Beloved teacher, translator, poet, scholar, and mentor, Allen Mandelbaum died on October 27th, 2011 at the age of 85. Mandelbaum is perhaps best known for his award winning translations of The Divine Comedy and the Aeneid, which won him the National Book Award in 1973, but he also published several volumes of his own poetry. He was a professor of English and Comparative literature at the Graduate Center from its founding in the 1960s until his move to Wake Forest University in 1989. During his time at the GC he deeply inspired his students, many of whom now hold academic positions at the Graduate Center and other prestigious institutions. Below are short remembrances of Professor Mandelbaum from several of his former students.

Ammiel Alcalay

Graduate Center, CUNY

It was 1980 — I’d returned to New York from two years in Jerusalem where I managed to cobble together a BA from Empire State College after dropping out of City College in 1978. I’d moved from Ancient Greek and Latin to Hebrew, Arabic, and Spanish, and wondered how I might pursue these interests in some more formal way. As a classic academic underachiever (my high school years were 1969 to 1973 and there were far more interesting things to do than go to school), I wasn’t cut out for most graduate programs. I got the Columbia application and, after looking it over quickly, tore it to shreds in a combination of relief and despair. I simply didn’t know where to turn. It was then I decided to go find Allen Mandelbaum at the old Graduate Center on 42nd Street. I knew some of his poetry (Leaves of Absence, Chelmaxioms), and his early translations of Quasimodo, Ungaretti, and the Aeneid. I intuited that he might be a person to whom one could utter names like William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Lorine Niedecker, Luis Zukofsky or Pier Paolo Pasolini without getting a blank stare. This was not a simple proposition in the academy of 1980. What I didn’t yet know but soon found out was that I could also utter names such as Ibn Arabi, Ibn Ezra or Mouloud Mammeri, and he would know what I was talking about. I never encountered anyone who knew so much but yet read like a poet, who knew that even Dante was struggling to figure out how to use words, and learned as he went along, not really understanding how to use the word “when” (“cuando”) until Canto XXVI. Through Allen I was able to pinpoint the journey of a vowel or a sound cluster across millenia in ways I could only intuit before. We spent several hours together in what would be the first of countless sessions in Allen’s office or apartment, in his characteristically conspiratorial hush that made you feel like you were in on some cosmic poetic operation, and actually an essential part of it. At a certain point, he marched me down to the Comparative Literature office and asked that they attend to the formalities of getting me into the program. It was, undoubtedly, a very different world.

Under Allen’s guidance, I feel like I was one of the last students in this country (generationally speaking), to get a certain kind of philological training. This meant working through at least three or four generations of scholarship (Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, French and English, in my case), as well as Allen’s legendary bibliographies, made not for a semester or an exam but for at least a lifetime. He made sure I had access to Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody, not in the abridged one volume version but the complete three volumes, by loaning it to me for several years. Allen’s generosity was, at times, overwhelming. He had grown up with Hebrew and when I began to further my studies in medieval Hebrew poetry I got wind of an old Jewish bookstore under the Manhattan Bridge that was going out of business. I wandered, with great longing, through stacks of coveted volumes that were extremely hard to find anywhere. When I reported this back to Allen, who was very aware of my limited financial situation, he simply gave me a signed blank check and told me to get whatever was necessary. When I was living in Jerusalem and very ready to give up on finishing my dissertation (what would become After Jews and Arabs), Allen gave me and my wife Klara an offer we couldn’t refuse: he invited us to Venice and paid for lodging at a pensione close enough to meet for coffee every morning in order to convince me I needed to finish my doctorate. I told this story to some of my students after class one night, just two days before hearing of Allen’s death, and one of them, Mariana Soto, a CUNY/BA student I’ve been working with, wrote me after seeing my posting about Allen’s death: “I was just thinking about how I was glad you finished your PhD. I keep feeling like the class you’re teaching and the space/intersections it creates have been/are really significant for all of us. There’s so much bullshit in big buildings of education. It really matters to have not just professors but teachers. What I meant to say is when I read this message I feel moved by the death of this person I never knew. Teachers matter.” I will be forever grateful that I had the good fortune to have Allen as my teacher.

Henry Weinfield

University of Notre Dame

“You taught me how man makes himself eternal”–thus Dante to his old teacher, Brunetto Latini, in Allen’s translation of the Inferno. That’s more or less what I learned from my old teacher, and it sums up how I feel about him as well. He was without question the largest, most generous, most magnanimous human being I have ever known. Wonderfully funny and completely without pomposity, he was a poet and teacher of the utmost seriousness, and when one became his student one learned, first of all, that the things of the intellect were to be taken with the utmost seriousness.

More than anyone I have ever known, Allen lived in that Republic of Letters–or (to use the metaphor he borrowed from Ungaretti) terra promessa–in which the great poets and thinkers are continually in conversation with one another. There Dante conversed with Virgil and Ovid, but also with Goethe and Mallarmé. Having once entered through the Mandelbaum Gate, they held discourse with one another in perfect freedom and without any concern for anachronism. Such was his erudition–and generosity–that everyone of any significance was included. When one entered through the Mandelbaum Gate, anything could happen. The lion could lie down with the lamb. Aquinas could find himself in dialogue with Ezra Pound or with the great Yiddish poet, Yankev Glatshteyn.

Those of us who were privileged to be his students were immediately included in the ongoing conversation he was perpetually having with himself. His range of reference was so vast and he spoke so elliptically that until one learned how to connect the dots, one was completely at sea. The first class I ever took with him (it must have been in 1974) I remember raising my hand and saying, “Professor Mandelbaum, could you please repeat the last half hour!” It was sink or swim, and if we stayed the course it was not only because of Allen’s brilliance but because we knew that in him we had found a true model of what the intellectual life could be.

In those years when there was much talk of the “anxiety of influence” and so forth, learning from Allen meant inhabiting a very different sort of intellectual universe, one in which the relations among poets and thinkers were “fraternal” rather than antagonistic. Allen was attuned to the tragic ironies of history, but he was a genuinely utopian thinker, at least as far as his understanding of the human potential afforded by the traditions of poetry, art, and thought was concerned. In the Limbo canto of the Inferno, Dante and Virgil reach “a meadow of green flowering plants” (basically the Elysian Fields that Dante has taken over from the Aeneid), and we are told: “The people here had eyes both grave and slow; / their features carried great authority; / they spoke infrequently, with gentle voices.” As the nobility of his rendering of those lines indicates, in a very real sense Allen lived there too.

When I was a young man, I came under his influence, and that changed me irrevocably. His example helped me form the image of myself that I wanted to pursue. He was a teacher in the highest sense, and I cannot separate anything I have done or tried to do from what I learned from him. I carry his image in my mind, and will until I die.

Farewell, beloved teacher and friend!

Burt Kimmelman

New Jersey Institute of Technology

Allen was Allen.

I speak of Allen Mandelbaum tautologically to avoid the ineffability inherent in describing the supernal. I also mean to impart some sense, though, of how completely sui generis Allen was.

I studied with some brilliant people at the Graduate Center in the 1980s. Allen was not brilliant. He was a genius. Yet he was not at all distant (he once wept in class over a poem).

To be around Allen was to live with depth and intensity of language, which was absolutely exhilarating—so thrilling I was addicted to it. And Allen spoke his own language. When he spoke, his subtlety and quickness of association beckoning, one had to scramble to think both critically and poetically at once. Jack Hall, who taught at the Graduate Center then, once said of him (quite enjoying the cleverness of his baseball metaphor, and in obvious admiration): “With Allen, you have to take the first pitch.”

Allen did not seek me out to work with him (though his canny insistence that I write the particular paper I did in the course I took with him set me up for a wealth of future scholarly publications, and soon thereafter he wrote the foreword for my first book of poems). After some protestation he gave in to me when I came to his office to confess my need to work with him. What ensued was one of the most cherished relationships of my life. And in time the roles of our friendship, while he remained my mentor, reversed.

Love took my hand and smiling did reply,

“Who made the eyes but I?

“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.”

“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”

“My dear, then I will serve.”

Once my dissertation proposal passed the English program’s committee I took the summer off to write a first draft. Trying to flesh out the plan in the proposal, I decided to begin with some background commentary (typical avoidance behavior), sort of an introduction to the introduction I was supposed to be writing. Two weeks later I said to my wife, Diane Simmons (we met at the Graduate Center), “you know, when this dissertation is done, I think I have another book here.” A week after that I realized that I was going to write that book then and there. I plunged in, saying nothing to Allen or anyone else. By the end of August I had a rough first draft (which years later became a book Allen blurbed).

I brought the draft over to Allen’s apartment. Diane was teaching so I had our baby daughter with me, who constantly smiled at Allen’s attentions. In his typical way he explained, “It’s the glasses, dear, the glint of light.”

She and I occupied his couch while Allen sat at a desk with his back to us, turning pages slowly, smoking one cigarette after another. After an hour he broke the silence: “Uh, I think we have an idea here.” He told me to clean up the draft and get it to my readers.

Allen sensed my need to go my own way and he was a hands-off adviser (though he knew that my readers, Bob Payne and Fred Goldin, would write extensive marginalia—a great team). After my dissertation defense Allen joined us for drinks. Eventually I found a job and the years passed. At odd times the phone would ring and, picking it up, I would hear that voice speaking in medeas res; it was an indescribable joy. He would call to see what I was up to and I would tell him and ask him what he was up to and he would tell me (“I the unkind, ungrateful”).

I think we all desired admittance into Allen’s bella scuola (thinking here of his great translation of the Commedia), Allen Dante’s Homer. His intellect was beyond my ken. He was a mensch, in any case. He had me play by his rules (but he let me figure out how to maneuver within them), not the rules we should have followed. I was so very lucky for that.

Joan Richardson

Graduate Center, CUNY

Early afternoon, Saturday, October 29th —howling storm, rain mixed with snow, and wild wind darkening, chilling all: “Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains,” the words kept coming up, punctuating and distracting my attention as I attempted to address the task at hand, meeting a deadline, finding source indications of lines and phrases I had quoted in an essay about William James and pragmatism. Lightning, then whistling thunder sounding like a jet passing low, whooshing branches of the huge, old sycamore lashing roof and windows: “Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains”—and then, in counterpoint, the ping of an email arriving: from Ammiel Alcalay with the news that Allen had died. Tears came up and I more than shuddered: it was from Allen that I had learned how to read and hear that line from Stevens that had, like so much else I began to learn from Allen, become part of my being, “Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains.” The reality of spirit.

On Thursday night I had dreamed I was on a stage talking about Allen—I only learned a day after Ammiel’s Saturday email that Allen had died on Thursday—about how he used to sing, or, rather, quietly intone, the Psalms in Hebrew as we worked on the page proofs for his Inferno—I was his research assistant that year, his marks in the margin in the Peacock Green ink he used for his fountain pen. Shades, shades. This dream, of course, returned as I felt what I felt on hearing he had died, and I cried and thought of how I should honor his spirit and realized, naturally, that I could do no better than continuing to do my work, and so went on paging through my heavily marked copy of James’s Pragmatism to locate page numbers for phrases, that, like all that has come to matter, I know by heart. Tears uppoured again as I came to: “To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after…. That beloved incarnation was among matter’s possibilities.”

“Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin!”—Emerson. Had I not learned to read Stevens and the other Modernist poets with Allen, and then back through the Romantics to Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer, I don’t think I would have begun to hear Emerson or James in Stevens or Donne in Eliot or the Vita Nuova in Pound. Allen Mandelbaum lived, and still lives, in the shapes and sound of words he taught us, his most fortunate students, to hear, and to see through them worlds within worlds and angels falling, where in Paradise Lost there are two—otherwise thought impossible—stress maximums on the fifth syllable: Exhilarating!—“There is no wing like meaning.” He revealed to us language’s elegant mysteries. He would be thrilled, in response, by a question about the place of a comma.

On finding myself during my first semester as a graduate student in the Program of Comparative Literature in Allen’s seminar on Modern Poetry offered by the Program in English, I took notes furiously, transcribing what seemed a foreign language. I would spend days following in the dictionary and in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, translating my notes. Three or four weeks went by before I gathered courage enough to describe my quandary to one of my classmates—none of whom had said anything more than I did in seminar. But some occasionally nodded, and so did not seem uncomprehending. I had thought to myself that I was the index pointing the difference between those who had been English majors in college—those weighted down by Norton anthologies—and lesser beings. In response, then, to my voicing my ignorance to one of my classmates at the end of the meeting when I had been asked to give a “précis” on Eliot’s use of the quatrain in comparison to Theophile Gautier’s Emaux et Camees during our next session: “I don’t understand what he’s saying…!,” he replied, “Oh, don’t worry, nobody does…,” I was grateful, if still perplexed. We all had a lot to learn, and we did. Allen was my first dissertation director, when my topic was “The Difference between the Operation of Metaphor in Poetic and Ordinary Language.” Following his guidance, I began gathering all the references to metaphor from the pre-Socratics on. After many months in the library of Union Theological Seminary, when I was only up to the Church Fathers, I realized that I would never get to write that dissertation, but Allen knew I had to learn that for myself.

For some years during my graduate career, Allen was Executive Officer of the Program in English and I was one of the student representatives to the Graduate Council. Allen was passionate in arguing at meetings for giving official designation/documentation to/for candidates who had completed all requirements and who were deepening their research and writing the dissertation. Dressed in one of his exquisitely-cut Italian tweed jackets, dark shirt, thin suede or horizontally-striped raw silk tie, removing the cigarette holder with the nicotine-removing filter from his teeth—it was his habit to chew on it as he was thinking, and we all smoked then—he stood one afternoon and described how the ABD—“All But Dissertation” designation—would give candidates a “serenity platform”—a residence in time permitting the kind of learning he exemplified and valued. It was pure Allen, one of my beloved teachers.

“They will come no more/ The old men with beautiful manners.”

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On approach, Death By Audio, one of Brooklyn’s Do-It-Yourself, all-ages concert venues, is unassuming – and strikingly so. The north side of South 2^nd Street’s sidewalk runs unevenly, from solid concrete slabs at the corner of Wythe Avenue to mid-block cracked asphalt and unkempt grass. Ailanthus tree branches drape over a gravel-pathed parking lot, surrounded by blank facades of anonymous warehouse space. The south side of South 2^nd Street boasts new commercial spaces and freshly built, still mostly unoccupied condominiums. If the south side of the street exemplifies the spectacle of progress, the north side lays paused before pedestrians, not unlike the neighborhood’s elderly residents, watching passers by from their front steps on a Sunday afternoon. They’re living monuments to the neighborhood’s past, and their rigid silence suggests foreboding and anxiety over whether they’ll fit into the Williamsburg of tomorrow. For many, the Williamsburg of tomorrow – a condominium covered refuge for Manhattanites, dormant industrial warehouses rising into a Frankenstein-like Battery Park vis-à-vis Miami Beach – is already the Williamsburg of today. On a stifling August afternoon, Edan Wilber, one of a few individuals who run Death By Audio, reflects on the dramatic development with self-aware awe. “When I started booking shows here, this was the only thing on this block,” he explains. “Now there are three restaurants, a bar, those condos, and a movie theater on the corner. All of that sprang up in 18 months.”

