Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste

The news media of late presents an even more skewed view than usual of the state of our institutions of higher learning.

The current skirmish in the culture wars concerns the reaction of a handful of activist students and professors to the war in Gaza.  If all your news diet consists of Fox News, pro-Palestinian activism and incidents such as the occupation at Columbia and a scattering of other, mostly private universities are rampant throughout American higher ed.  If I am to believe the clickbait headlines in my newsfeed, all of the commie elitist professors on every single campus in the country are indoctrinating all of their students in a woke orthodoxy which, if unchecked by loyal Americans, will result in the destruction of Israel.

This reportage is a cynical ploy by right wing news outlets to further polarize the electorate ahead of November’s election by appealing to the prejudices of their audience.  Tapping into festering resentments across a vocal segment of the public is profitable.  Pigeonholing anyone with any schooling beyond twelfth grade as an out of touch elitist with a head filled with useless “knowledge” is a good media strategy.

Like Fox’s audience, my only experience with the protests is what I watch and read.  The campuses where I work have been quiet.  The topics of Israel, Gaza, and Hamas are largely unmentioned by my students and I have only touched upon them in passing as they are largely tangential to the subjects I teach.  This goes to show that the people most agitated about what is undeniably a humanitarian crisis are on the fringes while the people most affected get lost in the ideological dogma of others.

Let’s begin with the campus protestors.  Let’s stipulate that the events of October 7^th and beyond have been horrific for those affected on both sides.  Having said this, the rhetoric wielded by the pro-Palestinian activists is disturbingly pro-Hamas.  It seems they are blind to the implications of “From the river to the sea.”  Quick to accuse Israel of genocide against the Palestinians, they are explicitly advocating the genocide of Israeli Jews.  Their behavior towards their critics or even towards anyone outside the group is also couched in rhetorical excess, branding them as “Zionists” without regard to the person or the arguments posed.

Now on to the cultural warriors of the right.  Unwilling to brook any criticism of Israeli policies or actions, they brand any critics as “anti-semites” who seek an end to Israel.  They willfully ignore Netanyahu’s heavy-handed policies in the West Bank and his ill-fated abandonment of Gaza to Hamas rule.  There doesn’t seem to be any questioning of the intelligence failures which led to the October 7^th attacks.  (Considering that the attacks coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War—another intelligence failure—one would think Netanyahu, his advisors, and the Israeli intelligence establishment would have been more alert.)   The delusional worldview of evangelicals for whom Israel’s existence brings us one step closer to the End Times has taken on a cult-like status across the political right, further polarizing the discourse.

The overflow effect on domestic policy has been to put American higher education in the crosshairs even more so than usual.  The focus has been upon “elite” institutions but the larger targets are colleges and universities across the board.  Conservatives want to replace so-called political correctness, which is not nearly as prevalent as charged, with their own orthodoxy.  Calls for the resignation of Columbia’s president, coming on the heels of the resignation of Harvard’s president after her congressional testimony on campus activism, is calculated to create a chilling effect.  Calls for cutbacks of humanities and social science courses and their replacement with more vocational curricula are another front in the right-wing war on academia. The limited scope activism that has the right in a lather is merely a convenient opportunity for them to advance their anti-intellectual agenda.  For them, Israel is beside the point.  The war in Gaza is a convenient opportunity, nothing more.

 

© 2024 The Unassuming Scholar

Four Little Girls

Even the casual visitor to this blog will notice that I have a penchant for observing significant anniversaries.  This one is especially poignant.

Fifty years ago today, members of the Ku Klux Klan detonated a bomb at the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.  The bombing marked the climax of the Klan’s terror campaign against the city’s African-American residents generally and civil rights activism in particular.  16^th Street Baptist was at the center of Birmingham’s civil rights struggle in the early 1960s and was a natural target for white supremacist violence.

Although Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, the Klan ringleader in the bombing, claimed the bomb was meant to go off before that morning’s service when the church was unoccupied, the blast killed four girls attending Sunday school in the church basement.  Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair perished. Nearly two dozen more people were injured.

The bombing focused the world’s attention on Birmingham, a city with a white establishment determined to postpone desegregation as long as possible.  The prosecution of the bombers, whose identities were known early on, did not take place until fourteen years after the fact.  Bill Baxley, Alabama’s young Attorney General, had been horrified by the act and once in office made a concerted effort to bring the bombers to account.

Chambliss went to prison in 1978, where he died seven years later.  It took much longer to bring in his accomplices.  Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton were finally convicted in 2001.  Cherry died in prison in 2004.  Herman Frank Cash escaped justice altogether, dying in 1994.  It took a good deal of courage for witnesses to come forward, even years later.  The late Rev. Petric J. Smith was a key witness at the trial of his uncle, Robert Chambliss.  Following the trial Smith was forced to leave Birmingham for good.  Had the trial taken place today, it’s quite possible he still would have been run out of town.  The New South may appear to have shed the darker burdens of its past, but the old attitudes lurk beneath the surface.

The memory of the 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing persists in our collective consciousness, albeit tenuously.  As our leaders are so fond of reminding us, we live under the constant threat of terror.  We should remember that on so many occasions in our history, we victimized our own. 

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar