Last night, after watching highlights from Donald Trump’s disturbing performance at CPAC, I posted the following to Twitter. And, as a few people have asked me what I meant by it, I thought that I’d post an explanation here.
McCarthyism started this way, with threats against institutions of higher education designed to force out liberal faculty members, replacing them with conservative ones. https://t.co/f81EVZe006
— Mark Maynard (@MarkAMaynard) March 3, 2019
While I, of course, found much of what our President said last night to be troubling, like his repeated suggestion that Democrats want to make the murder of babies legal, I was particularly struck by the threat he leveled at America’s institutions of higher education, as it reminded me of something that we’ve seen in this country before… something that a lot of us hoped we’d never see again.
As I heard Donald Trump announce last night that he would soon be signing “an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research grants,” I was immediately taken back to a conversation I’d had about half a dozen years ago with Ann Arbor native Alan Haber, the first president of Students for Democratic Society (SDS). Specifically, I was reminded of a memory that Haber had shared with me from the Fall of 1954, when, as a freshman at the University of Michigan, he’d happened across a small protest on the steps of Angell Hall, where a group of graduate students and university employees had gathered to protest the firing of professors Chandler Davis, Mark Nickerson, and Clement Markert, all of whom had been fired after refusing to cooperate with the House Unamerican Activities Committee. [This is a part of U-M history, like the fact that Ann Coulter, Herman Webster Mudgett, and Theodore Kaczynski all attended school here, that many of us otherwise proud alumni would like to forget about.]
If you have the time, I’d encourage you to watch the video of my conversation with Haber, which goes into some detail about the impact of McCarthyism on campus, as men like Davis, Nickerson and Markert were pushed aside in favor of far-right academics like my old European Intellectual History professor, the very conservative Stephen Tonsor, who was hired in ’54, just as these other three men were leaving. [For what it’s worth, I valued Tonsor’s perspective, and still think fondly of his lectures, which seemed to be delivered without the least bit of concern as to how they might be received by the students present. I have a particularly vivid memory of a lecture that he began by slamming his briefcase on his desk and declaring quite loudly that pop-singer Madonna was “a whore.” If you don’t believe me about that, by the way, you can ask my friend Dr. Peter Larson, who, back in ’92 or ’93, after weeks of hearing my Tonsor stories, and assuming they were total bullshit, demanded that I allow him to tag along and attend class with me. Well, I took him with me to class one morning, and it just happened to be on the day that Tonsor decided to lecture on Madonna, who, by the way, had attended the university a decade or so earlier. Tonsor, for what it’s worth, would have been about 70 at the time.]
Of course, we have no idea if Donald Trump will actually sign an executive order designed to make college campuses more friendly to the views of his followers. He does, after all, tend to say things like this quite often, and not follow through. And it’s impossible to know, even if he did demand research institutions to shift right, what that would look like in practice. How, after all, does one make a world-class research institution more friendly to those who disregard facts and refute science?
If changes did happen, I imagine they would start subtly, as they did during the era of Joseph McCarthy. Universities wouldn’t immediately start firing climate scientists and announcing endowed chairs in QAnon Studies… No, they’d start by trying to curry favor with the administration, hiring people known to be friendly with the President. And things would evolve from there. Faculty members like Juan Cole would find themselves without jobs, and faux-academics like Sebastian Gorka would find themselves in demand. And, over time, if there wasn’t some kind of correction, our nation’s research institutions would turn to shit… at a time, I might add, that we need our academic research institutions more than ever. [Remember, the window to address global climate change is closing fast.]
I know this probably goes without saying for many of you, but I think it’s worth pointing out, for those who don’t work in academia, that federal research dollars aren’t exactly easy to come by. Academics compete for federal research dollars, and, at least in theory, only the best projects are funded, after having gone through an intensive peer review process. And, historically speaking, the results of this system have been incredible. Without federal research investments, it’s doubtful, for instance, that we’d have smartphones, the internet, or many of the drugs we benefit from today… Now, just imagine, instead of choosing the most promising projects, with the best research teams, for funding, you eliminated from consideration any projects coming from campuses thought to be unfriendly to the followers of Donald Trump? And what would that look like for America?
To those of you who agree with Donald Trump on this, I have one simple question… Would you rather have scientists at Berkley, or at Bob Jones University, working on the cancer drug that you might one day need to save the life of your child? I know, in the moment, it may feel good to lash out and punish those “ivory tower intellectuals” who, in your opinion, don’t understand what it really means to earn a living, but, really, by doing so, you’d just be hurting yourself.
Like I said, there’s a very good chance that nothing will come of this most recent threat. Trump has said as much before, and done nothing. With that said, though, all of us here in the greater Ann Arbor area, which is so dependent on the University of Michigan’s research operation, should be concerned that our President is talking about restricting research dollars to universities that he perceives as unfriendly. [UM is the number one public research institution in the nation in terms of federal research expenditures.] We just can’t afford to take such threats lightly… Here, with more on this, is an except from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
…The Pew Research Center found last year that 79 percent of Republicans said they were unhappy with professors who inject their political and social opinions into class discussions, and 75 percent said colleges were too worried about protecting students from views that might offend them.
Before making the announcement, President Trump brought to the stage a conservative activist who was punched in the face last month at the University of California at Berkeley.
The activist, Hayden Williams, had been helping the university’s chapter of the conservative group Turning Point USA.
Williams told the crowd that students like himself face “discrimination, harassment, and worse if they dare to speak up on campus.”
The president told Williams that he has a great lawyer and suggested that he sue the university, and possibly the State of California.
“Ladies and gentlemen — he took a punch for all of us. … Here’s the good news: He’s going to be a very wealthy young man. Go get ’em, Hayden.”
The president’s latest threat echoes one he made in 2017 against Berkeley. He said he would cut off federal support for the university after unrest over the visit of a right-wing provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, turned violent.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that neither Williams, nor the individual who struck him, were Berkley students… So this example offered by Trump has absolutely nothing to do with Berkley.
I should also add that I may not have reacted quite so strongly to Trump’s comment about withholding research dollars from institutions that he perceives as too liberal, had it not been for the fact that he doubled down on his Joseph McCarthy impersonation during the same rant, saying that he had ‘a list of names’ of people in Congress who “hate our country.” Here, if you haven’t seen it, is the video.
So, yeah, the President of the United States, after declaring the Justice Department case against him to be “bullshit,” then went on to say, “We have people in Congress who hate our country… and I could name names if you want, but I think you know who I mean.”
This is not normal.
This is dangerous.
And more people will die.
I could go on for hours, but it would just make me more depressed. So I’m going to search for Phil Silvers videos on YouTube instead.