For many New Yorkers, be they those suffering from the financial challenges of gentrification or those resigned to it with the presumption of inevitability, the conversation is dreadful and devoid of long term context. There are few local topics that incite more despair than the false choice between caricatures of salivating opportunists and heartbroken liberals. In historic terms, Williamsburg’s acclaim as the newly-crowned center of New York cool is a recent phenomenon, but gentrification – the development of under-utilized urban areas by and for wealthy interests, while displacing low-income residents – is a phenomenon that can trace its roots to Second Empire Paris.

Beginning in 1852, Georges Eugène Haussmann’s renovations of Paris promised to transform the city from medieval to modern. As Haussmann would have it, gone were the slums and narrow roadways where the urban poor had organized barricades in violent stand-offs with the state. In their place, the new Parisian boulevards, lined with bourgeois apartments, were designed to facilitate military suppression of political protest and to enable commercial transport, epitomizing the connection between a city’s modernity and its commercial viability. While his influence, known as Haussmannization, can be witnessed all over the world, its manifestation in New York is particularly striking.

Robert Moses, the man who had a greater impact on New York’s urban planning than any other individual in the last 150 years, admired Haussmann’s work, and many of the features of daily life that New Yorkers take for granted – from bridges and highways to public works – have been shaped by his prerogative. Moses favored the interests of the city’s wealthy minority over the lower income public, divesting money from inner city public transportation and resisting investments into poor urban neighborhoods (often destroying them in the process), instead supporting suburban expansion and commercial interests. In the mid-1990’s, former Mayor Giuliani proceeded from where Moses left off, aiming to transform the city into one part tourist attraction and one part status symbol for the world’s wealthiest people. His actions were the logical extension of an ideology that seeks to distance public and private space from presumptions of public good, in order to maximize private wealth. The notion of the neighborhood itself has been transformed from a sprawling community to real estate organized by commercial interest, turning all space, both public and private, into one homogenous economic entity.

Today, in New York City, the monthly charge of rent and minimum cost of living are so demanding that any act on the hierarchy of needs lower than strict survival can be nearly impossible for many people.  Acts of artistic expression often require free space for development, but most concert venues and art galleries, focused on making money at every possible opportunity, in large part to pay their high rent, cannot offer the flexibility artists need. David Harvey reflects on the legacy of Haussmannization in his essay The Political Economy of Public Space. “What had been lost was the idea of the city as a form of sociality,” he writes, “as a potential site for the construction of utopian dreams of a nurturing social order.” But now, in North Brooklyn, ground zero for the gentrification debate, an alternative economic model for the arts, with broad implications for all New Yorkers, is gathering steam amongst a loose collective of artists and musicians. In venues like Death By Audio and Silent Barn, free space for art is a necessity, not a luxury.

One can discover Death By Audio from the slightly ajar, nondescript door facing the sidewalk of South 2^nd Street, flanked on either side by columns of frosted glass. In a neighborhood inundated by ad campaigns for its apartment complexes, assorted flyers, and brightly lit marquees, the lack of identification around Death By Audio’s entrance seems intentional. Inside, past the volunteer collecting donations in the doorway, stacks of the DIY community’s self-published art project/leaflet Showpaper, and an L-shaped hallway with exposed piping, the venue is broken up into two rooms. The front contains the performance space, and the back is used for selling merchandise and socializing. Art and graffiti cover the walls, including a striking mural, painted by Screaming Females vocalist Marisa Paternoster, which faces the audience from behind the stage. Amidst its cartoonish expressions and mischievous insinuations is a depiction of a bearded man brimming with excitement, looking out at the room in adoration. On good nights, the audience will crowd around the stage and look back at the man’s image with the same enthusiasm. That man is Edan Wilber.

Wilber currently books shows for Death By Audio and plays an integral role in Brooklyn’s DIY all ages movement. Wilber moved from Florida to New York over ten years ago to attend NYU film school, but was forced to take a year off because he couldn’t afford it. Although he went to shows every night after work, he often wasn’t allowed in because he was under 21.  “I used to go to Mercury Lounge and stand outside,” he says. “It got to the point that the bouncers were like, ‘We know you. We know you’re not 21. There’s no way you’re getting in here.’”

Joe Ahearn, the managing director of Showpaper and one of the organizers behind Silent Barn, argues that “there are many reasons to run a 21 plus event, but the primary motivation is economic. Making sure everyone in attendance is able to drink allows you to perpetuate a bar-and-alcohol model for your business, offsetting the cost of rent and whatever your overhead may be. All-ages events are almost never an economically successful model for throwing shows.”

Faced with such challenges, Wilber and others who run Death By Audio rent the performance space from a landlord but also live on the premises, in the same warehouse structure. Money, which comes in at the door, largely goes to the band. Liberated from the bar-and-alcohol business model, Death By Audio is free to let anyone and everyone in, whether eight years old or 80.

“Philosophically, we’re similar to Death By Audio,” says Nathaniel Roe, one of the organizers behind Silent Barn. Over seven years ago, Silent Barn began as a renovated warehouse used for band rehearsals, before transitioning into an innovative model for maintaining the artistic integrity of a performance space – all within a city that defines its sense of modernity by its commercial viability. The organizers of Silent Barn are now actively pursuing a new space, which will afford them the option to legally reside within the venue that they also hold performances in. “Without public grants or private donors, the only way you can run a venue without making it a blow-out, with tons of people buying booze, is to live in your venue,” Roe asserts. “It frees you on a financial level. Art values rather than money values.”

Even though the Brooklyn DIY scene’s innovative tactics for self-subsidizing space in a restrictive market breaks rank with much of the precedent set by punk’s past, the scene stills draws influence from a legacy established through thirty years of counter culture. The DIY culture, and the all ages movement which rose from it, began in the early 1980’s American punk and hardcore scene. These bands and audiences, primarily teenagers, were disregarded by the mainstream music industry, deemed incapable of producing anything commercially viable. If they wanted to keep producing art and music, their only choice was to do it themselves. And they did, creating touring routes across the country and dotting the American landscape with independent venues, press, and record labels, often in unconventional locations. Michael Azerrad, author of the definitive text on America’s DIY movement, Our Band Could Be Your Life, explains, “For musicians and audiences, DIY spaces are a way of separating their community and its culture from commerciality, making it more about the joy of getting together and having fun – which is exactly the right priority.”

“We call it living in the stew,” Roe says. “To me, living in the venue symbolizes a complete turnover to aesthetic values – there’s art everywhere all the time. This is a complete immersion in artistic value.“

Instead of occurring in a vacuum, these experiments in the public utility of private space are catching on. “People are disillusioned with capitalism, even if they’re not anti-capitalist,” says Amy Klein, of the band Titus Andronicus. “They know that the economic system is failing and we need something new.” Titus Andronicus utilizes another DIY venue, the so-called Shea Stadium, as a rehearsal space and recording studio. The band The So So Glos runs the space and oversees its day-to-day operations. “These venues aren’t just about space,” Klein adds. “They’re about fostering a particular style of music with a philosophy that says anyone can do it – anyone can make music. Your music is more important than your financial status.” According to The So So Glos’ drummer, Zach Staggers, the features of these spaces are essential to the integrity of the final product. “Music is supposed to be listened to in spaces like ours; it’s an atmosphere of freedom.”

Upon departure at the end of an evening, Death By Audio shrinks deeper into the anonymity of its unassuming façade with each passing step forward. The urban spectacle of a viable alternative from the dreadful norm lingers in the air – or in this case, in the divisions of cracked sidewalk slabs, accompanying the departing crowd fifty feet in all directions from the venue’s door. If, in fact, the use of public and private space often nakedly reveals people’s determinations and the values of their time, what conclusion can be drawn from understanding Brooklyn’s DIY scene? As Amy Klein sees it, “We are in a time of economic upheaval. With rent being so high, young people are opting out of the traditional lifestyles that aren’t even possible anymore.”

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In many respects, 2011 has been marked as much by the mayhem of nature as it has by the upheavals of men.  While challenges to political authority have captured the imaginations of millions and produced exciting tremors of revolution across the continents, Mother Nature’s increasingly ferocious response to the heavy environmental footprint of industrial production will likely be judged the most profound source of social change around the world in the years to come.

From the Japanese tsunami, which triggered the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, and the extreme drought that currently threatens the lives of millions in the Eastern Horn of Africa, to the wildfires, hurricanes, and periodic flooding that have decimated both coasts of the richest country in the world, anthropogenic climate change is increasingly—and undeniably—at the core of politics and society everywhere in the world.

Tropic of Chaos, Christian Parenti’s excellent new book examining the intersections between climate change, neoliberal economic policy and the spread of political violence, bracingly argues that the convergence of these threats to international security has set our world along a course that will result in a broken planet conditioned by catastrophe, conflict and xenophobic distrust. That is, unless meaningful action is taken immediately to reorient international relations away from this disastrous trajectory.

I recently spoke with Parenti — who has for several years been a visiting scholar at the CUNY Center for Place, Culture and Politics and is currently visiting professor of sociology at Brooklyn College –about his book, the future of climate wars, failures of leadership in Washington and at the UN to combat environmental degradation, and what can be done to avoid a world driven by the politics of natural catastrophe and the ethics of the armed lifeboat.

I wanted to begin by briefly touching on the book’s title and, more importantly, discussing the theoretical concept that largely gives shape to the book’s narrative arc: what you refer to as the “catastrophic convergence.” Can you give us a sense of what you mean by each and talk about how they informed your research and analysis?

The “tropic of chaos” is less important than the “catastrophic convergence.” The tropic of chaos is more of a play on words that refers to the conditions in the Global South which is that belt of post-colonial, underdeveloped, over-exploited states that mostly lay between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. So, it’s sort of a name for that region of the world.

The “catastrophic convergence” is the driving thesis of the book, the argument that climate change doesn’t just look like tornadoes, floods, and droughts.  It also looks like religious violence, ethnic pogroms, civil war, state failure, mass migration, counterinsurgency and anti-immigrant border militarization.  And so, climate change rarely works on its own.  Usually, it arrives in the Global South on a stage preset for crisis.  The forces that have preset that stage are militarism, and radical free-market restructuring—neoliberalism. Cold War militarism, and now the War on Terror, have flooded the Global South with cheap weapons and men trained in the arts of assassination and interrogation, smuggling, small unit attacks and terrorism.  Neoliberalism has created increased poverty, increased inequality and a tattered and stressed social fabric.  As a result, it leads to less social solidarity, it damages and degrades traditional economies and makes more populations more vulnerable to sudden weather shocks, extreme climatic events like drought and flooding, which are due to anthropogenic climate change kicking in hard. And it is combining with these two preexisting crises—militarism and inequality and poverty—and the three of them are meeting in this catastrophic convergence and articulating themselves as increased violence. That can be religious violence, ethnic violence, sometimes class-based violence. Sometimes this is expressed as chaos and relative or outright state failure.

But in the Global North, the catastrophic convergence presents itself as a renewed emphasis on building-up the incipient police state that exists in many western European countries as well as the United States. So, we now have a reengagement with the discourse around border militarization, a reanimation of the xenophobic discourse that goes with those policies which are increasingly articulated in environmental terms—there’s an environmental crisis; there’s not enough to go around; immigrants need to be rounded up; everybody needs to sacrifice some civil liberties; the border needs to be militarized. If climate change pushes chaos and state failure in the Global South, it creates authoritarian state hardening in the Global North, at least in its earliest stages.

You offer compelling evidence that while the American popular discourse is largely primitive and backwards when it comes to the politics of climate change, the United States military sees the challenges very clearly and informs to a great degree its doctrine on counter-insurgency. You argue that this gives life to “the politics of the armed life boat.”  Can you talk more about how the US military is responding to climate threats, and what you understand to be the prospects for survival in the armed life boat?

The militarized response in the United States takes place in the military, but also at the state level in the development of a green xenophobia.  They aren’t necessarily connected, but they fundamentally produce the same thing, which is a hardening of state policy.  The military—to its credit—takes climate science very seriously.  It does not question the validity of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which is the last one to be published, the one that was attacked because it had a few footnotes which were wrong.  And they were wrong. There was stupid, arrogant stuff around those errors, but the errors and their correction in no way change the conclusions of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report.  The military takes the report seriously unlike, say, the Republican leadership in the House or many other elements of the American political class.

The military runs scenarios of what the future will bring.  What they see is not so much an increase in conventional warfare between states as they do an increase in humanitarian crisis, civil war, banditry, religious wars, state breakdown.  And they realize that the armed forces will be called upon to respond with various forms of low-intensity conflict: counter-insurgency, direct intervention, humanitarian intervention, shoring-up allied states, as well as increased training and advisory roles in these conflicts.  The future for them is essentially one of open-ended counterinsurgency on a global scale as articulated through these various reports, some of them public, some of them secret.

In terms of the ethics of the armed life boat, which would seek to manage this crisis of a planet in decline, and manage it through the use of force, the examples of that are found on right-wing talk radio, which calls for expelling immigrants, or in people like Deborah Walker, who I discuss in the book. Walker describes herself as a northern Californian environmentalist. She’s also an anti-immigrant xenophobe and a racist.  And then there’s the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)—which I didn’t address in the book because I didn’t know about it; it was only exposed after the book was published—FAIR—the original anti-immigrant lobby group associated with Garrett Hardin and others—started a front group called Progressives for Immigration Reform that was seeking to reach out to environmentalists and progressives with a message of excluding immigrants, talking about the carrying capacity of the country and making the case that immigrants, essentially, should be repressed.

These are the current features of this state hardening. One can imagine how this project of border militarization and planetary management through counterinsurgency and counterterrorism could build around it a kind of paranoid, frightened, xenophobic consent among more and more Americans. And that would be the politics of the armed life boat: the idea that we have ours, the world is ending, and we need to hold on for as long as we can through the force of arms. The military—again to its credit—does not think this is a good long-term plan. They always say that this stuff has to be dealt with through the reduction of carbon emissions. Otherwise, we are going to hit all the tipping points climatologically which will lead to self-compounding climate change and the unleashing of such radical transformations in weather patterns that it will be very hard for civilization to hold on.  Radically rising sea levels and the massive desertification of the grain baskets of the world, among other problems, will make it very hard for even the most developed economies to survive. That’s what scientists predict and project if we continue with business-as-usual, which is burning fossil fuels.

Let’s talk about water for a moment, a point of hope for some environmentalists insofar as it seems to be one of the few things that states have a interest in securing and a resource around which even antagonists—such as India and Pakistan—can cooperate.  You take on a variety of this argument, that “water is rational,” when it comes to something like the Indus Water Treaty, and question its long-term viability. Talk about where things currently stand, and what you see as the prospects for the treaty’s continuing functioning in the future?

The Indus water treaty is remarkable insofar as it has worked for as long as it has. It was signed in 1960, negotiated in 1959, but it is fraying in part because climate change planners and elites in each country are very much aware that water resources are going to be increasingly scarce.  So India is building lots of dams and canals on its side of the border and claims that it is not violating the treaty, that it has the right to use the water under the treaty—which it does—as long as it doesn’t diminish the flow.  But then Pakistan argues that there is diminished flow which contributes to their suspicion of India, they believe that India is not simply impounding the water but that they are siphoning it off. And increasingly we witness this entering the discourse of the radical religious right in Pakistan, the asymmetrical assets that have been cultivated by Pakistani intelligence like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jama’at-ud-Da’wah which recently made statements about India’s “water terrorism” and how water must flow or else blood will. So the issue is becoming more intense.

As and to the question of whether or not it can be maintained, that’s an open question in part because the threat of climate change is suddenly part of the equation but also because there’s just horrendously bad management of the agreement, in Pakistan especially, where there is very little productive adaptation.  I wrote a piece in The Nation recently about just this.  The core of any climate adaptation in Pakistan would be social justice and land reform. No elites in Pakistan are willing to consider this, however, nor do aid agencies make this a condition of development aid, and the United States government doesn’t want to talk about.  There is a tradition of progressive movements in Pakistan but they have suffered tremendous repression and their demands for economic redistribution go unanswered. As a result, there has been no movement on the issue—even after the recent horrendous flooding—towards land redistribution and social justice, out of which might have come some better water management strategies, not to mention better use of the land.

In terms of what I criticize in the book was not the treaty itself, but instead what I thought was sort of a silly article that tried to explain why the treaty works between these two belligerents that have fought four wars, and yet the treaty works. The article argues that it is water rational which to me seems completely tautological. The real question is “why is it rational”? That’s the question, not a conclusion. Why is this rational as opposed to it being rational, for example, for India to annihilate Pakistan by just damming all the rivers?  And I suggest a few answers that I think are rather obvious, including the fact that that would have been simply too extreme. India has the upper hand but the international political atmosphere is such that it would not allow that kind of action.  Also, Pakistan has backing from the United States.  But as things continue to unravel in the future that could be a possibility especially if India diverts more and more water from Pakistan and Pakistan becomes more and more desperate and lashes out, if not conventionally with military force then with their asymmetrical assets, i.e. terrorism, in both India and Afghanistan.

The ability for the world to mitigate against the worst effects of climate change will largely depend on multilateral efforts at containing the damage.  The United Nations has traditionally been the center of gravity for this purpose and yet it’s largely been a failure: Copenhagen was a disaster, and Cancun only cleaned up some of the mess. Among other problems, the Secretary-General has been almost entirely absent as a force in these proceedings, and as you point out, the United States, the necessary prime mover in all of this, hasn’t assumed leadership on the issue.  Why is that, do you think?  Can you talk about how you view the Barack Obama administration’s record on the environment thus far, and what you think can be done to reorient Washington to more productive action?

The way you framed it is correct.  The United States has played a non-productive role, a destructive role. It has not taken the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations seriously and as a result they have broken down. We are the largest economy in the world and until recently we were the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world before China overtook us. The world looks to the United States for leadership but US actions, especially at Copenhagen, were really depressing. As a result those talks fell apart,  Though the process limps on towards its next round of negotiations in Durban South Africa.

What will change the US position? Protest, clearly. There has to be a movement that forces the Obama administration to do this. The Obama administration is proving itself to be very right-wing on many issues, including this one.  It just hasn’t been good on climate even as the majority of people who elected him take climate change very seriously and care deeply about the issue.  And so, I think there needs to be a movement to pressure him. There are campaigns underway that can do just that.  For instance, there is Beyond Coal, a big campaign sponsored by the Sierra Club under the leadership of Michael Brune, and the work that Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network and the direct action group Radical Action for Mountain People Survival and long struggling local groups like the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition are doing to stop mountain top removal coal mining and coal plant production. Using everything from direct action to lawsuits and lobbying this array of groups has helped the construction of about 130 coal plants.

So, there are campaigns like the fight against coal that people should get involved with. There’s also the actions that were taken in August to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline that would run Canadian tar sands  slurry through the United States and  down to the Gulf  final refining and  export, where people committed acts of civil disobedience in Washington, DC.  These kinds of things need to be done.

Beyond that, I think organized labor has to begin taking climate change seriously. The main thing that organized labor has done recently was Rich Trunk urging President Obama to take China to the World Trade Organization because Beijing was subsidizing its clean tech sector. In the name of competitiveness, the AFL-CIO is trying to cut Chinese subsidies, which they will not be able to do, first of all. And second of all, they’re not demanding similar subsidies here in the United States that would put people back to work. It’s pathetic. So, all the various institutions of the left need to take climate change seriously and start building a movement to pressure government to make it an issue on the international stage.

Now, in terms of what the Obama administration could do to reduce emissions: if it wanted to engage the UN process, there’s a lot that can be done without having to go and get permission from the Republicans.

The EPA, for one, has the obligation to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. This is the result of environmental groups suing and fighting in court for ten years—and finally winning at the Supreme Court level—to get the EPA to consider greenhouse gas emissions under the 1970 Clean Air Act, which holds that if emissions are dangerous to human health than they have to be regulated. And sure enough, greenhouse gas emissions are dangerous to human health due to their adverse effects on the environment. Therefore, the EPA has an obligation to regulate them and has just begun promulgating these rules. Unfortunately, they are not very robust. In fact, they’re pretty lame and the administration is dragging its feet on the issuance of these rules by building in delays. If the EPA were serious and really imposed strict rules, say, on smoke stacks in coal plants and oil refineries it could effectively push investment towards clean technology as the rising cost of dirty energy and carbon emissions would drive people away from it.

The other thing the government could do is leverage its tremendous purchasing power. If state purchasing of vehicles and electric power were done according to environmentally clean specifications, the public sector’s carbon footprint would be substantially reduced. At the same time, it would also likely create knock-on effects in the private sector by allowing the burgeoning clean teach sector to achieve economies of scale and provide its energy, vehicles and services at a rate that is cost competitive with diesel fuel and gasoline.

As power shifts from west to east with the so-called rise of China, many warn that China’s growing political and economic might is being built on the back of environmental degradation, which is only further exacerbating climate change internationally.  In the book though, you briefly mention that China is beginning to move to clean technology production.  Can you give us a sense of how Beijing’s approach has differed from that of Washington, and what the likely outcome might be?

I don’t think that China’s approach is that well-organized, yet.  The main thing to keep in mind, though, is that Beijing’s actions aren’t motivated by some high-minded concern about climate change.  The issue of local pollution has really driven China to embrace clean technology. Take the wind sector, for example, which is growing at something like 20 percent a year in China.  They invited in all the Western firms—Gamesa, Vestas , GE—then essentially counterfeited their technology and then invited these firms to take, in the case of GE, for example, 2 percent of the market.  GE could go to war with them and say “hey, you stole our technology” and try to prove it in court which would only get them shut out of the Chinese market. Or, they can just shut up and take 2 percent of a market that is growing very, very fast. Needless to say, they have chosen the latter.

The one lesson we can take from China is the same lesson that most of the Asian economies remind us of, which is that capitalism develops best when there is a strong state guiding it. Capitalists and capital need discipline, they need to be disciplined. They need to be taxed, and their investments need to be guided by the state because when the market is left to its own self-regulation—which is the ideological preference and prevailing ethos of our political class—you do not get the types of innovations and hothouse developments that have characterized industrialization throughout East Asia.  The command model of capitalism that China has embraced—a version of what was done in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—this dirigiste model is quite effective in potentially mitigating the worst abuses of people and nature committed by capitalism while at the same time encouraging its better, Promethean qualities.

After all, Marx not only criticized capitalism ruthlessly, but also praised its ability to create enormous amounts of wealth and technology and transform the face of the planet. That is essentially what we have done in a bad way with fossil fuels. But we need to push on through it and have a reindustrialization around clean technology. I do not think a retreat from industry back to the local is in any way realistic. We have to accelerate through this crisis and come out the other end with clean technologies. That means that we can’t keep flying around everywhere, driving big cars and generally being wasteful. We have to consume less and transform the way we live, radically. But we aren’t going to do that by turning our backs on machinery and electricity.  We need windmills. If we don’t get them, we are going to continue burning coal and field-stripping our AK-47s in preparation for our neighbor’s next attack on the bunker.

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Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner’s latest play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Guide to the Scriptures opened this month in New York to critical acclaim. But praise for Kushner, whom many consider the greatest living American playwright, was drowned out by outrage at the CUNY Board of Trustees’ decision to deny him an honorary degree from John Jay College.  On May 2, the board met to rubberstamp the entire group of notables slated to receive honorary degrees from the various CUNY campuses.  Before the vote was taken, trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld—no stranger to controversy—voiced his objection to Kushner’s nomination based on what he considered the playwright’s unacceptable political views as regards Israel.  The Board of Trustees ultimately removed Kushner’s name from consideration.

In response, thousands of students, faculty, and others from around the country mounted a campaign in Kushner’s defense.  The angry chorus of voices demanding that Kushner be restored to the list of honored nominees ultimately forced the CUNY’s hand. Benno Schmidt, the chairman of the board, called an emergency meeting for May 9, where the executive committee of trustees voted unanimously to overturn their previous decision and grant Kushner the award. The GC Advocate spoke with Kushner just hours after the emergency meeting to discuss the momentous reversal, the politics of free thought and expression in higher education, and the playwright’s close connections to the CUNY community.

To begin with, can you give us a sense of your immediate reaction to today’s events? Were you happy with the Board of Trustees’ decision to reverse their earlier vote, and grant you the honorary degree from John Jay?

Yes, absolutely. I am happy they reversed the decision that they made last week.  I recognize it was exclusively the result of the enormous protests mounted by the faculty and students of CUNY and of people all over, and I am very, very grateful to everyone who protested. I realize that it has a lot to do with things that are bigger than me. But I think the protests held the board to account, and really made them change their decision and I think that it is appropriate that they did that.

You originally said that you wouldn’t accept the degree even if the board reversed course. Is this still true? And if so, do you plan on speaking at the commencement ceremony?

I‘ve been contacted by several people on the faculty of John Jay, the president of John Jay and Karen Kaplowitz, president of the faculty senate, who have all asked me to accept if I am offered the degree, or I guess I should say accept for the second time, since I had already accepted the first time, and I intend to do that, yes.  I am really looking forward to being at the commencement ceremony on June 3, and celebrating everyone who is graduating.  My understanding is that we are supposed to deliver a speech at commencement.  Certainly Mr. Wiesenfeld was under this impression, and as we know he’s always accurate, so I am assuming that I will.

Jeffrey Wiesenfeld made very clear today that he has no intention whatsoever of resigning his seat on the Board of Trustees. What do you think about this? Would you like to see him removed?

My feeling is that his behavior both during that meeting and in the many interviews he has given since represents a misuse of his position as a trustee of the City University of New York. Whether or not a level of misuse that mandates his stepping down or being removed from the board of trustees, the mechanics of removal is not really for me to say.  That’s a decision for the CUNY community to make. I don’t believe his behavior is in any way appropriate and actually I think it had very little to do with any legitimate business of CUNY and had only to do with his own personal and political agenda. I don’t think that’s what a trustee should be about.  I am eager to see what happens, and I guess now that I am an honorary graduate of the John Jay School of Criminal Justice I am part of that community, and will be able to participate in those discussions.

Stanley Fish argued in the New York Times this week that the politics of honorary degree candidates should be considered by boards of trustees in deciding whether to grant the awards. Do you agree?

That’s a really complicated question.  Do I think that any political opinion is acceptable? No. I believe that there is such a thing as hate speech, I believe that there is a kind of articulation of ideas that can lead to appalling crimes. I think that we have to be very careful in parsing that kind of speech because it a very complicated business. In other instances it is sort of clear. I am not an absolutist in this regard. But I believe that in the university, freedom of thought and expression is paramount and that the trustees and the administrations, the faculties, and the students themselves at the different colleges should all be vigorous in preventing any kind of atmosphere that seems to preclude by a threat the expression of the free exchange of ideas.

I didn’t read Mr. Fish’s column. But when someone is smeared the way I was by Mr. Wiesenfeld, I do know that the board has certain responsibilities. My name was in that room entirely because I had been selected as an honorary degree candidate.  I know that Fish says it’s the right of the board to consider any person’s politics in voting on honorary degree candidacies. So there is that question. But the second question has to do with that word, “consider.” I would have had a lot less trouble with what happened to me had anyone at the board said, “Wait a minute, did you bring supporting evidence? If you are going to do this, why didn’t you print out a complete interview this guy has given, or an essay that he has written that shows us what a terrible person he is? Why are you coming here with a bunch of scattered quotes.” I think then that it would have been a whole other issue, and it would have reflected a much better light on the board if someone had just said, “I don’t think this is the appropriate way to level an accusation of this kind,”  if they had said “Mr. Wiesenfeld, if you’re not coming better prepared, you can’t really be serious.” In fact, I think he wasn’t. If you listen to the podcast of the original meeting, he doesn’t seem to have intended to do anything more than register a complaint.

Your new play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures opened in the midst of all this controversy surrounding the trustees’ original decision to deny you an honorary degree. I’m wondering, is it easier in today’s America to be a socialist than it is to be a critic of Israel? If so, why do you think this is?

Well, I would not characterize myself as a critic of Israel. That isn’t my job. I don’t feel like I am any more critical of the state of Israel than I am of many other countries including my own.  I think every responsible adult has a responsibility to hold to account their governments to pay attention to what’s going on.  I think what’s happened here is an interesting thing.  The expectation of Mr. Wiesenfeld is that when he says “This guy is anti-Israel” that the entire world will rear up in horror and run in the other direction.  And that didn’t happen this time, because people who really care about Israel, and I include myself in that number, realize it is enormously important now to start to build a policy towards a just and lasting peace in the Middle East based on reality, as to what has actually happened, based on history and not on right-wing fantasy. That’s the hope for that region, and really for the world.

It’s always been tough about this primarily because of the long and horrendous history of oppression and suffering of the Jewish people. As a result, I think we have very good reason to be anxious about public debate about Israel, and yet that anxiety, no matter how understandable or grounded in history as it is, shouldn’t stand in the way of saying out loud the things we believe are true.

Finally, can you talk about your evolving feelings concerning CUNY? Has your view on the university changed through all this?

Well, it’s only gotten better, and it was already incredibly high to begin with, which is why I agreed to accept the degree in the first place. I gave a speech last year at John Jay and I was just dazzled by the students. I’ve talked to students at Queens College, at the Graduate Center, at City College. I have aunts and uncles that went to City College in the 1930s. I have always believed that this is an incredible institution of higher learning and a paradigm for what a public, urban university ought to be. The way the students and faculty responded to this whole thing has been incredibly impressive, incredibly courageous and vigorous, and I think this speaks beautifully of the university. And so, I am really proud of the affiliation.

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In a wave of global protests that indicted the lack of vision, courage, and responsibility on the part of their elders and political leaders, young people in Egypt, Lybia, Tunisia, France, Puerto Rico, and Greece have recently taken history into their own hands. Fighting not merely for a space to survive, but also for a society in which matters of justice, dignity, and freedom are objects of collective struggle, these demonstrations have signaled a new stage in which young people once again are defining what John Pilger calls the “theater of the possible.” Signaling a generational and political crisis that is global in scope, young people have sent a message to the world that they refuse to live any longer under repressive authoritarian regimes sustained by morally bankrupt market-driven policies and repressive governments. Throughout Europe, students are protesting the attack on the social state, the savagery of neoliberal policies, and the devaluation of higher education as a public good. In doing so, they have defied a social order in which they cannot work a decent job, have access to a quality education, or support a family, a social order that offered them a life stripped of self-determination and dignity. In Tunisia and Egypt, students have been at the forefront of uprisings that eventually led to the overthrow of authoritarian societies, which for too long forced young people to linger in a liminal space in which there were no jobs, no hope for the future, and far too few freedoms.
In the face of these mass uprisings, many commentators have raised questions about why comparable forms of widespread youth resistance are not taking place in American cities. Everyone from left critics to mainstream radio commentators have voiced surprise and disappointment that America’s youth appear uninspired by the collective action of their counterparts in other countries. Some commentators, including Courtney Martin, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, have suggested that the problem is one of privilege. In a 2010 article for that magazine titled “Why Class Matters in Campus Activism,” Martin argues that American students are often privileged and view politics as something that happens elsewhere, far removed from local activism.
Many of us from middle- and upper-income backgrounds have been socialized to believe that it is our duty to make a difference, but undertake such efforts abroad—where the “real” poor people are. We found nonprofits aimed at schooling children all over the globe while rarely acknowledging that our friend from the high school football team can’t afford the same kind of opportunities we can. Or we create Third World bicycle programs while ignoring that our lab partner has to travel two hours by bus, as he is unable to get a driver’s license as an undocumented immigrant. We were born lucky, so we head to the bars—oblivious to the rising tuition prices and crushing bureaucracy inside the financial aid office.
This theme is taken up in greater detail in Martin’s latest book, Do It Anyway: A New Generation of Activists. Sadly, however, the analysis Martin provides in that book suffers, like her piece in the The American Prospect, from the same sort of privilege that it critiques. It suggests not only that middle-class kids are somehow the only appropriate vanguard of change for this generation, but that they suffer from both a narcissistic refusal to look inward and an ego-driven sense of politics that is as narrow as it is paternalistic and missionary in focus. This critique is too simple, lacks complexity, and is plagued by the very same problems to which it is objecting.
The other side of the over-privileged youth argument is suggested by long-time activist Tom Hayden, who argues that many students are so saddled with financial debt and focused on what it takes to get a job that they have little time for political activism. According to Hayden student activism in the United States, especially since the 1980s, has been narrowly issues-based, ranging from a focus on student unionization and gender equity to environmental issues and greater minority enrollment, thus circumscribing in advance youth participation in larger political spheres. While Martin and Hayden both offer enticing narratives to explain the current lack of student resistance, Simon Talley, a writer for Campus Progress, may be closer to the truth in claiming that students in the United States have less of an investment in higher education than European students because for the last thirty years they have been told that higher education neither serves a public good nor is an invaluable democratic public sphere.
These commentators, however much they sometimes get it right, still underestimate the historical and current impacts of the conservative political climate on American campuses and the culture of youth protest. This conservatism took firm hold with the election of Ronald Reagan and the emergence of both neoconservative and neoliberal disciplinary apparatuses since the 1980s. Youth have in fact been very active in the last few decades, but in many instances for deeply conservative ends. As Susan Searls Giroux has argued, a series of well-funded, right-wing campus organizations have made much use of old and new media to produce best-selling screeds as well as interactive websites for students to report injustices in the interests of protesting the alleged left-totalitarianism of the academy. In her book Between Race and Reason: Violence, Intellectual Responsibility and the University to Come Searls Giroux writes:
Conservative think tanks provide $20 million annually to the campus Right, according to the People for the American Way, to fund campus organizations such as Students for Academic Freedom, whose credo is “You can’t get a good education if they’re only telling you half the story” and boasts over 150 campus chapters. Providing an online complaint form for disgruntled students to fill out, the organization’s website monitors insults, slurs and claims of more serious infractions that students claim to have suffered. Similarly, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, founded by William F. Buckley, funds over eighty right-wing student publications through its Collegiate Network, which has produced such media darlings as Dinesh D’Souza and Ann Coulter. There is also the Leadership Institute, which trains, supports and does public relations for 213 conservative student groups who are provided with suggestions for inviting conservative speakers to campus, help starting conservative newspapers, or training to win campus elections. Or the Young Americans for Freedom, which sponsors various campus activities such as “affirmative action bake sales” where students are charged variously according to their race or ethnicity, or announcements of “whites only” scholarships.
Liberal students, for their part, have engaged in forms of activism that also tend to mimic neoliberal rationalities. The increasing emphasis on consumerism, immediate gratification, and the narcissistic ethic of privatization took its toll in a range of student protests developed over issues such as the right to party and “a defense of the right to consume alcohol.” As Mark Edelman Boren points out in his informative book on student resistance, alcohol-related issues caused student uprisings on a number of American campuses. In one telling example, he writes “At Ohio University, several thousand students rioted in April 1998 for a second annual violent protest over the loss of an hour of drinking when clocks were officially set back at the beginning of daylight savings time; forced out of area bars, upset students hurled rocks and bottles at police, who knew to show up in full riot gear after the previous year’s riot. The troops finally resorted to shooting wooden ‘knee-knocker’ bullets at the rioters to suppress them.”
All of these explanations have some merit in accounting for the lack of resistance among American students, but I’d like to shift the focus of the conversation. Student resistance in the United States must always be viewed within a broader political landscape that, with few exceptions, remains still unexamined. In the first instance, we have to remember that students in Western Europe, in particular, are faced with a series of crises that are more immediate, bold, and radical in their assault on young people and the institutions that bear down heavily on their lives than those in the United States. In the face of the economic recession, educational budgets are being cut in take-no-prisoners, extreme fashion; the social state is being radically dismantled; tuition costs have spiked exponentially; and unemployment rates for young people are far higher than in the United States (with the exception of youth in poor minority communities). European students have experienced a massive and bold assault on their lives, educational opportunities, and their future. Moreover, European students live in societies where it becomes more difficult to collapse public life into largely private considerations. Students in these countries have access to a wider range of critical public spheres; politics in many of these countries has not collapsed entirely into the spectacle of celebrity/commodity culture; left-oriented political parties still exist; and labor unions have more political and ideological clout than they do in the United States. Alternative newspapers, progressive media, and a profound sense of the political constitute elements of a vibrant, critical formative culture with a wide range of public spheres that have helped nurture and sustain the possibility to think critically, engage in political dissent, organize collectively, and inhabit public spaces in which alternative and critical theories can be developed.
Because of the diverse nature of how higher education is financed and governed in the United States, the assault on colleges and universities has been less uniform and differentially spread out among community colleges, public universities, and elite colleges, thus lacking a unified, oppressive narrative against which to position resistance. Moreover, the campus “culture wars” narrative has served to galvanize many youth around a reactionary cultural project while distancing them from the very nature of the economic and political assault on their future. All this suggests that another set of questions has to be raised. The more important questions, ones which do not reproduce the all too commonplace demonization of young people as merely apathetic, are twofold. First, the issue should not be why there have been no student protests, but why have the protests that have happened not been more widespread, linked, and sustained? The student protests against the draconian right-wing policies attempting to destroy the union rights and collective bargaining power of teachers supported by Republican Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin is one example indicating that students are in fact engaged and concerned. There are also smaller student protests taking place at various colleges across the country, including Berkeley and CUNY. But student activists appear to constitute a minority of US students, with very few enrolled in professional programs. Most student activists are coming from the arts, social sciences, and humanities (the conscience of the universities). Second, there is the crucial issue regarding what sort of conditions have young people inherited in American society that has undermined their ability to be critical agents capable of waging a massive protest movement against the growing injustices they face on a daily basis? After all, the assault on higher education in the United States, while not as severe as in Europe, still provides ample reasons for students to be in the streets
protesting.
Forty-three states have pledged major cuts to higher education in order to compensate for insufficient state funding. This means an unprecedented hike in tuition rates is being implemented; enrollments are being slashed; salaries are being reduced; and need-based scholarships in some states are being eliminated. Pell Grants, which allow poor students to attend college, are also being cut. Robert Reich has chronicled some of the impacts on university budgets, which include: cutting state funding for higher education by $151 million in Georgia; reducing student financial aid by $135 million in Michigan; raising tuition by 15 percent in Florida’s eleven public universities; and increasing tuition by 40 percent in just two years at the University of California. As striking as these increases are, the fact is that tuition has actually been steadily rising over the past several decades, becoming a disturbingly normative feature of post-secondary education.
One reason students are not protesting these cuts in large numbers may be that by the time the average American student now graduates, he or she has not only a degree but also an average debt of about $23,000. As Jeffrey Williams points out in his 2008 article for Dissent, “Student Debt and the Spirit of Indenture,” this debt amounts to a growing form of indentured servitude for many students that both undercuts any viable notion of social activism and is exacerbated by the fact that unemployment for recent college graduates rose from 5.8 percent to 8.7 percent in 2009.” Crippling debt plus few job opportunities in a society in which individuals are relentlessly held as solely responsible for the problems they experience leaves little room for rethinking the importance of larger social issues and the necessity for organized collective action against systemic injustice. In addition, as higher education increasingly becomes a fundamental requirement for employment, many universities have reconfigured their mission exclusively in corporate terms, replacing education with training, and defining students as consumers, faculty as a cheap form of subaltern labor, and entire academic departments as revenue generating units. No longer seen as a social or public good, higher education is increasingly viewed less as a site of struggle than as a credential mill for success in the global economy.
Meanwhile, not only have academic jobs been disappearing, but given the shift to an instrumentalist education that is decidedly technicist in nature, the culture of critical thinking has been slowly disappearing on US campuses as well. As universities and colleges emphasize market-based skills, students are neither learning how to think critically nor how to connect their private troubles with larger public issues. The humanities continue to be downsized, eliminating some of the most important opportunities many students will ever have to develop a commitment to public values, social responsibilities, and the broader demands of critical citizenship. Moreover, critical thinking has been devalued as a result of the growing corporatization of higher education. Under the influence of corporate values, thought in its most operative sense loses its modus operandi as a form of critical mediation. Increasingly, it has become more difficult for students to recognize how their education in the broadest sense has been systematically devalued and how this not only undercuts their ability to be engaged critics but contributes to the further erosion of what is left of US democracy. The form of instrumental training students are now receiving undermines any critical capacity to connect the fees they pay to the fact that the United States puts more money into the funding of war, armed forces, and military weaponry than the next twenty-five countries combined—money that could otherwise fund higher education. The inability both to be critical of such injustices and to relate them to a broader understanding of politics suggests a failure to think outside of the normative sensibilities of a neoliberal ideology that isolates knowledge and normalizes its own power relations. In fact, one recent study by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that “45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.” The corporatization of schooling over the last few decades has done more than make universities into adjuncts of corporate power. It has produced a culture of critical illiteracy and further undermined the conditions necessary to enable students to become truly engaged, political agents. The value of knowledge is now linked to a crude instrumentalism, and the only mode of education that seems to matter is that which enthusiastically endorses learning marketable skills, embracing a survival-of-the-fittest ethic, and defining the good life solely through accumulation and disposal of the latest consumer goods. Academic knowledge has been stripped of its value as a social good; to be relevant and therefore funded, knowledge has to justify itself in market terms, or simply perish.
Enforced privatization, the closing down of critical public spheres, and the endless commodification of all aspects of social life have created a generation of students who are increasingly being reared in a society in which politics is viewed as irrelevant, and the struggle for democracy is being erased from social memory. This is not to suggest that Americans have abandoned the notion that ideas have power or that ideologies can move people. Unfortunately, the institutions and cultural apparatuses that generate such ideas seem to be primarily controlled by the corporate media, right-wing think tanks, and other conservative groups. Public pedagogy, or the expansive pedagogical practices that now take place through major cultural apparatuses such as mainstream electronic and print media and other elements of screen culture, is now dominated by the right. Unfortunately, while progressives are more than willing to challenge right-wing ideologies and policies, they are less inclined to acknowledge the diverse ways in which culture functions in the production, distribution and regulation of power both symbolically and institutionally as a pedagogical force. Unwilling to engage the educational force of the larger culture seriously as part of its political strategy, progressives have failed to adequately theorize how conservatives have seized upon this element of politics in ways that far outstrip its use by the left and other progressive forces. In part, this use of the educational force of the culture explains both the rapid rise of the Tea Party movement and the fact that it seems to have no counterpart among progressives, especially young people, though this may change given the arrogant and right-wing attack being waged on unions, public sector workers, and public school educators in Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio, New Jersey, and other states where Tea Party candidates have come to power.
In a social order dominated by the relentless privatizing and commodification of everyday life and the elimination of critical public spheres, young people find themselves in a society in which the formative cultures necessary for a democracy to exist have been more or less eliminated, reduced to spectacles of consumerism made palatable through a daily diet of game shows, reality TV, and celebrity culture. What is particularly troubling in American society is the absence of vital formative cultures necessary to construct questioning persons who are capable of seeing through the consumer come-ons, who can dissent and act collectively in an increasingly imperiled democracy. Sheldon Wolin is instructive in his insistence that the creation of a democratic formative culture is fundamental to enabling both political agency and a critical understanding of what it means to sustain a viable democracy. According to Wolin,
democracy is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs. What is at stake in democratic politics is whether ordinary men and women can recognize that their concerns are best protected and cultivated under a regime whose actions are governed by principles of commonality, equality, and fairness, a regime in which taking part in politics becomes a way of staking out and sharing in a common life and its forms of self-fulfillment. Democracy is not about bowling together but about managing together those powers that immediately and significantly affect the lives and circumstances of others and one’s self.
Instead of public spheres that promote dialogue, debate, and arguments with supporting evidence, American society offers young people a conservatizing, de-formative culture through entertainment spheres that infantilize almost everything they touch, while legitimating opinions that utterly disregard evidence, reason, truth, and civility. The delete button has replaced the critical knowledge and the modes of education needed for intimacy, long-term commitments, and the search for the good society. Attachments are short-lived, and the pleasure of instant gratification cancels out the coupling of freedom, reason, and responsibility. As a long-term social investment, young people are now viewed as a liability, if not a pathology. No longer a symbol of hope and the future, they are viewed as a drain on the economy, and if they do not assume the role of functioning consumers, they are considered disposable.
Within the last thirty years, the United States under the reign of market fundamentalism has been transformed into a society that is more about forgetting than learning, more about consuming than producing, more about asserting private interests than democratic rights. In a society obsessed with customer satisfaction and the rapid disposability of both consumer goods and long-term attachments, American youth are not encouraged to participate in politics. Nor are they offered the help, guidance, and modes of education that cultivate the capacities for critical thinking and engaged citizenship. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, in a consumerist society, “the tyranny of the moment makes it difficult to live in the present, never mind understand society within a range of larger totalities.” Under such circumstances, according to Theodor Adorno, thinking loses its ability to point beyond itself and is reduced to mimicking existing certainties and modes of commonsense. Under such circumstances, thought cannot sustain itself and becomes short-lived, fickle, and ephemeral. If young people do not display a strong commitment to democratic politics and collective struggle, it is because they have lived through thirty years of what I have elsewhere called “a debilitating and humiliating disinvestment in their future,” especially if they are marginalized by class, ethnicity, and race. What is new about this generation of young people is that they have experienced first-hand the relentless spread of a neoliberal pedagogical apparatus with its celebration of an unbridled individualism and its near pathological disdain for community, public values, and the public good. They have been inundated by a market-driven value system that encourages a culture of competitiveness and produces a theater of cruelty that has resulted in what Bauman calls “a weakening of democratic pressures, a growing inability to act politically, [and] a massive exit from politics and from responsible citizenship.” If American students are not protesting in large numbers the ongoing intense attack on higher education and the welfare state, it may be because they have been born into a society that is tantamount to what Alex Honneth describes as “an abyss of failed sociality [one in which] their perceived suffering has still not found resonance in the public space of articulation.”
Of course, there are students in the United States who are involved in protesting the great injustices they see around them, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the corruption of American politics by casino capitalism, a permanent war economy, and the growing disinvestment in public and higher education. But they are indeed a minority, and not because they are part of what is often called a “failed generation.” On the contrary, the failure lies elsewhere and points to the psychological and social consequences of growing up under a neoliberal regime that goes to great lengths to privatize hope, derail public values, and undercut political commitments. The way society conceptualizes youth, especially poor youth of color, has changed from viewing youth as a symbol of hope and promise into a sign of trouble and threat. What is clear as a result of this “failed sociality” is that if democracy is going to deliver on its promises not only do young people need to have a passion for public values, social responsibility, and participation in society, but they also need access to those public spaces that guarantee the rights of free speech, dissent, a quality education, and critical dialogue.
At the heart of such public spaces is a formative culture that creates citizens who are critical thinkers capable of reinvigorating and revitalizing the idea of democracy as a social movement. Young people need to be educated both as a condition of autonomy and for the sustainability of democratization as an ongoing movement. Not only does a substantive democracy demand citizens capable of both self-criticism and social-criticism, but it also requires a critical formative culture in which people are provided with the knowledge and skills to be able to participate in such a society. What we see in the struggle for educational reforms in Europe and the Middle East is a larger struggle for the economic, political, and social conditions that give meaning and substance to what it means to make democracy possible. When we see fifteen-year-olds battle the established oppressive orders in the streets of Paris, Cairo, London, and Athens for a more just society, they offer a glimpse of the true potential of youth as a constructive form of trouble making. But this expression of trouble exceeds the dominant society’s eagerness to view youth as a pathology, as monsters, and as a drain on the market-driven order. Instead, trouble in this sense speaks to something more suggestive of what John and Jean Comaroff call the “productive unsettling of dominant epistemic regimes under the heat of desire, frustration, or anger.” The expectations that frame market-driven societies are losing their grip on young people who can no longer be completely seduced or controlled by the tawdry promises and failed returns of corporate dominated and authoritarian regimes.
These youth movements tell us that the social visions embedded in casino capitalism and deeply authoritarian regimes have lost both their utopian thrust and their ability to persuade and intimidate through threats, coercion, and state violence. Rejecting the terrors of the present and the modernist dreams of progress at any cost, young people have become, at least for the moment, harbingers of democracy fashioned through the desires, dreams, and hopes of a world based on the principles of equality, justice, and freedom. In doing so, they are pointing to a world order in which the future will certainly not mimic the present. What might be characterized by some commentators as an outburst of youthful utopianism reminiscent of the 1960s may in fact be the outcome of a pressing and very immediate reality.
Youth culture has proven to be global in its use of new media, music, and fashion, and increasingly in terms of its collective anger against deep-seated injustice and its willingness to struggle against such forces. It is only a matter of time before American youth recognize that they, too, are more than consumers; that market-driven society is not synonymous with democracy; that private rights are not more important than the social good; and that society’s view of them as pathological and disposable, demands a call for massive resistance in the streets, schools, and every other public space in which justice and democracy matter.
One of the most famous slogans of May 1968 was “Be realistic, demand the impossible.” The spirit of that slogan is alive once again. But if it is to become more than a slogan, young people in the United States must join their counterparts across the globe in struggling to continue to build the formative cultures, critical public spheres, social movements, and democratic institutions necessary to make that struggle possible. Thus, the most important question to be raised about American students is not why they do not engage in massive protests, but when will they begin to look beyond the norms, discourses, and rewards of the neoliberal society they have inherited? When will they begin to learn from their youthful counterparts protesting all over the globe that the first step in building a democratic society is to imagine a future different than the one that now stunts their dreams as much as their social reality? Only then can they be successful in furthering the hard and crucial task of struggling collectively to make a future based on the promise of democratic freedom happen.

