In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

329 13 Teaching by Candlelight Vijay Prashad A few years after 9/11, my dean called me for a meeting.1 It was a pleasant enough day, a little chilly and overcast but nothing dramatic. I walked across the beautiful campus of the private liberal arts college where I teach in Connecticut . Along the way, I greeted and was greeted by students, staff, and other faculty. My geniality felt a little forced, because I was anxious about what awaited me at my walk’s end. The dean and I had a fractious relationship , although it was neither personally unpleasant nor professionally threatening . This time, the dean’s call had been brief and the summons immediate. His expression was grave. I sat in one of the plush chairs in an office that seemed unusually empty of the books that normally clutter the shelves of an academic room. He was polite, and he asked how I had been. Then he told me that he had received a few letters that accused me of being a communist and an agent of foreign powers. He laid out the facts in the letters and then leaned toward me, touched my wrist, and asked if the college could do anything to ensure my safety. I was shocked. Not by the letters, for those are now frequent. My e-mail, answering machine, and mailbox are familiar with the bile of different kinds of hateful political forces. There is even a website that asks for my head— nothing tops that. What surprised me was the dean’s reaction: he could care less about the actual allegations and was simply worried about my wellbeing . As I walked back to my office in a daze, I thought about my position of privilege. The letters that came to the dean were filled with poor English grammar, misspellings, and outrageous accusations. They could not be taken seriously in themselves, particularly when they were being hurled at a tenured professor at a private college. Of course, the same dean, before 9/11, challenged my right to teach a course on Marx, but on this score, he was upright. The braying of the multitude, even if correct, could not assail the comfortable position of the tenured professor. My academic and political freedom trumped their prejudices. 330 · vIjay PraShad Still, the idea of the “campus radical,” the domesticated rabble rouser who provides the academy with its illusion of ideological diversity, concerned me. As long as the radical is in a minority, as long as the radical is unable to drive campus culture, nothing is threatened. To consider the problem of “academic freedom” and the recent assaults on individual faculty members on the terrain of their right to assert certain opinions, without an analysis of how many of us get away with what we do and say or even get our views promoted, is insufficient. Shouldn’t we at least be asking who gets to even hear our views or afford to sit in our classes? Campus democracy needs to be understood on a far greater canvas than in the terms of “academic freedom.” We have to be alert to the fact that it is this narrowed notion of democracy (academic freedom) that allows our intellectual institutions to get away with a great deal of undemocratic activity. A few years ago, I came upon a survey that helped me widen the way I understand campus democracy. It comes from two social scientists (Harvard University ’s Neil Goss and George Mason University’s Solon Simmons). Their survey of a thousand U.S. residents, conducted for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), shows that twice the number of those asked have confidence in the U.S. academy over the White House.2 Despite the assaults on the academy by the right wing, the public’s faith in the major academic institutions remains. They have not entirely bought the view that higher education is compromised by its liberalism or radicalism. It helped of course that George W. Bush had such a low standing, so the comparison at that time might not be fair (I wonder what people would say now, with Barack Obama in the Oval Office). When asked to name the biggest problem facing higher education, a plurality (42.8 percent) pointed to “the high cost of college tuition,” while 17 percent worried about “binge drinking by college students.” Only a small number focused on the issue of “political bias in the classroom” (8.2 percent) and...

Share