We Demand: The University and Student Protests 9780520966284

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We Demand

american studies now: critical histories of the present Edited by Lisa Duggan and Curtis Marez Much of the most exciting contemporary work in American Studies refuses the distinction between politics and culture, focusing on historical cultures of power and protest on the one hand or the political meanings and consequences of cultural practices on the other. American Studies Now offers concise, accessible, authoritative, e-first books on significant political debates, personalities, and popular cultural phenomena quickly, while such teachable moments are at the forefront of public consciousness. 1. We Demand: The University and Student Protests, by Roderick A. Ferguson 2. The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit, by Scott Kurashige

We Demand The University and Student Protests Roderick A. Ferguson

university of california press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2017 by Roderick A. Ferguson Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ferguson, Roderick A., author. Title: We demand : the university and student protests / Roderick A. Ferguson. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: lccn 2017005611 (print) | lccn 2017009354 (ebook) | isbn 9780520292994 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520293007 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520966284 (epub and ePDF) Subjects: lcsh: Student movements—United States. | Minorities—Education (Higher)—United States— History. | Kent State Shootings, Kent, Ohio, 1970. | Public universities and colleges—Curricula—United States—History. | Universities and colleges— Curricula—United States—History. | Educational equalization—United States—History. Classification: lcc la229 .f465 2017 (print) | lcc la229 (ebook) | ddc 371.8/1—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005611 Manufactured in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Cece

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contents

Overview ix Introduction 1 1. The Usable Past of Kent State and Jackson State 14 2. The Powell Memorandum and the Comeback of the Economic Machinery 35 3. Student Movements and Post–World War II Minority Communities 54 4. Neoliberalism and the Demeaning of Student Movements 68

Conclusion 81 Acknowledgments 99 Notes 101 Glossary 115 Key Figures 119 Selected Bibliography 121

ov ervi ew

introduction Demands by students are part of historic calls for social transformations inside and outside the American academy. In addition to being sources of inspiration, those demands have provoked social regulations. Activism

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The Progressive Demand

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Student Movements

chapter 1. the usable past of kent state and jackson state Dominant discourses of diversity arose alongside efforts to expand the university’s police powers. Both were attempts to regulate student demands for social redistribution and reorganization. Kent State • Jackson State • The President’s Commission on Campus Unrest

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/ Overview

x

chapter 2. the powell memorandum and the comeback of the economic machinery The confidential Powell Memorandum, written by the soon-to-be Supreme Court justice Louis F. Powell, was a blueprint for the replacement of the social ideals promoted by progressive student activists with market ideals favorable to US capitalism. Free Enterprise System

• US Chamber of Commerce Memorandum

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Powell

chapter 3. student movements and post– world war ii minority communities The increased visibility of minoritized communities was both the basis and the product of new intellectual, cultural, and political formations within and outside American colleges and universities. Dēmos • Minoritized Communities • Social Reproduction • Social Transformation • Reorganization of Knowledge • Freedom Schools

chapter 4. neoliberalism and the demeaning of student movements The demeaning and discrediting of student insurgencies, a historic strategy of dominant forms of power, is a presentday strategy of neoliberalism. Trilateral Commission

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Crisis of Democracy

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Neoliberalism

conclusion This book’s take on Saul Alinsky’s 1971 Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals offers “rules” meant for both inspiration and revision—that is, to inspire readers to revise them for the needs and goals of their own contexts. Saul Alinsky

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Radicalism

Introduction

This book is written for you, the student who believes that we can or should do better than the world that we’ve inherited—the scholarship kid, the activist, the one who works on campus or off, and the student who is not an activist at all. It’s a world in which you will more than likely graduate with not only a degree but a financial debt that will probably follow you for years to come. It’s an environment in which you will encounter not only new texts and theories but racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, xenophobia, and classism as well. It’s a society in which people are thrown into a chasm full of dangers, cruelties, and inequalities. Much of the news of those perils comes from the university itself, not as an institution removed from these dangers but as one deeply implicated in the crises before us. In fact, most of us who are in the American academy received the news of these current-day jeopardies because of recent campus struggles. In 2012, Maine’s Unity College became the first college or university in the United States to financially divest from companies that exploit fossil fuels, and in doing so it helped to shed light on 1

2 / Introduction

how, to quote from a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, “some of the world’s largest carbon producers—including BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy, and Shell—developed or participated in campaigns to deliberately sow confusion and block policies designed to reduce the heat-trapping emissions that cause global warming.”1 In 2013, the Dream 9—a group of young, undocumented Mexican nationals who were brought to the United States as kids and have lived most of their lives as Americans— self-deported to Mexico and attempted to gain reentry to the States. Once denied reentry, the Dream 9 staged a hunger strike, calling attention to the uncertainty that other young undocumented folks in the United States face, and to the Obama administration’s record-breaking deportations (438,421 in 2013, according to the Pew Research Center).2 In 2015, a coalition of University of California students made up of members of the United Auto Workers union, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Students for Justice in Palestine wrote letters to UC president Janet Napolitano opposing the UC Board of Regents’ proposed adoption of the US State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism.3 This definition associates anti-Semitism with any critique of Israeli state polices or practices, particularly with regard to Palestinians. Before the regents’ vote, the UC Berkeley professor and philosopher Judith Butler distinguished between “anti-Zionism” and “anti-Semitism,” writing, Anti-Zionism names a political viewpoint that individuals have a right to express under the First Amendment and to debate according to the principles of academic freedom. . . . Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, is a despicable form of discrimination, and it has no place on college campuses, and must be clearly opposed as we would oppose any and all forms of racial discrimination.4

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The board, however, unanimously adopted the definition, effectively making critiques of Israeli state policies and practices by scholars, students, and activists equivalent to hate speech. After the vote, the Palestinian American student and activist Omar Zahzah argued, like Butler, We all agree that anti-Semitism and racism must be combated on campus. Where we disagree is in the claim that anti-Zionism is bigotry. Palestinian and Jewish students alike should have the right to say that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 was morally wrong and that Palestinian refugees should have the right to return home to a state where Palestinians and Jews live in equality rather than in a discriminatory Jewish state.5

As Zahzah suggests, conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism makes the history of Israeli occupation and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians unspeakable. Also in 2015, by the first week of December, student protesters from eighty campuses throughout the nation had issued demands for racial justice. They were inspired largely by protests at the University of Missouri. Soon thereafter, students at other schools, such as Claremont McKenna, Ithaca, Oberlin, Princeton, Purdue, the University of Alabama, Yale, and the University of Minnesota, held protests and issued demands of their own. They pointed to institutional racism in faculty hiring and student admissions, racially themed fraternity parties, and racial profiling on campuses. This is a moment of renewed activism on college campuses, a renewal that contradicts taken-for-granted arguments about young people’s apathy. Each of the movements mentioned above has worked to challenge the ways that the university obscures its own social relations, how it—as my mother used to say— “throws rocks but hides its hands.” Like governments and

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corporations, the university turns real concerns and real people—ones that student activists spend their days and nights worrying about and fighting for—into abstractions, turning them into mere pieces that can be moved from here to there on the chessboards of the powerful. These students have effectively said that ensuring the well-being of the earth, people of color, immigrants, and other minoritized peoples and communities are not abstract concerns that can be separated from the operations and responsibilities of the university. Their demands represent an insistence on a new social order, a fundamental change in social relations, an attempt to guarantee that social practices within the university both account for the livelihoods of communities that are disfranchised and guarantee the safety of an ecological environment that is in terrible jeopardy. Their demands say, in sum, to the powers-that-be that who and what they take as abstractions and pawns are in fact our living, breathing priorities, as well as the bases of our politics and our visions for institutional transformation. For all their seeming newness, our present-day troubles are not entirely different from the ones that previous students struggled over. Like everything “new,” they have part of their genesis in “bygone” battles. In other words, there’s much we can learn from those earlier campaigns as we figure out how to clarify and launch our own. To this end and with you in mind, We Demand argues that the crisis of the contemporary American academy is part of an institutional and social backlash against the inroads made by student movements, inroads that challenged the systems of power that sought to constrain the lives and possibilities of the marginalized and the future of our earth, advances that tried to increase the chances that we all might have for selfinvention and collective well-being.

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The assertiveness of minoritized communities and progressive politics after World War II worked to change how American universities thought of themselves, pushing those institutions to accept responsibility for the betterment of an increasingly diverse and demanding public, a public that would no longer be shamefaced because of its differences of race, gender, ethnicity, indigeneity, sexuality, class, and ability. The increasing insurgency of marginalized communities and the politics and inquiries that they have engendered occasioned some of the most definitive intellectual shifts of the twentieth century. As a text that sees issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and indigeneity as signs of our intellectual advancement, this book opposes those that argue that attention to these modes of difference has compromised academic excellence or radical politics. We Demand is also an alternative to those works that assert that the primary problem of the university is the loss of its “public status.” While this book shares the belief that colleges and universities must possess and create a truly democratic vision of public education, it departs from most of these texts at the point where they presume a universal notion of “the public” and fail to fully appreciate how the advances of minoritized communities have shifted our intellectual landscape in unprecedented ways. In contrast to the books that lament the public university that once enjoyed state support, this book invokes “public university” to signal the heterogeneous publics whose due has never been received, whose dreams have never been fully activated, and whose histories and identities are rarely acknowledged as part of our “public.” In your studies, in your activism, or perhaps from someone at your job, you may have heard that there is no power without resistance. Well, the reverse is just as true: there is no resistance

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without power either. Indeed, the kinds of pressures that student movements of the 1960s and ’70s placed on the academy were met with a ferocious offensive. That offensive was made up of forces within the university and political and economic entities from outside. If the student movements demanded that the university commit itself to the economically, politically, and institutionally impoverished communities that often existed literally outside its walls, then administrators, politicians, and businesspeople issued their own set of demands: that the university refortify its commitment to systems of power that would keep those communities out and keep students, faculty, and staff regulated from within. The “crisis” of the university can therefore be understood as a problem of adapting the university to the new kinds of publics that have arisen in the wake of the student movements, as well as the social justice issues that those moments highlighted. As teachers, students, and workers in today’s American university, we are the inheritors of this insurgency and its backlash, and it behooves us to learn its history. To begin with, the progressive demand is one of the deep and historic elements of social movements. It is the initial utterance of insurgency. Historically, the demand has been simultaneously an intellectual, political, and ethical creation. The demand helped to elevate the crises happening in communities that would otherwise go unheard to the level of the social, making those crises public and worthy of an organized response. Consider, for example, what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper said in her 1892 essay “The Higher Education of Women”: Put your ear now close to the pulse of the time. What is the keynote of the literature of these days? What is the banner cry of all the activities of the last half decade? What is the dominant seventh which is to add richness and tone to the final cadences of this cen-

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tury and lead a great modulation into the triumphant harmonies of the next? Is it not compassion for the poor and the unfortunate, and, as [Edward] Bellamy has expressed it, “indignant outcry against the failure of the social machinery as it is, to ameliorate the miseries of men!”6

The “banner cry,” for Cooper, is a historical event, one staged in the name of the broadest possible freedoms for the greatest number of people, an event declaring that we can do better than the social machineries that seem bent on producing misery. The “key-note” of the nineteenth century—“compassion for the poor and the unfortunate”—is the demand of our own: an end to the devastation of the earth, the occupation of the indigenous, and the social exclusions that have come to characterize the lives of so many. Cooper’s passage suggests another element that has been crucial to all progressive politics—the relational character of social struggles. As the work of countless progressive intellectuals and activists attests, the best struggles have been characterized by their insistence that political organizing and engaged scholarship become occasions for connecting forms of struggle. In his 1986 essay “Responsibilities of the Black Scholar to the Community,” the great black historian, theologian, and Institute of the Black World director Vincent Harding wrote of that relational spirit as a personal and historical inspiration. Discussing his family’s decision to move to Denver in 1981, he said, We moved there in part because of the conviction that black people must assume major responsibility for the revisioning and reshaping of this society. I felt intuitively that there were certain powers extant in the Southwest that I needed to be in touch with, among them the power of the natives of this land and the power of the Chicanos. And so part of my reason for going was to find a way to

8 / Introduction understand more fully and to participate more deeply in the life of Native American and Chicano communities, and to see the ways in which children of Africa could come into a deeper relationship with children of Mexico and children of the earth.7

For Harding, the black scholar has a responsibility not only to black peoples and communities but to other peoples and communities as well. Realizing that broad responsibility and connecting with other histories of struggle, he suggested, is crucial to “the revisioning and reshaping of this society.” Both Cooper and Harding suggest that the degree to which our politics produces connections with other struggles has been the measure of our progressivism for a very long time. Harding—like other intellectuals, artists, and activists committed to liberatory struggles—presumed the complexity of communities that were dismissed because of their marginalized social positions. This presumption obligated him and others to discover the intricacies that existed within and among those communities. With such complexities in mind, We Demand argues that the increasing visibility of communities made up of immigrants, people of color, women, indigenous people, queers, transgender persons, and disabled people represents far more than a demographic change in numbers. The rise of these minoritized communities has signaled an epistemological shift of the highest order, a shift in how knowledge can be reorganized in political and academic contexts. Because of these communities and the demands that they have inspired, the US government, the American academy, and the US economy have changed. This new visibility did something unprecedented in the history of modern thought: for the first time, intellectual work had the chance of being evaluated for its relevance to women, people of color, queer people, and other minorities. Put

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simply, what it meant to be modern now included engagement with the developing insurgencies represented by people and cultures on the margins. We Demand bases its argument on the fact that the American university changed because of the emergence of these new kinds of “publics” in the United States, because of the assertiveness of communities differentiated by race, gender, ethnicity, indigeneity, religion, sexuality, ability, and class. In this context, the makeup of university knowledge, faculty hires, and student admittance takes on both political and intellectual importance. Contrary to the conventional narrative of the 1960s and ’70s student protest movements, they wrought changes not simply in the numbers of women and people of color who could enter the academy but also in the place that those minoritized people might occupy in the production of university knowledge and the reshaping of American society. Plainly put, when students challenged the university, they were calling for a new social and intellectual makeup of the university and for a new social order in the nation at large. As those student activists were pushing against the old (i.e., racist, patriarchal, classist, homophobic) way of doing things, they met with a fierce response from dominant forms of power. Indeed, the transformations that students called for ran up against resistance from actors and institutional practices both outside and inside the university, practices that attempted to prevent the full realization of the students’ demands. In this struggle over whether the vision of a more democratic university and society would prevail, the same institutions that seemed to honor student requests were also the ones that rejected them. Minority faculty members were hired and minority students were admitted. But they—especially black, brown, and Native faculty and students—were kept at low numbers. Research on

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/ Introduction

race, gender, and sexuality was often overscrutinized to determine whether it met university standards of excellence. Also, the very forms of student activism that opened the way for new kinds of intellectual interests and new kinds of people to embody those interests were regarded with increasing suspicion and even criminalized. All of these responses were ways to regulate the intellectual and social transformation of the American university. Their sum was an attempt to thwart the main goal of the student movements: turning the interests of the minoritized and the disfranchised into social forces that would allow those same folks to assume a role in history. The suppression of students’ vision of an inclusive university worked to snuff out the possibility that this vision would impact not only the university but the rest of the country as well. I wrote this book because it is time that we begin to see student protests not simply as disruptions to the normal order of things or as inconveniences to everyday life at universities. Student protests are intellectual and political moments in their own right, expanding our definitions of what issues are socially and politically relevant, broadening our appreciation of those questions and ideas that should capture our intellectual interests: issues concerning state violence, environmental devastation, racism, transphobia, rape, and settler colonialism. The first chapter of We Demand analyzes how the university— as an institution of power—adapted to the challenges of student activists with the discourse of diversity and the expansion of police powers on campus. The chapter reads The Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, prepared by a committee convened by President Richard Nixon in 1970, to show how politicians and administrators promoted the ideology of diversity as a way to construct student protests as the antithesis of diversity

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and tolerance rather than as calls for meaningful social transformation. This also meant constructing university administration and the American government as the protectors of diversity and tolerance against student activists, whom the report understood as agents of social disorder. This has allowed the university to establish not only diversity initiatives designed to protect the campus against the ostensible disorders produced by activists but also police forces that will supposedly do the same. Shifting from chapter 1’s focus on state and academy, chapter 2 turns its attention to how portions of the business sector responded to student insurgencies of the 1960s and ’70s. In 1971, Louis Powell, soon to be a Supreme Court justice, called on the business community to marshal its resources against the insurgencies taking place on campuses throughout the United States. This chapter argues that the Powell Memorandum, in championing neoliberal agendas that asserted the value of corporate and administrative needs over the needs and visions of marginalized communities and peoples, challenged the student movements’ efforts to make universities prioritize the lives and personhood of minorities over the needs and interests of corporations. Chapter 3 takes up another aspect of neoliberal strategies of suppression, an aspect that they have borrowed from prior efforts at containment—that is, the attempt to remove everyday people from history, from their right to transform the academy and the larger society. This chapter argues that the opposite has always been the primary gift of progressive social movements: the inspiration of people to be historical actors who can change the direction of social life. This inspiration comes from the increased visibility of minoritized communities after World War II, a visibility that has occasioned and been occasioned by the emergence of new intellectual, cultural, and political actors.