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Popular media has portrayed the 2010 midterm elections as nothing short of a complete sea change.  For those with Right-leaning political views or who ardently support the Republican Party, the results are prophetic—their sixty-three seat pick up in the House (and now fifty seat majority) has been cast as a telling rebuke of liberal ideology and policy.  To Democrats, progressives, and the Left it is a defeat that is stinging but not indicative—Senate wins in California, Washington, and Delaware, and maintaining their slim overall Senate majority (now 53-46), pointing to the limitations of populist politics and “fringe” movements (i.e. the Tea Party).  However, the most telling results are actually at the state level.  The GOP gained twelve governors seats and hold a 29-19 edge overall.  The party also won 53 percent of state legislative seats and gained control of fifty-five chambers.  A different perspective highlights the significance of this achievement: the 3,890 seats Republicans gained gives them their highest total number since 1928.

There are two greater trends that loom large when examining the changing US political landscape.  First is the shifting composition of Democratic Party supporters.  Howard Dean’s “Fifty States,” Rahm Emmanuel’s big-tent, Chuck Schumer’s Wall Street gravitation, and David Plouffe’s “Audacity To Win” all represent the ideologically divergent and politically diverse strategies employed by Democratic leaders over the past decade. These strategies have yielded the party’s impressive electoral gains at every level of government since 2004.  Intended or not, the combination of all these approaches built the support network for Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential victory: a “coalition of the willing” that reflected the racial, age, cultural, and political shifts in the country’s population.  It is what writer Jeff Chang describes as the “colorization of America”—a cultural paradigm shift caused by the fact that America’s population has simultaneously and rapidly become browner and younger.  This complex synthesis of race and generation composes Barack Obama’s explicit political support; and this support is coupled with the gritty inside politics of party leaders like Rahm and Schumer, and the astute organizing vision of Dean and Plouffe, to produce the electoral gains and political will that propelled Obama to his victory over a dynasty (the Clintons) and an establishment mainstay (John McCain).

However, as a poll from the October 27, 2010 New York Times points out, the latest midterm cycle shows the Democrats losing the coalition voters that gave their party control of the House, Senate, and Presidency in 2008. The NYT-CBS poll showed the party losing their advantage among women, Roman Catholics, less affluent Americans and independents. A Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner post-election analysis showed Democrats losing their percentage of votes in the Midwest and the suburbs; and among White unmarried women, Whites not in college, White men not in college, and independents.

This troubling fissure is exacerbated by a second trend:  the failure of the Democratic Party to connect its policy objectives to more abstract issues of equality and justice.  Michael Tomasky’s New York Review of Books essay “The Elections: How Bad for Democrats?” describes how this disjuncture operates.

Republicans routinely speak in broad themes and tend to blur the details, while Democrats typically ignore broad themes and focus on details. Republicans, for example, speak constantly of “liberty” and “freedom” and couch practically all their initiatives—tax cuts, deregulation, and so forth—within these large categories. Democrats, on the other hand, talk more about specific programs and policies and steer clear of big themes.

What Democrats have typically not done well since Reagan’s time is connect their policies to their larger beliefs.

After the 2008 elections and leading up to these midterms the GOP platform had been clear: smaller government; tax cuts; and reduced spending through cuts to social welfare programs.  This generalization cuts across the party, from moderates to Tea Party loyalists.  In following Tomasky’s analysis, the deductive explanation of the 2010 results is that the country overwhelmingly supports Republican themes—the caveat this time being the particular policies advocated by the Tea Party.  However ambiguous they may be (i.e. “cut the budget”), they resound clearly in their practical manifestation: repeal the 2009 health care act and prevent the inclusion of the public option as a price control mechanism; not increasing taxes at the federal or state level; loosening the regulations on businesses, etc.

While we now know who will be leading these changes, many questions remain.  The United States has so far not experienced any significant retrenchment or austerity as a policy response, certainly not at the federal level, nor at the level or scope that is currently being anticipated. The country’s recent turn from Keynesian deficit-spending to “quantitative easing” is not, and should not, be read as just a fleeting populist sentiment that will phase out.  In many ways the turn is reflective of an intellectual hegemony that has been steadily built for almost three decades by the likes of Charles Murray, Thomas Sowell, and the corresponding conservative and right-leaning think tanks; and a political leadership spurred not only by the conventional “Reaganites,” but by ardent, longstanding political operatives such as libertarian Ron Paul (who was labeled the Tea Party’s “brain” and “intellectual godfather” in a recent profile in The Atlantic.

The realization that these ideas have a strong possibility of being widely implemented raise serious concerns about what kinds of outcomes they will produce. Who, for instance, will these policies impact and what will be the effects of the legislative changes they suggest might happen.  It is my analysis that these policies will detrimentally impact several vulnerable

groups stretching across the boundaries of race, ethnicity, geographic location, sexuality, gender, and income. The groups most harmed by these changes will no doubt include he formerly incarcerated; rural populations; the LGBTQ community; the working class, working poor, and those in poverty; and undocumented immigrants. These groups represent a population that intersects Chang’s multi-cultural paradigm; the traditional Democratic base post the Great Depression and the cultural and social movements of the 1960s; and the broad coalition of 2008 Obama supporters.  But what sectors of society, what part of the American system, will be most powerfully hurt by these changes?  The public higher education system is the place to look.

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The topic of public education has become an increasingly important part of national political and policy discussions.  Much of this conversation has been centered on the issue of K-12 education, as fierce arguments over charter schools, teachers’ unions, and standardized testing have made their way into the public conversation. Documentaries such as Waiting for Superman, and major philanthropic investments by several foundations (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) and individuals (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million dollar gift to the Newark Public School system) have increased the private sector’s participation and unquestionably raised public awareness.  Legislation such as No Child Left Behind and grants like the recent Race to the Top competition have greatly politicized educational policy..  Yet in April the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported that preliminary budget proposals for 2011 showed governors from twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia proposing cuts to K-12 and Early Education. By November, that number had grown to thirty-four states. These proposed cuts include Georgia, which is cutting $112 million from programs intended to assist closing the gap in funding between wealthier and poorer school district, and Arizona, which is eliminating preschool for 4,328 children.

The looming crisis for public higher education appears like it will be even worse.  Forty-three states have imposed cuts to higher education and many of those measures adversely impact vulnerable and underrepresented populations: the California system has raised tuition by 40% since the middle of the 2009-2010 school year; Florida’s eleven public universities will raise tuition by 15 percent for the 2010-11 academic year; and Michigan reduced student financial aid by $135 million (over 61 percent), including decreases of 44 percent in competitive scholarships and 44% in tuition grants..

Strikingly, these cuts were decided on before the midterm wave of fiscally conservative policymakers swept state legislatures across the country.  Academic research has shown that at the state-level, the ideology and political activity of the governor’s office strongly influences the state’s education policy. Even more worrisome is the fact that several governors who supported increasing access to higher education are leaving office.  Ohio’s Ted Strickland (defeated by Republican candidate John Kasich) and New Mexico’s Bill Richardson (who reached his term limit) were fierce advocates for conceptualizing state public education and college readiness as a “P-16” system (from preschool to college graduation).  In a state known for its “blue dog” elected officials and overall socially moderate electorate, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm was known during her two-terms as a vociferous defender of poor and low-income students at the state’s public colleges and universities. With the loss of Granholm, who also left because of term limits, the state’s legislature has already successfully repealed many of her financial aid, grant, and scholarship policies.

Republicans also made key gubernatorial gains in border states, with Jan Brewer (R-AZ) and Rick Perry (R-TX) reelected and Susana Martinez winning the seat for the party in New Mexico.  Each wins here is critical considering these states’ contentious histories on issues like affirmative action in college admissions (specifically Texas), and their role in the contentious political battles around immigration (especially in light of Brewer’s role in Arizona’s SB1070 immigration law which caused a national stir this summer).  California, another important border state, did see Democrats with progressive immigration stances win six critical state offices (including Governor, Secretary of State, and Attorney General); as well as hold in the Senate with Barbara Boxer defeating  Carly Fiorina.  However, California’s deep fiscal problems and troublesome higher education decisions over the past eighteen months make forecasting the state’s political landscape difficult. Regardless, these elected officials and the political climate of these states will be key as debate over the DREAM Act continues in Congress.

