of due process. The Mueller probe, a prosecutorial inquiry, found insufficient basis to bring criminal charges against a sitting president. Even at this pre-trial stage of investigation, the president had the opportunity to testify in person or, as he chose to do, to answer questions in writing under the guidance of his attorneys. In the New Jersey case a jury convicted two Christie aides of illegal actions taken to get back at a political rival, while charges were ultimately dropped against Governor Greitens. Moreover, in none of these cases was the element of scapegoating present, because the public harbored no guilty consciences about similar behavior in themselves.

In the current impeachment inquiry, Democrats, who control the House of Representatives and all of its committees, have indeed shut minority Republicans out of exercising their own subpoena power, and they have allowed witnesses to testify in closed sessions without compelling reasons for doing so (protecting the identity of a formal whistle-blower, of course, would be one such compelling reason). Democrats liken the House inquiry to the secretive, prosecutorial grand jury stage in a criminal case, and they contend that if the impeachment process leads to a formal trial in the Senate, the president and his supporters will have the opportunity at that point to mount their own defense. While constitutionally defensible, this position appears to lack consideration for what might be called political due process. Since the success of any impeachment drive is dependent on ensuring the public’s perception of fairness throughout the process, Democrats are likely being shortsighted in some of these early procedural decisions. Still, the president, aided by his formidable legal staff, will be fully able to defend himself against any articles of impeachment, should the case move to a Senate trial.

Republican politicians have nevertheless cleverly employed the countercharge of “witch hunt” in all these instances, because, much as Americans have historically been prone to conduct campaigns of moral and political purification (i.e., witch hunts), another side of the American character has typically reasserted itself after each such episode and condemned the earlier miscarriages of justice. Following the catharsis of a witch hunt, tolerance for human foibles returns and more humane paths toward reform are found. Politicians can thus cynically appeal to these anti-witch hunting sentiments as a way to discredit legitimate investigations into their own actions. Close to 50 percent of the American population, according to a poll taken just prior to the release of the Mueller report, accepted President Trump’s mischaracterization of the special counsel’s investigation as a “witch hunt.” Even Joseph McCarthy, the leading witch hunter in the Red Scare of the early 1950s, could misleadingly cast his Senate opponents as a “lynch party,” when the Senate in 1954 finally acted to censure him, and Trump himself recently invoked the same concept (“a lynching”) to describe the impeachment inquiry.

The best way to prevent such perennial misuse of the “witch hunt” label would be for Americans to stop themselves before they allow their moral fervor to get out of control and run roughshod over the legal rights of others—in other words, to refrain from witch hunting in the first place.

L’identitié américaine à travers le miroir de Salem

This article, a translation of the Introduction and Conclusion from my book, Switching Sides: How a Generation of Historians Lost Sympathy for the Victims of the Salem Witch Hunt, appeared in the French journal Perspectives Libres, No. 30 (juillet 2022 – juin 2023).

The Fog of Youth: The Cornell Student Takeover, 50 Years On

This article appeared on Quillette, June 25, 2019. Internal citations for this article are available on request. Contact Tony Fels.

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On April 20, 1969, an era of student rebellions that had rocked American campuses at Berkeley, Columbia, San Francisco State, and Harvard reached a culmination of sorts with the triumphant exit of armed black students from Cornell’s Willard Straight student union building after a two-day occupation. The students had just won sweeping concessions from the university’s administration, including a pledge to urge faculty governing bodies to nullify reprimands of several members of the Afro-American Society (AAS) for previous campus disruptions on behalf of starting up a black studies program, judicial actions that had prompted the takeover. White student supporters cheered the outcome. And when the faculty, at an emergency meeting attended by 1,200 professors, initially balked at the administration’s request to overturn the reprimands, the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) led a body that grew to six thousand students in a three-day possession of the university’s Barton gymnasium. Amid threats of violence by and against the student activists, the faculty, in a series of tumultuous meetings, voted to reverse themselves, allowing the crisis to end. Student protestors claimed victory for a blow successfully dealt to what they held to be a racist institution.

This positive interpretation of the meaning of the Cornell events has surprisingly remained mostly in place among the left-leaning participants (all within the SDS orbit) with whom I have kept in touch over the past 50 years. Most other former New Leftists whom I have spoken with or who have written about the crisis see it roughly the same way. One might have thought that decades of personal maturation would have produced profound doubts about the wisdom of such extreme actions taken when we were still in, or just past, our teenage years.

The continuity in interpretation by former SDSers is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that the nation at large took a distinctly critical view of the same events right from the start. Most Americans immediately recoiled at the sight of the widely reproduced image, captured in a Pulitzer prize-winning photograph, of the bandolier-wearing student leading the Willard Straight Hall activists, rifles at their side, out of the building.

Headlines describing Cornell’s “capitulation” and “disgrace” typified national news coverage. Among 4,000 letters written to Cornell’s top administrators after the crisis, under five percent viewed the administrators’ actions favorably, and the student rebellion no doubt helped reinforce the country’s shift toward conservative dominance that had begun the previous November with the election of Richard Nixon. Yet through this immediate aftermath and on into the future, most of the aging participants have shown little evidence of rethinking.

In searching for a way to explain this insularity in left-liberal interpretation on the occasion of the rebellion’s fiftieth anniversary, I am struck by how little we activists really knew about the details of the events that were unfolding before our eyes, and how we wanted to know these details even less, both then and later. I gained this appreciation of our ignorance by reading Donald Alexander Downs’s Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University (Cornell University Press, 1999), an invaluable narrative and analysis of one of the era’s major campus uprisings. A political scientist today, Downs was himself a Cornell undergraduate during the late 1960s, although his book says nothing of any role he may have played in the crisis (and I have no personal recollection of him from those days). The book apparently came much later, a project for which he carried out extensive research in the Cornell archives, reading through local newspaper accounts and other written sources, and interviewing dozens of former participants in the 1990s.

While Downs presents his own argument about the threat posed by the Cornell protests to academic freedom—an argument I find persuasive—his carefully written and thoroughly documented account can be detached from that argument by those who might disagree with the lessons he draws. His study deserves widespread attention by anyone today who still wishes to hold to a romantically positive version of those events. Much as the “fog of war” obscures an accurate assessment of a large-scale battle from the range of vision held by any particular combatant, the “fog of youth” may be said to have prevented the vast majority of Cornell’s students at the time from grasping the implications of the conflict as a whole. Thanks to Downs’s history—to which I have added a few minor corrections from Bruce Dancis’s memoir, Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison during the Vietnam War (Cornell University Press, 2014), and several observations from Divided We Stand: Reflections on the Crisis at Cornell, ed. Cushing Strout and David I. Grossvogel (Anchor Books, 1971), and Anita M. Harris’s Ithaca Diaries: Coming of Age in the 1960s (Cambridge Common Press, 2015)—we can acquire a far more informed view today of the entire picture, revealing just how adolescent, intolerant, and frightening the Cornell protests actually were. Looking back now, there is little to be proud of.

White Radicals Take the Initiative

As Downs shows, two mostly separate streams of student activism, one predominantly white, the other exclusively black, came together in spring 1969 to produce the rebellion at Cornell. The mostly white leftists centered their attention on opposition to the American war in Vietnam. As early as May 1965, radicals in a variety of organizations (SDS came to Cornell in 1963 but did not dominate the campus left until fall 1966) disrupted a speech by Averill Harriman, U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, taking his microphone and insulting him as an “agent of imperialism.” A few days later students interrupted the annual ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) review with a sit-in, sparking an angry reaction by members of the audience. A similar demonstration against Marine recruiters in November 1967 by about 200 protesters and 30 counter-demonstrators led to pushing, shoving, shouting, and obstruction.

Not all such student activism resulted so quickly in confrontation. Predominantly white student radicals pursued other issues along with their antiwar activities, including support for the civil rights movement earlier in the 1960s, and later a push for educational reforms (in class size, the grading system, and other areas), a drive to have Cornell build low-income housing for the residents of the adjoining town of Ithaca (the focus for the SDS faction of which I was a leading member), and a campaign for greater freedom of speech and expression in campus publications. Even the latter cause, however, came to a potentially violent head in January 1967, when the district attorney from the surrounding county directed sheriff’s deputies to seize a literary magazine for its sexually explicit material and arrest its student distributors. Repeating a famous tactic from the 1964 free speech movement at Berkeley, students threatened the county official by ominously surrounding his car, while trying to trip a deputy. Local authorities soon backed off, though not before some students had vandalized the empty police car. An effort to encourage students to resist the draft, begun peacefully in spring 1967, similarly ended in a sit-in at the university proctor’s office when the administrator forcibly tried to stop the organizing by suspending several students.

Whether peaceful or confrontational in design, nearly all these forms of campus activism framed themselves as “demands.”  With the barest of exceptions, radical students showed little interest in putting forth proposals, making suggestions, or engaging in reasoned dialogue in order to bring about reforms at Cornell or in their wider communities. Leftists produced plenty of leaflets and other information, increasingly in the name of anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist ideals, aimed at attracting more students to their side, but their unstated goal was expression far more than persuasion. Persuasion by its very nature proceeds slowly, whereas student demands were expected to be met immediately. Even negotiations were frowned upon as likely to lead to unacceptable compromise.

The adolescent character of this sort of rebelliousness displayed itself clearly at the largest campus protest to hit Cornell back in the 1950s, an era that most SDSers would have thought bore little relationship to the antiwar and antiracism activism of the later 1960s. The issues in contention at that time concerned university rules requiring chaperones for women students and prohibiting parties in off-campus student apartments. In 1958 over one 1,000 students gathered outside university president Deane W. Malott’s house, shouting obscenities and throwing rocks while the president was meeting inside with the chairman of the school’s board of trustees. Students chanted, “We have parents now, who needs more?!” It cannot be simply coincidental that the occupation of Willard Straight Hall on April 19, 1969, an act that turned the university on its head, would take place during Parents’ Weekend.

African American Students Join the Fray

Meanwhile, alongside these actions by mostly white activists, radicals among Cornell’s African American students were pursuing their own agenda. When James A. Perkins succeeded Deane Malott as Cornell’s president in 1963 during the height of the civil rights movement, he quickly undertook measures to increase the number of African American students. From four black students admitted to a freshman class of 2,300 in 1963, their numbers grew to 94 in the 1968 incoming cohort. By the spring of 1969, Cornell’s undergraduate and graduate student population included 259 African Americans.

As was true among the white students, radical activists never comprised more than a relatively small minority within the total black student population. But the situation black students faced of being a distinct racial minority on a large campus, together with the heightened racial consciousness that came with the rise of the black power movement in the summer of 1966, meant that radical leaders were able to attract a significant following during this time. Coercion of more politically moderate individuals, especially ones who tried to maintain personal relationships with white students, also played a role, as a number of black former students and others whom Downs interviewed reported. The Afro-American Society, founded in early 1966, typically had 50 to 100 members but could occasionally bring as many as 150 students to its meetings and actions.

Black students at the time faced incidents of racial prejudice and cultural misunderstanding. Examples included a derogatory remark with racial overtones made by some white players toward some black players during tryouts for the men’s freshman basketball team, roommate conflicts in the dorms between white and black women over the procedures involved in fashioning Afro hairdos, and arguments over what music should be played on the cafeteria jukebox. Cornell’s popular fraternity system produced the biggest incident. While some African Americans, including several AAS leaders, belonged to predominantly white fraternities, many black students encountered barriers at the time of rushing. In October 1966, midway into a dance party at one fraternity house, a doorman began charging blacks an entry fee that he waived for whites. The Interfraternity Council was sympathetic to Cornell’s black students and quickly carried out an investigation. Its judicial body found that, while the fraternity did not originally set out to exclude black students (earlier in the party both white and black students had been admitted), discrimination had occurred. In response, the council placed the fraternity on probation for a year and then co-sponsored (with the AAS) a “Soul Week” on campus that brought black power advocate Stokely Carmichael and other national figures to Cornell. Nevertheless, this incident led to the formation of a racially exclusive residence for men and, a little later, another for women (Wari House) for those black students who wished to move to them. As described in a slightly more detailed account of this episode than Downs’s, written a year after the Cornell takeover by AAS member Cleveland Donald, Jr., for an anthology, Divided We Stand: Reflections on the Crisis at Cornell, the fraternity’s blatant act of discrimination had a radicalizing effect on the university’s black students.

