Who threatens Higher Education? Don’t ask the Washington Post

Florida is currently governed by a fascist who has made it one of his primary goals to take control of higher education in the state, mold it in a way that supports his ideology, and eliminate those who oppose his policies. The most overt example is his hostile takeover of New College, which recently fired a faculty member for expressing “leftist” views. The state also proposed banning gender and sexuality studies and critical race theory from public university curricula and curtailed tenure protections for its faculty.

So I was a bit surprised to open the Washington Post this morning to see a front-page (or its digital equivalent) story on the purported threat of “cancellation” that focused on a professor at the University of Central Florida. This person was fired (and then reinstated) not because he expressed views deemed unacceptable to the far right, but rather because he seems to be a racist. Here’s a comment from a student who took his course after he came back to UCF:

Several of Negy’s students said that they had signed up for his psychology course without knowing the professor had been fired — but that he had shared it with them during his first lecture.One student, a Black woman, said she thought Negy was a good teacher. But she was disturbed by his suggestion that, “statistically speaking, minorities are just not as smart as other people. I don’t know. I feel like that’s kind of offensive.” The student spoke on the condition of anonymity because she worried about criticizing one of her professors.

Asked about the student’s concerns, Negy said that he lectures about “observed differences” among races on test scores, but that he doesn’t have “training in genes” to assess why these differences exist.

Does the Washington Post really think that this person should represent the threat to academic freedom in Florida?

The thesis of the article is absolutely true — that there is sometimes a messy tension between academic freedom and the needs of the classroom. It is not easy to decide when a professor has overstepped the line. But articles like these distort the picture of the threat to higher education in America. It is not in clunky administrative systems that attempt, in good faith (it seems from these examples), to establish some basic standards for how professors should behave with regard to the classroom environment, but rather in a direct, sustained, and systemic attempt to destroy academic freedom itself.

An Anniversary to Remember

Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin: “Un-German” and “Unnatural” Literature is Sorted Out for the Book-Burning Ceremony (undated photo, May 6-10, 1933). GHDI. © Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz

I wasn’t aware, until I heard it on NPR this morning, that today is the 90th anniversary of the famous Nazi book burnings. This date is worth taking a moment to consider in light of ongoing efforts to ban books from public libraries and schools today. Like in the past, one of the main targets is any book containing knowledge about people marginalized for their sexual orientation and gender identity. One of the first targets of the book burnings (completed, it is worth underlining, largely by students) was Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research, which advocated for sexual reform and cared for queer people between World War I and the Nazi takeover. Today, the targets are graphic novels and young adult literature about LGBTQ+ people. But it’s all the same thing.

It was with this in mind that I read this morning that Indiana legislators defunded Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute, using the very same slur that was often used by Nazis against queer people in the 1930s: that they preyed on young people. It is hard to understand how we arrived at this point. Marriage Equality, we were told, would assimilate queer people into American society and reduce homophobia. And yet! One can only agree with Sam Huneke is in the linked article that the pursuit of normalization has only served to reify the divide between normal and abnormal that is used by homophobes and fearmongers.

Separation of Powers only works with Checks and Balances

I had planned on writing a post today on my experience teaching for the first time in the era of Chat GPT, but instead I can’t help but ask if someone, somewhere, could please inform our leading lights that the idea of separation of powers comes coupled with the idea of checks and balances. From today’s WaPo regarding the latest in Clarence Thomas’s obvious corruption:

We’re told that out there, in the constitutional ether, lies a strict separation of powers that precludes any interference by Congress and the president with the independence of judges. Lately, in the case of the upper chamber and the high court, that system looks like this: Durbin in a standoff with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., in a battle of polite letters.

Who told us this? Because they are missing an important part! I remember that lesson in elementary school too! But it came quite clearly with the linked idea that each branch balanced one another out so that one could not exercise unjust power over the other (or over us). We’re in the midst of a power grab by the judiciary, so it might be good for Congress to remember that part too.

Won’t someone think of the educational needs of Supreme Court children?