Along with these external issues, public higher education faces a number of important internal challenges.  Retention and completion remain a problem at many public schools, for instance, where the time to completion for most students is longer,, and the subsequent financial strain placed on them and their institutions is becoming increasingly troubling for the system.  Community colleges are also facing the strain of rising enrollments, driven often by jobless adults looking to retrain themselves and acquire new skills in an increasingly competitive market.  Community colleges, like the state universities, are also facing several complex and difficult economic circumstances. The Obama administration, for instance, is only providing $2 billion in competitive grants through the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 instead of the previously promised $20 billion.  And even as they face increasing political scrutiny from elected officials, and endure public scorn from liberals, the for-profit college sector continues to become a critical player in higher education–emblematic of this is the fact that the University of Phoenix has, over the past two years, graduated more Black students than any Historically Black College and University.

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The politics are turbulent and safe landing is uncertain.  In many ways what CUNY has come to stand for and the function it has come to serve is indicative of the test that lies ahead for public higher education.  The idea of an inclusive and functioning democracy, driven by increased access to higher education is being fundamentally challenged by the new political paradigm. With the federal government essentially underwriting the cost of college for low-income students who receive Pell Grants and subsidized loans, many commentators are predicting a significant scaling back of college enrollment. The impending budget cuts coupled with this political climate form a powerful interest group that could severely limit access to higher education, for all but the most wealthy.

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Not one to shy away from controversy, the outspoken and acerbic political cartoonist Ted Rall (best known for his take down of 9/11 widows and football-playing war heroes) has recently published a new book, Anti-American Manifesto with Seven Stories Press, in which he urges the reader to throw off the chains of pacifism and once again take up the difficult discussion of violence as a political tool. Intrigued by the boldness and chutzpah of this gesture, the GC Advocate sat down with Rall to talk a little bit about the complications and possibilities implicit in this argument.

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Advocate: So, Ted, let’s jump right into it. In your new book you explicitly advocate the use of revolutionary violence. It’s hard to get any more radical than that and I can’t imagine the decision to write such a book was an easy one to make. Indeed, in conversations with friends about the book I’ve found that even the mention of revolutionary violence is almost universally greeted with disdain, shock, or disbelief. I am really interested in how you came to this decision to write the book, the events or ideas that led you to this argument, and why you felt compelled to write this book now?

Ted Rall: Well, it was a very difficult decision, from a career standpoint as well as from the standpoint of being a simple American citizen. As a student of history I am well aware of the fact that revolution is dangerous and violent and brutal and can make things worse before they make things better, so it’s not a decision to be taken lightly. I want to be very clear that even though the book is a call to arms and a call to get rid of the current government, and it does definitely defend the use of violence (I would say that there is no such thing as non-violent revolution; no radical change has ever taken place without violence or the credible threat of violence), but I think there is a tendency to sensationalize the violent aspect of the book. Most revolutionary activity is inherently non-violent actually. It’s just that violence is part of the revolutionist’s toolbox; it has to be, otherwise there is no way to credibly remove the state. The rich and the powerful don’t give up wealth and power voluntarily so you can’t fight it nonviolently without effectively tying one hand behind your back.

In terms of the decision to write the book I kind of followed a simple, logical process, which is to ask myself and many other people whether there was any possibility that this system, the Democrats and the Republicans and the corporatist capitalist system that they support, could or would address any of the really serious pressing problems that are faced by the Unites States today—whether those are income inequality or the environment and climate change, or skyrocketing deficits, or war and militarism, or healthcare—and I don’t think so. We are talking about a government that can’t even get it together enough to improve the efficiency of automobiles. I mean we’re talking about a government that passes a health care reform plan that actually makes health care more expensive and harder to obtain for most Americans, so how are they going to provide socialized health care. We are talking about a democratic president who issues an executive order granting himself the right to assassinate American citizens, so how is that president going to increase personal freedoms and civil rights and so on. I am forty-seven years old, I have seen a constant downward trajectory and I came to the conclusion more in sorrow than in anger that the system had become unreformable. It was one particular event however that proved it perfectly for me: the bank bailouts. When Obama decided to continue them in November of 2008, the process that Bush had begun in September and October of 2008, I knew that the system was unreformable, because we are talking about using an economic crisis that called for jobs creation as an excuse for lining the pockets of major corporations; in other words, business as usual. Yet the situation was anything but usual, it was the full blown collapse of the of the global economic system and the only solution to keep political stability going was massive job creation stimulated by the government. But they did not and could not and would not do that. When Obama refused to be the new FDR I knew that, Obama being about the best most progressive, smartest president we were gonna get out of this system, I knew that the time had arrived to call for revolution. Now I wish that other people were doing it, I wish that I could join someone else’s movement. I don’t want to stick my neck out; it’s not fun to attract all of this heat, but no one else is doing it. There’s no Left whatsoever in the United States. All there is is wimpy liberals. So, I wrote this book in order to start a conversation. This is not revolution for dummies, this is not a how-to guide, this is not the anarchists’ cookbook. If you are picking this up looking for how to overthrow the US government buy another book; this is not that book. This is a book that creates the space to have a discussion that is just not even part of American politics. American politics occurs strictly between the Ds and the Rs. We don’t even talk about the Greens and the Libertarians, much less the possibility of getting rid of the system entirely.

Advocate: Along those same lines, how has your life changed since the publication of the book? What’s the last month been like for Ted Rall? What have you learned about America, particularly concerning the subject of this book?

TR: I guess many things did not come as a surprise. The fact that the media and the political system are so deeply entrenched and unwilling to consider actual change came as no surprise. The fact that there are many very reactionary, hateful people who defend the status quo no matter what came as no surprise either. But what did come as a surprise were the huge crowds that came out to my book signings, which indicated to me that there is a thirst for talking about these sorts of options. Many, many people have been over the system for a long time, but that conversation doesn’t take place, so I provided a forum for that kind of dialogue to happen. What I’ve learned, and it’s kind of what I suspected, is that there are a lot of people out there like me. I wouldn’t have written the book if I thought I was alone. I don’t think I’m such a unique thinker. A lot of people can look at the same set of circumstances and draw similar conclusions, and they have. So in terms of how my life has changed, I mean, it hasn’t really, except for being very, very busy doing interviews, but that’s about it.

Advocate: One of the claims that you make in your book, and one that I think many Leftists would agree with, is that the Left in America has become pacified to the point of complete ineffectiveness. Why do you think this is? What has changed and how can the Left get its “groove” back as it were?

TR: I wish I knew the answer to the first question. This process started when I was a kid, so in a sense I’ve been living with it my whole life. I’ve never seen what a real Left looks like, but I’ve read about it in books, and I’ve seen it in movies. I don’t know what happened to the Black Panthers and the New Left and SDS and all that. But from what I’ve read, the baby-boomers who fought these battles were exhausted by the end of the late sixties and the early seventies. The drugs and the violence and the failure to get anywhere against the war in Vietnam just wore them out. The assassination squads led by COINTELPRO, and all the strikes of ’68 having no real result just brought them to the point of being tired. And there was no Left at all, even a lame Left in the 1970s, and when opposition started to coalesce it was a whole new generation, it was my generation, generation X, in the eighties against Reagan, and I remember from that time we didn’t know what to do. The country had turned so far to the right we didn’t have the confidence of our convictions. We didn’t feel like if we led the charge there would be anyone there to follow us. So without role models and without any sense of a forward momentum people just got lost.

In terms of the militant pacifism, that is something that really mystifies me because a lot of people will talk about Nelson Mandela, for instance, and say “oh his peaceful example…” Well, he might have a calm tone, but he shot a cop! That’s how he ended up in prison in the first place. If I remember right, he shot a cop while the guy was directing traffic, so it’s not like he was a pacifist by any means. The ANC was very violent and they were considered a very radical communist organization at the time, so I don’t know. In terms of how the Left can get its groove back, well, my book doesn’t explain that either. It’s a call for people to be strong. But how to organize people to do that, I don’t know. There’s going to need to be revolutionary programs, there is going to need to be charismatic leaders, there is going to need to be propaganda films and political parties to start this process of radicalizing not just people’s politics, but their tone. It’s very frustrating for me to see the self-confidence that the Right has and not understand why the Left doesn’t get that this is how we need to be too. I mean, we are right. They’ve been proven wrong about everything, so why are we so wimpy? We are trying to save the world here and yet we’re worried about hurting people’s feelings. I don’t get it at all.

Advocate: It seems to me like one way of getting that groove back is precisely the threat of violence. How exactly would the use of violence by groups on the Left change the political landscape in America? Wouldn’t the use of violence, as several people have suggested to me, merely delegitimize any group that used it and alienate potential allies?

TR: That is an argument, you know. I think what would really happen if there were a real Left is, of course, that there would be numerous stripes of the Left, some more radical than others. When violence has been used it can be very inspiring. For instance when ELF burned down those houses in Washington State on a development, or when they burned down a ski lodge in Aspen, or when they burned SUVs at a car dealership, I remember thinking: that’s funny. I hate those SUVs, I hate suburban sprawl. There are twenty million vacant homes in the United States, why are we still building anything? And you see the ineffectiveness of non-violent approaches. You go to city council meetings, you argue against a development, but the fix is in, everyone’s been paid off. And of course it happens anyway. Did these guys stop the process of sprawl? No. But they got a piece of these guys. They bugged them. They caused them problems. It just seems to me that all of the power is going from corporations and from the Right and coming down like a fist on the Left and on ordinary people. And every now and then when you get to bite these guys back it makes you feel better.

In terms of the danger of turning off the moderates, well, that’s true; that is always a danger, and in fact, if the Left is violent and the government and the Right do not respond with violence then that would not work. What the Left would have to count on is the extremely violent and hostile nature of the system itself; that they would overreact and expose themselves as the monsters that they are. That’s the purpose of any kind of violent act. Like 9/11. If the Unites States had not responded violently and had used that as an opportunity to open up dialogue with the Islamic world, it would have been counterproductive to al Qaeda, but it was a huge victory for al Qaeda precisely because the United States responded with extreme violence, and that radicalized moderates. I think violence only works if it provokes bigger violence from the state, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that it probably would.
Advocate: This leads me to my next question, actually, which is about the idea of complete revolution. Your book, as far as I can tell, argues for complete and total overthrow of the United States government. Aren’t there other less drastic tactics that might produce revolutionary change, or is this the only option?

Look, I can’t predict the future. It would be great if it were possible to reform the system and get some substantial change out of the existing system simply because it would be cheaper and easier in terms of blood and money—that would be preferable. Revolution should always be the last resort. But it’s hard for me to imagine right now, as things stand, because the system has been so incredibly resistant to any kind of reform in recent years. It’s all about give backs, it’s all about push backs. “We’re going to fire you, we’re going to take away your rights. After we make you poor we will make it impossible for you to declare bankruptcy.” It’s just relentless, and that attitude of “we will not compromise, we will not be reasonable” just leads me to believe that you can’t negotiate with these people. But you never know.

Advocate: In the book you also argue that revolution is necessary in large part because the United States is already on its way to collapse. Can you talk more about that? How do you see that happening and when do you think it will happen?

TR: There are so many possible ways that collapse could ensue that it is impossible for me to tell you how it will go down. I don’t know if it’s going to be environmental collapse that sparks food shortages and food riots. I couldn’t tell you if it will be simple economic collapse because the government can no longer issue debt. I can’t tell you whether it will be the complete collapse of the consumer economy because of high unemployment and the inability of people to spend money. I don’t know if it will be blowback from one of America’s countless wars of aggression. All I can say is it just feels incredibly unsustainable and since the collapse probably is coming sooner rather than later, the question is what we should do about it. Should we just let it happen, go the way of the Soviet Union in the early nineties and let the country tank the way Russia did in the nineties? Or do we act and step in and replace the system with something that works better now?

Advocate: In your book you are extremely, how can I put it, reticent about proposing any kind of replacement system…

TR: Yeah, that’s the major criticism of the book. People don’t like that. They want to be told exactly where I’m going to take them, and the answer is: I’m not taking them anywhere! It’s up to them. It’s up to others. This book is already 280 pages; it’s too long really for a manifesto as it is, and it’s actually kind of ridiculous to be in a situation where you have to write a book like this, because in any other country it’s a given that if the government doesn’t work you can overthrow it. And it’s only in the United States that we have such childish politics that the idea of bringing up revolution as an option is somehow shocking or radical. In a way it’s almost embarrassing to have to write this thing.

But the next question is, obviously, what does the new government look like, what does the new regime look like? And I have my ideas about that and I hint at them and I am working on a book now that’s a sequel to this that will lay out what I think should happen next: a transition to Socialism. But like I wrote in the book, what I think really doesn’t matter. I am one of three hundred million people; I am not special. I am not smarter or dumber than anyone else. I am just a guy, and I have my opinions and I will put them forward. But what needs to happen is for us to start thinking outside of this box, get rid of this system, and have a national conversation that involves a struggle over what comes next. Are we going to have a left wing government, a right wing government, something else, who knows? But we need to have that talk. I felt that if I laid this out as a purely left wing book that it would, first of all, needlessly eliminate potential allies on the right, and secondly, it was kind of beside the point. I viewed it as becoming a giant distraction. As it is people on the right would love that because they look at my politics and they say that Ted Rall’s book calls for left wing revolution, but it doesn’t. It just calls for revolution. I didn’t put it in the book, because I wanted to make the case for revolution outside of the construct of ideology, because it is impossible to predict what’s going to come next.

Advocate: Speaking of the Left: in your book you are pretty harsh on some very well liked and admired figures on the Left. Michael Moore, for instance, and the Yes Men, whom I think are really hilarious…

TR: They are hilarious..

Advocate: So, what’s up with that? What’s the problem with what they do? Aren’t they allies in your cause?

