Taking Back the Academy!: History Of Activism, History as Activism.

TAKING BACK THE ACADEMY!: HISTORY OF ACTIVISM, HISTORY AS ACTIVISM

Edited By Jim Downs and Jennifer Manion. Routledge, 2004.

Today I marched with striking graduate teachers and researchers at New York University carrying signs like "Derridians Make the 'differance'," "Nerds: Making NYU Smarter," and "Explain Again How Blacklists Protect Academic Freedom," and then returned home to review the collection Taking Back the Academy, which explores the possibilities, tensions, and responsibilities built into the relationship between historians and activism.

Taking Back the Academy comes out of a 2002 conference at Columbia University that sought to explore the links and gaps between historical scholarship and political activism. The conference was organized by two graduate students, Jim Downs and Jennifer Manion, who have brought together authors representing a range of institutional, generational, intellectual, and activist backgrounds: Eric Foner, Eileen Eagen, Vania Markarian, Martin Klimke, Anita Seth, Kimberly Phillips-Fein, John McMillian, Nancy Hewitt, David Rosner, Glenda Gilmore, Drucilla Cornell, Kitty Krupat, Kathleen Brown, Tracey Weis, and Jesse Lemisch. The group's thoughts on history and activism take the varied forms of traditional academic articles, personal narratives, letters, lectures, and conversational exchanges. Their perspectives are varied as well: some of the authors contribute historical studies of activism, some authors conceive of their writing and teaching of history as activism, many write of being historian-activists, and some are activists for history. These differences are subtle but important, for it is not clear that these authors would come to an agreement on the relationship between history and activism or on the definition of a historian-activist. But these disagreements, as they unfold through the book, are productive and ultimately flame a discussion worth having.

The two papers of "history," Martin Klimke's chapter on student movements in a transatlantic context and Vania Markarian's piece on the ongoing debate over the historical representations of the Tlatelolco massacre, reframe the movements of the 1960s as global phenomena, and engage in a self-examining analysis of how the history of student movements has been written. Klimke's "Between Berlin and Berkeley, Frankfurt and San Francisco: The Student Movements of the 1960s in Transatlantic Perspective," reveals the "structural similarities and ideological affinities" of the U.S. and German SDSs, the Students for a Democratic Society and the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (the German Socialist Student League). Klimke systematically traces the groups' connections and interactions, some direct and institutional, others mediated and cultural. The two groups engaged in intellectual exchange and sometimes organizational cooperation, sharing a transnational politics of university reform, anti-imperialism, and dissent from the war in Vietnam, as well as theories of social movement formation and action. But Klimke suggests leaving a sociological social movement framework by putting the SDSs' history within the broader context of German-U.S. relations during the Cold War. U.S.-German Cold War cultural diplomacy encouraged transnational affinities and rebellions; while it brought German and U.S. students into contact at educational institutions, American cultural influence in Germany and violent foreign policy in Southeast Asia fueled anti-Americanism. But disillusioned German youth felt a common bond with the U.S. student movements and counter-cultures they saw challenging these same power structures, enabling German student activists to be, "With America against America."

In practice, Klimke's piece elucidates some of the themes and debates running through the rest of the collection. He suggests that the simultaneous societal upheavals in France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, and the U.S. in the 1960s have garnered increased historical interest now that recent social movements and activists are trying to historicize and create global connections. Klimke also demonstrates that scholarship, especially theory, influences social movements, suggesting that C. Wright Mills, the Frankfurt School, and Herbert Marcuse provided significant intellectual inspiration and solidarity for the U.S. and German movements.

As the contributors to Taking Back the Academy attest, the scholarship-activism relationship is not unidirectional, but symbiotic. Social movements have inspired entire new fields of knowledge and scholarship. As under- and mis-represented people--working class students, students of color, women, queer students, and so on--entered into the university they demanded through activism, and created in scholarship, histories that addressed their experiences. The world and its people's struggles shape even the most cloistered of academicians and their work. But many more historians go into writing and teaching history because they believe ideas can change the world. They want to arm themselves or others to speak these truth(s) to power. Thus, in their essays and conversations, nearly all the contributors examine their past and present activisms, and the way critical theory and historical knowledge shape their current scholarship and movements.

Especially interesting is the provocative discussion between Drucilla Cornell and Kitty Krupat on feminist theory and the forging of activist alliances. Challenging what he sees as relativism and presentism in other participants' papers, Jesse Lemisch asserts the importance of historical truth and calls for left scholarship in all fields, not just ones that seem relevant to left activism. He reiterates his question of 1968, "Who will write a left history of art?"--suggesting that we cannot predict the scholarship that will inspire and drive future generations of activists and historians.

There are a number of challenging insights on teaching, as well. In "Teaching Student Activism," Eileen Eagan advocates that student activism be included in all history classes, instilling in students the understanding that they are engines for social change. Eagen addresses the pedagogical difficulties in teaching student radicalism (its erasure from textbooks, the complexities of violence, the overwhelming focus of scholarship on the U.S. in the sixties, especially on groups like SDS and SNCC, etc.). Eagen argues that students' current struggles for change should be subjects for the classroom, not just their historical ones. Bringing students into the classroom to talk about their activism teaches students to examine the institutions and social structures shaping their lives. Eagan goes on to outline, in helpful detail, the weekly work of her senior seminar on the history of student activism. Similarly, feminist historians Kathy Brown and Tracey Weiss propose pedagogy as activism, but debate methods. Weiss is influenced by Myles Horton's philosophy of following-up knowledge with action, teaching her students to "produce for use," by making knowledge "visible, shareable, portable, and expandable." Brown is committed to teaching her students to question the naturalness of historical narrative and to ask who is marginalized by it, but refrains from measuring scholarship against "practical value." In their writing of their own scholarly history, the two also analyze the structures that shape their teaching--public and private universities, work and family life, and the dissonance between academic expectations and activist commitments.

A notable absence in the text, which is revealed in Glenda Gilmore's contribution describing the (often sexist and violent) verbal attacks and calls for silencing she encountered after speaking out against the war on Iraq, is an analysis of student activism on the Right. If not activism, pernicious student apathy is implied or assumed at various moments in the book but not interrogated. Similarly, framing activist history solely as left history obscures the fact that history which strictly abides by our previous conceptions of the world and buttresses existing power structures is not "in-active," but rather also shaping ideas and, consciously or not, futures as well as pasts. But this may be an organizing choice rather than intellectual oversight, as the planners and participants came together to discuss their own historical and activist perspectives in the hopes of thinking through the challenges of their own historical moment.

Thus, the collection is also worth reading as a remarkable historical document in itself. I can imagine the excitement of an intellectual historian coming across it decades from now and gleaning insight into historians' awareness of their social responsibility to the present. The war in Iraq--strikingly evoked as some contributions were written before the war started, others after--and the struggles of historian-activists to develop, act on, and sustain an anti-war politics and organization are everywhere in the book. Graduate student organizing campaigns, and the hope for politically engaged organizations of academics fighting for their interests, their scholarship and teaching, in the face of an increasingly corporatized university, is the subject and inspiration for many of the essays.

Anita Seth, Kimberly Phillips-Fein, and John McMillian provide both historical and personal perspectives on the graduate student unionization movement. This new generation of historian-activists is forming relationships with workers and community groups, asking who should profit from the work of the academy, and imagining a new commitment of intellectuals to the public. They are in the fight for their history, for academic freedom and job security in the face of market imperatives and union-busting campaigns. So, I will be back down to NYU next week, this time better armed by Taking Back the Academy and my sign, "Historian Shaping Labor History."