What pushes the latest revelation about Clarence Thomas’s corruption from tragedy to farce is this justification from his sugar daddy Harlan Crow:

“Harlan Crow has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth,” the statement said. “As part of his desire to perpetuate the American dream for all, and believing education is the great equalizer, he and his wife have supported many young Americans through scholarship and other programs at a variety of schools.”

Ah yes, we can all sympathize with the need to provide tuition for the at-risk adopted child of a Supreme Court Justice making a base salary of over $200k a year, plus the various book deals and “personal” gifts of Crow and others. How else would this poor child have gotten a quality education without the beneficence of this Republican billionaire? It’s hard to fathom.

I do wonder how much the “good” ones are partaking of these extra benefits as well…

Some things never change

Couldn’t help but note this parallel from my reading for the day. First, from Edward Ross Dickinson’s Sex, Freedom, and Power in Imperial Germany, a description of late nineteenth and early twentieth century movement against “immorality” (meaning, in this time, everything from pulp cowboy novels to bars and cafés to erotica):

Ironically, of course, the agenda of the morality movement was not to cover up immorality again but rather to eradicate it, precisely by making it visible (40).

And then today, reading E. Tammy Kim’s article published today in The New Yorker, regarding the fight over book banning in rural Montana:

Cuthbertson called “Gender Queer” pornographic and inappropriate for children. She brought giant blowups of the illustrated panels, ironically putting this content in full view.

Ironic both cases may be, but also illustrative of a common strategy amongst those most devoted to supposedly eradicating so-called immorality from public view. Precisely because no one can agree on what constitutes immorality, evidence of it has to be constantly displayed, pointed to, examined, and denigrated in order to create some kind of common understanding of what is being othered as inappropriate. Fortunately, it’s precisely those practices that often serve other uses of the material. I haven’t read Gender Queer, but all the controversy around it has undoubtedly helped young queer people find it for themselves.

Scenes from Baltimore

Some pictures from today’s big protest in Baltimore (a local news report and aerial views).

That’s me in the middle.

Calling the Police

1892 Letter from B. Rousseau to the Paris Police
B. Rousseau to Commissaire de Police, August 29, 1892, “Bois de boulogne. Dossier général,” JC 82, formerly BM2 42, Archives de la Préfecture de Police.

About a week ago, just as the protests and uprisings against police brutality began in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a woman named Amy Cooper called the police after being asked to put her dog on a leash by a Black birdwatcher named Christian Cooper (no relation) in Central Park. Prior to calling, Amy Cooper warned that she was “going to tell them [the police] there’s an African American man threatening my life.” As many others have noted, in doing so, Cooper deployed her white privilege to threaten the possibility of state violence in ways that resonated with the long history of white women pointing fingers at Black men who were then subjected to extrajudicial violence. The most famous case, of course, was the lynching of Emmett Till who was murdered in 1955 after a white woman named Carolyn Bryant claimed that he had whistled at her. Bryant recanted in 2017.

I started thinking about this moment again as I continue to work through Josephine Butler’s Government by Police (1879). Butler connects the growth of police power in both Continental Europe and in the United Kingdom to the growth of moral policing, especially around the development of regulated prostitution. For Butler, then, the police posed both a general danger to liberal society and a particular danger to women. Butler’s feminism — at first — was thus organized around protecting women from the police, not calling on them in women’s defense.

Continue reading “Calling the Police”

Josephine Butler on the Police

I started drafting what I thought might be my first op-ed based on my current interests in Josephine Butler (1828-1906) and her campaigns against regulated prostitution in France. But as I was writing, I realized that some of what I was saying may be better kept for the article I’ve been hammering at for the better part of a year. At the same time, I still wanted to take a moment to lay out some of the things I’ve been thinking about regarding my own research’s connection to the current protests against police brutality.