TR: I would say the reason I picked them is because they are so good. They are the best that the official American Left has to offer, in the same way that Obama is the best, in terms of the mainstream political system, that the system has to offer. Michael Moore has got this immense audience of tens of millions of people, his movies can open up in hundreds of theatres, he can talk about things that no one else can talk about, he’s got this great Midwestern folksy sensibility, he has a gentle delivery; he’s really kind of a genius. And his TV show was even better than his movies I think. And the Yes Men are great too. And I am sure you’re asking yourself, ok what are you talking about, why are you down on these guys so much, and it’s because they don’t go there. Like Jon Stewart and Colbert, this kind of dissent validates the official system by saying “look at the American political system; it’s so big and open minded that it even allows a guy like Michael Moore or the Yes Men or John Stewart to operate.” And the implication is, it’s not that bad. But you notice that they marginalize people who actually call for radical change, like Howard Zinn or Ralph Nader. Those people are not allowed to get their message out. So you’re allowed to go up to the edge of ridiculing, but you can’t call for real change; all you can do is poke gentle fun, or not so gentle fun, but it’s got to be all in fun. You can’t call for the actual system to be replaced, and that was really the argument I was trying to make there.

Advocate: Do you feel like you have been marginalized in that way?

TR: Absolutely, sure. And that was before I wrote this book even. The country lurched to the right significantly in 2001 and has not come back at all, and everybody I know who is, like me, a Lefty cartoonist, has been savaged by the decline in print and the changing political climate. But I don’t view it as a personal thing; I take it for granted. I guess I could be a milquetoast liberal and have a few more client newspapers, but what would be the fun of that? The story that I’m trying to write about my own life is about taking chances and doing what I think is right, not just trying to put a few extra bucks into my 401K.

Advocate: World events seem to be catching up with the book. Witness just the recent student protests in London, or the news that Obama’s planned spending and entitlement cuts have angered both the liberal left and the radical right. Do you see events like these as somehow echoing or speaking to what you talk about in the book? Is the revolution already underway, and if so, how do we get these movements to coalesce.

TR: The revolution is not underway, but certainly the revolutionary climate is upon us. And the Europeans seem to be, as usual, setting the standard for what needs to be done. They are used to this, they know about this and they are probably going to go first, but Americans are incredibly docile and they’re going to have to stop shooting each other at the mall and start aiming their rage at the rich and the powerful who deserve it.

Advocate: Lastly, I wanted to give you the opportunity to respond in print, if you like, to a commentary by Fox News anchor Greg Gutfeld, who called you a “bitter cartoonist” and said that “advocating phony revolution is where idiots like Ted start and end.” He also argued that you would come after him swinging your NPR tote bag.
TR: I think that is funny. I’ve read a lot of those right wing blogs where they just sort of assume that all Lefties are effeminate and unable to stand up and fight, and they make it real personal, like “I would beat you down; you’d be carrying your yoga mat” or whatever. It’s so funny that they think that is how politics are going to play out, but I am paying the price, in a way, for forty years of wussie Lefties. They are not afraid of us; they think that we are a bunch of wimps, that at the first sign of a fight we are going to run away like little girls. I don’t blame them for thinking that because that is what the American Left is. I think everyone can strive to be braver but I doubt too many of them would do as well as me and two other Leftie cartoonists: Matt Bors and Steven Cloud who just came back from Afghanistan in August. We were there for a month and we lived with locals, unembeded, no contacts with the military, no guards, just us, low key, and we traveled all over the country, we went to Taliban areas and we stayed at Taliban hotels…I’d like to see those guys, those armchair warriors do what we did and see how they come out of it.

In terms of Mr. Gutfeld calling me a “bitter cartoonist,” well, guilty as charged. All good political cartoonists are bitter about injustice and stupidity and I am guilty and I plead guilty. In terms of whether it’s a phony revolution or not, well, there is no revolution at all, so it can’t really be phony, but I certainly would like to see a real one.

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“The iconoclasm need not be loud and messy.”

According to Michelle Latiolais, a former student of John Williams at the University of Denver where he taught for many years, this was a recurring bit of advice that Williams gave to his creative writing students.  Latiolais wrote about this in her introduction to another of Williams’s fine novels, Butcher’s Crossing.  Both Butcher’s Crossing and Stoner were recently published through the New York Review of Books Classics series which has brought back into circulation several titles that deserve to be revisited.  The cover designs in this series are all beautifully done as well, and the handsome cover of Stoner features a Thomas Eakins painting that perfectly fits the somber, contemplative mood of the novel.

(For the record, this John Williams is not to be confused with “John A. Williams” the African-American novelist and author of The Man Who Cried I Am.)

Stoner is among the most beautifully written of all the academic novels I’ve read.  In Stoner John Williams certainly fulfilled the principles that he taught to his own students.  The novel was first published in 1965, and I have come to think of it as a novel of “The 1960s”, but one that took a different angle on the social upheaval of that time.  While you can turn to Ginsburg or Burroughs for the noise and messiness, Williams provides a nuanced look at some of the social background that produced this rebellion: the conformity of middle-class respectability, the stifling norms of gender and sexuality, the worship of wealth and finance, the violence and death of perpetual wars.  It isn’t a book that aims to be loudly political. While all those themes are present in Stoner in various forms, they are all tucked away into a simple, powerful, and resonant tale about the life and career of a simple Missouri farm boy who becomes an English professor.

On the first page of the novel John Williams gives us a biographical blurb on Stoner that is as good a summary of the novel as any reviewer could write:

“William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses. When he died his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University library. This manuscript may still be found in the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: ‘Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues.’”

That is his core story, but there’s so much more.  Stoner is born into a poor farming family in Booneville, Missouri.  He goes off to college with the idea that he will study agriculture and bring that knowledge back to the family farm.  Instead he discovers a passion for medieval English literature, and when his advisor presents him with an opportunity to teach some courses and pursue his Ph.D., Stoner finds himself on his way to career in academia.

In his personal life, Stoner ends up married to Edith, a socially awkward young society girl born into a family of “means” in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father is a pompous man of the financial industry, and let’s just say 1929 was not kind to him and his family.  Edith has been cultivated by her parents to be little more than ornamentation for some wealthy husband who will give her the comfortably dull life that she is accustomed to.  Despite the fact that he is not well off, Edith senses some kind of freedom in marrying Stoner (though she is unable to articulate it) and decides to accept his proposal.  The social and sexual awkwardness between them is apparent throughout their entire marriage, from their very first days together on through the later years as they grow into little more than emotionally distant roommates raising a young daughter together.

The most powerful section in the novel comes when Stoner falls into an affair with Katherine Driscoll, a graduate student who takes one of his seminars.  Driscoll is younger than Stoner, but is a world wise and experienced woman in her own right.  This could easily be dismissed as just another in the long line of sordid affairs portrayed in academic fictions (and nearly any fictional work involving heterosexual middle aged men.)  At one point Stoner acknowledges that his own situation has devolved into just such a cliché and in a moment of despair he sees himself as, “a pitiable fellow going into his middle age, misunderstood by his wife, seeking to renew his youth, taking up with a girl years younger than himself, awkwardly and apishly reaching for the youth he could not have, a fatuous, garishly got-up clown at whom the world laughed out of discomfort, pity and contempt.”

Though Stoner and Driscoll’s relationship is as innocent and sincere as extra-marital relations come, they run aground of the morality of the college community.  When a rival professor catches wind of their relationship he uses it as ammunition against Stoner.  Eventually his meddling forces Stoner and Driscoll to make a difficult decision about their relationship.

The language of the novel is quite beautiful and I could single out any number of passages that seem so precise and resonant in describing physical or emotional details in the story. I’ve seen more than one review compare it to Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, another gracefully written academic novel full of longing and desire.  One of the passages that stands out is when Stoner has just buried his parents and ponders the fleeting insignificance of the meager agrarian lives that they led:

“He thought of the cost exacted, year after year, by the soil; and it remained as it had been – a little more barren, perhaps, a little more frugal of increase.  Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed.  Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them.  Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh, and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances.  And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.”

As far as the academic world goes, Stoner subtly portrays some of the mundane activities of the academic life in a way few other novels accomplish, and it does so in an engaging style that doesn’t alienate the non-academic reader.  That said, one character who academics will certainly recognize is Charles Walker a graduate student in one of Stoner’s seminars.  Walker is one of those students who never lets the fact that he is unprepared for class keep him from participating in the discussions anyway.  In one particularly scandalous scene Walker is supposed to be presenting a paper of his own, but instead he improvises his presentation by bashing another student’s paper.  Now much ink has been spilled over the way that some theory junkies in literary studies rely on their pre-fabricated psychoanalysis or post-structural jargon and apply the same dull terms to whatever literary work they happen to be talking about.  Though “theory” came later, Williams shows us that the academic bullshitter was not invented in the 1980s and 1990s.  When Stoner is drafted to sit in on Walker’s orals committee he not only takes the shoddy student down a peg, he also provides a rather useful summary of the basic things that one should know as a scholar of early English literature. I think the best academic novels manage to be pedagogical in this way, by not only dramatizing the academic life, but also teaching something about the disciplines depicted in the work.

It’s no secret we are in a period of uncertainty about the future of the novel (or any other long forms of writing for that matter).  I think of novels like Stoner whenever I hear someone crowing about how many hundreds of books they just downloaded on their snazzy new Kindle.  (I’m posting this on a blog, so obviously I’m no Luddite.)  For me, the worst part of these technological changes is the brazenly arrogant attitude some people seem to take toward the amount of toil, effort and care that goes into producing just one of the novel titles that these technocrats so callously flip through in their fancy gadgets. It seems that the owners of e-readers always seem to brag about how many books they have accumulated on the device before they talk in detail about any particular one that they have read.  Stoner strikes me as the kind of finely tuned, elegant writing that we will never see again in this fast, cheap and out-of-control media environment.  Who has the patience to write such novels?  Who has the patience to read them?  Or even read about them?  I love novels like Stoner because they remind me of the value of the novel, the pleasures of reading the great ones over and over, and the ability of the novel to capture unique aspects of humanity that can only be articulated by the hand of a diligent, careful observer of the human condition.  A narrative artist like Williams can give shape and form to that confusing jumble of accumulated consequences and decisions that we call life.  I just hope that we can find strategies to preserve and cultivate this type of art, and this type of contemplation, somewhere inside or outside of this digital hive.

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10 More Academic Films

In a previous GC Advocate article I presented my list of Top 10 academic films.  I received some insightful feedback from various people who read the list.  (And I heard from a couple of friends who chastised me for including John Singleton’s Higher Learning.)

To recap:  I am interested in the academic film as an extension of the “academic novel.”  Several of the works listed below were adapted from such novels.  As the critic John Lyons simply put it in his 1962 critical study, The College Novel in America:  “I consider a novel of academic life one in which higher education is treated with seriousness and the main characters are students or professors.”  Extending this basic concept to film, my objective here is to find works that seriously examine the meaning of higher education in some way. (And I do believe that humor is certainly a valid way to examine higher education.)

Considering the literary form of the novel, it comes as no surprise that so many academic novels are set in English departments and deal with literature professors.  And considering that several films have been adapted from this pool of academic novels, that dominance extends into academic films.   I’ve tried to identify a few more films outside of literature, and I’m always on the lookout for more.   Apparently David Cronenberg is at work on an adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s As She Climbed Across the Table, a novel about an academic physicist, so there is some hope on the horizon.

Limiting my previous list to 10 films meant excluding a number of other worthy examples in this genre.  So here are some brief comments on 10 more academic films I considered for the previous article.  Just the for the fun of it I’m ranking these as well, from 20 to 11.   I am also including a short list of several other notable films that fit the criteria, though this is certainly not a comprehensive list.  If anyone has any more suggestions, we’d love to read your comments.

20. Possession (2002) –  This film is based on the novel by A.S. Byatt. The director Neil LaBute is known for some appallingly awful male characters, but the closest we get to that here is the faint whiff of crass Americanism in the character of Roland Mitchell (Aaron Eckhart), a literary scholar from the U.S. studying in England on a fellowship.  The film follows the story of Mitchell and British literary scholar Maud Bailey (Paltrow) as they research a romance between two fictional Victorian era poets.  Rarely has any film dealt with the intricacies of literary scholarship at this level of detail, (though, yes, all the sleuthing is a tad exaggerated). The period setting and costumes in the overlapping historical narrative were quite lovely.  That said, I imagine this film is precisely the kind of dry, pretentious exercise that most people have in mind when I tell them that I’m interested in films about higher education.  Still, this is just too much of an academic film to dismiss entirely.  Unfortunately the rich material in Byatt’s novel just did not seem to transfer well to the screen.

19. The Squid and the Whale (2005) – Directed  by Noah Baumbach (who has made a name for himself chronicling the lives of discontented yuppie intellectuals)  The Squid and the Whale is a family drama centered on a couple of PhDs raising a family in Brooklyn’s Park Slope in the 1980s.  Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels) is a pompous literature professor and novelist who is oblivious to the fact that his literary star is rapidly fading.  His wife Joan (Laura Linney) is growing tired of his cantankerous attitude, and has literary aspirations of her own.  Their two young sons (Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline) get caught up in the mix of their divorce, start acting out in various ways, and are forced to accept that their father may be more of an intellectual bully and manipulator than they realized.  As for the academic content, there’s a storyline where Bernard takes up with a young female graduate student.  His literary opinions also make for some biting moments of dry humor (in one dinner table conversation he dismisses A Tale of Two Cities as “minor Dickens”).  However, much of the story centers on the emotional family drama which is why, as much as I like it, I rank this one lower than other films that deal directly with higher education.  Still I find it a wonderful film otherwise, especially if you happen to be familiar with this particular neighborhood and its literary denizens.

18. A Single Man (2009) – Based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood,  the film was directed by fashion designer Tom Ford and  it certainly has its share of pretty people, in pretty clothes, in pretty settings.  However the film also calls attention to the homophobic political climate of the 1950s and 60s.  Isherwood’s ironic title is mean to invoke the lack of social validity for homosexual relationships during that time.   The main character, George (Colin Firth), is a British professor of literature teaching in Los Angeles in 1962, but he is far from a single man.  He has in fact just lost his partner of 16 years in an automobile accident, but he is not even allowed to attend the funeral. (It’s for “family only” a sympathetic relative of his partner explains to him over the phone.)  Claude Summers at glbtq.com has written an extensive and insightful article comparing the Isherwood novel with the film adaptation. As Summers put it:  “If the film lacks the political edge and spiritual profundity of Isherwood’s novel, it compensates to some extent for these failings by its intense feeling, as well as its sensual and elegant style.”

17. Wonder Boys (2000) – Adapted from Michael Chabon’s novel of the same name, Wonder Boys features Michael Douglas as Grady Tripp, a pot-smoking creative writing professor and novelist at a university in Pittsburgh who has been working on an interminable novel for seven years and is dealing with a recent divorce.  Two of his students are James Leer (Tobey Maguire), a socially awkward young writer who is obsessed with the details of celebrity suicides, and Hannah Green (Katie Holmes) who is infatuated with Tripp. The main set piece for the film is the university’s annual WordFest, a literary event that brings publishers and literary agents, among others, to the campus.  The cinematography is striking, featuring lovely gothic campus scenes in the winter.   I have not yet read the novel version, but the film seems to work well on its own as an entertaining satire of the obnoxious eccentricity one sometimes finds among the students and professors in the nation’s MFA programs.

16. Tenure (2009) –  This film came out in 2009 but apparently didn’t get much of a theatrical release.  It features Luke Wilson in the role of Charlie Thurber, a young English professor up for tenure review at the fictional Gray College.  Unfortunately for him he has spent his time becoming an engaging and effective teacher rather than padding his resume with boring peer-reviewed journal articles. The film is far from an accurate representation of how the tenure process actually works, but its heart is in the right place. It humorously addresses a very real and serious issue in academia: that devoted teaching is often valued less than academic stardom.  Among the funniest bits in the film is the storyline with Thurber’s best friend (played by Jay Hadley), a wacky anthropology professor who spends his time combing the woods for evidence of the elusive Sasquatch.  The online reviews of the film are middling, which might scare people off. And yes the film indulges in romantic comedy clichés (Gretchen Mol plays the hot young professor from Yale who is hired to replace Thurber, and they fall in love.)  Still, I think the film has spirit and portrays the academic life with humor, thoughtfulness and a refreshing lack of pretention.

15. Disgrace (2008) – Here is another novel adaptation, this one based on J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.  John Malkovich plays white South African literature professor David Lurie.  Lurie is a literary scholar in his soul, and a lover of Wordsworth and Byron, but in a corporatized higher education system that has become dismissive of anything but the most immediately marketable subjects he is relegated to teaching dull “communications” classes to disinterested students.  (Honestly, I cannot recall how well that distinction is driven home in the film, but it certainly resonated in the novel.)  The story begins with an ill-advised relationship between Lurie and a “coloured” female student, a scandal which forces Lurie out of his teaching post.  He leaves Johannesburg to visit his daughter Lucy in the countryside where they end up being the victims of an unrelated brutal attack by three young black men.  The attack and Lucy’s complicated response to it, which is contextualized in the novel, really needed more historical-political background than the medium of film could allow. But otherwise it is a competent, well-paced adaptation of the novel, and a haunting and resonant piece of work on its own.

14. Educating Rita (1983) – In this film Michael Caine plays Frank Bryant, an apathetic and alcoholic literature professor who tutors Rita (Julie Walters) a spunky 26 year old working class student taking Open University courses. (The British equivalent of our adult education programs here).  In this Pygmalion inspired screenplay Bryant takes a particular interest in Rita and introduces her to the world of literature and ideas.  As Rita takes to her literary interests she finds that her newly discovered intellectual curiosity unexpectedly drives a wedge between herself and the working class community she came from.  At the same time she does not feel at home in the privileged world of the academy either.   The film is a wonderful representation of a student’s evolving consciousness and self-confidence, and is ultimately a compelling story about the kind of liberating self discovery that can come through an education in the humanities, particularly among students for whom such high-minded pursuits are considered materially “impractical.”

13. Something the Lord Made (2004) –  As you may have noticed, most of these films are about the humanities (particularly English professors) but here is a great academic film that deals with the sciences. This HBO film tells the story of Viven Thomas (wonderfully portrayed by Mos Def), a black surgical assistant who assisted Dr. Alfred Blalock (Alan Rickman) in developing an open heart procedure to cure “Blue Baby Syndrome.”  Much of the film takes place in university research hospitals, at Vanderbilt University where Blalock first hired Thomas, and then later at Johns Hopkins University. Though he possessed a rare gift as a surgeon and was a self-taught  medical researcher, Viven Thomas was never able to afford to pursue his own medical degree. (The Depression of the 1930s exacerbated his financial troubles.)  Thomas was hired and paid under the title of a janitor even though the work that he did for Blalock was that of a research assistant. The film subtly portrays the institutional and cultural racism of its time, such as one scene in the film when Thomas and a black friend are walking down a sidewalk chatting, casually stop their conversation to step aside and let white couples pass, then pick the conversation back up again without missing a beat.  That Thomas did all this groundbreaking research while working in university hospitals where he was not even allowed to walk through the front door is just one of the many stories of injustice and institutional discrimination faced by African-Americans in the Jim Crow era.

12. Back to School (1986) – Rodney Dangerfield stars in this film as the buffoonish street-wise millionaire Thornton Melon, proprietor of a successful chain of “Tall and Fat” stores. To encourage his son Jason (Keith Gordon) to go to college and acquire the formal education he never had, Melon decides to enroll in school with him.  This film is certainly a silly comedy chock full of Dangerfield’s signature one-liners, but it also captures something essential about the American attitude towards higher education.  On the one hand we see college as a democratic means of upward mobility, but we also scoff at the college as a bastion of elitism and unearned privilege. Particularly interesting in Back to School is the conflict between Thorton Melon and Dr. Barbay, a pompous economics professor with whom Thorton is competing for the affections of English professor Diane Turner (Sally Kellerman).   From Bill Gates to Kanye West we revel in our stories of rich and famous college dropouts.  Dangerfield plays this quintessential archetype, a businessman without a college degree who made truckloads of money and gleefully gives the finger to all those smug college dons who insist that education is the only way to success, happiness or fulfillment.  As much as I support higher education I think it’s also important to honor and cultivate that autodidactic, do-it-yourself spirit.  The film splits the difference by showing Melon encouraging his son to pursue an educational opportunity even though he took a different route in his own life.

11. Kinsey (2004) –  I have to confess that I really dropped the ball on this one.  I saw this film in theaters when it came out in 2004, but it took another recent viewing for me to appreciate what an accomplishment it really is.  This definitely should have been near the top of my previous list.  Perhaps more than any other film I’ve listed so far Kinsey drives home the importance of academic freedom, and demonstrates how rational academic inquiry can have a huge impact on the larger society.   The film is a skillfully constructed biopic based on the life of biologist and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey (played by Liam Neeson) and the groundbreaking research on human sexuality he spearheaded at Indiana University.  The film shows how Kinsey’s interest in zoology and the mating habits of insects and animals led him to question why similar scientific study had not been applied to human sexuality.  The film dramatizes how important it is for public health, and for the health of democracy, to have accurate scientific knowledge about sexual practices available in the public sphere.  It effectively portrays the dark ages of hypocrisy and misinformation out of which the feminist and gay rights movements emerged, and manages to do so without compromising on all the emotional and political complexity involved.

A few more films:

(Here are just a few more academic films that I identified but did not include in the Top 20)

Another Woman and Husbands and Wives. Both directed by Woody Allen.  Another Woman is based on Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and featured Gena Rowlands as a philosophy professor on sabbatical in New York writing a book.  Husbands and Wives includes a storyline with Allen as a novelist and creative writing professor at Columbia University.

A Beautiful Mind –  Directed by Ron Howard the film stars Russell Crowe as Princeton University mathematics professor John Nash.

Elegy – Based on Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal featuring David Kapesh (Ben Kinglsey) a professor of literature and “public intellectual.” Much of the academic content of the novel is absent in the film, but there’s plenty of naked Penelope Cruz, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Gaudy Night – Technically not a “film” but a 1987 three part BBC mini-series based on Dorothy Sayers’s 1936 mystery novel, set in an Oxford women’s college.  Beyond the mystery plot, the story also deals with the politics of women’s education.

The Great Debaters – Produced by Oprah, directed by Dentzel Washington who plays Melvin Tolson, a poet and professor who directed the debate team at historically black Wiley College in Texas and led them to a pioneering debate against Harvard University. (It was actually against the University of Southern California).

Iris –  Based on John Bayley’s memoir about his life with the novelist and professor Iris Murdoch.  Murdoch and Bayley met, and both taught, at Oxford.  Judi Dench gives a heartrending performance of Murdoch as she struggled with Alzheimer’s in her later years.

A Serious Man – The most autobiographical film from the Coen Brothers so far.  The story centers on Larry Gopnick, a Jewish physics professor in 1967 suburban Minnesota who is best by a series of Job-like calamities.  Joel and Ethan Coen were raised in Minnesota by two academic parents. (Their father was an economist and their mother an art historian).

Stomp the Yard – Like Spike Lee’s School Daze, this was also filmed on my alma mater’s campus.  But unlike Spike Lee this filmmaker seemed to think that black college students are incapable of any intelligent communication beyond snarling, scowling, fighting and dancing. Disappointing.   

The Savages – Indie film stalwarts Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney play siblings who reluctantly have to care for their estranged father.  Hoffman’s character is a theater professor in Buffalo, NY struggling to write a book on Bertolt Brecht.   

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf –  A classic film (based on Edward Albee’s play) starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.  The film is more about an academic couple’s marital drama than about academia itself, but at least one other critic found it an iconic work of academic fiction. (“Who’s Afraid of the Campus Novel.”)

Even more films

(I haven’t seen these yet, but GC Advocate editor James Hoff has already been on my tail to hurry up and get something posted to this blog, so perhaps I’ll write about some of these in future posts.)

The Absent-Minded Professor

College

Dark Matter

Love Story

Mona Lisa Smile

Proof

P.S.

Revenge of the Nerds

Spinning Into Butter

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From the looks of it, you might think that Foreign Policy—the once venerable journal of international political analysis—had come under the editorial guidance of Marvel Comics.  The magazine’s latest cover features a Hitler-mustachioed Robert Mugabe, a vacant-eyed Kim Jong Il, and three other dastardly-looking dudes you’ve likely never heard of standing shoulder-to-shoulder under the banner “The Committee to Destroy the World,” and looking distinctly like a group of neighborhood toughs getting ready to kick your ass.  A smaller headline in the corner informs readers that this is “The Bad Guys Issue,” while another hints that zombies are also threatening world peace, leaving one to assume that the existential threats facing international relations demand a lot more in the way of Captain America and his Avengers and a lot less Ban ki-Moon and the League of Ineffective Bureaucrats.

But no.  As it turns out, the layout guys were just excited about the publication of this year’s Failed States Index, FP’s annual list of the world’s most mismanaged countries, with attendant essays on why it is that the predominantly brown-peopled parts of the world can’t seem to escape their apparently inexhaustible capacity for barbarism and how we in the west—who have our own houses perfectly in order—can save them.

Yet while readers won’t find any superheroes dispatching the forces of evil from North Korea, Zimbabwe or Sudan in the new issue of Foreign Policy, they might notice that the magazine’s comic book-style does indicate a retreat from serious political analysis of perhaps the stickiest problem in international relations. What are failed states, anyway?  What distinguishes them from weak states, hollow states, collapsed states, or any of the other states victimized by adjectivitis? You won’t find answers in Foreign Policy!  Instead, the journal presents a list of sixty “unhappy” countries, ranked according to twelve “indicators of failure”—demographics, refugees, illegitimate governments, brain drain, public services, inequality, group grievances, human rights, economic decline, security forces, factionalized elites, and external intervention—some of which are self-evident, others less so, but none fully explicated.

In years past, FP’s Failed States Index—while still riddled with methodological, definitional, philosophical, and other problems—at least possessed the virtue of introspection.  Noting, for example, that Mugabe’s Zimbabwe ranked second only to Somalia in the 2009 Index as the world’s most miserable state, Robert Rotberg—perhaps the leading theorist of failed states—argued that the “failed states” concept was a blunt analytical tool in need of significant refinement if two such disparate situations could be so neatly lumped together on paper.  “Zimbabwe is the second most failed state, just ahead of Sudan, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, and Afghanistan,” he pointed out, before stating the obvious that because “Zimbabwe has no discernible civil warfare,” and the “state has not lost its monopoly control of violence…[it] should not be considered failed.”  Not only that, but Rotberg conceded that “other results are equally confusing,” leading him to the conclusion that “a more objective system of rankings” was necessary.

Not so this year.  Foreign Policy has seemingly boiled down the world’s problems to a small band of “bad dude dictators and general coconut heads,” “senile autocrats,” “suave bandits,” “eccentric buffoons,” “quacks,” and “tin pot despots,” leading its writers variously to the groundbreaking conclusions that “bad guys matter,” “failed states matter,” that “actually, it’s mountains” that complicate the development of the world’s most fragile states, and that the traditional bogeymen of American conservatism—China, France, and the United Nations—are in fact responsible for the propagation of dictatorship throughout the world, just as we suspected.  And this is to say nothing of the fact that the editors chose to give one of the last words in their “bad guys” issue to Paul Wolfowitz…

All of which is bad enough.  But even more troubling is the journal’s seeming headlong plunge into paternalist arrogance and a macho glorification of war touring that seems designed more for thirteen year old boys than a mature audience of informed readers—the magazine’s traditional base.  Even a cursory glance at the slew of adjunct essays to this year’s Index gives a flavor of the way in which the journal has chosen to present and analyze world events.  Take, for instance, the lede of an essay on Central America: “Every time I go to Guatemala, I find a dead body.”  Or the badass self-regard of an essay entitled “Mogadishu Was a Blast”: “One night we invited a new friend in Mogadishu to visit us in Kandahar.  His response: ‘Visit you in Afghanistan?  You’re crazy!  It’s too dangerous.’” And then there’s this slice of condescension in an essay on troubled Central African Republic: “A charming tic of Central Africans is a tendency to label things as literally as possible.”  If it’s true that a dissertation examining the language employed by global northern analysts of global southern politics waits to be written, prospective researchers would do well apparently to supplement their diet of Nicholas Kristof op-eds with recent issues of Foreign Policy.

This is not to say, of course, that the current issue, or FP more generally, constitutes an unalloyed bad.  To be sure, despite its problems, the Failed States Index offers a jumping off point for productive discussion of the reality of failed states and vulnerable populations that are adversely affected by social collapse.  And the journal should be applauded for its attempts at introducing a broader audience of readers to the world of international politics.  Moreover, good things are happening at the magazine.  The recent overhaul of what had been the moribund FP website produced a sleek, constantly updated, and informative homepage that has established itself as required reading for those interested in international politics, and provided a home for Stephen Walt to write the smartest, most level-headed blog on global affairs currently going.

But the latest edition does suggest that in its efforts to sell copies of the magazine, the editorial team at Foreign Policy has allowed the complexities of international relations to be taken hostage by writers who would have you believe that our world is being overrun by a team of supervillians, that the Global South is largely a jungle of bloody chaos that victimized helpless and hapless indigens, that state failure is bad for locals but cool to witness if you have the luxury of getting out, and that anything less than the steady, civilizing hand of Western power is sure to doom the most vulnerable of us around the world.

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