Militant actions did not start right away, but a building takeover at predominantly black Howard University in spring 1967 on behalf of a black studies curriculum, among other issues, spurred on African American students elsewhere. Black activism at Cornell, much like its white radical counterpart, now acquired the character of making nonnegotiable demands and using the power of group intimidation to get results. Black student radicals had the added tool of appealing to feelings of social guilt felt by sensitive white students, faculty, and especially administrators, a factor cited by many of the people Downs interviewed for his book. Donald recognized this factor as well in his own essay, though he added that “the act of haranguing whites” also produced frustration for AASers, “because blacks knew that whites enjoyed the punishment…[and] by enjoying the punishment, deprived blacks of the therapeutic value inherent in the act of punishing.”

The First Black Radical Actions

The new militancy found expression principally in the demand for an African American studies program at Cornell. An economics course on development offered in the spring of 1968 semester provided the immediate catalyst. Although the course instructor, a visiting professor from the Philippines, was not explicitly addressing the situation of blacks in the United States (but rather poor people in general), he made a number of statements in class about poverty that three radicals among the seven or eight African Americans in the class found to be racist. When the professor made it difficult for these students (or any students) to raise objections in class (though not out of class), the three radical students took matters into their own hands.

They registered a complaint with a dean and then the Economics chair, asking for an apology from the professor, the professor’s dismissal, and a black professor to be appointed in his place. A couple of weeks later, after spring break, the radical students returned to the classroom, taking over the podium to read a statement. Chaos broke out before the professor canceled the class. The radical students then gathered about 40 to 60 supporters, marched over to the Economics Department and took over the office. There they held the chair hostage for the next seven hours (they also briefly detained three secretaries), declaring the office closed until a mechanism had been established to address their three demands. With student supporters on the outside and plainclothes campus guards called to the scene, the situation grew increasingly tense. At one point a fight broke out when five black students pushed past the guards to join those inside. Two guards and one student were injured in the melee.

The occupation came to an end when the university provost agreed to meet with the students to discuss their demands, hire an outside lecturer selected by the AAS, and investigate the whole matter. A nine-member commission composed of faculty, administrators, and students (the Williams Commission) expeditiously carried out the ensuing investigation, and unanimously concluded that the economics professor had not been guilty of overt racism, although a minority of three believed that unconscious or institutional racism had been at work in some of the professor’s presentations. The commission also censured the radical students’ actions in the episode, referring them to Cornell’s judicial board for adjudication while recommending against severe punishment.

Despite the findings of the Williams Commission, however, the university administration decided not to charge any students in the disruption, and the provost even indicated to leaders of the AAS that he and other administrators took their side morally. As the dean of the College of Arts and Science put it in a public report at the time, “[The economics professor] and I and most whites are racists in some degree. We are all in some degree ignorant of and insensitive to the plight of black people….I think they [black students] have the right to demand of us…that we make an immediate and resolute effort to teach ourselves about black problems, and that we dedicate ourselves as an institution to finding solutions to these problems.” The willingness on the part of Cornell’s administrators to overlook these unlawful campus actions, equally true for some of the disruptions caused by white radical students, would contribute enormously to the armed takeover of Willard Straight Hall one year later.

The Push for a Black Studies Program

In hiring an AAS-approved outside lecturer in the wake of the Economics Department takeover, Cornell in effect took the first step toward establishing a black studies program at the university. In the fall of 1968, the university set up an advisory committee of faculty and students to plan the program, but AAS radicals soon articulated their own proposal, characteristically set forth as a list of demands. Rejecting the advice of faculty and several African American students on the advisory committee to structure the program as an interdisciplinary major with professors hired by contributing departments, the radicals insisted on an autonomous College of Afro-American Studies with powers over its own finances and hiring. In early December, the radicals arrived at the advisory committee meeting with close to 50 supporters and announced that the planning group had been disbanded in favor of a new black-only body, voting 50-0 in favor of the change. On the same day, six radicals precipitously evicted a professor and two employees from a building that the university had already designated to be used as the program’s headquarters beginning a year from then, when the program would likely be starting up. Three days later, the AAS presented their autonomous college plan to President Perkins and demanded his approval within 24 hours.

When the “deadline” passed without the president’s authorization, AAS radicals initiated what became known as the “December actions.” Seven militants pointed toy guns at students in front of the student union and disrupted traffic. They invaded the administration building, committing petty vandalism (knocking over a sand-filled container with cigarette butts and two candy machines, discharging a fire extinguisher, and banging on office doors). Back at the student union, they surrounded a campus police car, striking its hood and roof, and barged into a closed dining room pretending to demand service. The following day, 75 African American students, accompanied by some children, staged a brief sit-in in front of the president’s office. When Perkins offered to speak with them and sent out a cart of food, they refused his offer and overturned the food cart. Another group of 30 went to three different campus libraries, removing an estimated 3,700 books from the shelves, dumping them in front of the circulation desks and proclaiming that they had “no relevance to me as a black student.” The December actions came to an end a day later, when a radical contingent delayed that evening’s basketball game by marching across the court while playing music. It would be the reprimands of three AAS students involved in the toy gun harassment episode, a punishment handed down by the student-faculty judicial board after a nearly five-hour meeting that lasted until 2:00am on April 18, that would precipitate the Willard Straight takeover the following day.