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As expressions of that visibility, progressive student movements, diverse as they have been, are doing now what they did then, drumming the idea that the university and the social world are in motion and can therefore be moved in other directions, that they are fluid and hence responsive to change. Inasmuch as colleges and universities position administrators to be the driving forces behind those institutions, they rob faculty and students of historical agency, of their right to social transformation and redistribution. This chapter argues that real transformation in the university can take place not through the expansion of administrative powers but only through grassroots mobilization among faculty, staff, and students calling for redistribution at every institutional level. Chapter 4 looks at another strategy of neoliberalism: its attempt to discredit demands for social transformation. Specifically, this chapter analyzes the ways that commentators portray student insurgencies as massive rants by spoiled and coddled children rather than movements whose lineage includes celebrated social movements of the past. This chapter argues that reducing student protests that call for the disruption of the status quo to collective tantrums is not a trivial action. Indeed, it is part of a long history of strategies used to suppress redistributive efforts and progressive attempts to connect various forms of struggle. The conclusion compiles lessons that I have learned as someone who has worked and struggled within universities for more than twenty years. It is my version of Saul Alinsky’s 1971 Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. Rather than issue a set of laws, I offer lessons in this chapter that are meant for inspiration and revision. They are filled with histories, vignettes, passages, and sayings that, on first blush, appear not to belong to discussions of the university. As an example, consider the inde-

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pendent filmmakers of whom Toni Cade Bambara wrote. Making socially responsible cinema, she said, involves assuming the enormous tasks of reconstructing cultural memory, of revitalizing usable traditions of cultural practice, and of resisting the wholesale and unacknowledged appropriation of cultural items—such as music, language style, posture—by the industry that then attempts to suppress the roots of it—where it came from—in order to sustain its ideological hegemony.8

If our goal is to be in the university but not of it, we should emulate those independent filmmakers and writers who knew that the “tools of their trade [were] colonized,”9 artists who nevertheless put those tools to alternative uses so that other stories could be told and other creators could do the telling. In this spirit, I wrote this book with the conviction that student protests are part of our cultural memory, part of our usable traditions, and part of our opposition to those forces that seek to suppress the unadulterated demand that our social world be redistributed.

on e

The Usable Past of Kent State and Jackson State

At the end of April 1970, students at Kent State University in Ohio began to demonstrate against the US invasion of Cambodia, the subsequent deaths of US soldiers, and the massacres of Vietnamese men, women, and children. For many people, the bombing of Cambodia, conducted to defeat Vietnamese rebels who were positioned there, suggested that the war in Vietnam was continuing rather than ending. Moreover, students were also protesting the draft, which mandated military service for the Vietnam War and by and large selected young men from economically and racially disfranchised backgrounds. By May 3, almost one thousand National Guard soldiers had been dispatched to the campus; in retaliation, the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps building was set on fire. When Ohio governor James A. Rhodes visited the campus and observed the demonstrators, he said, We are going to eradicate the problem. . . . These people just move from one campus to the other and terrorize the community. They’re worse than the Brown Shirts in the communist element and also the Night Riders and the vigilantes. They’re the worst 14

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type of people that we harbor in America. And I want to say that they’re not going to take over a campus.

On May 4, students continued with their demonstrations, defying orders to cease, and the day ended with National Guard soldiers firing on them. In a matter of seconds, sixty-seven bullets were unleashed on the protesters; nine people were wounded, and four people—Jeffrey Glen Miller, Allison B. Krause, William Knox Schroeder, and Sandra Lee Scheuer—were killed.1 On May 14, 1970, just ten days later, local law enforcement in Jackson, Mississippi, received word that students at Jackson State University, a historically black college and university, were pelting rocks at white motorists on one of the main roads on the campus, a road that was often the site of racial harassment of students by whites. A rumor that Charles Evers, a local civil rights leader and politician and the brother of the slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and his wife had been killed spread through the campus as well. A dump truck was set on fire, escalating the situation. The police came and were met with rocks and bricks thrown by angry students and locals. They responded by riddling one of the women’s dorms with a barrage of bullets— about four hundred, according to an FBI investigation. Two young black men, Philip L. Gibbs, a junior at the school, and James Earl Green, a high school student, were killed in the confrontation.2 What happened at Kent State and Jackson State is usually told as examples of the tragedies and the turbulence of student protests in the 1960s and ’70s. But they were also important junctures in the history of the American university and indeed of American society. After the killings at these universities, dozens of college presidents in the United States petitioned their state legislators not to curtail but to augment police powers on their

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The Usable Past

campuses. This chapter ponders the irony, then, of how an institution presumably dedicated to the education of young minds could produce the conditions for their possible annihilation. As I will show, the events at Kent State and Jackson State set in motion a series of interrelated processes—including the criminalization of students, the extension of university administration, the use of ideologies of diversity and tolerance against social insurgencies, and the expansion of police forces on campus yards—all of which created this peculiar institution of the current American academy and its particular view of student protest, an institution and a view that have helped to authorize ideological forces and repressive powers that shape our present day.

demanding new institutional and social orders Think back to the 1960s and ’70s student movements and how large the word demand loomed in radical manifestos that called for widespread social change then. In 1968, the Third World Liberation Front of San Francisco State College issued its “Notice of Demands,” listing the establishment of “a School of Ethnic Studies” as the number one demand.3 In 1969, the Lumumba-Zapata Coalition, a student group at the University of California at San Diego, on hearing of the institution’s plans to build a new—“Third”—college, responded, “We demand that the Third College be devoted to relevant education for minority youth and to the study of the contemporary social problems of all people.”4 In that same year, African American and Puerto Rican students at the City College in New York issued their “Five Demands,” intended to change the university’s institutional and intellectual structure to speak to the histo-

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ries and realities of Puerto Rican and African American students at that institution. The lists of demands put together by students at San Francisco State, UCSD, and City College inspired similar campus movements across the United States. The SF State demands signaled an interest in the reorganization of institutional life and in the reorganization of knowledge on college campuses and in American universities. Student activists on other campuses followed suit, recognizing that changing the social climate of the university meant admitting more students and faculty of color as part of an effort to change the intellectual climate of the university. Hence student activists called for greater numbers of people of color in universities, along with the creation of curricula that would be relevant for a world riddled by war, racism, sexism, poverty, and colonialism. For the students, to “demand” meant that it was time for a new social and epistemological climate to emerge at American universities and colleges. As student activists worked to assert their demands as the means to change the university and the larger social world, other social forces responded by trying to reassert authority over the transformation of the academy and the larger world. The US government and university administrations worked to convince campus communities and people outside the university that the administration could best manage the progress and the direction of the university. One strategy was to deploy the category “diversity” against the students and their visions of social justice. For instance, on June 13, 1970, President Richard Nixon established the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest in response to the killings at Kent State and Jackson State. Its account of these incidents, titled The Report of the President’s

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Commission on Campus Unrest, begins by arguing, “The crisis on American campuses has no parallel in the history of our nation.”5 While it locates the causes of campus unrest within the racial divisions at the heart of the nation, the report is overwhelmingly dedicated to constructing students as potential criminals, who—if unchecked—could disrupt the social order. Addressing student demonstrators as the cause of such disorder, the report states, “There can be no more trashing, no more rock-throwing, no more arson, no more bombing by protesters. No grievance, philosophy, or political idea can justify the destruction and killing we have witnessed. There can be no sanctuary or immunity from prosecution on the campus.”6 While the report claims that the commission was formed in “the wake of the great tragedies”7 at Kent State and Jackson State, it actually performs a kind of sleight of hand. Even though it states that it was motivated by the killings of student protesters, the report frames student activists as threats to democracy rather than as people whose freedoms should have been protected under democratic law. The report’s argument that students were the cause of social disorder is therefore ironic, given that students were the victims killed by state violence. Thus, the commission emerged presumably in response to the senseless deaths of student protesters, only to criminalize student activism. This irony—of an expressed concern for student activists joined with a real suspicion of them—was a signature feature of the Nixon regime. Nixon made his reputation by straddling the border between promoting law and order and seemingly advocating for civil rights. In his 1968 speech accepting the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, he argued for social order against what he perceived as threats from activists. Refer-

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ring to racial uprisings that broke out in Detroit, Washington DC, Chicago, and Baltimore, as well as the catastrophes of the Vietnam War, he stated, “As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night. We see Americans dying in distant battlefields abroad. We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home.” Here he saw an opportunity to use the discourse of civil rights—not to ensure greater freedoms for blacks and other minorities but to preserve the social order. As he stated, “Let those who have the responsibility to enforce our laws, and our judges who have the responsibility to interpret them, be dedicated to the great principles of civil rights. But let them also recognize that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence. And that right must be guaranteed in this country” (italics mine).8 Nixon was evolving a strategy to use the key phrase of social justice—“civil rights”—to redirect authority away from grassroots efforts and organizations and back toward dominant social institutions. What’s striking about Nixon’s statement is the subtle way that civil rights is removed from the circumstances of racial exclusion for people of color and cast instead as the general problem of individual well-being for all Americans, regardless of social privilege; the well-being of average Americans, this suggests, is jeopardized by activism and outcries against structural racism. This statement serves as an example of a strategy that Nixon deployed throughout his tenure as president—that is, the use of discourses of civil rights to refortify and extend the powers of the US government and to preserve the dominant social order. Later on he used the language of black power to promote what he called “black capitalism,” an economic program that mobilized the language of self-determination and racial pride to encourage racial

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minorities to identify with rather than think beyond the free market system. In a similar spirit and as part of a plan to recruit racial minorities to the Republican Party, he established the Minority Business Development Agency (later renamed the Office of Minority Business Enterprise) to provide business loans to minority entrepreneurs.9 Similar to how Nixon used civil rights language, the commission deployed the civil rights categories of diversity and tolerance in an attempt to promote law and order. The report presents itself as an upholder of the right to dissent. This pretense could also be seen in the makeup of the commission. For instance, James E. Cheek, then the president of Howard University, was one of its members. When Cheek assumed the presidency, Howard students had been protesting for two years, even closing the school in 1968 and 1969 over such issues as the university’s crackdown on students who called for changes in the curriculum and for greater responsiveness to student grievances by the administration.10 Howard University received much of its funding from the federal government, and at one point Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia argued that the university had become “infiltrated, infested, and contaminated with black power.”11 Cheek sometimes wore dashikis and had even debated Martin Luther King Jr. on the viability of nonviolence. Moreover, on the presidential commission he stated, “Students are determined they are not going to be fired upon and not be prepared to fire back, and I think it is a dangerous kind of situation where students are confronted with officers who overreact.” But Cheek combined a rhetoric of self-defense and the aesthetics of black power to ultimately enforce order on the campus. Indeed, his obituary in the New York Times points to how he soon became a symbol of order: “At the start of the 1969–70 academic year, he

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said he would ‘not attempt to administer under intimidation, violence or coercion of any kind.’ ”12 Another key person on the commission was James F. Ahern, a former police chief. When thousands of protesters rallied for two days in New Haven on behalf of eight members of the Black Panther Party who were awaiting trial on charges of murder, he was credited with defusing this potentially volatile situation and gained national fame. Like Cheek, Ahern became a symbol of establishment sympathy with protesters—having called for the arrest of the National Guard soldiers who killed students at Kent State—and maintenance of the social order in the face of social protest.13 In many ways these two men embodied the commission report’s attempt to straddle an acknowledgment of student grievances and a desire not only to maintain order but to multiply the forces for keeping order. Hence, the report begins by affirming the activists’ sense of inequality in the United States: The shortcomings of the American university are the third target of student protest. The goals, values, administration, and curriculum of the modern university have been sharply criticized by many students. Students complain that their studies are irrelevant to the social problems that concern them. They want to shape their own personal and common lives but find the university restrictive. They seek a community of companions and scholars, but find an impersonal multiversity. And they denounce the university’s relationship to war and to discriminatory racial policies.

The report juxtaposes its misgivings about student activism to a demand for tolerance in order to construct the students as potential victims of conservative violence from citizens who “believe that students who dissent or protest—even those who protest peacefully—deserve to be treated harshly.”14

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After conceding some of the students’ grievances, the report abruptly changes its tone and criticizes students as agents of a grave misconception: “Behind the student protest and on these issues and the crisis of violence to which they have contributed lies the more basic crisis of understanding.” In an ostensible defense of diversity, the report makes a case for the social heterogeneity of US society: “Americans have never shared a single culture, a single philosophy, or a single religion. But in most periods of our history, we have shared many common values, common sympathies, and a common dedication to a system of government which protects our diversity” (italics mine).15 This construction of the United States as a paragon of diversity is then tied to another, one that assumes that students themselves are threats to diversity: Among the numbers of this student culture, there is a growing lack of tolerance, a growing insistence that their own views must govern, an impatience with the slow procedures of liberal democracy, a growing denial of the humanity and good will of those who urge patience and restraint, and particularly of those whose duty is to enforce the law.

For the report’s authors, the results of the students’ alleged intolerance is clear: “A small number of students have turned to violence; an increasing number, not terrorists themselves, would not turn even arsonists and bombers over to law enforcement officials.”16 The stakes of this intolerance are not simply academic but national: If this trend continues, if this crisis of understanding endures, the very survival of the nation will be threatened. . . . Despite the differences among us, powerful values and sympathies unite us. The very motto of our nation calls for both unity and diversity: from

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many, one. Out of our divisions, we must now recreate understanding and respect for those different from ourselves.17

A report that begins apparently as a way to call attention to the vulnerability of students to state violence spends most of its pages constructing student demonstrators as the cause of social violence, as potential criminals in need of state regulation. Part of constructing students as potential criminals means rendering student activists as irrational actors, irrational not only in their demands but also in their speech and conduct: “Students must accept the responsibility of putting their ideas in a reasonable and persuasive manner.” The students’ irrationality is also un-American, the report implies, since their lack of reason is understood as inimical to American values: “They must recognize that they are citizens of a nation which was founded on tolerance and diversity, and they must become more understanding of those with whom they differ.”18 In a context that regarded student activism as dangerously vulnerable to irrationality and violence, student demands were not seen as critiques of the social order and calls for social transformation but instead were often viewed as by-products of the students’ irrationality. Only by submitting to the norms and orders set by the state and administration could students hope to regain their status as rational patriots, as stewards of an American regard for tolerance and diversity. For university and political elites, then, the social categories “tolerance” and “diversity” were never meant to inspire appreciation for the student movements, movements that might shed light on social inequalities and recommendations for transcending them. “Tolerance” and “diversity” were instead ways of saying “Society must be defended”—that is, protected from the student, who was understood to be a criminal from the start.

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diversity and the expansion of administration If calls for diversity and tolerance were ways of saying “Society must be defended,” then academic institutions were obliged to put certain mechanisms and apparatuses in place for that defense. This entailed the expansion of administrative procedures, offices, and relationships. It was an expansion of both ideological and repressive systems. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s theorization of the role of intellectuals in social reproduction can help explain what took place as universities responded to student agitation. In “The Formation of Intellectuals,” he wrote, Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only on the economic but also in the social and political fields.19

For the report, the student movements were occasions to clarify the “essential function” of the university for a liberal democracy. It can also be read as an intellectual document meant to give the university “homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only on the economic but also in the social and political fields.” For example, the report organizes that homogeneity and awareness around “values held in common,” values that stand for “the importance of diversity and coexistence to the nation’s health.”20 The report thus calls for the creation of a stratum of intellectuals who would use diversity to manage conflict in the student body in the name of the life of the campus and the health of the nation. To handle the grievances that student activists put before the university, the report recommends what it calls “the ombudsman method”:

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The ombudsman is an individual who acts as a mediator and factfinder for students, faculty members, and administrators. To be successful, the ombudsman must have both great autonomy and support of the university president. He must not be penalized by the college administration if his findings and recommendations embarrass university leaders.

In addition being an independent entity, the ombudsman, according to the commission’s members, would explicitly work on behalf of the managerial aims of the university where student activism was concerned: Some universities have appointed special student affairs administrators to act as liaison between students and the administration. These men and women are sometimes recent graduates. For example, a young, independent, black administrator often serves in the role of spokesman, mediator, and advisor for black students. Because these administrators have the confidence of the students, they can suggest practical modifications of student demands [italics mine] without being automatically branded as “sell-outs.” They can formalize complaints or proposals and bring them to the attention of appropriate faculty members and administrators.21

The report reveals that the university intended from the beginning to use the ombudsman’s seeming autonomy and racial identity as resources for rather than hindrances to the administration’s efforts to manage activism and confl ict. The job of the ombudsman was to take demands that might push against the university’s institutional order and bring them within that order, to—as the theorist Sara Ahmed has put it—make them “[cease] to cause trouble”22 Bringing the students’ demands within the university’s terms of order meant taking the students as figures of disorder. Understanding their demands as personal grievances was crucial to

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that rendering. Specifically, by reducing student activism to expressions of personal grievance, universities could abstract any and all visions for institutional and social transformation from student demands. Hence, alternative models for curricular development, faculty hiring, and student admissions could be understood as responses to individual complaints, which would be better resolved through simple bureaucratic procedures. Reducing demands for institutional transformation to grievances required offices predicated on narrowing visions for wholesale institutional and social change, offices that—oftentimes despite the best intentions—rendered those visions as hysterical and fanciful nonsense. In an ideological climate like that, how could there ever be any hope for redistribution?

the administrative and corporate specialization of diversity As minority difference was made into a resource to improve the brand of dominant institutions, as seen in the example of the ombudsman, those same institutions of state, academy, and capital responded to student movements calling for greater racial and gender representation by making diversity an administrative specialization—hence the rise of diversity offices, diversity officials, and what we might think of as the diversity bureaucracy. Rather than a result of student demands, we might more accurately think of diversity offices as the administrative and bureaucratic response to those demands. The sociologist Max Weber said about bureaucracy, “Office management, at least all specialized office management—and such management is distinctly modern—usually presupposes thorough and expert training. This increasingly holds for the modern executive and

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employee of private enterprises, in the same manner as it holds for the state official.”23 As diversity was literally turned into an administrative specialization, it moved further away from what students in the 1960s and ’70s intended when they radicalized forms of difference such as race, gender, class, and disability for revolutionary transformation. That radicalization was meant to be the basis for critically reorganizing knowledge within and outside the academy and promoting the entrance of minoritized subjects as central producers and consumers of that knowledge. Folding diversity into the bureaucratic machine and moving it up into the administration was one way of mitigating student demands and preventing them from becoming matters of social transformation.24 As part of the bureaucratization of diversity, and as the example of the ombudsman shows, institutions of power learned to extend their influence by promoting a few minorities—raising them up as examples of what could be done, even going so far as to extol the virtues of their cultural differences and histories— and by paying lip service to the idea of increasing the number of underrepresented students and faculty while actually keeping their numbers low, creating a climate in which minority difference could conceivably be affirmed without the presence of minoritized subjects and communities. While the student movements used radical critiques of race, gender, class, and sexuality to call for increases in the numbers of students of color, women, and queers in the academy, the academy and its compatriot entities—the government and US corporations—presented those differences not to engender radical social transformations but to improve their brands. These maneuvers by academic and corporate elites gave birth to multiculturalism in the 1980s and ’90s and became—as Jodi Melamed

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has shown—the basis of “official,” “state-recognized,” and university-certified antiracism.25 Through neoliberal multiculturalism, capital and academy presented themselves as the real achievements of student and social protest, producing products and constructing brands that bore the marks but not the substance of movement ideals and visions. This was not evidence of state and capital adhering to the vision of social movements but rather an indication of their move away from them. Under neoliberal multiculturalism and through the powers of academic and corporate elites, demands for racial, gender, and class representation were used to meet administration and corporate needs rather than the intellectual and social needs of communities that sat just outside university gates.

securing the campus For an ideological project that criminalized student activism and promoted diversity as a rationale for law and order, it should come as no surprise that the presidential commission’s report recommends the buildup of security forces as the means to protect diversity and tolerance. As it states, “The university’s police or security force is its ultimate internal resource for preventing and coping with campus disorder.”26 To forestall and manage disorder, campus security must be able to distinguish between “disorder and orderly protest.” Disorder, it says, comes in the forms of “disruption, violence, and terrorism.” Disruption can be defined as “any interference with others to conduct their rightful business.”27 This includes “obstructive sit-ins, interference with academic activities, the blockading of campus recruiters, and interference with the rights of others to speak or to hear others speak.”28 The report defines violence as “willful injury to

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persons or damage of property.” It describes terrorism as “the organized, systematic use of violence by clandestine groups, usually in pursuit of political objectives.”29 The broad definition of disruption is striking, justifying police repression in the name of order and relying on the university administration—and not the faculty or students—to determine what is the rightful business of the university and what is not. According to the report, it is the job of university officials to determine what is orderly and what is not: “[University officials] must increase their capacity and bolster their will to respond firmly, justly, and humanely to disruption.”30 Here we get a glimpse of how the report encourages the university to model its security units on the police forces that characterize the larger society. Obliging the university to maintain its ideals of diversity and tolerance and regulate its populace through the development of security systems, the report states, Many universities today have the attributes and managerial problems of civil communities. They are the scene of growing numbers of demonstrations and of an increasing rate and variety of crime. . . . A fully staffed and trained campus police force at its best can perform the functions of a small municipal police department with respect to campus disorders.31

Initially, campus security was made up of lone police officers rather than entire campus police forces. According to a 1971 document published by the US Department of Justice’s National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, “The development of the automobile marked the beginning of the 20th century campus security officer. The control of traffic and the problems incident to parking necessitated laws and individuals to enforce the laws.”32 Regulating the mobility of the automobile

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was part of ensuring the gender propriety of women as well: “The automobile problem was more than one of merely lack of parking space. It was a question of students, particularly women, behaving within proper moral constraints”—that is, not having sex outside marriage. As the document states, “The doctrine of ‘in loco parentis’ required that the institution serve in the stead of the parents and the exercise of this policy required a force equipped to patrol the campus, its vehicles and environs.”33 While the automobile and the university’s role “in the place of a parent” occasioned the emergence of twentieth-century campus security, the rise of the student demonstrator occasioned a shift in campus security and encouraged the university to become less parentlike and more statelike. After student protests in the 1960s, US college presidents lobbied their state representatives for authorization to create on-campus police departments. As of 2015, more than forty states had passed laws to allow campuses to form their own police departments. Most public schools with more than twenty-five hundred students and over 90 percent of private schools with that amount have their own police departments.34 The French intellectual Michel Foucault argued that Western society’s institutions of power have historically based themselves on the maneuvers and goals of war. Describing the ways that relationships of force have helped to shape institutions in the West, he contended, “The role of political power is perpetually to use a sort of silent war to reinscribe that relationship of force, and to reinscribe it in institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even the bodies of individuals.”35 By using the killings of student activists to expand rather than curtail police powers, The Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest attempted to do something similar. It recommends that univer-

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sities and colleges reinscribe relationships based on force and the maintenance of order within institutions, relationships that would distinguish between those people and groups that represent order on campus and those that represent disorder—and whose management would require administrative and security apparatuses. Present-day campus security is thus a product of the set of force relationships that constitute the contemporary university, relationships of force justified by a fear of students and an ostensible respect for diversity. As an institution that was adopting the force relationships of the larger society, the university was turning itself into a microcosm of the state, inventing new ways to legitimate and extend conditions of violence as it talked of order and peace.

the university and its orders of violence The convergence of administrative and police powers is alive and well in the contemporary university. What I have described so far is an institution that dramatically transformed itself from a simple and straightforward academic enterprise into an administrative system that has become more and more statelike, with apparatuses that try to ensure order both by persuasion and by force. Indeed, the university after the student movements of the 1960s and ’70s became a platform for education, bureaucracy, and security. Thus, police violence, administrative violence, and ideological violence have come together in an institution that is at once a bureaucracy, a school, and a police station. The university is now an institution that enacts and legitimates not one type of violence but several. One recent example of the university’s use of repressive (i.e., police) violence to assault student protesters occurred on

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November 18, 2011, at the University of California at Davis. Students associated with the Occupy movement at that university occupied the campus quad, where they erected tents, in protest against tuition and fee increases. University police, according to a UC Davis task force report, were instructed to remove the tents. While they were doing so, one police officer used pepper spray on a group of protesters who were sitting peacefully on a walkway. Offering context, the task force report stated, The incident also took place against the backdrop of worldwide student protests, including demonstrations by the Occupy Wall Street movement, which triggered similar events across the nation. These protests presented challenges for all affected universities and municipalities in attempting to balance the goals of freedom of speech, maintaining the safety of both protesters and non-protesters, and protecting the legitimate interests of government and the non-protesting public. [Italics mine.]36

This report positions student protests as a shared police concern for “universities and municipalities,” revealing just how normal the overlap between university and state practices has become and how student activism is already presumed to be a problem of order for administrative and police powers, one that must be managed in the name of not only the university but also society in general. Another expression of the university’s investment in forms of violence appeared in the case of Professor Steven Salaita, a case that illustrates how the university legitimates ideological and administrative violence. In August 2014, the administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign fired Salaita for tweets attacking Israel’s bombing campaign in the West Bank. In her justification of the termination, then chancellor Phyllis Wise invoked the protectionist logic of diversity. In an open letter to

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the faculty, she stated, “We have a particular duty to our students to ensure that they live in a community of scholarship that challenges their assumptions about the world but that also respects their rights as individuals.”37 In fact, according to Salaita’s book Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom, the board of trustees used the phrase “entry not approved” to carry out the termination. Discussing the phrase, he writes, During the vote, the trustees referred to me as “Item 14, page 23, number 4.” . . . When it comes to budgetary and ideological concerns, we are not human beings, but agenda items. Such is the tenor of “entry not approved,” a technical dictum replete with human interest but wholly oblivious to any iteration of humanity. . . . This bureaucratic flourish forestalls emotion by deploying pragmatic judgment in a passive voice. Nobody, according to the record, is actually responsible for that judgment. Like all acts of bureaucratic management, it was done by fiat of habituation.38

With this passage, Salaita points to how the university behaves with the dispassionate violence of the state, having very little care for human and personal costs, and reveals that the university contains administrative and repressive (i.e., police) infrastructures like those of the state. Recalling instances of the state’s use of “entry not approved” in distinct and overlapping contexts of race, empire, and colonialism—the checkpoint that regulates the movement and evaluates the personhood of Palestinians, the “whites-only” signs that restricted the mobility and questioned the humanity of African Americans, the anti-Semitic policies that barred Jews from colleges and universities—Salaita shows that his firing was an administrative decision not divorced from histories of racial and colonial violence but part of those histories.

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As the university administration evoked the histories of settler-colonial, segregationist, and anti-Semitic infrastructures, it also expressed its own administrative and policing powers, demonstrating that Salaita’s dismissal was both an administrative matter of his employment and a policing matter concerning the presumed security of the university and its students. As he states, I was thus barred from the university. In barring me, the trustees also banished a set of ideas it considers threatening while codifying others it finds appealing (based on administrative interests). The body of the dissident scholar personifies a breach of institutional virtue; he is thus banished from entry as both physical object and intellectual subject.39

Read as an ideological expression of diversity, Salaita’s termination was—in the administration’s eyes—a rational act aimed at protecting the student body from a faculty member now constructed as a threat to the university’s social order. Firing Salaita, a faculty member of color of Jordanian and Palestinian heritage, was also a way to regulate and expel certain critiques from the university, critiques having to do with occupation and settler colonialism. Both the assault on student activists at UC Davis and the firing of Salaita are part of a longer history, one born in that moment when the university—on the government’s advice— began to manage conflict and exercise police power in the name of protecting diversity and social order.

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The Powell Memorandum and the Comeback of the Economic Machinery

The incidents that the previous chapter discusses raise the question of what kinds of life the university began to see itself as protecting and what kinds it was willing to compromise or even disregard. The Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest was not the only outside attempt to shape the university’s priorities. On August 23, 1971—almost a year after the release of the report—Louis Powell Jr., soon to be a Supreme Court associate justice, issued a confidential memorandum titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System” to the chair of the education committee of the US Chamber of Commerce, a private, conservative, and pro-business lobbying group. Popularly known as the Powell Memorandum, it outlines and urges an offensive against what it considers “the broad, shotgun attack on the system itself” by radicals on the left.1 The previous chapter explains how a fear of student demonstration fixed the university as a platform for nonacademic institutions like police forces; this chapter looks at how that same fear was used to justify encroachments on the university by corporations. These 35

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particular incursions helped to displace attempts by student activists to offer the university as a location for ensuring minority personhood and environmental protections. In fact, Powell begins his memo by arguing that the attack on capitalism comes from elite institutions, “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”2 About college campuses, he writes, One of the bewildering paradoxes of our time is the extent to which the enterprise system tolerates, if not participates in, its own destruction. The campuses from which much of the criticism emanates are supported by (i) tax funds generated largely from American business, and (ii) contributions from capital funds controlled or generated by American business. The Boards of Trustees of our universities overwhelmingly are composed of men and women who are leaders in the system.3

The memorandum goes on to argue, “Although origins, sources, and causes are complex and interrelated, and obviously difficult to identify without careful qualification, there is reason to believe that the campus is the single most dynamic source” of the assault.4 Commenting on its significance, Noam Chomsky argues that the memorandum was part of an “enormous, concentrated, coordinated business offensive beginning in the 1970s to try to beat back the egalitarian effects that went through the Nixon years,”5 egalitarian effects produced by the student movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Like the Nixon administration’s report and its impact on the institutional and ideological uses of diversity and security regimes, the Powell Memorandum helped to disrupt the social transformations called for by students. It did so by constructing

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progressive critiques as demands for social chaos that would threaten the “free enterprise system” and “the American political system of democracy.”6 Powell’s memorandum competed with at least two concerns of student protests at the time: the dignity of minority personhood and the preservation of the earth itself. Indeed, it was an implicit attempt to beat back the ways that student and social movements tried to limit the appraisal of capitalist economic production as the most important and valuable entity in US society, more valuable than the disfranchised and more precious than our planet. Concerns for the disfranchised and for the welfare of the environment provided the impetus for transforming academic, economic, and state institutions. These concerns produced what Chomsky calls a “democratizing wave” in US society, a wave that the Powell Memorandum alerted the business community about.7 This chapter addresses the historic struggle between student and social movements to promote minority personhood on the one hand and corporations and university administrations to promote administrative and corporate personhood on the other. In Powell’s memorandum are the very questions that animate a host of struggles in the academy today—over the administrative and financial jeopardies around interdisciplinarity, the low numbers of black and Latinx students on college campuses, the marginalization of students of color in general, the consummation of administrative and corporate logics within the academy, the rise of student debt and the impoverishing of millions of young people, and the university’s investment in corporations that jeopardize the well-being of the planet. All of these issues grew out of battles over which social vision would have more value in the university and therefore society: the right of

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disfranchised peoples and a vulnerable planet to be free of deprivation, or the ability of corporations to use the world and a society’s resources as they see fit. This contest is part of an old question that activates all progressive movements: “Given the alienations of our social structures, what will be the status of the human and the earth and the possibility of historical change?”

the struggle for personhood Recent and past campus events have invoked the ethical, political, and intellectual charge of the 1960s and ’70s social movements, particularly their insistence on considering the possibilities of human personhood and environmental well-being, a consideration that might install a new—albeit long-dreamed— ethical, intellectual, and political identity in the American academy. Consider, for instance, what June Jordan wrote about the open admissions movement at the City College of New York, a movement that set as its goal the enrollment of any student who wished to attend and that for Jordan elucidated black studies as a field dedicated to the fulfillment of human possibility: We choose a real, living enlargement of our only life. We choose community: Black America, in white. Here we began like objects chosen by the blind. And it is here that we see fit to continue—as subjects of human community. We will to bring back the person, alive and sacrosanct. We mean to rescue the person from the amorality of time and science.8

For Jordan, movements such as open admissions and the emergence of black studies were historic opponents of the human devastation wrought by colonialism, slavery, and capitalist labor

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exploitation, exhilarating attacks against the degeneration of human possibility. To use Noam Chomsky’s metaphor, student movements were part of a wave of democratization that crested in US society. In 1970, for instance, New York University’s Gay Student Liberation took over Weinstein Hall with the help of the local chapter of the Gay Liberation Front in protest over the decision of the school administration and board of trustees to ban any and all queer dances. Among the protesters was the cofounder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries Sylvia Rivera, who remembered, “It happened when there had been several dances thrown there, and all of a sudden the plug was pulled because the rich families were offended that queers and dykes were having dances and their impressionable children were going to be harmed.”9 That protest led to ones at NYU’s Bellevue Hospital, which was still prescribing shock treatment for homosexuality. The demands that the students issued included the right for queer communities within and outside the university to use university space, open admission to NYU for queers and other minorities, the discussion of homosexuality in university courses, and the end to the psychiatric persecution of queers at Bellevue.10 Like the effort at City College, the protests at NYU insisted that the university respond ethically and intellectually to the fact and the right of human personhood in all its varieties and as it is threatened by racial, gender, sexual, and class violence. The student movements in those schools—and at others such as UC San Diego, Kent State, and Jackson State—issued a general demand for academic institutions to reorient themselves in favor of disfranchised populations and an already compromised

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planet. In other words, progressive demands were organized around the redistribution of outcomes in the university and in US society generally. That demand for representation and redistribution met a powerful backlash from corporate sectors.

the emergence of corporate personhood If the 1960s and ’70s saw a social movement push for increasing the life chances of socially and economically disfranchised communities and the well-being of our world, the 1980s brought about a new challenge to that drive. In that decade, we observed another type of personhood emerging, one that was in opposition to the prior attempts at redistribution—that is, the personhood of the corporation, which became a point of mobilization. In their book Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University, Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie talk about this shift: As the economy globalized, the business or corporate sector in industrialized countries pushed the state to devote more resources to the enhancement and management of innovation so that corporations and the nations in which they were headquartered could compete more successfully in world markets. . . . Business leaders wanted government to sponsor commercial research and development in research universities and government laboratories. . . . Faculty and research universities were willing to consider partnerships with business and government based on commercial innovation because government spending on higher education was slowing down.11

Funding thus moved away from curiosity-based research, which in the United States has had a harmful effect on interdisciplinary scholarship, endangering ethnic and women’s studies pro-

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grams in particular. Additional harm ensues from ideological and institutional maneuvers to neutralize challenges to various forms of exploitation, challenges that come from interdisciplinary locations in the humanities and social sciences especially. In this shift, funding resources and the psychic resources of will and imagination were designed for upward redistribution to wealthy and dominant sectors, overturning efforts to move institutional, economic, and intellectual resources down to marginalized and disfranchised communities. New partnerships bloomed between corporations and the academy as they attempted to make as many resources as possible available for the expansion of dominant institutions, partnerships that worked to upset the efforts to reroute university resources for the good of the minoritized and the earth. Moving institutional, economic, psychic, and intellectual resources toward dominant institutions was the aim of the Powell Memorandum, particularly in its detailed recommendations for how business might ideologically assault critiques coming from and inspired by campus movements. As it states, “The first essential—a prerequisite to any effective action—is for businessmen to confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management.”12 The memorandum then gives an extensive list of ways this might be done: develop public relations departments to confront critiques of the free market, link up with national organizations that also promote capitalism and establish an academic cadre of free-market sympathizers as speakers, evaluate textbooks to assure—in Powell’s words— “fair and factual treatment of our system of government and our system of free enterprise,”13 restore balance to faculties by ensuring that they hire scholars who promote the free enterprise system, institute courses within business schools to address the

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growing critique of liberal capitalism, and monitor national television networks for their coverage of the free market. Moreover, the memo argues that since part of the problem is the publishing and teaching productivity of anti-capitalist faculty, scholars in favor of the free market must also use publishing and teaching as much as possible to disseminate their ideas. According to the lawyer and author Jeffrey Clements, Powell—a former director for the global tobacco manufacturer and seller Phillip Morris—wrote the memorandum as a way to challenge the attacks that scientists were making on the tobacco industry in the 1960s and early ’70s. As a member of the board of directors and as counsel for Phillip Morris, Powell argued that these attacks were purely ideological and that “any suggestion that cigarettes caused cancer was ‘not proved’ and was ‘controversial.’ ” Through his legal work on behalf of the tobacco industry, Powell built a case that corporations are entities with rights similar to those of human beings. Clements shows that once Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court, the justice aggressively pushed an activist agenda that worked to establish corporations as “people” with rights. As Clement argues, “Justice Powell would go on to write the Court’s unprecedented decisions creating a new concept of ‘corporate speech’ in the First Amendment. Using this new theory, the Court struck down law after law in which states and Congress sought to balance corporate power with public interest.”14 Through the power of the Supreme Court, Powell produced a social world in which corporations were literally understood as life-forms whose rights must be defended against the challenges put to them by actual people. Powell’s memorandum prefigured his plan for the court. The agenda that he enacted there was understood as a way to combat the rise of progressive movements in various sectors of Ameri-

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can society, not the least of which were American colleges and universities. The memorandum worries especially about the magnitude of influence that radical intellectuals might have in those institutions. Powell identified professors of that ilk: “They may range from a Herbert Marcuse, Marxist faculty member at the University of California at San Diego, and convinced socialists, to the ambivalent liberal critic who finds more to condemn than to commend.”15 For him, the charisma and productivity of these faculty members were causes for alarm: Such faculty need not be in the majority. They are often personally attractive and magnetic; they are stimulating teachers, and their controversy attracts student following; they are prolific writers and lecturers; they author many of the textbooks; and they exert enormous influence—far out of proportion to their numbers—on their colleagues and in the academic world.16

We can observe his apprehension about the intellectual output of other progressives in further remarks about textbooks: We have seen the civil rights movement insist on rewriting many of the textbooks in our universities and schools. The labor unions likewise insist that textbooks be fair to the viewpoints of organized labor. Other interested citizen groups have not hesitated to review, analyze, and criticize textbooks and teaching materials.

For Powell, such revisions were made not to critique social inequalities but to accommodate the viewpoints of interest groups, so textbooks should be rewritten to reflect the interests of corporations as a social group too: “If the authors, publishers and users of textbooks know that they will be subjected—honestly, fairly and thoroughly—to review and critique by eminent scholars who believe in the American system, a return to more rational balance can be expected.”17

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As his attention to charismatic teaching, textbooks, and other writings shows, Powell based his strategy for ideological warfare on the intellectual productivity that he observed among progressive thinkers. His memorandum calls for “equal time” on the campus speaking circuit for “individuals or organizations who appeared in support of the American system of government and business.”18 It also calls on the Chamber of Commerce to urge “the need for faculty balance upon university administration and trustees,” to correct what it perceives as an “imbalance” that favored critics of capitalism.19 Hence, Powell recommended that businesses put scholars who were favorable to capitalism in universities, where they would monitor textbook content, publish scholarly journals sympathetic to pro-business viewpoints, and form a speakers bureau that could foster alliances with the business world. According to Clements, the Powell Memorandum was responsible for the “wave of legal foundations” that corporations established: “These legal foundations were intended to drive into every court and public body in the land the same radical message, repeated over and over again, until the bizarre began sound normal: corporations are persons with constitutional rights against which the laws of the people must fall.”20 Thus, when Powell asked for “balance” in portrayals of the free market, he was in fact demanding that social forces tilt even more in favor of corporations.

the corporation as minority It was not only that Powell wanted corporations to be considered persons. He also wanted them to be regarded as minorities. As he stated in the memorandum,

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Yet, as every business executive knows, few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, even the million of corporate stockholders. . . . One does not exaggerate to say that, in terms of political influence with respect to the course of legislation and government action, the American business executive is truly the “forgotten man.”21

It is important to contextualize this argument, which appeared in a social climate in which women, queers, disabled folks, and people of color were asserting more visibility. Powell identified legislative maneuvers that were rendering corporations aggrieved minorities: “Current examples of the impotency of business, and of the near-contempt with which businessmen’s views are held, are the stampedes by politicians to support almost any legislation related to ‘consumerism’ or to the ‘environment.’ ”22 The memorandum implies that social movements against racism, capitalism, patriarchy, and environmental abuse—rather than making society better—had worsened the conditions of the real change agents and the most important people in society, one of society’s most crucial minorities: corporations. As the legal scholar Anders Walker argues, Powell’s upbringing in the South influenced his understanding that even dominant groups and institutions could be minorities, as his opinion in the 1978 Supreme Court decision on affirmative action Regents of the University of California v. Bakke shows. In Walker’s words, Powell believed that “whites were themselves minorities— divided by religion, lineage, and culture—and many had suffered ‘a history of prior discrimination at the hands of the State.’ ”23 Indeed, in his Bakke opinion, Powell argues that the

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equal protection clause was meant for all minorities in the United States, which he takes to mean whites as well: As the era of substantive due process came to a close . . . , it was no longer possible to peg the guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment to the struggle for equality of one racial minority. During the dormancy of the Equal Protection Clause, the United States had become a Nation of minorities. Each had to struggle—and to some extent struggles still—to overcome the prejudices not of a monolithic majority, but of a “majority” composed of various minority groups of whom it was said—perhaps unfairly, in many cases—that a shared characteristic was a willingness to disadvantage other groups.24

Powell’s argument defanged diversity in university admissions by deracing it. Drawing out the implications of this decision, Walker argues, “Rather than continue to emphasize the discrimination traditionally faced by non-whites, modern day diversifiers might be better off developing tools to preserve diversity among whites, then applying those tools to benefit everyone.”25 As Christopher Newfield puts it, “Powell protected not the rights of the groups discriminated against, but the right of the university to run itself as it saw fit.”26 Powell developed tools to highlight white diversity and then extended them to benefit dominant institutions. To construct corporations as bereft of adequate political representation, he argued in his memorandum, “Politicians reflect what they believe to be majority views of their constituents. It is thus evident that most politicians are making the judgment that the public has little sympathy for the businessman or his viewpoint.” He then established corporations as in need of the kinds of intellectual and curricular responses that minorities were getting: “The educational programs suggested [earlier in the memoran-

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dum] would be designed to enlighten public thinking—not so much about the businessman and his individual role as about the system which he administers, and which provides the goods, services and jobs on which our country depends.”27 In effect, Powell argued that in a nation that truly provided protections for all its minorities, corporations—as the embodiment of the “forgotten [i.e., white] man”—would enjoy the same intellectual, institutional, and political safeguards as other minorities.

universities, corporations, and the taking of the world Powell’s construction of corporations as persons and minorities was not a way of turning attention, resources, and sympathy to a neglected minoritized community. It was in fact a means of shoring up and augmenting the power of institutions that student activists were challenging because of their enhanced capacities to shape and exploit life. Rather than a means of broadening the definitions of protection and personhood to defend and support vulnerable communities and resources, the memorandum was a way of extending the long history of the modern Western university’s alienation of the people. The genealogy of this alienation begins at the very founding of the modern Western academy. Immanuel Kant’s 1798 The Conflict of the Faculties was the first text to identify the university as an institution that takes responsibility for the people. In that book, the philosopher says about “the people,” The people want to be led, that is (as demagogues say), they want to be duped. But they want to be led not by the scholars of the faculties (whose wisdom is too high for them), but by the businessmen of the faculties—clergymen, legal officials, and doctors—who

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understand a botched job . . . and have the people’s confidence. . . . For the people naturally adhere most to doctrines which demand the least self-exertion and the least use of their own reason, and which can best accommodate their duties to their inclinations. [Italics mine.]28

Kant’s theorization of the modern research university constructs the people as the antithesis to and the other of reason. Because of this, they are the natural dupes of their superiors. The people’s desires and inclinations turn them away from reason, discipline, and introspection—that is, away from the life of the mind. For Kant, “the people” are not “the learned community,” for which theories and intellectual innovations are designed. With such formulations, Kant helped to turn the idea that “the people” are intellectual and critical beings into a dubious prospect, at least where the modern university was concerned. While Kant believed that the university should not be subjected to outside pressures, Powell argued the contrary. As he stated, “The ultimate responsibility for intellectual integrity on the campus must remain on the administrations and faculties of our colleges and universities. But organizations such as the Chamber can assist and activate constructive change in many ways.”29 For Powell, constructive change would come from the business sector rather than from leftist political communities within and outside the university. Like Powell’s vision of universities and colleges, Kant’s imagining of the research university in the eighteenth century appeared in a vigorous period of racial modernity—in his case, the period when modern institutions like the nation-state, capitalism, and the Western university were developing in relation to imperialism, colonialism, and slavery—in which the American university too was implicated. In Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery,

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and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, for instance, Craig Wilder examines how the imperial and racial imperatives of the US nation-state shaped such institutions as Harvard, Princeton, Rutgers, the University of North Carolina, Williams College, and Yale: American colleges were not innocent or passive beneficiaries of conquest and colonial slavery. The European invasion of the Americas and the modern slave trade pulled peoples throughout the Atlantic world into each other’s lives, and colleges were among the colonial institutions that braided their histories and rendered their fates dependent and antagonistic.30

One of the ways that those histories and lives were braided was in the development of racial sciences by American colleges and universities—along with their European counterparts—which won increasing renown for these white institutions while seeking to prove the inferiority of blacks and American Indians with a discourse that proposed that Natives would eventually vanish from the land and that blacks would naturally work it. Indeed, as one slave owner argued in his Phi Beta Kappa speech, “The red men of the forest have . . . been supplanted by a much nobler race of beings of European blood.” The building of colleges and plantations was a way to prevent the “roving savages of the forest” from maintaining Southern lands as “a savage and frightful desert.”31 Large institutions like universities were thus seen as racially motivated ways to control and manage irrational Native and black populations and the environmental resources that— without the management and control of whites—would surely go to seed. For Powell, leftist activism on college and university campuses was alarming in part because of its demand that corporate access to land and resources be regulated. As we saw above, he

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stated that “current examples of the impotency of business, and of the near-contempt with which businessmen’s views are held, are the stampedes by politicians to support almost any legislation related to ‘consumerism’ or to the ‘environment.’ ”32 The environmental movement was then making large inroads. The historian Adam Rome situates this movement in the context of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki33 and the Vietnam War, writing, “In the late 1960s, the environmental cause attracted millions of people in their teens and twenties, and the energy of the young helped make environmentalism a mass movement.” The movement spread as “young activists formed ‘eco’ organizations in hundreds of cities and college towns.” Students were extremely important in building that movement, making them—in Rome’s words—“the key force in the mobilization for Earth Day,” which was first celebrated in 1970.34 As it developed, the environmental movement became a way for activists to connect to issues of race, war, and empire. The forward to the New Left book Eco-Catastrophe argued, Like the race crisis and the Vietnam War . . . the ecological impasse is not merely the result of bad or mistaken policies that can be changed by a new Administration or a new will to do better. It is, rather a basic malfunction of the social order itself, and consequently cannot be dealt with on a piecemeal, patchwork basis.35

Scientists and activists charged the United States with committing “ecocide” by using chemical weapons in the Vietnam War. According to Rome, critics decried “the complicity of the corporate world in environmental devastation abroad and at home,” pointing to companies that profited from both chemical defoliants used during the war and toxic chemicals used in towns and cities throughout the United States.36 Connecting environmen-

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tal devastations to ideologies of whiteness, the writer Susan Sontag asserted, “It is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.”37 The university’s part in the histories of settler colonialism, racialized nonwhite labor, and land access implicated it in the exploitation of the environment. Indeed, American universities’ involvement in the seizure of Native lands and the exploitation of Native and black labor is an expression of Western modernity’s understanding that racial and ecological exploitations go hand in hand. As the critical ethnic studies and environmental scholar David Pellow argues, Through what Rousseau called the social contract, “subpersons” and “savages” were excluded from the polity since they were equated with nature. Thus, nature and the spaces certain people (or “subpersons”) occupied were devalued, or perhaps selectively valued insofar as they provided a strategic benefit to the modernity project. Thus, the meaning of space and race codeveloped to produce racism and environmental harm as one integrated process as European expansion took hold during the sixteenth century. In other words, the ideological, cultural, psychological, and physical harm visited on people of color was supported and made possible by a system that did the same to nature.38

Large institutions like universities and corporations had been helping to produce and support structural racism and been harming the environment well before the Powell Memorandum, but once activists began to oppose them, it worked to reestablish a social and racial contract that favored their ability to do so. In this new context, student movements calling for environmental,

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social, and racial justice could be marginalized in the name of corporations, now constructed as the actual minorities and victims of exclusion. Understood as both persons and minorities, corporations could then be defended on the basis of equal rights and in opposition to discrimination. In its push to secure and extend corporate America’s foothold in academic institutions, the Powell Memorandum helped to foster not only material but also ideological partnerships between university administrations and corporations. As the critical universities scholar Marc Bousquet asserts, “Over the past forty years, the administration of higher education has changed considerably. Campus administrations have steadily diverged from the ideals of faculty governance, collegiality, and professional self-determination. Instead they have embraced the values and practices of corporate management.”39 As campus administrations diverged from their earlier ideals, they began to consort with corporations in ways that the Powell Memorandum envisaged. Their advancing power over that of faculty and students was antithetical to what campus activists were demanding: the right of students and faculty to determine the nature and direction of their institutions. One of the effects has been a shift in the availability of opportunities for people in universities: an expansion for administrators and a contraction for everyone else. Bousquet states, “Over three decades, the number of administrators has skyrocketed, in close correspondence to the ever-growing population of the undercompensated. Especially at the upper levels, administrative pay has soared as well, also in close relation to the shrinking compensation of other campus workers.” The increase in administrative pay has produced greater identification with administrative positions: “In a couple of decades, administrative work

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has morphed from an occasional service component in a professorial life to a ‘desirable career path’ in its own right.”40 Upward redistribution is global in nature and consequences, reaching far beyond American academic institutions and the United States. As one example, the sociologist Teresa Córdova offers a glimpse of neoliberalism’s impact on Latinx people: “The policies of neoliberalism . . . were implemented in developing countries through powerful, transnational institutions acting in the interests of capital accumulation.” The effect of those policies were widespread: “The neoliberal regime in Latin America—ironically implemented in the name of ‘poverty reduction’—destroyed land-based resources and economies, devalued currencies, raised the price of imports, commodified cultures, and altered social fabrics.” Discussing the effects of neoliberalism on the lives of immigrants, she argues, “It exacerbated gaps in income and wealth and increased internal migration from rural areas to urban centers. . . . The mobility of capital, in fact, is partly what gives rise to the mobility of labor. Immigration of Latinos to the United States must be understood in this political-economic context.”41 If neoliberalism defines market-based attempts to increase the power and mobility of corporations, then we can understand the Powell Memorandum as part of that work. In attempting to augment corporate power via colleges and universities, the memorandum inserted itself into the larger history of the systematic diminishment of human and planetary life. It alerted the business sector to the growing opposition within the academy to the expansion of corporate powers, and the business sector responded with a large-scale offensive against efforts on behalf of minoritized communities and our endangered world.

three

Student Movements and Post–World War II Minority Communities

One of the aims of the Powell Memorandum was to expand the powers of university administration, not for the good of the people who study, live, and work on and next to campuses but for their eventual alienation. As the previous chapter demonstrates, administration has historically been geared toward the enlargement of its own life and those of corporations rather than toward the lives of people disfranchised because of their race, gender, sexuality, class, or disability. If university administration has “skyrocketed” since the 1970s, as Marc Bousquet argues,1 it has done so at the expense rather than as the fulfillment of the student movements that emerged after World War II and the disfranchised communities that they represented. This chapter tries to make sense of the antagonistic relationship engendered by the expansion of administration and the assertiveness of minoritized communities after World War II. Those communities are much more than “problem areas” or places known for their deficits. They are the locations of cultural, intellectual, ethical, and political riches, places whose his54

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tories refute the notion that bureaucracies can best represent them. Because of their marginal status and their critical potential, they are akin to the Greek dēmos as described by certain theorists. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière, for instance, talks about the dēmos as that group of everyday people that “demanded to be included in the public sphere, to be heard on equal footing with the ruling oligarchy or aristocracy, i.e. recognized as a partner in political dialogue and political power.”2 For Rancière, dēmos denotes the community of those excluded from the national ideal of the unified citizenry, those who are “uncounted,” the ones whose words, lives, histories, and cultures don’t receive the same consideration as those of the oligarchs. The lives, histories, and cultures of the oligarchs are the ones that set the standard for what it means to be citizen and human. Rancière also argues that while the dēmos is excluded, its power lies in its exposure of the arbitrariness of the oligarchs’ standards: such standards cannot and do not encompass all of life and its complexity, and thus the oligarchs’ power to name and set presumably universal norms are contrivances at best.3 For Rancière, politics begins when the uncounted become aware of their unequal status and the arbitrary powers of their rulers.4 The social and cultural movements of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s revealed minority communities as constituting the dēmos in the United States. As racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender minorities demanded to be included in the social institutions that make up US society, they asserted the right to determine how they were represented. To get what they wanted, minority communities applied certain intellectual and political pressures to social institutions in general and academic institutions in particular. As conduits of those pressures, post–World War II social move-

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ments revealed this dēmos to be a site of knowledge and as a horizon of social complexity, the beginning of a new order of politics and intellection, one that illustrated the arbitrariness of racist, heteropatriarchal, classist, and ableist standards. The communities that made up the dēmos of US minorities were heterogeneous, and the broadest forms of liberatory politics that emerged in that era attempted to make use of that heterogeneity. For instance, Angela Davis, who was a young UCSD graduate student at the time, observed, Back in the late ’60s, the emergent Black student organization, in alliance with the Chicano student organization, decided to campaign to create a new college at ucsd, which we wanted to name the Lumumba-Zapata College. We envisioned it as a college which would admit one-third Chicano students, one-third Black students, and one-third working-class white students.5

Like the movements at San Francisco State College and the City College of New York discussed in chapter 1, the LumumbaZapata Coalition strove to produce a politics based on the possible affiliations among progressive black, Latinx, Asian American, and white students, a relational politics founded on the heterogeneity of disfranchised communities. Through these efforts, they were saying that they did not have to do politics as usual, they did not have to produce knowledge as usual, and everything could be rewritten—not to reproduce the status quo but to overturn it.

the dēmos and the reorganization of knowledge After World War II, activists and cultural workers used the complexities of the dēmos to challenge the university’s production of

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knowledge. One angle was to attack the modern university’s organization of knowledge in the name of specialized areas of knowledge and interest. In The Intimacies of Four Continents, the social theorist Lisa Lowe addresses modern liberalism as the political and knowledge formation that has worked to keep the histories of privilege and exploitation in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe separate and specialized in different academic fields. As she writes, “The modern division of knowledge into academic disciplines, focused on discrete areas and objects of interest to the modern national university, has profoundly shaped the inquiry into these connections.”6 If ideology divides the world and its peoples into wholly distinct categories, there’s no sense of their connections. Central to Lowe’s argument is the notion that the university’s systems of specialization arose from modern liberalism’s colonial project of naming and classifying humanity. She writes, “As modern liberalism defined the ‘human’ and universalized its attributes to European man, it simultaneously differentiated populations in the colonies as less than human” and set boundaries between the study of these two groups.7 The extent to which our politics fail to see the connections among various histories of struggle is the extent to which they are based on a division of knowledge derived from both liberalism and colonialism. In her classic piece “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” Audre Lorde addresses dominant Western knowledge’s coding of difference as separation and antagonism and how profit economies need difference to be coded in this way to make sure that there are a majority of people who work and a minority of folks who can reap the benefit of the majority’s labor: We have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we

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think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.8

In many ways, the ethnic studies movements of the 1960s and ’70s attempted to produce patterns for relating across the human differences represented by the dēmos. For instance, an interest in the relational possibilities of coalition politics led black, Chicano, and white UCSD students to propound a new and—at the time—revolutionary curriculum for the proposed LumumbaZapata College. Of a course titled “Revolutions,” students wrote, Black and Brown People have become the vanguard of social change because they constitute the most oppressed sector of American society. It is within this framework that Black and Brown people must thoroughly comprehend the theory and practice of the successful as well as unsuccessful revolutions around the world. Reading material in this area will include such authors as Lenin, Nkrumah, Marx, Malcolm, Fanon, Padmore, Che Guevara, and Mariano Azuela.9

A relational politics was for these students a way of understanding the conditions and possibilities of revolutionary practice in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Russia, and Africa: the broadest forms of liberation necessitated the widest range of historical and political knowledge. The African American, Puerto Rican, and white students and faculty at the City College of New York who were advocating for open admissions at the same period also saw a relational and coalitional politics as the basis for social transformation. One of their demands for what they renamed “A Free University for Harlem I.S. 201” went to the very heart of relational politics: “That Black and Puerto Rican history and the Spanish language

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be requirements for all education majors.” As the statement from the City College students and faculty said, “It seems obvious that school teachers who are going to work in [this] education system should have a working comprehension of the history of Black and Puerto Rican peoples and should be able to communicate with the children they teach.”10 For students and faculty working for open admissions, relating across human differences was a way of—in Jacqui Alexander’s words—“becoming fluent in each other’s histories.”11 Movements outside universities were also occasions for exercising the power of the “uncounted.” One example was the historic twenty-five-day occupation of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) in San Francisco by disability rights activists in 1977, designed to push the federal government to prohibit discrimination based on disability. As the disability studies scholar Susan Schweik notes, this sit-in was made possible by a coalition between disability rights activists and the Bay Area chapter of the Black Panther Party.12 According to Schweik, the Panthers provided food to the activists and covered the protest in the party’s newspaper. One activist credits the party’s daily contribution of “fried chicken, fish, salad, corn, potato salad, rolls, punch, and assorted paper supplies” with helping to sustain the sit-in. Schweik ascribes the party’s alliance with the disability rights movement to the disabled Black Panther Bradley Lomax, who was part of the occupation from the beginning: “The Panthers came to this analysis [of disability] and extended its support for one main reason: because of Bradley Lomax. Lomax was a disabled Panther and a Panther disability rights/independent living movement leader whose work at this juncture began well before the HEW building occupation.” The disability activist Corbett O’Toole, who was

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also in the sit-in, summed up the significance of the presence of Lomax and Chuck Jackson, a Black Panther who was also Lomax’s personal care attendant: By far the most critical gift given us by our allies was the Black Panthers’ commitment to feed each protester in the building one hot meal every day. . . . The Panthers’ representative explained that the decision of Panthers Brad Lomax and Chuck Jackson to participate in the sit-in necessitated a Panther response . . . and that if Lomax and Jackson thought we were worth their dedication, then the Panthers would support all of us.13

As the history of these social movements demonstrates, relating across social differences had political implications. It meant exposing how dominant forms of Western knowledge were politicized toward viewing cultural and social differences as antagonisms, as problems to be rooted out; it meant broadening the political and imaginative horizons upon which the bastards of the West might engage one another’s historical relationships to varying forms of subjugation; it meant creating coalitions across those forms; and it meant coming together across differences to produce institutions that might address those differences in their complexity. As the various components of the dēmos learned from one another’s histories and struggles, how we relate to members of other groups became a radical political question aimed at challenging the status quo and producing a new and better world.

social reproduction versus social transformation Trying to relate across human differences was an attempt by the excluded to become something other than what Western history

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intended for them. As the above passage from Audre Lorde suggests, relational politics, in inspiring certain visions for disfranchised communities and the social differences that they represented, put social movements at odds with dominant institutions like colleges and universities. The issue of relating across human differences thus raises another issue: how does one produce alternative practices and logics within a place like the university, whose history is one of misrecognizing and distorting those differences? If, as chapters 1 and 2 argue, American universities and colleges responded to student protests by marginalizing the transformative power of those protests, then the expansion of university administration has come at the cost of the visions laid out by progressive students and inspired by the communities that make up the dēmos. In The University in Ruins, Bill Readings discusses the administrator’s ascent during the period of neoliberal globalization: The central figure of the University is no longer the professor who is both scholar and teacher but the provost to whom both these apparatchiks and the professors are answerable. . . . . The administrator will have been a student and a professor in his time, of course, but the challenge of the contemporary University is a challenge addressed to him as administrator.14

The Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest and the Powell Memorandum are challenges addressed to the university’s administrative role. Despite their differences, both encourage university administrations to reassert order in the face of student demonstrations, whether by allying with government entities and businesses or by establishing diversity offices to mitigate student demands. The privileging of the administrator as the center of academic relations has meant the triumph of

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social reproduction—here the process by which the university and its ways of doing things are regenerated rather than disrupted and altered. As forces that motivated and created social transformation, disfranchised communities became more visible after World War II as part of larger efforts to transform social institutions like the academy to make greater space for the lives and humanity of minoritized communities. But this historic situation in which greater space was demanded for poor people, people of color, women, queers, and the disabled in fact resulted in more space for the administrator. The ascendancy of the administrator was not occasioned by the visibility of minority communities and the need for transformation, however. It was principally motivated by an interest in widening the university’s powers against the kinds of social transformations that minority visibility demanded. The sociologist Max Weber argued that by their very nature, bureaucracies always have an antagonistic relationship to the people who make up the societies in which they operate. As he stated, “The dēmos itself . . . never governs larger associations; rather, it is governed.” The people play a kind of “informational” role for bureaucracies, influencing how executive leaders are selected and which sections of the people might shape “the content and the direction of administrative activities” as bureaucracies work to mold public opinion.15 We can see that antagonism in the university’s deployment of diversity not to upend institutional racism and other forms of inequality but to bolster those inequalities under the guise of working to abolish them. The expansion of administrative powers has produced a crisis like none before. As the university has worked to standardize and protect how and whom it enrolls, how and whom it hires, and

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which lives it protects and which it jeopardizes, the administration has revealed itself as a powerful site for reproducing the status quo. This power has helped it to hold at bay the kinds of reorganizations and transformations—in student admittance, faculty hires, and knowledge production—that the dēmos of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s demanded. The crisis is simultaneously intellectual, political, and social. As the administrative university works as a guarantor of the status quo, it has negated exactly what increasingly visible minority communities promised: that everything can be rewritten, that history is not set in stone, that an institution’s present does not have to be its future. As diverse and as contradictory as the 1960s and ’70s student movements were, they based their principles of participation and evaluation on the ideas that knowledge could be reorganized and that institutions could be changed for the good of minoritized communities. Administrative expansion has produced a crisis in how we understand ourselves as historical beings, as people who are not the passive observers or recipients but the active and passionate makers of history. The US student movements after World War II, like those in so many other parts of the world, were rebelling against institutions of power that were holding them back from making historic change. In The Colonizer and the Colonized, the French-Tunisian writer Albert Memmi argues that colonization is “unpardonable” for its “historic crime toward the colonized, dropping him [sic] off by the side of the road—outside of our time.”16 He goes on to explain, “To subdue and exploit, the colonizer pushed the colonized out of the historical and social, technical and cultural current.”17 What Memmi describes as characteristic of colonization—its ability to exploit by robbing people of historical agency—is typical of all forms of dominant power; dropping people off by the side of the road and pushing them

