Repress U-A Gramscian Case Study In A War of Position: The "Homeland Security" Attack On Academia

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Jan 26, 2008 at 15:17

As such, it illustrates a particularly broad front in the struggle for hegemony-subsuming the entirety of an inherently troublesome institutional sector to the most rigorous forms of hierarchical control-those associated not simply with the military, but with military intelligence. The article, "Repress U", by Michael Gould-Wartofsky, is organized perfectly for illustrating how a well-coordinated war of position can be carried out.  Discussion begins on the flip.

Repress U

Free-speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new security curriculum. Private security contractors. Welcome to the homeland security campus.

From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism prevention"--as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name--have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.

Building a homeland security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission:

1. Target dissidents. As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the campus has attracted increasing scrutiny--with student protesters in the cross hairs. The government's number-one target? Peace and justice organizations.

From 2003 to 2007 an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation Notice system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential terrorist threats" to the Defense Department itself. In 2006 the ACLU uncovered, via Freedom of Information Act requests, at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the United States--some listed as "credible threats"--from student groups at the University of California, Santa Cruz; State University of New York, Albany; Georgia State University; and New Mexico State University, among other campuses.

No doubt many of you read something about these incidents.  Or about campus "free speech zones," which Gould-Wartofsky also mentions in this section.  But few probably thought about it in terms of what it might it portend operationally.  What was the purpose being served?  Obviously, chilling dissent is one purpose.  But chilling dissent is not the end of it, this article shows.  It's just one piece of the puzzle.

2. Lock and load. Many campus police departments are morphing into heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide array of weaponry, from Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles. Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the rubric of the "war on crime" only escalated with the President's "war on terror." Each school shooting--most recently the massacre at Virginia Tech--adds fuel to the armament flames.

Two-thirds of universities arm their police, according to the Justice Department. Many of the guns being purchased were previously in the province of military units and SWAT teams: for instance, AR-15 rifles (similar to M-16s) are in the arsenals of the University of Texas campus police. Last April City University of New York bought dozens of semiautomatic handguns. Some states, like Nevada, are even considering plans to allow university staff to pack heat in a "special reserve officer corps."

And so, slowly but surely, people become acclimatized to living in a garrison state.  It makes them feel "secure," by simultaneously making them feel insecure.  It changes their everyday experience, expectations, and assumptions about what is normal, taken-for-granted.

3. Keep an eye (or hundreds of them) focused on campus. Surveillance has become a boom industry nationally--one that now reaches deep into the heart of campuses. In fact, universities have witnessed explosive growth since 2001 in the electronic surveillance of students, faculty and campus workers. On ever more campuses, closed-circuit security cameras can track people's every move, often from hidden or undisclosed locations, sometimes even into classrooms.

The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators reports that surveillance cameras have found their way onto at least half of all colleges, their numbers on any given campus doubling, tripling or, in a few cases, rising tenfold since September 11, 2001. Such cameras have proliferated by the hundreds on private campuses, in particular. The University of Pennsylvania, for instance, has more than 400 watching over it, while Harvard and Brown have about 200 each.

After all, what have you got to hide, right?  Fourth Amendment?  You've got to be kidding!  Expectations of privacy are so 20th Century!

4. Mine student records. Student records have in recent years been opened up to all manner of data mining for purposes of investigation, recruitment or just all-purpose tracking. From 2001 to 2006, in an operation code-named Project Strike Back, the Education Department teamed up with the FBI to scour the records of the 14 million students who applied for federal financial aid each year. The objective? "To identify potential people of interest," explained an FBI spokesperson cryptically, especially those linked to "potential terrorist activity."

Strike Back was quietly discontinued in June 2006, days after students at Northwestern University blew its cover. But just one month later, the Education Department's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, in a much-criticized preliminary report, recommended the creation of a federal "unit records" database that would track the activities and studies of college students nationwide. The department's Institute of Education Sciences has developed a prototype for such a national database.

It's not a secret that the Pentagon, for its part, hopes to turn campuses into recruitment centers for its overstretched, overstressed forces. The Defense Department has built its own database for just this purpose. Known as Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies, this program tracks 30 million young people, ages 16 to 25. According to a Pentagon spokesperson, the department has partnered with private marketing and data-mining firms, which in turn sell the government reams of information on students and other potential recruits.

There are no civilians anymore.  Just pre-enlistees and pre-detainees.  Which are you?

And how do our brave new candidates respond to this situation?

As John K. Wilson noted on his College Freedom blog:

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Democratic Presidential Candidates All Promise to Attack Academic Freedom

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards all gave terrible answers in the debate last night about ROTC and the Solomon Amendment. In Obama's defense (since I've just published a book about him), I think he was taken by surprise by the question and doesn't understand the issues, which I've discussed at InsideHigherEd.com. Here's the transcript:

RUSSERT: Senator Clinton, I'll start with you. The volunteer Army, many believe, disproportionate in terms of poor and minority who participate in our armed forces. There's a federal statute on the books which says that, if a college or university does not provide space for military recruiters or provide a ROTC program for its students, it can lose its federal funding. Will you vigorously enforce that statute?

CLINTON: Yes, I will. You know, I think that the young men and women who voluntarily join our all-volunteer military are among the best of our country. I want to do everything I can, as president, to make sure that they get the resources and the help that they deserve. I want a new, 21st-century G.I. Bill of Rights so that our young veterans can get the money to get to college and to buy a home and start a business. And I've worked very hard, on the Senate Armed Services Committee, to, you know, try to make up for some of the negligence that we've seen from the Bush administration....So I think we should recognize that national service of all kinds is honorable and its essential to the future of our country. I want to expand civilian national service. But I think that everyone should make available an opportunity for a young man or woman to be in ROTC, to be able to join the military and I'm going to do everything I can to support the men and women in the military and their families.

RUSSERT: Of the top 10 rated schools, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, they do not have ROTC programs on campus. Should they?

CLINTON: Well, there are ways they can work out fulfilling that obligation. But they should certainly not do anything that either undermines or disrespects the young men and women who wish to pursue a military career.

RUSSERT: Senator Obama, same question. Will you vigorously enforce a statute which says colleges must allow military recruiters on campus and provide ROTC programs?

OBAMA: Yes. One of the striking things, as you travel around the country, you go into rural communities and you see how disproportionally they are carrying the load in this war in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan. And it is not fair. Now, the volunteer Army, I think, is a way for us to maintain excellence. And if we are deploying our military wisely, then a voluntary army is sufficient, although I would call for an increase in our force structure, particularly around the Army and the Marines, because I think that we've got to put an end to people going on three, four, five tours of duty and the strain on families is enormous. I meet them every day. But I think that the obligation to serve exists for everybody, and that's why I've put forward a national service program that is tied to my tuition credit for students who want to go to college. You get $4000 every year to help you go to college. In return, you have to engage in some form of national service. Military service has to be an option.

RUSSERT: This statute's been on the books for some time, Senator. Will you vigorously enforce the statute to cut off federal funding to the school that does not provide military recruiters and a ROTC program?

EDWARDS: Yes, I will. But I have to say, it's not enough to talk about the extraordinary service of men and women who are wearing the uniform and have worn the uniform of the United States of America.

Clearly, the candidates all accept without question the framing provided for the issues involved.  They are, for all intents and purposes, totally blind to the larger interlocking game that is afoot.  This is precisely how hegemony works at its "best."  No one questions anything.  "Culture war?  What culture war?  Nobody here but us chickens!"

Indeed!

Next:

5. Track foreign-born students; keep the undocumented out. Under the auspices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been keeping close tabs on foreign students and their dependents through the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). As of October 2007, ICE reported that it was actively following 713,000 internationals on campuses, while keeping more than 4.7 million names in the database.

Of course, this is all to keep us safe, right?  We all expect to be under constant surveillence, and none moreso than furriners.  Once a symbol of our openness and attractiveness to every country, every culture on earth, now they are all potential enemies.  Coming soon-RFIDs???

6. Take over the curriculum, the classroom and the laboratory. Needless to say, not every student is considered a homeland security threat. Quite the opposite. Many students and faculty members are seen as potential assets. To exploit these assets, DHS has launched its own curriculum under its Office of University Programs (OUP), intended, it says, to "foster a homeland security culture within the academic community."

The record so far is impressive: DHS has doled out 439 federal fellowships and scholarships since 2003, providing full tuition to students who fit "within the homeland security research enterprise." Two hundred twenty-seven schools now offer degree or certificate programs in "homeland security," a curriculum that encompasses more than 1,800 courses....

In fiscal year 2008 alone, $4.9 billion in federal funding will go to homeland-security-related research.

And, finally-what else?-The Shock Doctrine:

7. Privatize, privatize, privatize. Of course, homeland security is not just a department, nor is it simply a new network of surveillance and data mining--it's big business. (According to USA Today, global homeland-security-style spending had already reached $59 billion a year in 2006, a sixfold increase over 2000.) Not surprisingly, then, universities have in recent years established unprecedented private-sector partnerships with the corporations that have the most to gain from their research. DHS's on-campus National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terror (START), for instance, features Lockheed Martin on its advisory board. The Center for Food Protection and Defense relies on an industry working group that includes Wal-Mart and McDonald's offering "guidance and direction," according to its chair.

While vast sums of money are flowing in from corporate sponsors, huge payments are also flowing out to "strategic contracts" with private contractors, as universities permanently outsource security operations to big corporations like Securitas and AlliedBarton. Little of this money actually goes to those guarding the properties, who are often among the most underpaid workers in the universities. Instead, it fills the corporate coffers of those with little accountability for conditions on campus.

The cumulative effect of all these trends is significantly more than any one of them alone. Gould-Wartofsky concludes:

Following these seven steps over the past six years, the homeland security state and its constituents have come a long way in their drive to remake the American campus in the image of a compound on lockdown. Somewhere inside the growing homeland security state that is our country, the next seven steps in the process are undoubtedly already being planned.

Still, the rise of Repress U is not inevitable. The new homeland security campus has proven itself unable to shut out public scrutiny or stamp out resistance to its latest Orwellian advances. Sometimes such opposition even yields a free-speech zone dismantled, or the Pentagon's TALON declawed, or a Project Strike Back struck down. A rising tide of student protest, led by groups like the new Students for a Democratic Society, has won free-speech victories and reined in repression from Pace and Hampton, where the university dropped its threat of expulsion, to UCLA, where Tasers will no longer be wielded against passive resisters.

Yet if the tightening grip of the homeland security complex isn't loosened, the latest towers of higher education will be built not of ivory but of Kevlar for the over-armored, over-armed campuses of America.

The picture Gould-Wartofsky paints is chillingly accurate-this is precisely what it looks like when one social functions is subsumed and subordinated to another.  It is a sweepingly broad example of how hegemonic warfare is carried out.  It is not typical that the state itself is the prime mover involved, but neither is it surprising.  It's merely indicative of how far this process has gone in our country.