Contrary to appearances, all the idiocy in the world is not concentrated in Versailles.
Through boards of trustees, individual grants and corporate donations and long-term relationships, conservative elites wield tremendous influence over higher education in America. All the more reason it irritates them not to have total control. Consequently, back in 1995, Lynne Cheney and Joe Lieberman co-founded The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), an organization dedicated to rolling back academic freedom, and advancing the power of alumni and trustees to dictate what goes on in the classroom.
Typical of ACTA's mindset was its attack on the academy post-9/11, the hastily slapped-together report, "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America And What Can Be Done About It." Examples of such "failure" to "defend civilization" included statements such as "Ignorance breeds hate," "If Usama bin Laden is confirmed to be behind the attacks, the United States should bring him before an international tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity," and "[T]here needs to be an understanding of why this kind of suicidal violence could be undertaken against our country." The conservative agenda to stamp out critical thinking could not be clearer.
That's why they need a second front, The effects of intimidation alone are notoriously unreliable. Hence the push to invade academia under the ruse of providing intellectual diversity. Which brings us to some recent goings on in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
A couple of weeks ago, Jim Sleeper wrote a piece for TPM Cafe, "What 'Liberal' Academy?" inviting folks to read an exchange in the Chronicles of Higher Education touched off by Mark Lilla's piece, "Taking the Right Seriously: Conservatism is a tradition, not a pathology". I want to start off by saying that I think that intellectual diversity is a good thing. Should conservative thought be studied? Yes, of course. And to the extent that Lilla is arguing this, I have no objections. But that's not what he's arguing, since he starts off by attacking just such an enterprise. Lilla takes as his jumping-off point the opening of a "Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements" at UC Berkeley, and quickly objects:
It's not even clear that the faculty members involved have figured out what terms like "right wing" and "conservative" might mean. The Web-site blurb introducing the center [at the link above] describes anti-Communism as the "transcendent" issue for the right for most of the 20th century, and says that since the end of the cold war, right-wing groups have "spun on to the political stage with centripetal energy," whatever that means. This statement does not inspire confidence. In fact, the right-wing political parties in Europe have much older pedigrees, going back to the 19th-century counterrevolution. So do American and British conservatism, which came onto the political scene at least a century before 1989. In his recent book, The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History (Yale University Press), Patrick Allitt, a professor of history at Emory University, explores the full range of conservative concerns: states' rights, religion, the corruptions of urban life, immigration, the League of Nations, mass democracy, creationism, the New Deal, free markets, race, and so on.
It is a convenient left-wing dodge to reduce 20th-century American conservatism to cold-war politics, since it implies that conservative ideas are embedded in a world that no longer exists and never should have. In fact, in the 1930s American conservatives were far more obsessed with Franklin D. Roosevelt and his domestic legacy than with Joseph Stalin, and looked askance at all foreign entanglements, including the Second World War. The anti-Communist cause was first conceived by cold-war liberals, not by conservatives.
Unfortunately for Lilla, he's the one who is confused--as one can readily see, simply by reading the actual blurb oneself--which I will get to below.
Yesterday was Natasha's birthday. One of the gifts I wanted to give her was a subscription to the University of Pennsylvania library (we live right next to UPenn), so that she would have remote access to all the academic databases (the free library of Philadelphia provides remote access to some, but not all, of those databases). Natasha has long lamented her lack of access to scientific journals now that she is no longer in school. Such journals are key to both her work as a sustainable food writer. Also, it is relevant to her personal enrichment, due to her interests, and background, in biological science. Further, as a long-time graduate student myself, I remember just how useful it was to have remote access to such a treasure trove of academic work. Even now, there have been numerous times during my writing where I run up against firewalls on JSTOR. So, I figured it was time to get us access to all of this great information.
The problem is, as a I discovered, even if you are willing to spend $400 a year for access to the library as an individual, or $800 as part of a corporate account, access to many of the academic databases is still restricted. Unless you have a job with the university, or are enrolled as a student, many of the databases with the best available research are nearly impossible to access. Right now, the only way it seems that we can ever have access to many academic journals is for someone with access to illegally let us borrow their username and password. Nice.
Making all peer reviewed, academic journals free to the entire world online should be a cheap, simple, no-brainer policy for the federal government to improve society. How much would it cost the federal government to publish these journals online and for free? $10 million? $50 million? Probably about that much. But even if it is one billion dollars, are we seriously denying 95% of the country access to our best academic research because we are unwilling to shell out the necessary 1 / 3000th of the federal budget? Given that we constantly worry about our educational competitiveness as a country, there is simply no justification for allowing the academic publishing world to restrict access to our best research to such a small sliver of society. It is enough to remind someone of the local monopolies medieval European monasteries had over books.
The only people who make money off of these databases are the academic publishes themselves. The people who write and review the articles in these journals do it for free (well, for tenure, but still technically for free). The only exchange of money is when the libraries pay the publishers for the information. As such, these publishers are the ones restricting this remarkable cache of information for being available to anyone with the curiosity to learn. This is ridiculous. How can we say that we are serious about making America the country with the most per capita higher education in the world, as President Obama has recently set as a goal, if we continue to allow academic publishers to restrict our best academic research to a small sliver of our society?
It is high time that we placed all the content of peer reviewed, academic journals online, for free, and without any employment-based firewalls. It is a simple, cheap way to make a big leap forward for our culture, our democracy and our educational system. Information like this should not be restricted to a small percentage of society for the enrichment of the academic publishing world. There really is no way to justify denying 95% of the country access to our best, peer-reviewed academic research.
Higher education has been highly contested terrain in culture wars as far back as ancient Greece, if not farther. But a recently-published article in The Nation magazine gives a fascinating snapshot of the efforts undertaken since 9/11 to bring academia into line with George Bush's highly-partisan "homeland security" agenda.
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.
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