Countering the assault on higher education.

"I encourage [fellow Republicans] to use the language that the left has deployed so effectively on behalf of its agendas. Radical professors have created a 'hostile learning environment' for conservative students. There is a lack of 'intellectual diversity' on college faculties and in academic classrooms. The conservative viewpoint is 'underrepresented' in the curriculum and on the reading lists. The university should be an 'inclusive' and intellectually 'diverse' community'." (David Horowitz's website, cited in Wilson, 2005, 3)

The events of 9/11 facilitated an unprecedented right-wing assault on critical thinking within the United States, in the media, in public schools, and especially in higher education. Stanley Kurtz, the conservative critic who has argued for government oversight of area studies programs, sees in the war on terror newfound opportunities for right-wing incursions into higher education policy: "The war has unquestionably brought a new level of scrutiny to our politically correct campuses. Once the initial years of the campus culture war had passed, the public decided that campus leftism was either beyond the reach of anyone who hoped to do something about it, or irrelevant. The war changed that" (2002). Attacks on "leftist," "liberal," or "anti-American" curricula and faculty have become common--in area studies, American studies, and other fields that underwent critique and change after the 1960s.

Four key observations place these attacks in perspective and provide insight into how best to challenge them. First, the current war on higher education's antecedents are both the cold war and the culture wars. The tactics now in use by the right borrow from these two previous assaults on higher education by combining the anticommunist politics of the McCarthy era with the culture war fears that multiculturalism would wreak havoc on American identity and values. A counterattack must take this dual legacy into account. (1) Second, this war, like the two that preceded it, is geopolitical. It depends on a particular world view combining the three major ideologies of the right--neoliberal, fundamentalist, and conservative--and furthering a global imperial project that is bolstered by religious fanaticism and hypernationalism. Hence, for example, the right wing efforts to legislate an International Advisory Board to oversee international studies programs in conjunction with presidential initiatives to fund studies of America that support the current government's definition of American values. (2) Critics like Lynne Cheney worry that other cultures are celebrated while the United States is criticized. Groups like Campus Watch seek to rectify alleged bias in teaching about the Middle East. They claim that "many U.S. scholars of the Middle East lack any appreciation of their country's national interests and often use their positions of authority to disparage these interests" ("About Campus Watch"). Many critics have focused on how these assaults affect either American studies or area studies, but such assaults are interrelated and complementary. They express a particular view of the United States and its relationship to the globe. Third, the right's assault on higher education is typically disguised as a defense of student rights--such as the tight to academic freedom, the right to truth about universities, the right to fairness and balance in courses and curricula, the right to be taught about the greatness of the nation and of Western civilization, the right to exposure to conservative faculty, etc.--but really the assault is on the student. And fourth, to a certain extent the academic left--in a broad general sense--has facilitated these current attacks because since the 1960s progressive academics have been increasingly hesitant to advocate a coherent political vision.

This essay is chiefly about the third and fourth points: that these assaults ultimately target the student and that the ease with which the right has co-opted ideas like diversity and multiculturalism indicates the extent to which these ideas have been detached from their progressive political foundations. I begin with the place of students in recent conservative attacks. To place the educational policy of the Bush administration and its right-wing sympathizers alongside the "political tyranny" and "proto-fascism" of our government is to unmask the real targets of the current assault (3): dissent, critical thinking, social engagement, political activism, ethical commitment, and civic responsibility are depicted as threats to national security. Meanwhile, the neo-nationalism of the war on terror requires youth willing to support and fight for America, but not eager to participate actively in defining and contesting the nation's ideals.

What follow are some of the claims the right uses to press its assault on the student. I have divided the list into three interrelated groups, with illustrative quotes by some of the most conspicuous leaders of the right's assault.

THE LEFT BRAINWASHES STUDENTS AND THE RIGHT DOESN'T GET TO

The first set of quotations describes the current environment on campus as one of brainwashing, mind-control, and indoctrination. Interestingly, the right seems to suggest that the solution to the problem would be to hire more conservative faculty.

1. Students are victims of indoctrination.

"For some time now, conservatives have watched anxiously as tenured leftists have conducted mind experiments on American campuses, regulating speech and punishing ideas that are politically incorrect."--David Horowitz (The Art of Political War, 2000, 73).

2. Students have been denied access to conservative faculty.

The "About Campus Watch" site claims that "[t]he Middle East studies professorate is almost monolithically leftist due to a systematic exclusion of those with conservative or even moderately liberal views" (n.p.).

3. Students' Ideas are often discounted by Professors, In violation of their academic freedom.

"Rather than fostering intellectual diversity--the robust exchange of ideas traditionally viewed as the very essence of a college education--our colleges and universities are increasingly bastions of political correctness, hostile to the free exchange of ideas" (Anne Neal, co-president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni [ACTA], Congressional testimony, 2003, n.p.).

These three points reveal important premises that underpin the right's assault. As in the McCarthy period, the right again claims that students are victims of indoctrination. This charge is especially powerful. Merely accusing a professor of indoctrination sends shivers throughout parental and public consciousness. It is one of the most effective ways to cripple the progressive potential of higher education because it immediately makes the public suspicious of professors, and such suspicions easily lead to cuts in funding for education. Let us consider for a moment what such charges presume.

Throughout the Bush reign, the public has been repeatedly asked to believe uncritically, to sacrifice, and to obey. Connections between the type of public ideally imagined by the administration and education of the nation's youth should be obvious. If you require an obedient populace, then it is essential that you begin training youth accordingly. Favoring tests over critique, memorization over engagement, loyalty over social commitment, selfishness over community, and so on, implies a student educated to passively consume what the government and corporations provide rather than actively participating in a democratic society. This view of the unthinking student also appears in arguments assuming that students are docile and submissive, easily persuaded to accept their professors' politics. The emphasis on high-stakes testing, rote memory, and passive learning promoted by No Child Left Behind in K-12 reflects the same view.

The right also confuses confrontations that necessarily arise in critical pedagogy with intolerance of students' views. Most revealing is the right's implication that political affiliations of faculty seamlessly transfer into classroom dogma and that students readily accept anything a professor says. But, if professors so easily control their students, and if the left controls the universities, then why are there so many college-educated Republicans? Since it is abundantly clear that such arguments make no sense, what exactly does worry the right? Not left-leaning faculty I contend, but, rather, the intellectually engaged students left-leaning faculty hope to encourage. The right's insistence, however, that the classroom is a space of indoctrination and that the only solution to this problem is to hire more right-wing faculty indicates the extent to which they see education as a form of mind control. Is indoctrination the problem or is it the perceived lack of right-wing indoctrinators?

SHOULD UNIVERSITY FACULTIES BE UNITED OR DIVERSE?

The next three ideas bundle together around the concept of intellectual unity and diversity:

1. Students have not been presented with a diversity of Ideas and competing viewpoints.

Article 4 of the Academic Bill of Rights: "Curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences should reflect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge in these areas by providing students with dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate" (n.p.).

2. On the other hand, students have not been presented with enough faculty unity regarding the war on terror.

"... colleges and university faculty have been the weak link in America's response" to terrorism (ACTA, Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It, 2002, 1).

"... many U.S. scholars of the Middle East lack any appreciation of their country's national interests and often use their positions of authority to disparage these interests" ("About Campus Watch" n.p.).

3. Students have been deprived of a strong, solid education by the multicultural curriculum.

"Instead of broad courses on the full sweep of American history, many universities require a narrow focus on racism and inequality" (Restoring America's Legacy, Anne D. Neal and Jerry L. Martin, 3).

"Instead of solid core requirements, many colleges now offer students a cafeteria-style menu of hundreds of often narrow and even odd courses." (Jerry Martin, Congressional testimony on accreditation).

The range of these comments reveals another glaring contradiction: almost all of the conservative assaults on higher education take as an obvious fact that students benefit from exposure to a diverse range of opinions. But universities have simultaneously been accused of not uniting in support of the war on terror. So, which is it? Is the university united or not? Do ACTA and its allies support the "robust exchange of ideas" including dissent from a nation's decision to go to war, or not? Apparently, the term "intellectual diversity" as it has been used in these assaults means right-wing views, because diverse opinions about the war on terror are unacceptable. The conservative attack does not support students' rights, but rather a right-wing politics aimed at suppressing students' right to dissent. And sadly, the media and the public eagerly agree that universities are too critical of the United States and not critical enough of progressive material. On the one hand, there should be no diversity of opinion about the war in Iraq but, on the other hand, there should be vociferous and vehement critique of programs like women's studies or ethnic studies. A necessary step in any counterattack is to place these claims side-by-side in order to expose the transparency of the right's agenda.

A further complication in countering these assaults is the overlap between some of the claims made by ACTA and by those of us on the left. After 9/11 ACTA charged that colleges inculcate anti-Americanism, that curricula do not prepare students to defend American values or understand American history, and that general education has abandoned a "solid" "core" in favor of a "cafeteria style" selection of "odd" topics (2002). While dissenting from the view of universities as anti-American, many of us agree with ACTA that students are woefully unaware of key concepts in history and political philosophy. Donald Lazere, for instance, suggests that students need a core curriculum that includes exposure to courses on the Enlightenment and the American revolutionary "values" of active, critical citizenship, as the basis for a well-informed left. Lazere's position, though, is in direct contrast to the right's wish to teach American history uncritically, as evidenced by recent legislation in Florida requiring that American history be studied as fact, not interpretation (see Robert Jensen). "That factual history, the law states, shall be viewed as 'knowable, teachable, and testable'" (n.p.). Obviously, then, our reasons for wanting students to learn a historical "core" are diametrically opposed to those of the right. Clarifying the difference in our views on how to best teach history will be essential.

THE UNIVERSITY AS DEPARTMENT STORE

The last and possibly most important line of attack reveals the right's economic purpose:

Students and parents are not getting their money's worth, because rising tuition goes to support left-wing curricula and faculty.

"By empowering the consumers of higher education--students and parents--with information, we will ensure they can fully exercise their power in the marketplace of higher education. Be it adding transparency to college costs or adding sunshine to the accreditation process, the bill will give consumers access to significant new information to help them make their own best decisions about higher education" (Representative John Boehner's introduction to HR 609 2005, n.p.).

This last issue--consumer protection for students and parents--exposes one of the most potentially devastating features of the right-wing assault, reminding us that the target is ultimately funding and public support for higher education. These assaults have often been accompanied by major cuts in state and federal support for higher education. Representative Boehner's introduction to the Higher Education Act, also known as the College Access and Opportunity Act, exposes its neoliberal agenda. He converts higher education into a commodity that students and parents consume. With efforts to eradicate minority scholarships and to slash financial aid, it becomes clear that conservatives hope to eliminate the notion of the university as a public good, available to all. As education is increasingly privatized, and students increasingly think of it as a consumer product, it will become more and more difficult to encourage them to use the university as a site of social engagement and collective critique.

This survey of accusations made by the right indicates, I believe, the extent to which they actually target the student, for whom they display a profound disrespect. Such assaults combine to create a hostile learning environment on campuses, and to deflate public support for higher education.

GATHERING FORCES

In this last section I take up my fourth point--that these assaults have gained force, in part, due to the ease with which they have been able to capitalize on the language of progressive pedagogy. As indicated by this essay's epigraph, the right has consciously appropriated many critical terms used by the left. The ease with which conservatives have redefined and coopted terms like "diversity" and "multiculturalism," detaching them from their progressive political foundations, has caused many of us to reconsider some of the critical assumptions that have driven progressive pedagogy since the 1960s. What worries me, and what I believe poses our biggest challenge in countering these assaults, is the extent to which these words have become so effortlessly separated from their original references. It is a problem that requires a reconsideration of the left's commitments, since the postmodern turn.

The influence of poststructuralism and deconstruction on U.S. critical thought has led to a wariness, if not an outright disavowal, of any foundational ideas. One consequence is that advocates of multiculturalism have often been unwilling to link their claims to any broader political and intellectual convictions. Thus, language meant, for instance, to defend the disenfranchised now is mobilized to argue that creationists should be allowed to advocate their beliefs in biology classes; and the language of affirmative action, meant to rectify gross inequities in opportunity, now backs the hiring of token white, Republican males. To some extent, antifoundationalist thinking has kept progressives from putting forward the reasoned rebuttals and empirical evidence needed to demonstrate the fraudulence of the conservatives' tactics, when they deploy the language of support for the weak and poor in support of the powerful and advantaged. Lazere makes a similar point in a recent article on political literacy: "Although most of the advocates of [postmodern pluralism] consider themselves and their causes as politically liberal or progressive, their insistence on unlimited proliferation of localism and diversity--coincident with an age of unprecedented concentration of economic ownership, political power, and social control by multinational corporations and the right wing in America has had profoundly conservative consequences in obstructing the kind of unified opposition that progressive constituencies need to counteract the right" (257).

Some poststructuralist positions imply that government support and control of education is inherently coercive. This negative view, however, fails to appreciate the fact that it is only through legislation that the state can commit funds to support public education. Some progressive educators like Jonathan Kozol and Adolph Reed have advocated far more active federal efforts toward overcoming the "savage inequalities" in access to good primary, secondary, and college education. The loss of such support--through reduction of tuition grants, financial aid, and work-study funds--along with equalization of tax funding among rich and poor schools, diminish the possibilities for education as a site of progressive politics. I believe that the critical tendency to advocate decentralization and localism per se has been highly problematic. Not only does it run the risk of advancing the corporatization of the university by mirroring the rhetoric of neoliberal privatization, but it also sabotages the development of the critical vision necessary for progressive pedagogy. What is missing is a positive counter-argument that highlights the important role that government support of education plays in the construction of civil society.

New Left campus activism in the 1960s was based on a profound commitment to political change, social reform, and engaged citizenship, linked broadly to the tradition of democratic socialism. It is true that the left saw in the university an environment that disinclined students to express their views, to learn about issues relevant to their own lives, and to challenge the authority of their professors--positions which sound frighteningly similar to those echoed recently by voices from the new right like those of David Horowitz. The left's suspicion of the university was well-founded, but I believe it also rested on an assumption that despite such criticism the university would still remain a site of critical possibility. (4) Indeed, many of us have dedicated our lives to the notion that the university is a place to foster social change, even while we have found ourselves constantly critiquing it.

Consequently, some on the left characterized the student as victim while trying to create the conditions within which the student could become a socially engaged agent, one whose identity derived from a sense of both individual and community value. Over time, though, and in response to the antifoundationalism that accompanied the postmodern turn in U.S. leftist theory, the left de-emphasized or abandoned the struggle to make higher education a place where students could actively seek social reform. Masao Miyoshi's "Ivory Tower in Escrow" documents this retreat from politics especially in the humanities. He suggests that the "gradual rejection [by U.S. humanities scholars] of the idea of totality and universality in favor of diversity and particularity among the 'progressive' humanities scholars" had devastating effects for political resistance: "This ideological shift seeks to rectify enlightenment collectivism, and it is no doubt salubrious. At the same time, it must be recognized that the idea of multiplicity and difference parallels--in fact, endorses--the economic globalization" (39). The push to deconstruct master narratives, to disengage language from meaning, to question all forms of knowledge, despite the fact that the theorists who originally offered such theories often did so at the service of politics, rapidly led to an inability to formulate any constructive view. The result was nihilism, skepticism, and antifoundationalism. Most importantly this view led more to suspicion of higher education than to advocacy for change. As Miyoshi argues: "the cant of hybridity, nuance, and diversity now pervades the humanities faculty. Thus they are thoroughly disabled to take up the task of opposition, resistance, and confrontation, and are numbed into retreat and withdrawal as 'negative intellectuals'" (48). Recognizing the self-destructive tendencies of these left critiques, the right has promoted a neoliberal view of the student that understands undergraduates in terms of the market and within a society that measures success based on purchasing potential. Henry Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux point out that neoliberalism depends on "a culture of cynicism, insecurity, and despair" (2004, 249).

If we hope to counteract the rightwing assaults we need to return more vigorously to the goals of progressive pedagogy. Reminding ourselves that these goals were based on a belief in learning as a process of questioning and permanent critique should not deter us from simultaneously struggling for a common good. It is worth asking how the postmodern position that critical thinking means reassessing, deconstructing, taking into account various points of view, and scrutinizing orthodoxy led to an abandonment of any effort to link the struggle for social change to political vision. Rather than struggle for something we found ourselves struggling against everything. The solution, I believe, requires us to recruit postmodern critique as a strategy for developing a more nuanced, more flexible, more egalitarian project of social action. Dialectical thinking suggests that the need to constantly revise and reconsider political goals should lead to a more powerful politics, not to a weaker, more uncertain one. Where we have failed is in our own hesitancy to risk the necessary confrontations that arise from a shared vision of education as a social value. Where we can triumph is in our relentless commitment to creating an environment that encourages students to question everything, including us. But these questions must be posed with purpose and vision, and we must be willing to confront students when their questions, about grades or about whether they really have to do the reading, reinforce the idea that education is merely a commodity to be purchased. In order for educators to wage a successful counterattack on the current assaults on higher education we have to be willing to struggle, yet again, to encourage the kinds of questions that can make higher education a site of critical agency and political engagement.

WORKS CITED

Boehner, John A. "Introduction of the College Access and Opportunity Act." 5 May 2004. House of Representatives. http:// thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/ R?r108:FLD001:E50756.

Campus Watch. "About Campus Watch." Accessed 8 August 2005. http://www.campuswatch.org/ about.php.

Cheney, Lynne. America: A Patriotic Primer. New York: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, 2002.

Cheney, Lynne. When Washington Crossed the Delaware: A Wintertime Story for Young Patriots. New York: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, 2004.

Giroux, Henry. The Terror of Neoliberalism: The New Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy. Boulder, Co: Paradigm Press, 2002.

Giroux, Henry and Susan Searls Giroux. Take Back Higher Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Horowitz, David. "The Academic Bill of Rights." Accessed 3 March 2004. http://studentsforacademicfreedom.org/.

Horowitz, David. The Art of Political War. Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 2000.

Jensen, Robert. "Florida's Fear of History: New Law Undermines Critical Thinking." CommonDreams.org. Accessed 31 July 2006. http://www. commondreams.org/ views06/0717-22.htm.

Kurtz, Stanley. "Students Fight Bade Introducing NoIndoctrination.org." National Review Online. 2 December 2002. Accessed 8 August 2005. http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz120202.asp.

Lazere, Donald. "Postmodern Pluralism and the Retreat from Political Literacy." JAC 25.2 2005): 257-293.

Martin, Jerry. "Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Select Education, Committee on Education and the Workforce." 22 June 2004. U.S. House of Representatives. Accessed 8 August 2005. http://edworkforce.house. gov/hearings/108th/21st/ accred062204/martin.htm.

Martin, Jerry and Anne Neal. "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It." 2002. Accessed 4 March 2004. http://www.goacta. org/publications/Reports/ defciv.pdf.

Martin, Jerry and Anne Neal. Restoring America's Legacy: The Challenge of Historical Literacy in the 21st Century. 2002. Accessed 8 August 2005. http://www.goacta.org/ publications/Reports/ america%27s_legacy.pdf.

McClennen, Sophia. A. "The Geopolitical War on U.S. Higher Education." College Literature. Special Issue "The Assault on Higher Education" 33.4 (Fall 2006): 43-75.

Miyoshi, Masao. "Ivory Tower in Escrow." boundary 2. 27.1 (2000): 7-50.

Neal, Anne. "Testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee, Hearing on Intellectual Diversity." U.S. House of Representatives. October 29, 2003. Accessed 8 August 2005. http://www.goacta.org/ whats_new/Intellectual% 20Diversity%20Testimony.htm http://www.goacta.org/ what,s_new/ Intellectual%20Diversity%20 Testimony.htm.

NOTES

(1.) For a more detailed account of the way the current assaults borrow from the legacies of the cold war and the culture wars see my "The Geopolitical War on U.S. Higher Education."

(2.) Government oversight of area studies programs is a part of the latest version of Title VI legislation which provides federal support for international studies. In 2002 George W. Bush announced the "We the People" initiative. Part of the National Endowment for the Humanities, these grants are dedicated to educational projects that focus on the United States.

(3.) These terms are Henry Giroux's. See especially The Terror of Neoliberalism.

(4.) For more on this point see Masao Miyoshi.