The SDS and the Afro-American Society Join Forces

But the intervening four months between the December actions and the judicial board’s decision had not been devoid of additional and even greater provocations. The new semester on campus (spring 1969) brought SDS and the AAS together in two protests that turned violent. The goal of both protests was ending the university’s perceived support for the apartheid regime in South Africa through the school’s investments in banks that did business in that country. For Cornell, the principal bank in question was Chase Manhattan. Towards the end of February, Cornell’s international studies program sponsored a four-day symposium on the subject of South Africa, and trouble arose at the first evening session when an SDSer tried to interrupt a liberal South African defender of apartheid by asking the audience to decide whether he should be permitted to keep talking. Only the intervention by another SDSer, a law student, who appealed to the audience to uphold the principle of free speech, allowed the speaker to continue. But at the keynote event two evenings later, held at the Hotel Administration School’s Statler Auditorium, President Perkins did not fare as well. The president had earlier promised to use his remarks introducing the evening’s main speaker to explain the trustees’ reluctance to sell Cornell stock in the Chase Manhattan bank, and SDS and AAS members in the audience looked forward to the opportunity to make his position appear weak.

Even before Perkins could get to the podium, an AAS leader grabbed the microphone and an SDS leader shouted from the audience to demand that the president make good on his promise to explain the university’s investment policy and either break with it or defend it. That much was planned, but what happened next was not. As Perkins began to speak, one AAS member moved from the side of the stage to the lectern and lifted the president up by the collar. Black students in the audience began to beat drums they had brought with them, but soon boos from the audience took over. When a safety officer approached the stage to help free the president, another AAS member moved in from the other side of the stage, pointing a two-by-four board at the officer to stop him. A shaken Perkins was soon released and escorted off the stage to be driven home. The crowd in the auditorium was visibly shocked by what had occurred, and most cheered when a black South African anti-apartheid leader rose to condemn the two attackers, as did an SDS leader. But Downs quotes another eyewitness, an administrator, who observed that as the evening went on and more people spoke, “It was amazing as well as very disturbing to see the reaction of many members in the crowd change from one of concern about the uncalled-for treatment of the President to one of almost outright anger that the President didn’t remain in order that they could criticize him publicly.”

A less ugly but still violent protest broke out a little more than a week later, when about 200 SDSers and a considerably smaller number of AASers joined together to stop Chase Manhattan representatives from recruiting future employees at Malott Hall, home to Cornell’s business school. The demonstrators forced their way into the room where the recruiters’ table had been set up. A campus patrolman later recounted what happened next: “When we got totally overrun, I got pushed, I got knocked down on the floor, and [there was] glass all over the place….There were ten or fifteen students. I mean, they just literally chomped all over tables, literally, everything went flying. It all happened just, whoosh! So fast!…I went right through a window,  head first….I could have been killed…Several of the recruiters that were there that were sitting in the chairs, I mean, their chairs went over backwards, they just left their briefcases and everything and just walked away.” The university cancelled Chase’s recruiting efforts for the foreseeable future.

Violent Acts and Cornell’s Response

Neither of the disturbances at the Statler Auditorium or Malott Hall resulted in any university judicial actions. Proceedings against the two individuals who had taken part in the physical attack on President Perkins might have occurred, except that one of these men abruptly left the area after being cited and, perhaps more importantly, was expelled from the AAS, while the other had already dropped out of school. Sporadic cases of violent assault in fact hovered around the edges of the AAS’s activism at Cornell. In a fierce conflict between two factional leaders of the AAS that broke out in fall 1968, one small group went after another with guns and knives, and both sides were armed with chains, even if the only explicitly violent result was a smashed car window. During the December actions, an AAS member, one of the two men later involved in the attack on Perkins, struck a Cornell Daily Sun reporter in the face and roughed up a photographer when he noticed them in front of the building the organization had just seized to become the future headquarters of the black studies program.

The worst outbreak of violence occurred over the weekend following the Malott Hall protest. Three white students were assaulted on campus. In two cases the victims were attacked from behind but were able to identify their attackers as black; the third victim was rendered unconscious for four days from head injuries and was unable to remember anything about the assault. No suspects were ever identified, but an anonymous letter published soon after in the Sun under the title, “One Black’s View,” expressed “shock” and “shame” that “some of my brothers have found it necessary to attack white students.” As Downs notes, “He or she then claimed that those black students who opposed the AAS’s direction of action were afraid to speak out. ‘Even though I am black, if I signed my name to this letter, I would be intimidated. I have seen it happen to others.’” It is probably the case that the perpetrators of these violent acts comprised a tiny minority within the AAS, but the fact that such actions had taken place and were widely discussed on campus—to which might be added the outbreak of a number of fires of unexplained origin—enhanced the frightening quality of all the Cornell protests. In the background, too, was the violence taking place in the country at large, most especially the assassination of Martin Luther King (the news of which was reported just a few hours after the Economics Department takeover had ended), provoking anger among African Americans everywhere.

The context of this violent era of social change helps explain why the Cornell administrators responded so timidly to the radical actions of its white and black students. In a few cases the university’s judicial system had reprimanded student protesters and even placed some on probation. This was true for the demonstrators in the ROTC and marine recruitment altercations (in the latter case 129 students received reprimands), as well as for the few students charged in the December actions. But, as Downs points out, over time the mixed faculty-student judicial boards (which themselves underwent structural change during this era) lost legitimacy, not because they lacked fair-minded and dedicated personnel but because the growing influence of leftwing ideology undercut the value of individual responsibility in favor of group accountability. And if a group, like African Americans, was seen as a historical victim of prejudice, then that group’s rule breakers deserved to be treated with special leniency—at least that’s what many at Cornell, including its leading administrators, thought. By the time of the Willard Straight takeover, according to “many sources” whom Downs consulted, “the administration had adopted a ‘hands off’ policy when it came to potentially illegal actions of dissident students, especially blacks.”

