“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.

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.

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.

Capitalism in History Class

This letter to the editor appeared in The New York Times (online) on April 14, 2013.

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To the Editor:

“In History Class, Capitalism Sees Its Stock Soar” (front page, April 7) creates the mistaken impression that this development represents a departure “after decades of ‘history from below,’ focusing on women, minorities and other marginalized people.” The subject matter may be new, but the partisan, left-wing perspective is the same.

I’m sure that some valuable insights and historical linkages will emerge from this round of scholarship. But I doubt that these college courses will describe how, along with the rise of monopoly, the American market system also provided openings for tens of thousands of people with few resources — including ethnic minorities and women — to create businesses, offer needed services and commodities to their communities, and provide a route for themselves and their families into the middle class.

Capitalism entered world history at roughly the same time that individual freedom caught on as a widespread goal, and this linkage was not accidental. Any fair-minded historical treatment of capitalism would have to explain why this economic system has proved so popular, despite its many failings.

TONY FELS
San Francisco, April 7, 2013

Be Proud of Being "Colorblind"

This letter to the editor of the San Francisco Foghorn, the official student newspaper of the University of San Francisco, appeared on March 28, 2013 (print) and March 27, 2013 (online). The online version omitted my name as the letter’s author.

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Regarding anti-racism activist Tim Wise’s appearance before 600 people at USF (Foghorn, March 21, 2013), it’s hard to believe that most of the students in that crowd were not “encouraged” to attend by faculty, either as a class assignment or for extra credit. Why would white students of their own free will wish to go hear someone berate them for their alleged racial privilege? I could imagine Wise’s presentation would make students of color feel uncomfortable too. And how about those students who don’t identify so readily with either category?

In my 24 years of teaching at USF, I have noticed that most students, regardless of race, work hard to do well in school, many hold down jobs at the same time, and a very large number will go into debt in order to finance their educations. These are traits that students can be proud of in themselves. Pride, not guilt, offers the healthiest foundation on which to form solid friendships and work relationships, and that goes for relationships across racial lines or within them.

Thanks to the successes of the civil rights movement, we are all lucky enough to be living in a new era – for the past forty years – in which the vicious racial divides of America’s past are no longer powerful. Among the young in northern California and especially in the Bay Area, racial advantages in themselves are practically nonexistent. What does divide people are disparities in wealth, which include the residual effects of discrimination on past generations. But the antidote to that continuing problem is certainly not the cultivation of white racial guilt but a common effort by all to remove the economic and educational impediments to equal opportunity.

The great nineteenth-century African-American activist Frederick Douglass, whose second marriage was with a white woman at a time when interracial marriage was illegal in most states, used to paraphrase in many of his speeches the stirring Biblical words from Acts 17:26: that God had made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth. If Douglass could maintain this wonderful, integrationist vision in the midst of some of the darkest days for African Americans, surely we can do the same when racism is practically dead.

Bobby Seale Disappoints, Says USF Professor

This opinion essay appeared in the San Francisco Foghorn, the official student newspaper of the University of San Francisco, on March 3, 2011 (print) and March 2, 2011 (online). The online version omitted my name as the essay’s author, although I do appear as a “Tag” below the article!

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On Feb. 24, some 250 people jammed into McLaren Hall to hear Bobby Seale interviewed by my colleague, Professor Candice Harrison, of the History Department. The crowd showed an admirable mixture of USF’ers and people from the wider Bay Area community. Bobby Seale exhibited much charm and humor in his replies to Professor Harrison’s questions, relating stories of his rebellious youth along with a moving account of his awakening to racial pride. Toward the end, when he recited by heart and at double-time the long, angry poem that once got him arrested for obscenity on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue back in the early 1960s, it brought the house down. I left feeling well entertained.

But that was exactly the problem. The more I thought about it, I realized that I hadn’t learned very much about the issues of importance raised by Bobby Seale’s place in history as one of the founders and leaders of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, the most significant black power organization in the United States from 1967 until the early 1970s. Seale actually said almost nothing about those years. And most strikingly, he shared none of his reflections back on that time from the vantage point of today. Bobby Seale today is a man of age 75 or so. How does his mature vision take stock of what he and others did in their twenties and thirties in the heat of a great national upheaval?

Perhaps the central issue raised by the history of the BPP is the place of violence in movements for social justice. When the Panthers showed up in 1967 at the State Capitol in Sacramento armed with guns, it created a sensation. How does he look on that moment now?