Butler is most famous for her campaigns against the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1870s and 1880s Britain, as well as her participation in W.T. Stead’s ‘Maiden Tribute’ exposé and her later campaigns against regulated prostitution in the British colonies. Her interest in these issues remained rooted in her feminism, one inscribed within both the promises and problems of the time in which she lived. Her attention to the plight and vulnerability of working-class women and her pointed critique of the sexual double standard existed alongside her condescension toward the very women she sought to help and her commitment to English nationalism, imperialism, and white supremacy. Her campaign against regulated prostitution, however, was only one piece of a broader argument she levied against police authority more generally.

Continue reading “Josephine Butler on the Police”

Memorializing the Confederacy in the Confederacy

Forrest County Courthouse and Confederate Monument located in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

A couple days ago, in my role as a member of the advisory board of the USM Center for Human Rights and Civil Liberties, I organized and moderated a forum on Confederate memorialization. The context of such an event is contentious, to say the least. For the past 102 weeks (they are counting), protestors have appeared every Sunday to demonstrate against the removal of the Mississippi state flag from campus, which occurred in the wake of Dylan Roof’s attack in Charleston, S.C. The Mississippi State flag is the final flag in the country to include the Confederate battle flag. Any discussion of memorialization connects immediately to the debate over the flag, which led the Sons of Confederate Veterans to advertise our event and ensure that some folks were present to represent their views. A few did show up, including one woman — wearing a shirt with a small Confederate flag — who decided to film the proceedings without asking permission and another who audibly moaned and called the panelists’ “idiots” under her breath. Coming face-to-face with right-wing internet culture was certainly an experience (the one who kept moaning called a grad student — who had said nothing during the proceedings — a “social justice warrior” after he expressed displeasure at her rudeness, which included calling an undergraduate a “shitface”).

They needn’t have worried as the views of the SVC would have been represented regardless, in some form at least. Confronted with the notion that the Confederacy cannot be distinguished from the cause for which it was fought (slavery, for the record, or, if you prefer, white supremacy), some audience members seemed bewildered, others launched canards and red herrings at the presenters. What seems to come up most often, both from proponents and opponents of the monuments, is the idea that one can abstract the Confederacy out of its specific historic context and instead stand it as an almost universalizing principle (honor, loyalty, defense of family, etc). One person stood up and said that it was impossible to know why many of the soldiers fought in the Civil War, so to memorialize them was not necessary to memorialize slavery or white supremacy. This is a red herring. It is true that we cannot know why many individual soldiers fought in the Civil War; but it is also true that we do not memorialize individual soldiers (beyond the commanders). The memorial in Hattiesburg, for instance, is dedicated to the Confederate soldiers who fought for “their country.” The memorial stands in for the soldiers as a group who, together, fought to preserve the institution of slavery. Whether or not any individual soldier did not agree with or did not even understand why the war was being fought is irrelevant to what the Confederacy stood for and to what these memorials in turn represent.

It is precisely the need to be clear as to the meaning of the Confederacy that complicates one of the first fallacies to come up at our panel: the slippery slope (combined with a bit of whataboutism). The idea that we cannot distinguish between a statue of George Washington — or even Thomas Jefferson — from someone like Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis is absurd on its face. As Josh Marshall says, “the first question we should ask is: What is the person known for? How did they earn a place in our collective public remembrance?” If the answer is simply and only “the Confederacy” then we have a problem; if the answer is more complex, then we can have a good discussion. The only reason we remember either Lee or Davis is their association with the Confederacy. Washington and Jefferson, for all their very real faults, are remembered for more than their position as slave-holders (though we should do better at incorporating that into our memory of both).

As several of the students in the audience recognized, the case of the Nazi past is instructive. Although it elicited gasps from our neo-Confederate audience members, the comparison may not be exact, but it is apt. It is not worth outlining all the pros and cons of the comparison, except to note that both the Confederacy and Nazi Germany were regimes that fought in the name of white supremacy and the enslavement and murder of a specific group of people (even if the ultimate goal was not shared and the targets were different and — significantly — defined in very different ways). Generally speaking, Germany does not have memorials to the soldiers of the Wehrmacht. This absence is not because German families do not understand the sacrifice of the soldier. Indeed, historians have not shied away from asking, not only to what extent were ordinary soldiers perpetrators of the crimes of the Nazis, but to what extent they were — especially toward the end of the war — also victims. These questions are complex and the histories that emerge out of them are likewise complicated. But memorials do not lend themselves to complication; rather, they simplify, usually in the name of glorification. They stand for what we want, as a community, to represent “us.” They are, in this sense, active in the production of community. As Germany wrestled with and eventually came to terms with its own crimes, it decided that it would not recognize even the abstract values of the World War II soldier because to do so would be to bind it to the cause for which it fought. We should recognize the same with Confederate memorials.

We need more shame in this country. The resistance to acknowledging what the Confederacy was and what Confederate memorials represent is, in itself, a resistance to shame. Shame of our country; shame of our ancestors; shame of ourselves. But shame is a good thing for a community to acknowledge because it helps it recognize error; it helps us mature. Those who defend the monuments want to be proud of their ancestors; the urge is recognizable. But ultimately, it is fine to be ashamed of them. Their crimes only reflect upon you if you allow them to.

At the end of the event, a student asked if the German example offered any lessons for us today. Although I was serving as moderator, not as panelist, I took the question as the only Europeanist present. I explained a bit about how in some ways Denazification paralleled Reconstruction. If both ultimately failed, they did so for different reasons and, I argued, Denazification at least set the groundwork for a later re-appreciation of the Nazi past in the way that the end of Reconstruction and the urge to forgive and forget did not. In that regard, I said, the German experience of memorialization has only limited value as a lesson to us because we missed our opportunity; we will, I argued, have to find our own path.

And yet, thinking on it a bit more after the event, I considered that it took about two generations for Germany to reckon with its crimes. In part, this was due to outside forces (film, especially) that encouraged Germans to look at the Holocaust in new ways. In part, however, it was also due to the passage of time; the grandchildren of the perpetrators were more prepared than their parents to deal with the guilt. If we see today’s debate over memorialization as a fight not over the Civil War, but rather over Civil Rights, then we might have some reason to hope. The grandchildren of those who fought Civil Rights are and will continue to come of age. All snark about millennials aside, it may be up to them to reshape our culture of memory.

Conservative politics will have conservative results

I’m not infrequently asked why I think that gay marriage support has basically reached takeoff velocity in the past couple years. My ordinary response is obliquely related to what I’ve been talking about in my past couple posts; it’s largely the effect of more and more people coming out of the closet. The cumulative effect of these individual acts simply reveals first, the ordinariness of gay people and second, their prevalence. The regional differences I’ve noted are obviously important, but for the most part people have gotten used to the fact that queers are here and they’ve gotten used to it. Joan Walsh, however, points to why gay marriage demands have, in the grand scheme of things, been relatively easily been accommodated: its politics are essentially conservative:

I’ve come to believe that the difference exists because, except for far right religious extremists and outright homophobes, marriage equality is, at heart, a conservative demand – letting gays and lesbians settle down and start families and have mortgages just like the rest of us will contribute to the stability of families and society.

As she acknowledges, this echoes a long-standing and ultimately successful argument in favor of gay marriage by the likes of Andrew Sullivan and more recently Ted Olsen. But Walsh also puts this trend into dialog with more troubling developments regarding women’s rights. While we’ve seen the onward march of gay rights, feminist accomplishments are being rolled back.

Walsh tries to avoid putting LGBT accomplishments into conflict with women’s rights (“I don’t mean to pit women against the LGBT community, or suggest one side is “winning” at the expense of the other), but its actually a bit hard to do. If the movement, as represented by mainstream organizations like the Human Rights Campaign, has deployed an essentially conservative vision of the family, then should we not recognize the possibility that it has, in fact, contributed to the solidification of opposition to forms of sexuality outside it? Gay marriage advocates have very effectively normalized gay partnerships, but in doing so they’ve also normalized the family itself and so have perhaps contributed to the resistance to a politics dedicated to increasing not just women’s, but everyone’s sexual autonomy outside those confines.