The same sort of compensatory thinking, which could never be openly acknowledged, caused Cornell’s administrators to avoid speaking honestly to the faculty about most of their educational policies toward minority students, covering everything from the university’s admissions requirements (which were altered for incoming African American students) to the president’s final proposal for the new black studies program, reflecting most of the AAS’s original demands, that he submitted to the university’s board of trustees in early April 1969. The Cornell administration’s weak and deceptive style of leadership helped set up its strained relationship with the faculty no less than it encouraged continued student disruptions, even when the board of trustees approved the new Afro-American Studies Center at its April 10-12 meeting.

A Deceptive Cross-Burning Incident

The Cornell administration, however, was not alone in its reliance on deception to further its aims. With the trustees’ acceptance of the new black studies program, the AAS’s principal goal, the only demand of the society that remained unfulfilled was that none of its members be disciplined for their actions the previous December—actions needed, as they saw things, to bring that program into existence. Having come this far in obtaining everything it wanted, the AAS must have felt there was no reason to back down now on its final demand. In addition, the society’s group ideology, in which all acts were deemed collective in nature, virtually required that it mount a major demonstration that would rescue the three cited members from their anticipated reprimands. Perhaps sensing, however, that a critique of “judicial racism” might not provide sufficient justification for the audacious step that the AAS was now planning, some radicals—how many and who they were is not known—in all likelihood decided to add the provocation of a cross-burning in front of Wari House, the black women’s residence, together with a brick thrown through the residence window a little before 3:00am on the morning before the AAS seized the student union building.

The circumstantial evidence behind the claim that these events were staged is overwhelming in Downs’s account, although the truth of the matter was probably known to only a few in the AAS. Many people, from sympathetic university officials to police officers from the town of Ithaca, suspected a ruse at the time. There were no physical traces pointing to the involvement of non-Cornellians, to which may be added the fact, omitted from Downs’s book, that the wood used to construct the cross was purchased from art supplies sold at the campus store, as a subsequent report by the university’s trustees revealed. With the passage of years, more and more testimonies by individuals, both black and white, involved in the Cornell takeover have accumulated to buttress the claim made by then-university provost Dale Corson in a 1996 interview that he was “99.9 percent sure” that it was an inside job. In April 1969, however, nobody dared voice these suspicions, and the appearance of such an overtly racist act added momentum to the student rebellion, as it was cited again and again by participants in favor of overturning the reprimands. In her memoir, Ithaca Diaries: Coming of Age in the 1960s, Anita M. Harris wrote that a group of Jewish students issued a statement pledging their support for the AAS based on the “full [historical] implications” of such a “vile act.”

The Takeover

The takeover of Willard Straight Hall was not carried out without violence, even though rifles would only be brought into the building later in the first day of the occupation. At the outset, some of the AAS students were armed with chains, knives, and clubs. Arriving at around 5:00am on the morning of Saturday, April 19, the occupiers roused and expelled the 28 parents who were staying in the building’s upstairs hotel rooms for Parents’ Weekend. Some of the parents endured insults and were compelled to exit the rooms in their nightclothes, leaving their belongings behind. All were led down a long flight of stairs to the building’s garbage area, where they were forced to jump off a three-foot loading dock. Though none was injured, most were left shocked, frightened, and angry. During the occupation itself, a fair amount of vandalism occurred, including to the doors and the contents of the visitors’ rooms, to locks on vending machine coin boxes (with $1,000 taken), to interior floors and paintings, and to stores of food from the kitchen.

The AAS began bringing the infamous rifles (and some hatchets) into the building about eight hours into the takeover, after 25 white fraternity men had entered the student union from a side window in an attempt to break the society’s hold over the building. In the resulting melee, the occupiers were able to repel the fraternity men with only slight injuries to both sides, but this forcible effort to end the takeover added to fears by the AAS—unfounded, it turned out—that whites from the surrounding community, including sheriffs’ deputies or even the national guard, were planning an armed attack. The AAS justified its introduction of rifles on grounds of self-defense (the New York state legislature would make the presence of guns on a university campus illegal only after the Cornell rebellion), but “self-defense” could be asserted so aggressively as to carry the potential for violence itself—two days later, an AAS leader threatened that if Cornell’s faculty did not reverse its vote on the reprimands, various of its “racist” members were “going to die in the gutter like dogs.”

Just as AAS leaders manipulated the society’s own membership by means of staging (or, at the very least, failing to repudiate) the phony cross-burning incident in advance of the takeover, SDS leaders (from its “Action Faction”) carried on secret planning of their own to ensure that the predominantly white organization would rally behind the anticipated occupation. Downs demonstrates that a number of these white radical leaders had been alerted to the planned takeover by their African American counterparts several days before the occurrence. A few had purchased rifles for the AAS leadership several months earlier. By 7:00am of the first day, SDS had thrown up a picket line around the student union as “protection” for the occupiers inside, and the number of these dedicated supporters grew as the day wore on.

In truth, little manipulation of SDS’s membership was needed to bring about this support. Ever since the widely reported and explosive student rebellion at Columbia University the previous spring, most members were looking for some way to provoke a similar confrontation with Cornell’s administration. In addition, nearly all SDSers accepted the radical critique of the university’s judicial system as inherently rigged against black students, thus justifying in their minds the AAS’s demand to nullify the reprimands. Throughout the first three days of the rebellion, SDS managed to speak for an ever-increasing number of white students, who came to see the takeover and the tense showdown that developed between administration and faculty after the initial agreement between administrators and the AAS through the eyes of campus radicals. At one mass meeting of 2,500 students, the few who voiced misgivings were drowned out by chants of “Fight racism—meet the black demands NOW!” In the background lay the frequently voiced threat by SDS to take over the university’s administration building (Day Hall) if the faculty failed to reverse its first vote refusing to go along with the nullification agreement. Most students at the school seemed to endorse that plan.

In the end, however, SDS became a victim of its own success. Once guns had been brought into the occupation, the Cornell administration never wavered from its determination to accede to the AAS’s demand concerning the reprimands. “Saving lives,” in the words of one of the university’s main negotiators, became the administration’s sole objective. Yet even without the genuine fear of terrible violence if Cornell had, for example, sought an injunction to vacate the student union with the threat of law enforcement action behind it, the university’s record in the years leading up to the crisis positioned the administration to do nothing other than capitulate. It had no intellectual resources at its disposal to convince the student body, white and black alike, that reforms in university policies cannot come about through intimidation and force without sacrificing essential elements of any civic community, much less a university. It had given in to these sorts of actions too many times before.

Facing such a weak administration, SDS never got the confrontation it desired. As the number of its student supporters grew into the thousands, young people of more moderate dispositions inevitably came to dominate the huge meetings that took place. These students accepted the radicals’ interpretation of the AAS’s goals and remarkably even most of the society’s tactics. Doubtless the cross-burning incident played a large role in shaping this consensus. But when it became apparent on the evening of the third day (April 21) that the faculty was likely to overturn its initial vote, this great mass of moderate students blocked SDS from moving forward with its projected administration building takeover in favor of giving the faculty one more chance to decide. The following day, the faculty endorsed the agreement, although most said they did so only out of fear for a worse outcome if they hadn’t. Six thousand or more students joined with AAS leaders and President Perkins at Barton gymnasium in cheering this resolution.

Legacy

Eldon Kenworthy, a young government professor who had done more than anyone else to articulate the moderates’ position at a critical moment, later quipped in one of the Divided We Stand essays, “The Mensheviks had won,” a reference to Lenin’s less ruthless but still revolutionary opponents at the time of the Russian Revolution. The analogy was apt, because by arbitrarily overturning the reprimands, the Cornell community had broken, albeit nonviolently, with a fundamental principle in a liberal democracy that requires all mentally competent individuals, regardless of status or ethnic background, to be held accountable to the same set of laws. Confusion on this score would remain a lasting legacy of the Cornell rebellion, particularly because the campus judicial system that the university had in place in the late 1960s, Downs shows, had never been racist to begin with.

Beyond this confusion, the student rebellion produced few lasting results. Experiments in greater student participation in university governance that issued from the “Barton Hall community” proved fleeting. Black student activists achieved an African Studies program, but this goal had been won before the dramatic building takeover had occurred. The new program also suffered, Downs points out, from the extreme separatism of the AAS’s campaign to bring it into existence. Had the program been structured less autonomously and brought more fully into relationship with the university’s academic disciplines, as was the case with a similar program established around the same time at Yale, it might have gotten off to a stronger start. SDS declined in importance in the years following the takeover. Several prominent Cornell faculty members resigned immediately, while quite a few more began to look for positions at other schools. Downs quotes a number of professors who stated that they now began to edit or censor their lectures for fear of incurring student disapproval, knowing that they could not count on the university administration to back up their academic freedom.

The ethical shortcomings of the 1969 Cornell student rebellion, which appear so glaring today, were anything but clear to us radical activists at the time. In those days, what were taken to be moral ends—furthering along racial justice and ending the American war in Vietnam—justified an abundance of coercive means, as a leading Cornell activist, Bruce Dancis, acknowledges in his thoughtful memoir, Resister, although his criticisms do not go as far as mine. We thought little about the negative consequences of the tactics we adopted and delved not very deeply into even the positive goals we pursued—what, for example, would Vietnam be like if U.S. forces withdrew?

Downs helpfully warns against over-emphasizing the differences he has recorded in the tactics adopted by Cornell’s black and white student radicals. One of the AAS members he interviewed in 1997, he tells us, “would often punctuate her recollections of events with the exclamation, ‘We were so young!’” Indeed, the category of youth offers greater insight into the era’s excesses than that of race. The Cornell events formed not just part of a national outburst on American college campuses but also an element within a worldwide explosion of youthful energies that ranged from students opposing communist tyranny in Prague to those who provided the shock troops for Mao’s murderous Cultural Revolution. Perhaps Cornell’s Economics professor George Hildebrand put it best at the time when he castigated the university administration’s “incredibly naïve and romantic permissiveness that prevailed over the last three years,” stemming from its “misplaced faith in youth.” How many veterans of those student days, now in their late-60s or early-70s, would be willing to agree?

W(h)ither the US History Survey?

This article was published in Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, March 2016.

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Is the United States history survey an endangered species? It is at my school, the University of San Francisco (USF), and there is evidence that other colleges and universities face a similar peril.

At USF, a four-year liberal arts university, history majors who are concentrating in US history can now graduate without taking the traditional, comprehensive US history survey course. They may still take the survey, but they can also choose from a menu of other offerings that include African American history, Asian American history, and a course on “citizenship” (a study of social movements for equality, from the American Revolution to the present). Likely to be added to the menu, if department trends continue, are courses on Latinos in US history and the history of American women.

Proponents at USF defend these innovations in openly political terms. They say that most history majors already know the basics of US history—by which they mean the history of the country’s white male elite—before these students come to college, so instead majors need to focus on the experiences of subordinate groups in American society. These faculty deride the idea that any introductory course could be “comprehensive,” which they see as a smokescreen for teaching American “exceptionalism.” They evince no concern that a US-focused history major might graduate with little college-level knowledge of the colonial era, the American Revolution, the Constitution, political parties, the Civil War, industrialization, European immigrant groups, reform movements, or the nation’s foreign policy, except as these developments impinged on the histories of minority racial groups or women.

For those old enough to remember, such attitudes sound like a throwback to the history wars of the 1970s and 1980s. Remarkably, the contemporary burst of radicalism takes no account of how much has since changed in the teaching of history. Survey textbooks and course syllabi now routinely incorporate the histories of minority groups and women within their central subject matter. They integrate social, economic, and cultural history into political narratives and analyses. They place domestic events into a global context. No faculty member at our university or at any college I know of teaches according to the “straw” characteristics alleged by the new radicals. Ironically, it is probably chiefly at those high schools and occasional colleges where the use of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has become the norm that students are receiving a one-sided view of the country’s history—and this view is biased in the direction of the left, not the center or right.

A quick look at the history department websites of 21 other schools, selected at random in the year 2014–15, suggests that a similar trend away from the US introductory survey may be afoot elsewhere, although these websites reveal nothing of the reasoning involved. At the traditional end of the spectrum, one group of schools (Univ. of California, Berkeley; San Francisco State Univ.; Rutgers Univ.–New Brunswick; Univ. of Chicago; and Boston Coll.) requires or strongly recommends that all of their history majors—not just those with a US concentration—take at least one part of the US survey. Strikingly, three of these five are public institutions. A second group (Stanford Univ. and Pomona Coll.) similarly requires or strongly recommends that their US-focused majors take at least one part of the survey. A third group of schools (Amherst Coll., Princeton Univ., Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Carleton Coll., and Emory Univ.), like USF, structures majors around regional concentrations (there may be nonregional concentrations as well) that include US history but do not require the US-focused students to take a comprehensive introductory survey in their subfield. Then there is a fourth group of schools (Georgetown Univ., Yale Univ., Univ. of Michigan, Harvard Univ., Saint Mary’s Coll. of California, Santa Clara Univ., Macalester Coll., Boston Univ., and Univ. of Pennsylvania) that has moved away from concentrations for their student majors. These schools typically employ both more minimal and more varied distributional requirements within the major; the only internal requirement is the need to include courses from a variety of regions and time periods.

Certainly it would be necessary to examine each of these departments closely and talk to faculty members involved in order to draw solid generalizations about what has motivated this turn away from the introductory survey. I don’t think that the recent decline in undergraduate enrollments in the humanities, history included, is a likely cause, since the withering of the introductory survey has been underway for a number of years now. At my school, it began in 2010, and Louis Menand, in his enlightening history of curricular changes in the modern university, The Marketplace of Ideas (Norton, 2010), places the start of this development more than two decades earlier. Indeed, it might be that a larger pedagogical trend—politicizing the study of history along left-wing lines—has contributed both to the decline in history majors and the falling trajectory of the survey course. I would hypothesize that faculty members’ ideological interests are driving a reaction against the traditional composition of historical knowledge, devaluing the very idea of laying a foundation of commonly accepted facts and interpretations for students.

Some faculty deride the idea that any introductory course could be “comprehensive,” which they see as a smokescreen for teaching American “exceptionalism.”

I suspect that these developments have gone furthest within the teaching of US history. This new ideological extremism threatens to do lasting damage to the teaching of college-level American history, producing graduates with little to no acquaintance with the central institutions that have shaped the country’s history. At USF, where 5 of the 11 major courses typically lie within the student’s geographic concentration, a US-focused history major might begin with African American history, take three upper-division courses on US popular culture, California history, and the history of American women’s political activism, and then complete the requirement with a seminar on Native American history. For those history faculties that have not jettisoned regional concentrations altogether, it is doubtful that professors in European history or other geographic concentrations, out of concern for upholding high academic standards, would permit a similar narrowing of their own pedagogical fields. Yet many of these same professors—at least at my university—have acquiesced in the political alteration of the US field. They appear to do so for reasons of their own ideological leanings, which they seem to think may be indulged for the teaching of US subjects, or else out of fear of standing up against the current tide within the profession.

In The Marketplace of Ideas, Menand suggests that the disappearance of an introductory course indicates “a symptom of uncertainty about the essential character of a discipline” (p. 88). Elsewhere in his book, however, he appears mostly sanguine about the breakdown of pre-1970 disciplinary norms. But if the liberal consensus of the pre-1970 years has now simply been replaced by a new left-wing consensus, hostile to the very ideas of broad coverage and balance in teaching, I’d say we’ve taken a step backward in providing students with the advantages a historical education can offer.

Has Education at USF Become Too Politicized?

This article was published in the San Francisco Foghorn, the official student newspaper of the University of San Francisco, on February 25, 2015 (print and online).

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Everybody knows that the University of San Francisco is a left-wing school. Many students choose to come here because of the school’s overt commitment to social justice, while others negotiate their way through radical lectures and course assignments as best they can. “Progressive” faculty drive the process forward by hiring like-minded colleagues. Administrators, who are themselves ex-faculty members, embrace the politicized mission of the school. To what degree parents and trustees, two other important stakeholders in the university, understand how left-leaning the school has become is a more open question. But at what point does the ideological commitment of a university undermine its primary goal of equipping its students with a solid, well-rounded education?  In my view, that point has been reached.

Within my own History Department, it is now possible for a student to become a history major with a United States history concentration and yet never take the standard, entry-level introductory course in U.S. history.  Two recent departmental decisions allow students to take African-American history or a course on the history of American social movements for equality – both suitable as upper-division electives – in place of the broad introductory survey. Very likely, the histories of Asian Americans, Latinos, and American women will soon join these two thematic courses as new substitutes for the comprehensive overview.

The History Department’s most frequently offered course on the modern history of China, entitled “The Rise of China,” begins with the death of Mao in 1976, conveniently allowing the subjects of the Great Leap Forward (1958-62) and the Cultural Revolution (1965-76), together resulting in tens of millions of deaths at the hands of the Communist government, to go untaught. At UC Berkeley, the comparable course is entitled, “Twentieth-Century China.” The department also offers a course entitled, “Imperial San Francisco” (the comparable course at CCSF is “History of San Francisco”), and “Radical Labor History” (the comparable course at San Francisco State is “History of Labor in the U.S.”).

This past fall witnessed the launching of a new major at USF called Critical Diversity Studies. It is a thoroughly politicized major, for which the placement of the term “Critical” in its title indicates, as the major’s founding documents state, that it “is committed to interrogating and producing critical knowledge about power and inequality” and “seeks to explore and analyze how existing social, political, and economic conditions and relationships within and beyond U.S. borders shape local and global hierarchies, oppressions and activisms.” In plain language, the major focuses on what’s terrible about the American social system. But what if a student wishes to learn more about the success of ethnic integration in the United States as compared to Europe, or the reasons why America has attracted more immigrants than any other nation of comparable size? Would such a student be welcome? Probably not, just as faculty who would have disagreed with the left-wing agenda of this major were excluded from discussions of its formation right from the start.

In a particularly upsetting personnel decision, the Politics Department last year let go a nine-year veteran adjunct faculty member solely on the basis of an unsubstantiated charge of prejudice shown toward a Muslim student as part of his teaching. The professor denied the charge completely, but there was no due process. It would be as if a professor had accused a student of cheating, the student denied it, and without any hearing the student was expelled. In this case, even though the student in question declined to pursue the charge, nobody acted – not the department, the dean’s office, or the part-time faculty association – to make amends to the professor or see him rehired. One senses that USF was happy to see the professor go because his teaching on the subject of Muslim immigrants in Europe raised controversial questions for students to consider.

I have little doubt that the examples I am giving represent just the tip of an iceberg. It would take many more reports from concerned faculty and students before we know just how far USF has moved to the left. Academic freedom rightly protects faculty in organizing their courses, so restoring a wide range of viewpoints to USF’s curriculum will not happen quickly.  But I would make two suggestions to start the process going.

First, faculty should be required to separate political activism from classroom teaching. USF can best pursue its mission of social justice through its many extracurricular activities, allowing teaching to be guided by the traditional search for truth and a commitment to presenting students with the full range of perspectives that bear on any given subject matter. Second, in hiring new professors, department members and deans should actively seek candidates who can add diversity of thought to the campus. While aiming for objectivity in the classroom is essential to good teaching, complete objectivity can never be achieved by a single professor. That’s why a university faculty that reflects a wide range of ideological perspectives offers the most reliable way to serve the educational needs of students.

What's Wrong with USF's Minority Dissertation Fellowship Program?

This article was published in the San Francisco Foghorn, the official student newspaper of the University of San Francisco, on April 17, 2014 (print) and October 16, 2014 (online).

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USF’s faculty know all about our school’s Minority Dissertation Fellowship Program, but members of the wider campus community may not be so familiar with it. Started in 1993 under a grant from the Irvine Foundation, the program supports African-American, Latino and/or Asian-American graduate students with a year of financing and academic resources at USF as they complete their doctoral dissertations. Recipients also gain experience teaching one course per semester. Midway through their fellowship years, the doctoral fellows go on the job market in search of a full-time, tenure-track position in their particular field.

But here is what makes the program really significant: if USF likes what it sees in a particular fellowship recipient, the university may directly offer that person a tenure-track position at USF, bypassing the usual process of undertaking a nationally-announced search for every faculty job. Over the past twenty years, about seventeen faculty positions, all in the Arts College, have been filled in this way, augmenting our teaching staff with many hard-working and talented young scholars.

The MDF program is thus a prime example of the sort of affirmative action program that proceeds along the lines of a preference system. In fact, it is an extreme version of a preferential hiring program, since nobody other than a member of the three designated minority groups can apply. In the post-Proposition 209 world of California, such a program would no doubt be illegal at our state’s public universities. Private universities have greater leeway to fashion their own rules, but since USF receives state and federal funds for various purposes, the program’s legality may be questionable even here. One can easily imagine an individual with “legal standing” –that is, a qualified applicant for a new faculty position at USF, say, someone with a PhD who has even taught successfully on an adjunct basis here for years –objecting that he or she did not have the opportunity to compete for that position, simply because they were white.

But it is not the legal problems that most concern me about this program; it is the ethical issues involved. I have been a supporter of the MDF program for the past twenty years, but I no longer am. When USF’s full-time faculty was overwhelmingly white (about 88% in 1991), a good case could be made for the advantages of ethnically diversifying the faculty, even at the expense of limiting equal opportunity for all. Affirmative action in fact began in the 1960s with preferences, and its moral clout derived from its claim to right historical wrongs for groups that had been systematically excluded from job and educational opportunities through deep-seated prejudice. Such exclusions, however, are long gone, especially within the academic setting. At USF today the ethnic proportions of the full-time faculty have changed (whites comprise about 74%) and probably reflect those of the available pool of all PhDs quite closely.

As the Supreme Court struck down the original rationale for preferences (based on righting past wrongs), in favor of the much weaker argument about the educational value of diversity in itself, it has become even less justifiable to exclude white academics from competing for faculty positions simply in order to continue to enhance ethnic variety. At what point do the diminishing educational returns of elevating faculty of color drop below the moral costs of excluding other hard-working and talented academics who happen to be white? That point would seem to have been reached, especially in the case of faculty preferences for Asian Americans, a group that today outperforms European Americans and all other ethnicities by virtually every measure of social success.

The current fellowship program has produced other deleterious effects, some of which appear to have arisen only recently. USF now requires applicants to pursue topics related to the subject of diversity, straight jacketing academics of color into “studying themselves” if they wish to take advantage of the program. This limitation on what a given scholar may wish to study would seem to encourage the formation of new stereotypes, instead of serving to dispel old ones. Once on the USF faculty, graduates of the program, who earlier used to function exactly like every other faculty member, now seem increasingly to constitute themselves as an interest group, advancing special and sometimes dubious areas of study, like the new Critical Diversity Studies major, a major that appears to have few or no matches at any other American university.

In these ways the integrationist aims of the original fellowship program, like the original goals of affirmative action generally, have fallen by the wayside. And always in the background lurks the problem of all preference programs, which, as the African-American essayist Shelby Steele has pointed out, threaten to undermine the achievement of their recipients by depriving them of their chance to succeed in a wide–open competition. For all these reasons, it is time to rethink the program and probably to end it.