Assessing the Panthers’ violent history is no easy task. Emerging out of a social milieu itself subject to violence of many sorts, including brutality by urban police forces that were nearly exclusively white, the Panthers took up the challenge of defending African Americans from attack. Yet they brought violent responses with them, both within their own membership and to the outside world. And the whole picture was complicated by the presence of government informants planted within the organization. This difficult historical record is exactly what today’s activists and the general public could benefit from thinking about as they look for models from the past to guide future actions.

Near the end of his interview Seale recalled an altercation which ensued when a Berkeley policeman tried to arrest him. The two fell to the ground, and Seale reached for a knife in his pocket and cut the officer on his hand. Seale minimized this action, telling the audience that it was only a very small, scouting knife, the kind that has a corkscrew and nail file attached. The audience laughed with him, though this time a little more nervously than before. The perfect opportunity for Seale to add his mature reflection on this youthful incident and raise the general subject of violence passed, and the incident was left glorified, as if nothing had been learned from fifty years of subsequent experience. In the end, I’m afraid, the evening offered little more than a reliving of the sixties, with all its heroism and illusions still intact.

WASC: Accreditor Foxes Guard Collegiate Henhouse

This opinion essay was published on the website of The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy on January 25, 2010. The organization is now known as The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

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The nation’s recent financial crisis has highlighted the importance of regulatory watchdogs in exercising oversight of the nation’s financial institutions. Given my university’s experience with its educational regulator, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), maybe it’s time to pay as much attention to college accreditation as we’re paying to such credit-rating services as Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s. 

Colleges and universities are mostly insulated from any regulatory structure.  Although public universities are subject at least to the intervention of state governing boards, private institutions of higher learning appear to have no one looking over their shoulders, except when they come up for reaccreditation. 

In the United States, six regional accrediting agencies have arisen to provide this function. WASC is one of them, responsible for schools in California, Hawaii and the American territories in the Pacific.  If the instance I report on here is any indication of a larger state of affairs, a close examination of the accreditation system is in order.

Colleges and universities trade in ideas rather than money, so their principal ethical danger isn’t greed, but excessive zeal in service of some ideology. Nothing is more ruinous to the reasoned pursuit of truth, without which education becomes indoctrination.

Thus, you would think that WASC would take an interest in my charge that a dean’s office at my university likely rigged a departmental review to make the department look bad—a result in line with the administration’s political goals.

But if you think that, you’d be wrong.

In 2004-05, I was serving as chair of the history department at the University of San Francisco (USF) when, by school custom, our department came up for its ten-year review. The centerpiece of the review process is a report written by three outside evaluators who have visited the campus, read the department’s lengthy self-study, and consulted with students and faculty.  The method by which the three evaluators are selected is obviously important. 

At USF, when external reviewers are chosen by the dean’s office, formal guidelines call for the dean “to accommodate some of the department’s preferences” in the choice of the evaluators and in general to select reviewers, professionally competent within their field, who can supply “an objective outsider’s perspective on the quality of the program.”

In forming the history review team, however, the dean’s office ignored all nine of the history department’s qualified nominees and made no attempt to find even a single candidate mutually agreeable to the department and the dean’s office.  This was not its usual procedure and for the two other departments undergoing program reviews that year, the administration fully accommodated the preferences of department members. 

For the history department, the dean’s office selected a politically homogeneous team of three left-wing (not simply “liberal”) reviewers.  Contrary to the administrators’ later denials, the political leanings of at least two of these reviewers were known to the dean’s office in advance of their selection.  According to their official university websites, one reviewer taught a course entitled, “Historical Materialism: The Marxist Theory of the Past” (a highly unusual offering for a U.S. social historian), while a second reviewer had taken her students on a study-trip to Cuba.

The dean’s office further misled the history department when introducing its choices to us in advance of their site visit by omitting those parts of the reviewers’ resumes that displayed their political leanings.

It also chose for these same three evaluators two ethnic-minority males and one white female, at a time when the tenured historical profession in the United States was made up of 70% white males. Taken alone, this discrepancy could have indicated an admirable desire to make the team demographically diverse, but in the context of all the evidence in this case, it suggested an ulterior motive on the dean’s part to engineer a specific outcome. And when later asked to reveal the specific steps that it took in its selection process, the dean’s office failed to disclose any, including the size of its original pool of candidates and the number and names of candidates on its acknowledged short list.

While each of these separate actions might alone have been explained by chance or unusual circumstances (although this is doubtful), taken together they suggest intentional bias. The point is not that a Marxist historian, or even three Marxist historians, could never be objective or that it takes a white male on a committee to conduct a fair-minded evaluation (our department’s own nominees included six white women and one ethnic-minority man). 

Rather, the question is what motivated the dean’s office to form a review team in this way. I believe that the dean acted as she did because she wanted an evaluation that would criticize the department for failing to move quickly enough to diversify its faculty by race and gender.

At the time of the review the history department consisted of ten full-time members, including seven white men, two white women and one ethnic-minority man. While these proportions approximated national averages, they were considered insufficiently diverse by most personnel at USF, both inside and outside the department. And in the ten years preceding the review, the department had assembled a creditable record in efforts to achieve greater diversity, including voluntary participation in five ethnically-targeted searches, resulting in two job offers, one of which was accepted. Evidently, those and other efforts were not good enough for the dean’s office. Rather than speak to the department openly about its concerns, it apparently chose the devious path of attempting to engineer a negative program review.

When USF came up for reaccreditation in 2007, WASC, as is customary, solicited grievances from faculty, employees and students.  My submission charged that the dean’s office had violated the ethical principles of fairness, professionalism, transparency, accountability, honesty, and a commitment to follow stated procedures in an attempt to influence the outcome of the history review.

The ethical principles I listed are embraced under Standard One of WASC’s standards of accreditation. Standard One requires that a university “functions with integrity,” “exhibits integrity in its operations,” and “upholds sound ethical practices….” I asked WASC to investigate my charge that USF had failed to adhere to those principles.

WASC dismissed my charges without any investigation. Had it accepted my submission as a legitimate grievance, WASC would have been obligated by its own rules to ask for a formal reply from USF, to pursue questions of fact, and to render a judgment. It wished to do none of these things.  Executive Director Ralph A. Wolff explained that the issue was merely “an internal matter.” “Given that the selection of program reviewers is an internal matter at the institution,” Dr. Wolff wrote to me, “there is no basis for us to consider this as a breach of integrity.”

It is hard to imagine WASC taking such a hands-off position had the same charges originated, for example, in a review of a biology department where evidence pointed to tampering with the review team in order to bring the teaching of intelligent design into the curriculum.

I appealed the decision to Dr. Sherwood Lingenfelter, WASC’s chair of the board.  He  endorsed Dr. Wolff’s reasoning, writing, “the situation you describe does not demonstrate ‘significant non-compliance’ [with the Standards of Accreditation]…” Without having conducted an inquiry into my charges, it is hard to see how WASC could judge that the ethical non-compliance I alleged was either significant or insignificant.

It was also revealing that Dr. Lingenfelter referred to this dispute as a “political conflict.”  To call a dispute a “political conflict” is to relegate it to a domain of mere opinion (or, worse, personal animosity), as if the outcome has no consequences for the integrity of the institution. WASC probably wanted to view this dispute as pitting a university trying to advance faculty diversity against a faculty member trying to thwart it—which was not the case at all. 

My defense of fairness, due process, and transparency is indeed political, but not in the pejorative sense that WASC meant. Rather, it defends an Anglo-American liberal tradition that underwrites rules of a civil society by which disagreements can be channeled into constructive outcomes rather than into violence.

These same political values safeguard universities as places of free expression and reasoned argument. To some people on the left (as on the right), by contrast, all politics is tainted by crass group interest. The goal is simply to defeat your enemy by any means at your disposal and, if on top, as the left currently finds itself at USF and apparently at WASC, to stay on top.

In the case of the history review, because the dean’s office had circumvented its own stated procedures for ensuring balance and objectivity in the selection of reviewers, the evaluation written by the chosen team became an inflammatory document that distorted the department’s record in multiple areas, tarnished reputations, touched off a minor witch hunt for “racists” and “sexists,” created bitter factions, and hastened the departure of one member. The dean’s apparent breach of ethics produced a terribly destructive outcome.

It is not too late for WASC to reverse course, since USF’s reaccreditation process is still ongoing through 2009-10. If the accrediting body’s decision to reject an investigation into what happened in the selection of the history review team stands, college administrators in California and the Pacific region will know that they can “stack the deck” with impunity when they choose outside readers and evaluators for tenure cases and program reviews—that is, provided the results agree with WASC’s political orientation.

The depressing lesson from all this is that both college administrators and accrediting agencies, no less than groups of faculty members, are sometimes so politicized that fairness and integrity get trampled.