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out of the historical current is precisely what the administrative university has done. As the previous chapters have shown, the rise of the administrator and the corporate executive as the most valuable figures in and for the university has done nothing less than make students, faculty, and disfranchised communities the least valuable entities in the university’s eyes. By overvaluing administration, we turn our attention and energies away from the necessary work of interpreting race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability as ways of understanding the depth and complexities of peoples’ lives. In an article about these categories’ interpretive potential to transform the university, to inspire a reevaluation of minoritized students, the philosopher Judith Butler writes, I would argue that such categories can constitute a point of departure for a cultural understanding of a person’s background, life experiences, aspirations, and perspectives that constitute a hermeneutic condition for the understanding of that person’s past and future trajectory [italics mine]. Hence, the social categories become a condition for the interpretation of that person’s value and potential contribution—that is, a condition enabling an observer to locate and narrate the trajectory of that life.18

The abolition of affirmative action in California—through the passage, in 1996, of Proposition 209, which outlawed affirmative considerations in public institutions—was an attempt to crush the potential of categories such as race, gender, and class to interpret where a person had been, where they were now, and where they might go. As policies that asked people to reimagine the life trajectories of minority students, affirmative action programs were meant to be redistributive. Their dismantling represents a collective refusal to imagine the possibilities of minority life and intellect. More pointedly, it is, in fact, a cynical

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dismissal of the idea that racial minorities are worthy of futures other than the dismayingly familiar ones of economic impoverishment, prison, and premature death. No progressive politics can avoid the task of finding ways to produce organizations and foster ways of thinking within and outside the academy that can disrupt the various social conditions that narrow the possibilities of minority existence. Moreover, no politics worth its progressive salt can do without the interpretive powers of categories of race, sexuality, gender, disability, class, and so on. If we overvalue the work of administration and undervalue intellectual work, then we forfeit the right to disrupt those conditions and to reinterpret people’s value and potential. As inspirers of that interpretive work, the minoritized communities of the post–World War II period formed a dēmos in the truest sense of the word, demanding to be in the day’s historical, cultural, and intellectual currents. In addition to changes within the university, they inspired and created institutions beyond its walls, such as the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 and Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. These were fashioned so that people minoritized by race, gender, class, or sexuality could interpret and participate in historical change. In addition, they pointed to the crucial role of imagination in producing alternative representations and social worlds. When Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Hattie Gossett, Helena Bayard, Susan Yung, Ana Oliviera, Rosío Alvarez, Alma Gomez, and Leota Lone Dog founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, they were trying to produce an alternative to the mainstream publishing houses, one that would provide critical representations of minority cultures and enlist women of color as the authors and publishers of those representations. As Smith stated,

66 / Student Movements On the most basic level, Kitchen Table Press began because of our need for autonomy, our need to determine independently both the content and the conditions of our work and to control the words and images that were produced about us. As feminist and lesbian of color writers, we knew that we had no options for getting published except at the mercy or whim of others—in either commercial or alternative publishing, since both are white dominated.19

Kitchen Table Press thus “destabilized the natural functioning order of relations,”20 an order in which women of color were not meant to be authors or publishers with any frequency or circulation. A 1981 press release stated, “Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press is the only publisher in North America committed to publishing and distributing the writing of Third World women of all racial/cultural heritages, sexualities, and classes.” And in a 1984 description of the press, the staff stated, “Our work is both cultural and political, connected to the struggles for freedom of all of our peoples. We hope to serve as a communication network for women of color in the U.S. and around the world.”21 The Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 is another example of an effort to produce alternative institutions outside the administrative and ideological licenses and restrictions of official US education. This was a coalition of black and white undergraduates from around the country who helped to create forty-one Freedom Schools, which met in churches, on back porches, and beneath shade trees. As the educators and activists Kathy Emery, Sylvia Braselmann, and Linda Gold state, “The students were native Mississippians, averaging fifteen years of age, but often including small children who had not yet begun school [and] the elderly who had spent their lives laboring in the fields.”22 In addition to math and language arts, their courses covered black history, racial inequality in Mississippi, politics,

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and journalism. Discussing the significance of these schools, the great radical historian Howard Zinn wrote, There is, to begin with, the provocative suggestion that an entire school system can be created in any community outside the official order, and critical of its suppositions. But beyond that, other questions were posed by the Mississippi experiment. . . . Can we, somehow, bring teachers and students together, not through the artificial sieve of certification and examination but on the basis of their common attraction to an exciting social goal? . . . Can this be done by honestly accepting as an educational goal that we want better human beings in the rising generation than we had in the last, and that this requires a forthright declaration that the educational process cherishes equality, justice, compassion and world brotherhood? . . . . . . Would it be possible to declare boldly that the aim of the schools is to find solutions for poverty, for injustice, for race and national hatred, and to turn all educational efforts into a national striving for those solutions? Perhaps people can begin, here and there (not waiting for the government, but leading it) to set up other pilot ventures, imperfect but suggestive, like the one last summer in Mississippi. Education can, and should, be dangerous.23

The schools of Mississippi Freedom Summer stand as bold evidence of the intellectual and institutional pressures of the post– World War II dēmos, forces that rightly understood that imagination and intellect exercised on behalf of the minoritized are more robust and more advanced than what any administration can offer.

f ou r

Neoliberalism and the Demeaning of Student Movements

The “educational danger” of student movements—to reformulate Howard Zinn’s phrase1—lies in their capacity to produce insurgencies, insurgencies that are created by connecting social formations and processes that are supposed to be understood as disparate. We may understand student movements as efforts to illustrate the connections among systems of power that arose between academy, government, and corporation. The previous chapter used the increasing visibility of minoritized communities to explain the social ruptures that student and social movements produced in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s; this chapter looks at how systems of power have responded to those movements by demeaning the connections that they promote. Rather than see those responses as individualized acts, this chapter reads them as strategies used by and on behalf of dominant institutions to discredit the kinds of connections that can lead to social transformation. Put simply, offensives against progressive activism have always demeaned two of its signature features—that is, its remapping of social relations and connection of forms of struggle. 68

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This chapter shows how this polemical practice is one of the strategies of neoliberalism. In doing so, it argues that neoliberalism is not simply an economic and political formation involving governments and businesses but an ideological project meant to tear down the web of insurgencies that activists have been demanding.

the debasement of progressive politics in historical context In The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, the historian and theorist Lisa Duggan argues that neoliberalism conceals the very relationships that social movements work to highlight: Neoliberalism, a late twentieth-century incarnation of Liberalism, organizes material and political life in terms of race, gender, and sexuality as well as economic class and nationality, or ethnicity and religion. But the categories through which Liberalism (and thus also neoliberalism) classifies human activity and relationships actively obscure the connections among these organizing terms.2

A refusal to see the depths of social struggles works in the service of neoliberal processes that attempt to suppress our understanding of the complex and interlocking systems that make up the social world. One of the ways to suppress that knowledge is to debase those struggles as students take them up. Shortly after the student protests, discussed in the introduction, at the University of Missouri and other campuses gained a worldwide audience, online and traditional news outlets released a series of articles demeaning this movement. Reporters, politicians, and academics cast student demands for racial justice on

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college campuses as dictates calling for the universities to coddle underrepresented members of the student body, as tirades clamoring for the firing of white male administrators simply for being white male administrators, and as declarations commanding the suppression of free speech and the liberal flow of ideas. In a New York Times opinion piece, the sociologist Todd Gitlin argued, “Odds are we are witnessing a cultural mood that cannot be reduced to political-economic considerations. There’s a generalized anxiety when one has always been supervised, as this generation has,” and suggested that US culture has produced young militants who are “narrow-minded” and “weakhearted.”3 David Davenport, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a contributor to Forbes magazine, tried to distance protests in this moment from those of prior decades: “Let’s be clear, these are not your father’s student protests from the 1960s. Today’s students are not protesting wars and American foreign policy, but rather perceived slights and injustices in their college experience. In other words, the students are stirred up about their own lives and campus climates.”4 In addition, a series of articles argued that protests at Yale were affronts to free speech and open dialogue, the ideals that make up a liberal education. On the one hand, this assertion was curious, given that the empirical data suggested otherwise. In “What Do Campus Protesters Really Want?,” Emma Pierson and Leah Pierson show that the most common demands from students were: increase faculty diversity, require diversity training, fund cultural centers, and increase student diversity.5 On the other hand, the objections were not curious at all, given that demeaning student insurgencies has a long and infamous history. In his 1902 pamphlet “What Is to Be Done?” the revolutionary theorist Vladimir Lenin explains the debasing of revolutionary

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politics as a political practice. He discusses how the “legal Marxists”—a group of socialists who espoused their views in legal publications—declared “the idea of social revolution and of the dictatorship of the proletariat to be absurd” and reduced “the working-class movement and the class struggle to narrow trade-unionism and to a ‘realistic’ struggle for petty, gradual reforms.”6 For Lenin, the legal Marxists veered from socialist consciousness in constructing revolutionary change by a minority group as unrealistic. This exposed their fundamental elitism and conservatism—their belief that institutional power is more durable than human contestation, that the goals of revolutionary transformation can be reduced to the claims and horizons of the status quo. Moreover, Lenin pointed to how the debasement of progressive visions functioned politically, as a strategy to nullify radical demands and neutralize the energy applied to social redistribution and transformation. In the 1960s and ’70s, as we have seen, feminist, antiwar, and antiracist movements were cast as anti-intellectual and antidemocratic. Take, for instance, Michael Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Jōji Watanuki’s 1975 The Crisis of Democracy, a report for the Trilateral Commission. This group of private citizens from Western Europe, Japan, and the United States was convened by David Rockefeller, the American banker and former head of Chase Manhattan Corporation, to address their concern that— in Noam Chomsky’s words—“schools, churches, and universities were insufficiently indoctrinating young people.”7 In The Crisis of Democracy, the authors warn against what they call “adversary intellectuals”: In some measure the advanced industrial societies have spawned a stratum of value-oriented intellectuals who often devote themselves to the derogation of leadership, the challenging of authority,

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and the unmasking and delegitimation of established institutions, their behavior contrasting with that of the also increasing numbers of technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals.8

For the three authors, the rise of these adversary intellectuals “constitutes a problem to democratic government which is, potentially at least, as serious as those posed in the past by the aristocratic cliques, fascist movements, and communist parties.” The report denigrates movements that critique the contradictions of liberal democracy as phenomena bent on society’s destruction. About young activists, the authors say, “In all three Trilateral regions, a shift in values is taking place away from the materialistic work-oriented, public-spirited values toward those which stress private satisfaction, leisure, and the need for ‘belonging and intellectual and esthetic self-fulfillment.’ ”9 Conservative forces were not the only ones guilty of devaluing progressive calls for transformation. The left also engaged in its fair share. Indeed, radical organizations have often considered engagement with forms of racial, gender, and sexual difference as divisive rather than regenerative for progressive social and political struggles. The devaluation they practiced often took the form of movements that presumed that the goals of radical transformation had to conform to heterosexist and patriarchal visions of the social world. Consider, for instance, the fact that the veteran activists Rosa Parks, Daisy Bates, Myrlie Evers, Gloria Richardson, and Diane Nash were allowed to appear but not to speak at the 1963 March on Washington.10 Consider as well the 1970 flier “The Oppressed Shall Not Become the Oppressor,” in which the black and Latinx queer group Third World Gay Revolution confronts its heterosexual-of-color comrades about their homophobia: “By your anti-homosexual stance you have used the weapons of the oppressor thereby becoming the

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agent of the oppressor. . . . Therefore stop perpetuating in yourselves and your community the white-supremacist notions which are basic to your own oppression.”11 In 2001, student activists at Syracuse University formed the Beyond Compliance Coordinating Committee (BCCC)—a name meant to recall the civil rights movement’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—to address what they argued were ongoing issues of discrimination by the Office of Disability Services.12 The group was organized to challenge that university’s resistance to accommodating disabled students beyond what the law required. For the BCCC, the university’s resistance was also a means of restricting the kinds of transformations that might take place on campuses in response to the visible presence of disabled students, faculty, and staff. The BCCC argued that most institutions of higher education look at students with disabilities from a compliance mindset. Institutions, through their Disabled Student Services offices, are legally compelled to compliance with the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Compliance, however, does not always create an environment in which students can participate equally in the scholarly community.13

In their protest, the BCCC students pointed to a blind classmate who could not participate in the discussions for a disability studies class because the books for the course were never converted to audio texts early enough for him to listen to them. The director of the Office of Disability Services responded by offering to read the student’s texts aloud to him. The student refused the offer, since it would compromise his independence and delay the rate at which he could go through the materials. Moreover, the vice president of Undergraduate Studies, who was also

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the university’s 504 compliance officer, “refused to investigate the allegations of discrimination and demanded that the class provide evidence of [its] allegations.”14 In their charge of discrimination, the student activists were connecting the practices of the Office of Disability Services to ableist dismissals of disabled people’s needs. They argued that accommodation has to be conceptualized beyond the requirements of federal and state laws, with which the university was compliant: “Disability is about the human condition, and the Syracuse University community would be enhanced by a broader conceptualization of disability that calls for inclusion, integration, and equality.” The BCCC activists thus challenged the ways that disability offices inadvertently create the conditions for the demoralization of disabled students, asserting that “compliance with the law is the starting point, not the bottom line, for the university community, and disability should be included, along with race and gender, in what is defined as a ‘minority’ on campus.”15 The demeaning of potential social transformation can also be seen in the manipulation of difference by state and capital for purposes of domination. Jodi Melamed argues in Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism that corporations have taken up diversity initiatives as a way to promote antiracism as in line with market agendas.16 In such a context, minority differences are put in the service of corporate multiculturalism and the reproduction of corporate wealth rather than the communities that produced those differences. The demeaning of difference in this instance replaces a demand for redistribution with an endorsement of dominant institutions and the status quo.

