Watching Fox News a few weeks ago, on one of
the inevitable year-in-retrospective programs which air the last week of December,
an item in the news crawl caught my eye.
“Far-Left Professor Booted,” it read, or something like that.
I had to think a moment to make the connection,
then it hit me. The reference was to
Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher. I name-checked C-M in a post a while back when
he had stirred up a minor media storm by sending an angry tweet after a first-class
airline passenger gave up his seat to a soldier in uniform. That post wasn’t so much meant to discuss the
good professor but to mull over the public’s media-conditioned attitudes toward
the military and veterans.
Now I find myself asking what Ciccariello-Maher’s
firing says about the present state of academia. C-M had already landed himself in hot water before
the soldier tweet by calling for a “white genocide.” He was
apparently suspended by Drexel last October after he blamed President Trump for
the Las Vegas shootings. Switching
channels to CNN, I was informed C-M had actually resigned in the face of death
threats against him and his family.
I confess I don’t know much about George Ciccariello-Maher
in spite of his working in a discipline related to my own. What I have been able to glean is that C-M
belongs to a certain breed of academic whose public pronouncements tend toward sophomoric
oversimplifications of complex issues.
Lots of heat, but precious little light.
These kinds of statements may gain the
rapturous attention of coddled undergraduates and the ire of the anger junkies
on the political right. But they make
honest progressives like me wince. As
we slip further into a war of all against all in which we destroy the careers
and lives of people we don’t like, such grandstanding further undermines the
already precarious state of academic freedom.
I teach at a community college (two of them,
actually). I’m employed as contingent,
or adjunct faculty. No tenure. No job security. Just a feeble guarantee of academic freedom
which will inevitably evaporate into thin air the moment some student with a
wild hair up his or her ass and an axe to grind decides to lay waste to my livelihood.
My own interpretation of American history and society
is not really that different from that of Ciccariello-Maher. I just don’t express it in short bursts with
my thumbs is all. I am also careful to
point out that there are other perspectives than mine, that there are many
caveats and subtleties to any controversy, and that if a student disagrees with
my conclusions that’s okay as long as their own are based in fact.
I don’t know if this approach is the reason,
but I have had few strong disagreements with students over the years. Even my openly conservative students seem to
be okay with me for the most part. It
could just be that they’re taking the path of least resistance toward collecting
three credits and a grade. Probably so. My fingers are crossed that that’s the case
and that my luck will continue to hold.
Obnoxious proffies like George Ciccariello-Maher
make high profile targets for conservative trolls compiling “watch lists” of faculty
who don’t wave the flag or embrace the lay religion of American exceptionalism. However, safeguarding the right of professors
to express unpopular opinions is why we have tenure and academic freedom guarantees
in the first place. As someone who has
lots of unpopular opinions I feel threatened whenever the ability to openly
express them without fear of retaliation is challenged.
Higher education itself is an inviting target,
and not just for right-wing media outlets.
This is nothing new; Richard Hofstadter famously laid bare the deeply
ingrained anti-intellectual streak in our culture more than a half-century
ago. Even as credentialism has swollen
the ranks of post-secondary students, popular skepticism over the whole
enterprise hangs in the air. (Or as a piece in The Onion once put it,
school isn’t really America’s thing. We
just play the game to get what we want.)
The levelling of higher ed has resulted in the
perception colleges and universities should be little more than elevated trade
schools geared to training the public in marketable skills and nothing
else. We’re doers, not thinkers, so why
waste time on useless crap like art history and poetry and sociology? And while we’re at it, why should we listen
to a bunch of overeducated jackasses tell us things we don’t like? Besides, brains aren’t everything. In the real world, they’d be working for C
students.
(Hmmm…It seems I’ve digressed a little. Apropos of the preceding paragraph, I should
say a few things about myself. Firstly,
every paid position I’ve had since age 21 has required a bachelor’s degree or
higher. And no, I didn’t have rich parents
to put me through school. I worked lots
of odd jobs to pay for my studies. Secondly,
while I did have to wait until my mid-thirties to actually apply my classroom
knowledge in the workforce, at least I was able to make that happen.
Oh, and my major? Humanities.)
Returning to the topic at hand, the firing (or forced
resignation) of Professor C-M underlines the need for stocktaking within our
own ranks. The trend toward treating
students as customers and learning as a commodity, a topic I’ve commented upon
often in this space, is stifling the sacred endeavor of free academic
inquiry. We are letting this happen at
our peril. As for me, I’m holding my
breath waiting for the next head to roll silently praying it isn’t mine.
© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar
