Inside the Current Issue

Academic Repression in the First Person Presented here are Parts One and Two of a new, on-going series which lets professors, students and university employees tell their own stories of being fired, passed up for promotion, suspended or silenced for their political views.

Academic Repression in the First Person, Part Two:
THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU

Andy Smith

This could happen to you.

Campus administrators contact department chairs to "check up" on which ones joined an anti-war rally. Or campus police harass and arrest protesting professors. A temporary writing teacher makes a modest antiwar remark, and that is the end of her job. This disturbing phenomenon hits close to home. This could happen to you. This almost happened to me.

Before the Ward Churchill circus had calmed down, and around the time that I learned about anarchist Yale professor David Graeber getting terminated, I almost lost my university teaching job for defending my students in a public controversy surrounding a particularly provocative class project. While the details of that event are rather remarkable, it's rarely the exact circumstances that make these controversies and crises so disturbing. Rather, it's the overall impact that should scare us, when a chill wind blows through a community, when timid teachers think twice about reading a provocative passage or showing a shocking film clip, even when these have explicit connections to the course curriculum.

As right-wing and seemingly ridiculous as it is, the current assault on radical academics is consistent and vitriolic. The recent case of Ward Churchill is only the well-publicized version. Professors may be losing control of their profession. Countless teachers are attacked by a mob that includes right-wing radio and television hosts, ex-leftist David Horowitz's organized campaign for his version of "academic freedom," conservative bloggers, vindictive parents, and opportunistic politicians. From teachers attacked by irate parents who don't want their adult children to read profanity, to conservative students who protest poor grades by profiling lefty profs, these incidents may not be considered witch hunts, but they constitute a ubiquitous trend in an increasingly conformist America.

Throughout my life as a radical publisher, subversive writer, and revolutionary activist, I've often embraced trouble and tumult. But when I'm teaching at my day job, I maintain positive relations with my colleagues, never seek conflict with my students, and simply don't have the time to stir up much dissent on my friendly but conservative campus. So, imagine the shock I experienced when I discovered that my behavior at a one-day writing festival sponsored by my department might cost me my job.

A class project that involved informal interviews with students on the subject of "Greek stereotypes" gained sensational gravity when the "conclusions" of the research were presented as a poster at the Festival of Writing. The "offensive" claims made by the poster were these: (1) "Every stereotype contains a little bit of truth" and (2) "If you don't like a stereotype, change it"; then, the logo of each fraternity and sorority was presented in conjunction with the one-word "label" gleaned from the research.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the wild fracas that ensued. Students crowded around the poster; some tried to destroy it; others demanded it be removed. People shouted. People cried. People called me names, somehow assuming that as the professor, I had "endorsed" the conclusions of the project. (Like, perhaps, I had "endorsed" my other students' South Park project, full with TV-monitors spewing spicy episodes, or - get this - a visually strong anti-abortion project, complete with a poster filled with pictures of mutilated-fetuses).

My mistakes came when people verbally assaulted me, and I verbally defended myself with "unprofessional" language. The people I "had words with" included paid members of the fraternity council and a local parent (and police officer) who happened to be the father of a particularly offended sorority sister.

As a feminist, it's disconcerting that I was accused of anti-female hate speech. But that's precisely what happened because the members of one sorority had, according to my students, earned the label of "sluts." Now, I'm not sure how this works on other campuses, but I learned very clearly that the fraternity and sorority members are in fact members of an oppressed minority group, ready to seize the tools of political correctness to attack the libertarian predilections of a composition teacher.

It's amazing that my administration wanted to give me a pink slip over this incident. But this is what almost went down, when days after the incident, my department chair called me with the bad news. And as a temporary instructor with a one-year contract, I have no real recourse. Even without controversy, the university is never obligated to rehire me, and legally, can fire me without reason.

But in an equally incredible turn of events, this did not happen. I kept my job. I got a "letter in my file," but I am still teaching at the same school. It was only through vigorous support from my colleagues that I kept my temporary teaching gig for another year.

From this experience, I cannot understate the importance of working with one's colleagues and belonging to faculty organizations, of real workplace solidarity. My department chair and the director of writing both stood with me in a private meeting with the Provost. The president of the state conference of the AAUP wrote a letter on my behalf and met with my administration. Our attitude was not confrontational. Rather, we simply defended my excellent teaching, explained my position, and asked for compassion. Solidarity saved my ass, and I will not soon forget the fierce compassion I saw in the eyes of my "supervisors" as they refused to abandon me to take the administration's reprimand alone.

Of course, I was also reminded again that universities are part of a larger system, a massively corrupt, profit-driven, administratively demonic, bureaucratic matrix. The Right is wrong: the college is not some orgiastic den of anti-American fervor. It's not even some lofty laboratory of social democracy as we would like it to be.

While our teaching itself--authentic and subversive compared to much modern workfare--can be a form of activism, it is at bottom a day job, a respectable and challenging way to pay our bills. Teaching critical thinking and healthy skepticism to our temporary audience of a few hundred impressionable young people--while valuable on its own terms--does not a revolution make.

The battle to defend our right to teach is a reaction. It's defensive, and in a sense, conservative. But this is not a battle we should abandon. Those of us avowed radicals still working in the classrooms at public universities know that the larger trend is not really about Ward Churchill or David Graeber or any one professor unfairly singled-out for repression and ridicule, as important as such situations are. But rather, these attacks are the crude attempts of a vocal minority and noisy neo-conservative throng to threaten, twist, and appropriate the liberal construct of "academic freedom"--especially in the arts and social sciences--and impose a patronizingly simplistic version of exceptionalism and Americanism in its place.

Despite the dream of some conservatives, teaching composition to me is not about being a curator of commas, a police officer enforcing correct punctuation. In my four sections of composition this term, I still teach rhetoric and argument. We still read challenging and even radical material. While I know real freedom lies far beyond the academy, I am glad to be back at work this semester.

Writer, publisher, and activist Andy Smith is a composition instructor at a public university in Tennessee and a card-carrying member of the AAUP.

Academic Repression in the First Person, Part 1: Interview with Carol Lang