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the macros and the micros of modern power One of the most interesting aspects of current student movements is their exposure of links between the structural and personal impacts of power on people in the university. For instance, Occidental College’s student group Oxy United for Black Liberation demanded the staffing of “physicians of color” at the school’s wellness center “to treat physical and emotional trauma associated with issues of identity.”17 These traumas are evidence of the ways that structural inequalities affect people on very personal levels. In connecting the actions and ideologies of dominant institutions to their effects on us at the most intimate levels, student activists like the ones at Occidental illuminate a constitutive feature of modern power: the ability to extend itself in micro and macro directions. Consider the historian Eric Hobsbawm’s assertion in Nations and Nationalism since 1780 that one of the ways that the modern state tried to achieve a continuous and unbroken line between itself and the people within it was through the expansion of administrative systems. As he states, “Politically it ruled over and administered these inhabitants directly, and not through intermediate systems of rulers and autonomous corporations. It sought, if at all possible, to impose the same institutional and administrative arrangements and laws all over its territory.”18 Moreover, Hobsbawm argues that citizens and subjects, whether in or near the metropolitan centers of government or in the remotest parts, would be connected to the state through its agents—postal workers, railway workers, school teachers, police officers, soldiers—and through its administrative practices: obligations and services such as compulsory attendance at primary

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schools and military conscriptions, not to mention registries for birth, marriage, household composition, and death.19 In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argues that power moves from targeting the body as a singular unit to singling out various parts of the body for penetration. In this shift, forms of dominant power zero in on even the most minute particulars of the body: “movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity.”20 In Foucault’s and Hobsbawm’s descriptions, we find explanations of how institutional power takes up residence in the seemingly most private and protected areas of our lives. As both writers indicate, the birth of the modern nation-state represents the moment when power adjusted and expanded the scale of its targets to focus not only on the grand event or territory but also on the things nearest to us. As a result, the modern period is thus one in which power extended itself to the furthest reaches and designated those things closest to us—the body and the mind—as its circuits. It should therefore come as no surprise that students demand large structural changes such as increases in the number of faculty and students of color and in funding for mental health professionals. In such a historical context, one would expect students to recount the ways that racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and so on jeopardize them personally and institutionally. The suffering of students and their outcries illustrate the connections between dominant power’s investment in social structures and its impositions on personal life.

the personal and structural implications of student demands If neoliberalism suppresses knowledge of how social forces and social struggles connect to one another, then challenging

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neoliberalism requires the continued development of political practices and frameworks that can illuminate those connections. In this moment, we find student groups relying on the analyses elaborated by antiracist, feminist, and queer organizing to mount those challenges. In March 2014, for instance, Queers United in Radical Rethinking (QUiRR), an organization of queer and transgender students at Northeastern University’s School of Law, voiced their support for members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP): “We are outraged and deeply disappointed that our university has targeted Students for Justice in Palestine and some of its Muslim members for police interrogation, sanction, suspension, and potential expulsion.” According to QUiRR, the university sanctioned SJP for its “silent walk-out in 2013” from a presentation by active-duty Israeli soldiers and demanded that the group “pay for police at its events when other groups were not held to the same standard.” QUiRR also stated that campus police prevented SJP members from distributing fliers announcing group events on campus.21 QUiRR’s statement points to forms of violence produced by the university’s administration and police but also demonstrates the kinds of solidarities and connections that can be forged even as attempts are made to suppress those affiliations. If we are truly to understand this very interesting moment— signaled by demands for gender-neutral bathrooms in documents about antiblack racism or by marches in which affirmations of the dignity of transgender blacks are part of call-and-response chants—we have to look at the legacies of feminist and queer attempts to connect various kinds of struggles as a means of combatting regimes of alienation. Audre Lorde’s discussion of the political and ethical necessity of connecting various struggles as a way to challenge neoliberal

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formations is instructive here. In her essay “Learning from the 60s,” she contextualizes the role of difference in political movements: Each one of us here is a link in the connection between antipoor legislation, gay shootings, the burning of synagogues, street harassment, attacks against women, and resurgent violence against Black people. I ask myself as well as each one of you, exactly what alteration in the particular fabric of my everyday life does this connection call for? Survival is not a theory. In what way do I contribute to the subjugation of any part of those who I define as my people? Insight must illuminate the particulars of our lives: who labors to make the bread we waste, or the energy it takes to make nuclear poisons which will not biodegrade for one thousand years; or who goes blind assembling the microtransistors in our inexpensive calculators?22

Lorde’s words demonstrate that each of us is a link in the circuitry of human and ecological devaluation. Because of that, though, she suggests that we can disrupt that devaluation as well. In its list of demands for the Atlanta University Center Consortium (whose members it identifies as Morehouse College, Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University, and the Interdenominational Theological Center), the Black Liberation Collective exhibits this feminist and queer influence by stating, #AUCShutItDown wholly dedicates itself to the eradication of harmful practices that provide for the perpetuation of these grievances [police repression and the economic exploitation and disfranchisement of the surrounding community]. These harmful practices include but are not limited to: state violence against black and brown lives, such as police brutality, erasure and reconstruction of history, and allotment of resources; the exclusion of women, LGBTQIA, differently-abled, non-Christian, poor, and neurodiverse or mentally ill

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persons in addressing public issues; and the upholding of respectability tactics in the wake of calculated, widespread targeting of black and brown persons.23

Likewise gesturing toward its awareness that we are all links between struggles, Yale’s Black Student Alliance issued a statement in support of the student group Fossil Free Yale: “The fight to save our climate is integral to the struggle for Black Liberation. Race, more than any other factor, determines how likely it is a person lives in an unhealthy environment caused by toxic waste plants and other contaminators.”24 We can read the efforts of student groups to link up with one another as political and intellectual actions to shed light on various social devastations and possible alternatives to them. Connecting these struggles is also a way to show how decisions and practices of seemingly distant structures like governments, corporations, and universities impact us personally and deeply. Contrary to David Davenport’s argument in Forbes, in many of their demand statements, students linked their day-today slights to structural issues. The group Next Yale, for instance, said in its letter to that school’s administration, “There is a preponderance of evidence that racist environments, like Yale, harm the physical and mental health of people of color, like us.” The students then called for “mental health professionals that are permanently established in each of the four cultural centers with discretionary funds.”25 It is not by coincidence that I end this chapter with the legacies of women-of-color-feminist and queer-of-color formations. These formations can be credited with illuminating most decisively the links between the large-scale prospects of power and its microaggressions, the ways that the macro-level horizons of

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nation-state and capital affect the ostensibly minor planes of the body and its intimacies. Earlier feminist and queer movements thus insisted that our knowledge of structural violence comes from the insights of our bodies and our feelings, a sensibility that current student demands have revived.

Conclusion “Rules” for Radicals

You may already be an activist. Then again, maybe you’re just somebody who wants to find ways to keep your eyes open. In any case, I wanted to write a book for you that would relate current progressive activism to the educational and political struggles that underlie our lives today, struggles that have encouraged broad identifications and alliances, as well as critical undertakings that have reimagined the past and the present in the name of a radically democratic future. I wanted you to have a book that provides a history of what you are noticing and maybe even experiencing. Thus, We Demand has shown that beginning in the twentieth century, the university has been a primary location for the waging of a host of battles. Addressing the university as an entanglement of bureaucratic, ideological, and security interests, this book has also been interested in demonstrating how this profile is an expression of neoliberal social forces—and how the university has consequently worked to establish student activism as a basis of suspicion rather than a chance for social transformation. Hence, this book has dealt 81

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with the question of what it means to put all of our intellect, imagination, creativity, and yes, hope into transforming and building institutions in a context of not only stubborn but violent opposition. In this conclusion, I set down some soft rules for dealing with where we are at this point in history, rules that I hope you will adapt and revise for your particular circumstances. The subtitle is a riff on the title of Saul Alinsky’s 1971 Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals. Alinsky said he wrote his book as a way “to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which man [sic] can have the chance to live by values that give meaning to life.”1 How to create a world in which all people live meaningfully, cooperatively, justly, and fully is a vital question, especially now. Rule 1: All good radical politics require a thoroughgoing understanding of one’s historical and institutional context. The great scholar-activist Angela Davis has said, “Radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root.’ ”2 For me, philosophical and theoretical investigations have been the means of getting at the root of things and thus embody my sense of what it means to do radical work. While I developed my identity as a theorist in graduate school, I was first introduced to the idea that theory could illuminate the foundations of power and inequality while I was an undergraduate at the historically black Howard University. My professors in philosophy and sociological theory courses there asked their students to put classic works such as Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human

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Understanding, and Plato’s Republic alongside modern texts like Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Cheikh Anta Diop’s The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality?, Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, bell hooks’s Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, and Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society. My teachers put these works together to get us to see that theory—like archival work for some, like fiction writing for others—was a way to answer the question of how we got to this grim and head-scratching present. A historically informed theoretical investigation can be one way to get to the bottom of what you have been dealing with concerning the university. With various court decisions that have legally dismantled affirmative action programs and with the dismal decline in the numbers of blacks, Natives, and Latinx in academic institutions, our current moment shows that American colleges and universities continue to restrict whom they will identify as “the people,” the ones with whom they will enter into social and intellectual contracts. For Kant, the construction of “the people” as semiautonomous, intellectually inadequate, and easily misled applied even more to people of color. In 1764 he argued, The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr. [David] Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though

84 / Conclusion among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color.3

As a figure with no capacity for artistic or intellectual engagement, the Negro—and, by extension, other people of color— could not possibly benefit from university education and constituted an even lower order than the university’s “people.” Constructing blacks and Natives as the antitheses of rationality and as even lower than “the people” enabled colleges and universities to accumulate and exploit nonwhite labor and land. As Craig Wilder states, College founders and officers used enslaved people to raise buildings, maintain campuses, and enhance their institutional wealth. However, the relationship between colleges and slavery was not limited to the presence of slaves on campus. The American college trained the personnel and cultivated the ideas that accelerated and legitimated the dispossession of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans.4

History shows us that the modern Western university was erected as an institution fundamentally antagonistic to everyday people in general and people of color in particular. In a way, then, you and I are the children of this institutional inheritance, the beneficiaries of a history that—as far as this place is concerned—has always presumed the inferiority of various constituencies of “the people,” constituencies based on differences of ability, class, race, gender, and sexuality. And so we find ourselves in institutions that—for the most part—have never cared to fully imagine us. Taking note of the ways that the history of the academy bears down upon us also implies something about the past. We

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cannot—as strange as it may sound—presume that the past is relegated to yesterday. So, Rule 2: The past does not stay still. From the first to the middle hour of the day and on to eventide, it creeps. The continued narrowing of the public and the university’s relationship to “the people,” as well as the ongoing expansion of security and other repressive apparatuses, means that we have to situate the erosion of education as a public good within the history of the people’s opposition to the university system and within the construction of people of color and poor people as others to the public good. As I argue in The Reorder of Things, “With the simultaneity of prison expansion and academic exclusion, a new level of dispensability for blacks and Latinos was being born that would create opportunities for penal institutions and omissions for academic institutions.”5 In this time when the academic options for students of color are being narrowed, marking them as people to whom the modern American university has no responsibility, the past creeps and forms a racial project in which the academy is the domain of exclusion and prisons are the domain of inclusion as far as black and brown bodies are concerned. But “the past” isn’t just the bad stuff that washes onto the shore: historical and cultural riches also come in with the tide. Those riches are crucial to challenging dominant forms of power and creating alternatives to them. Learning the intricacies of dominant power can be overwhelming, but it’s always necessary, and as the historian Robin D. G. Kelly argues, “Historical models may provide valuable insights for those seeking novel solutions.”6 If we are to challenge power’s pernicious forms, we have to—as best we can—figure out all its angles; cultural traditions and practices are key components of that struggle. Such components can be found in those instances in which someone took the time to imagine a place for us. So,

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Rule 3: Politics is not the science of resignation. It is the science of our activation, by ourselves and by others. The history of institutions like my alma mater Howard University is part of the riches from which we can draw inspiration and creativity. Officials from the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands founded it in 1867. At that time, as you can imagine, there was considerable, even overwhelming distrust of the idea that black people were capable of any intellectual adventure, and so there was real opposition to the establishment of liberal arts colleges and universities for African Americans. Indeed, the politician and political theorist John Calhoun stated, “If a Negro could be found who could parse Greek or explain Euclid, I should be constrained to think that he had human possibilities.”7 The initial goals for the school were modest. First it was envisioned as a seminary to train “colored preachers with a view to service among the freedmen,” then as a “Normal and Theological Institute for the Education of Teachers and Preachers.” Finally, the founders struck upon the idea of building a liberal arts university for the education of those who were born free and those who were recently acquainted with that status. How a full-fledged liberal arts university became the final goal we don’t know, but the point is that someone dared to imagine and run with it. The great Howard historian Rayford Logan argues in his history of the institution, “It is probable that these limited early goals stemmed in part from doubt about the wisdom of establishing a liberal arts college or university for the education of Negroes. The belief in the ‘inherent’ inferiority of Negroes was widespread in 1866.”8 Historically black colleges and universities, like Howard, were early attempts to push against the limits of what a university could be and which people it might claim

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as part of its imaginative horizon. The other time when minoritized subjects challenged the university in this way was of course the 1960s and ’70s, when student movements demanded that women and people of color be seen as constituencies within the academy, not just bodies but bodies and minds that could help reorganize knowledge in ways that people had never imagined. This grand revision of minoritized people as the bearers of ideas, dreams, and visions is part of the cultural richness that we bring into the present day. Rule 4: Choose intellection. The project of human recovery requires deep and committed thinking. This is an endeavor that allows no shortcut or slipshod work and has no room for antiintellectualism. As the cultural critic Henry Giroux writes in America at War with Itself, “Ignorance is not simply about the absence of knowledge, it is a kind of ideological sandstorm in which reason gives way to emotion, and a willful limitation of critical thought spreads through the culture as part of a political project that both infantilizes and depoliticizes the general public.”9 With this comment and the history of the American university in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in mind— and certainly after the 2016 presidential election—we might say that anti-intellectualism, not an accident but the intention of certain social projects, is the mature and defensive expression of dominant institutions, one that retaliates against past and present political and intellectual uprisings. In the antebellum South, white property owners did not believe that laborers needed education; they were even less willing to pay for it with their taxes, insisting that education would make the exploitation of laborers “more difficult; and that if any of them were really worth educating, they would somehow escape their condition by their own efforts.” The great African

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American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in his monumental Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 that white laborers during the period of slavery rejected the idea of free public education as well, “accept[ing] without murmur their subordination to the slaveholders, and look[ing] for escape from their condition only to the possibility of becoming slaveholders themselves.”10 Here Du Bois shows that the rejection of free and public education was a central component of white racial identity across class divisions in the nineteenth century. By contrast, he argued that it was slaves who best understood the power of critical thinking and who demanded it in the form of a system of public education. In fact, enslaved and free blacks demanded free public education for all people in the United States, and as Du Bois explained, “It was this demand that was the effective force for the establishment of the public school in the South on a permanent basis, for all peoples and all classes.”11 As he shows, the Freedmen’s Bureau, missionary societies, and black reconstruction governments helped to establish the modern public school system, built on the idea that education should be available to all persons regardless of racial or class status. As the abolitionist and author Richard P. Hallowell argued, “The whites had always regarded the public school system of the North with contempt. The freedman introduced and established it, and it stands today a living testimony.”12 Understanding the life of the mind as a public good was—to follow the historian David Roediger—part of the slave community’s vision for “self-emancipation.”13 A radically democratic vision of the life of the mind is part of what we have inherited from those who knew bondage, and we may measure our anti-intellectualism in terms of our alienation from this community of the dead.

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I invoke the freedpeople’s dream of public intellection to illustrate the fact that this country has catastrophically and consistently said no to intellectual progress, especially when a condition of that progress has been a serious reckoning with issues of race in particular, as well as matters of gender, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity. It’s important to remember, though, that while saying no to real progress has been a hallmark of US power, saying yes has been part of its power too. Rule 5: When institutions say yes, that is also a moment of jeopardy. As this book’s discussions of diversity suggest, we are living in a time when institutions such as state, capital, and university do not exert their power simply by excluding us and saying no. They do that—certainly. But beginning in the 1960s, modes of power did not simply recoil from difference but instead learned how to bureaucratize it and thereby divest it of its radical and transformative potentials. This has engendered a political crisis for minoritized intellectuals and activists and prompted the kinds of campus activism that we now see, responses to the jeopardy in which the bureaucratization of difference has put us. Part of that jeopardy for minoritized intellectuals and activists has to do with the ethical crisis in which the American university now finds itself: whether it will be a place that encourages or discourages genuine critical thought and transformation, especially where minoritized communities are concerned. This ethical crisis has wide implications and again raises the question of what it means to be an insurgent intellectual within the university. The question applies not only to students but also to faculty. The postcolonial theorist Edward Said captured the crisis produced by intellectual surrenders in Representations of the Intellectual:

90 / Conclusion The question remains as to whether there is or can be anything like an independent, autonomously functioning intellectual, one who is not beholden to, and therefore constrained by, his or her affiliations with universities that pay salaries, political parties that demand loyalty to a party line, think tanks that while they offer freedom to do research perhaps more subtly compromise judgment and restrain the critical voice.14

Remaining independent and functioning autonomously in the university is necessary, especially for the critical intellectual who does not see institutional favors, decorations, and promotions as the goal of our work but understands that the creation of critical masses of minoritized subjects of all types within this stubborn place and others like it is the prize. What would it mean for those of us who claim various forms of minority difference—race, gender, sexuality, disability, and so on—to recognize when those systems of power appeal to our differences, calling out to us like sirens on the rocks, promising to recognize our cultural and embodied differences without ever taking real steps to provide a place for those differences to be expressed, reimagined, and embodied by the greatest number of minoritized people? What would it mean to produce a politics of minority difference that revolves around the will to create such places for such people, recognizing that verbal and bureaucratic appreciations of diversity are never enough? It would mean wrestling with Frantz Fanon’s insight about the ways that storytellers reimagined their craft during the anticolonial revolutions in Africa: The storytellers who used to relate inert episodes now bring them alive and introduce into them modifications which are increasingly fundamental. There is a tendency to bring confl icts up to date and

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to modernize the kinds of struggle which the stories evoke, together with the names of heroes and the types of weapons.15

Forms of minority difference can be tools of such modifications, but only if we refuse to let them reside in the mouth of administration. Forms of minority difference are not the playthings of dominant institutions. They are the burnt offerings of communities in struggle. In this regard, Vincent Harding’s distinction between institutional certification and the historical resources provided by black communities strikes a note that all of us—no matter our identities—should hear: Black scholars must remember their sources, and by this I mean no technically historical sources. I mean human sources. I mean that they were not created as persons, as historians, as teachers, by Purdue University or by UCLA or by the AHA [American Historical Association] or the OAH [Organization of American Historians] or any other set of letters. They are the products of their source—the great pained community of the Afro-Americans of this land. And they can forget the source only at great peril to their spirit, their work, and their souls.16

Modern institutions would be nothing without their practices of certification, acts that imply they have the power to elevate us and to—in Harding’s words—create us as persons. So powerful is this ruse that we often imagine that we amount to very little without their certifying brands. But what Harding suggests is that these powers of certification are never matches for the political, intellectual, and ethical depths of the minoritized communities—the dēmos—that inspire us. Appreciating that we are occasioned as intellectual, ethical, and political beings by those communities rather than by the administrative procedures of

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academic institutions leads us to a bit of counterintuitive wisdom—Rule 6: Assume you don’t belong. After leaving Howard and making my way to the University of California at San Diego’s Sociology Department for graduate school, I found myself in a disciplinary setting that didn’t know what to do with my interests in literature and race. One of my best friends at the time was a Greek woman named Alexandra Halkias. Alex was ahead of me in both age and graduate progress: I was in just my second year of graduate school, and she was close to finishing her dissertation, which later became the book The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece. We taught in the same writing program and shared an office. One day, during the period when all the instructors were busy grading students’ papers, I was worrying aloud about my marginal position in my department and considering a transfer: “Alex, maybe I don’t belong in sociology. Maybe I really belong in literature!” I said as she was trying to get through a stack of students’ final papers. Having had enough of my kvetching, she replied, “Rod, just assume you don’t belong!” To my surprise, her advice was liberating, because I realized that much of my anxiety was the result of trying to belong to a discipline on terms that I never got to determine, to be certified without ever having any say about the components of that certification. Her response helped me to see that being in sociology (or any other discipline or institution, for that matter) didn’t mean that I had to belong to sociology. From that day forward, I resolved that I would never again cry out for an institution’s certification. Alex’s advice also allowed me to exercise another bit of advice, which I had gotten while a sophomore at Howard. Still striving to figure out how to be a radical intellectual, I sought out Walda Katz Fishman, who taught some of the social theory

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courses in the Sociology Department. She was popular among the students as the main Marxist on the faculty, “the Wildcat,” as one of the office staff admiringly referred to her. Unbeknown to me at the time, Walda was also a cofounder of the progressive leadership-development organization Project South. After maybe two class sessions with her, I showed up to her office hours and promptly said that I wanted to be a radical intellectual and to use her as a model. So she invited me to accompany her to off-campus events and presentations. After giving a presentation on racial and class inequality at a high school in Washington DC, she said to me, “Rod, I’m flattered that you’re looking to me as a model for radicalism, but you know, you really have to be your own model.” Rule 7: In all things, be your own model, but one with historical ties. We can connect this rule to the theory of minoritized communities that this book has put forth. Minoritized communities are not static but dynamic entities, “constantly dancing between the past, the present, and the future.” Harding argues that those of us who are inspired by this dynamism and who are committed to multiplying it must “be alive to the movement of history and . . . recognize that we ourselves are constantly being remade and revisioned.”17 Walda’s advice, then, can be taken as a nod to transform ourselves through the inspirations produced by disfranchised communities. In order to engage that kind of transformation—one that requires a commitment to hearing other people’s voices and perspectives—we have to be always ready to experience information and inspiration. Rule 8: You can learn something from everybody. While radicalism can be a really inspiring standpoint from which to imagine and transform the social world, it can also be deceptive, in making us believe that the only knowledge we

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need to care about is the knowledge that we and others like us possess and produce. When I was trying to invent myself as a young intellectual in high school, one of my favorite teachers, an older white woman from New Orleans named Mrs. Virginia Scott Joiner, gave me a bit of advice. She was one of those people who could read by the age of three. Recognizing her precocity, her father told her while she was still a little girl, “Remember, Virginia, you can learn something from everybody.” When she gave me that advice, she was telling me to remember the same thing that her father meant: that my budding sense of myself as an intellectual could help me to engage others who were different from me rather than dismiss them because of their differences. This insight joins hands with something Audre Lorde said about the 1960s: “Sometimes we could not bear the face of each other’s differences because of what we feared those differences might say about ourselves. . . . But any future vision which can encompass all of us, by definition, must be complex and expanding, not easy to achieve.”18 Standing by this homespun principle of learning from one another is also a way of challenging one of the primary levers of historical violence, the lever that turns people and the planet into abstractions, rendering them objects that are not worthy of human consideration, distorting the living and the breathing into simple means to an end. This has been a failure not only of liberal and conservative formations but radical ones too. After the Soviet Union massacred Hungarian communists—specifically, students, workers, and soldiers whom Stalinists called “anti-Soviet Soviets”—for demanding greater freedoms in 1956, the progressive historian E. P. Thompson wrote, “Stalinism is socialist theory and practice which has lost the ingredient of humanity.”19 This is an ingredient that we have to add over and

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over again to our political efforts. As the great theorist and activist Grace Lee Boggs argued in her memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, true revolutions are about “giving birth to a new society based on more human values.”20 This bit of wisdom has also matured in artistic and academic domains. James Baldwin, for example, said, “It seems to me that the artist’s struggle for his integrity must be considered as a kind of metaphor for the struggle, which is universal and daily, of all human beings on the face of this globe to get to become human beings.”21 In her tribute to the black political theorist Cedric Robinson, the social theorist Avery Gordon captured this sense of our radically human task when she wrote, “The driving force behind all authentic radical thought is, as Cedric has eloquently written, ‘the recovery of human life from the spoilage of degradation.’ ”22 Thus Rule 9: We are part of long and courageous efforts of human recovery that someone took the time to imagine, and our political visions must be grounded there. While the academy is not the source of our personhood, it is definitely a site of struggle. Louis Powell knew that for sure. One of the reasons that he worried over how much Herbert Marcuse was writing was precisely that he realized the potential of critical work to inspire and transform. Indeed, the Powell Memorandum was an attempt to call attention to and encourage the emulation of what was for Powell the overwhelming work done by progressive intellectuals in media appearances, teaching, and writing: it propagated a conservative agenda whose exponents could apply the might of their dispersed and coordinated efforts to meet the force of progressive production. If we think back to the arguments from chapter 4 about the role of demoralization in student struggles, we can see that one of the central aims of

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conservative forces is to keep progressive folks from turning back to our work, from making our writing a power within the world. The Powell Memorandum was designed not simply to build a conservative onslaught but to halt progressive creativity. Here the Chicanx queer writer Gloria Anzaldúa’s words on progressive creation prove instructive: For many of us the acts of writing, painting, performing and filming are acts of deliberate and desperate determination to subvert the status quo. Creative acts are forms of political activism employing definite aesthetic strategies for resisting dominant cultural norms and are not merely aesthetic exercises. We build culture as we inscribe in these various forms.23

Dennis Billups, a black disability rights activist who occupied San Francisco’s Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, offered in an interview in the Black Panther, “We need to show the government that we can have more force than they can ever deal with—and that we can eat more, drink more, love more and pray more than they ever knew was happening.”24 Rule 10: Progressive creativity is a multiform social force. Powell’s worry about progressive creativity was partly due to the fact that the critique of capitalism was connecting various types of communities and people. As he argued, “We are not dealing with episodic or isolated attacks from a relatively few extremists or even from the minority socialist cadre. Rather, the assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued. It is gaining momentum and converts.”25 Put plainly, Powell was alarmed by the relational agendas of progressive work, its potentially extensive itineraries and strategies that reach beyond singular locales, neighborhoods, communities, and regions. Rule 11: There is no progressive politics that is not relational. At the heart of this relational vision is an awareness

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that historical change comes through a politics and an ethics devoted to collective affiliations and alliances. In her 1971 poem “Paul Robeson,” the black poet Gwendolyn Brooks captures this relational vision: That time we all heard it, cool and clear, cutting across the hot grit of the day. The major Voice. The adult Voice forgoing Rolling River, forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge and other symptoms of an old despond. Warning, in music-words devout and large, that we are each other’s harvest: we are each other’s business: we are each other’s magnitude and bond.26

The best of revolutionary demands have this relational spirit at their core. In his essay “The Student Demand,” the performance studies scholar and theorist Tav Nyong’o invokes a relational outlook in C. L. R. James’s definition of black studies, seeing it as a “critique of western civilization.”27 Nyong’o writes, Black studies as the critique of western civilization teaches us to ask: What do we owe each other for the sacrifices we are each called upon to make to rebuke and repair the world? How can we—those of us who profess to educate—accept the student demand not only as a rebuke, which it is, but also as a gift?28

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June Jordan’s discussion of the open admission movement’s student demands also captures this dual function. The university is vexed and vexing, she understands that, but the fact of the matter is that it’s there, a ground that must be decolonized. “Yet it waits there,” she says, “at the end of coercion, the citadel of technique and terminology. . . . How shall we humanly compose the knowledge that troubles the mind into ideas of life [italics mine]?”29 The “ideas of life” are precisely those that have been threatened over and over again in the world in which we live. And among you, the seasoned and the unseasoned alike are needed to “repair the grand devastation.”30 The black independent filmmaker Louis Massiah framed his 1995 interview with the writer Toni Cade Bambara by saying, I think of this gathering as an inquiry into culture as well as an inquiry into the possibilities of what it means to be fully human as we come to the end of this century. If the problem of the twentieth century is the color line, then the question in the era we are going into is really how can we be fully human? The struggle is between forces of inhumanity that push us further into alienated states against forces that really work for humanity, work for us to gain greater understanding of each other, understanding our possibilities in the world. It’s really in this context that I locate Toni as a force for humanness, helping us to try to realize our human potential.31

To work for humanity—our own and that of others: this is the high demand of the disfranchised.

ack nowledgm ents

I thank students and colleagues at the University of California at Davis, Yale University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the University of Kansas, in particular Daphne Brooks, Nan Enstad, Betsy Esch, David Roediger, and Julie Sze. My deepest gratitude goes out to the editors of this series, Lisa Duggan and Curtis Marez; to Niels Hooper, executive editor at University of California Press; to Bradley Deprew and Renée Donovan, editorial assistants at the press; and to Juliana Froggatt, the copy editor of this book. For their care and encouragement as readers, I am especially grateful to Robin D. G. Kelley, Miranda Joseph, and Curtis Marez.

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notes

introduction 1. Union of Concerned Scientists, The Climate Deception Dossiers: Internal Fossil Fuel Industry Memos Reveal Decades of Corporate Disinformation (2015), 2, available at www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach /2015/07/The-Climate-Deception-Dossiers.pdf. 2. Aura Bogado, “Undocumented Activists Take a Giant Risk to Return Home,” Colorlines, July 23, 2013, www.colorlines.com/articles /undocumented-activists-take-giant-risk-return-home; Ana GonzalezBarrera And Jens Manuel Krogstad, “U.S. Deportations of Immigrants Reach Record High in 2013,” Fact Tank, Pew Research Center, October 2, 2014, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/02/u-s-deportations-ofimmigrants-reach-record-high-in-2013/. 3. Ben Norton, “California Students Resist Authorities’ Attempt to Conflate Criticism of Israel with Anti-Semitism,” Mondoweiss, July 7, 2015, http://mondoweiss.net/2015/07/california-authorities-criticism/. 4. “Judith Butler’s Statement on UC Regents Proposed Principles against Intolerance,” posted by Christopher Newfield on Remaking the University, March 23, 2016, http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2016/03 /judith-butlers-statement-on-uc-regents.html.

101

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Notes to Pages 3–18

5. Robert Mackey, “University of California Adopts Policy Linking Anti-Zionism to Anti-Semitism,” Intercept, March 23, 2013, https:// theintercept.com/2016/03/23/university-of-california-adopts-policylinking-anti-zionism-to-anti-semitism/. 6. Anna Julia Cooper, “The Higher Education of Women” (1892), in A Voice from the South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 58–59. 7. Vincent Harding, “Responsibilities of the Black Scholar to the Community,” in The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 278. 8. Toni Cade Bambara, “Language and the Writer,” in Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fictions, Essays, and Conversations, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 141–42. 9. Ibid., 139–40.

chapter one. the usable past of kent state and jackson state 1. “Four Dead in Ohio: 35th Anniversary of Kent State Shootings,” Democracy Now, May 4, 2005, www.democracynow.org/2005/5/4/four_ dead_in_ohio_35th_anniversary. 2. Whitney Blair Wyckoff, “Jackson State: A Tragedy Widely Forgotten,” NPR, May 3, 2010, www.npr.org/templates/story/story .php?storyId=126426361. 3. “Third World Liberation Front: Notice of Demands” (1968), SF State College Strike Collection, added October 6, 2009, https://diva .sfsu.edu/collections/strike/bundles/187994. 4. Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2012), 52. 5. The President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, The Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1970), 1. 6. Ibid., 2. 7. Ibid., ix.

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8. Richard Nixon, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Miami, Florida” (August 8, 1968), The American Presidency Project, by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25968. 9. Ferguson, Reorder of Things, 57. 10. Sophia F. McDowell, Gilbert A. Lowe, and Doris Deckett, “Howard University’s Student Protest Movement,” Public Opinion Quarterly 34, no. 3 (1970): 383–84. 11. Ethel L. Payne, “Major Points by Howard Students in Protest,” New Courier, April 6, 1968, 2. 12. Douglas Martin, “James E. Cheek, Forceful University President, Dies at 77,” New York Times, January 21, 2010. 13. Robert O. Boorstin, “James Ahern Dies; Expert on Police,” New York Times, March 3, 1986. 14. President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, 4. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 5. 17. Ibid., 6. 18. Ibid., 14. 19. Antonio Gramsci, “The Formation of Intellectuals,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoff rey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), 5. 20. President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, 9. 21. Ibid., 205. 22. Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 27. 23. Max Weber, “Bureacracy,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 198. 24. In the 1970s, corporations also began to establish diversity offices, thereby folding diversity into the corporate machine. 25. Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 1. 26. President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, 131.

104 / Notes to Pages 28–36 27. Ibid., 117. 28. Ibid., x. 29. Ibid., 117. 30. Ibid., 120. 31. Ibid., 132. 32. Seymour Gelber, The Role of Campus Security in the College Setting (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, 1971), 25. 33. Ibid., 27–28. 34. Libby Nelson, “Why Nearly All Colleges Have an Armed Police Force,” Vox, July 29, 2015, www.vox.com/2015/7/29/9069841 /university-of-cincinnati-police. 35. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 16. 36. Reynoso Task Force, UC Davis November 18, 2011 “Pepper Spray Incident” Task Force Report: “The Reynoso Task Force Report” (University of California at Davis, March 2012), 5, https://info.publicintelligence.net /UCD-ReynosoReport.pdf. 37. John K. Wilson, “Chancellor Phyllis Wise Explains the Firing of Steven Salaita,” Academe Blog, August 22, 2014, https://academeblog .org/2014/08/22/chancellor-phyllis-wise-explains-the-firing-of-stevensalaita/. 38. Steven Salaita, Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom (Chicago: Haymarket, 2015), 33. 39. Ibid., 33–34.

chapter two. the powell memorandum and the comeback of the economic machinery 1. Louis Powell, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System” (1971; hereafter “Powell Memorandum”), 7. 2. Ibid., 2–3. 3. Ibid., 3.

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4. Ibid., 12. 5. Noam Chomsky, in Requiem for the American Dream, directed by Peter D. Hutchinson, P. Nyks, and Jared P. Scott (PF Pictures, 2015). 6. Powell Memorandum, 1. 7. Requiem for the American Dream. 8. June Jordan, Moving Towards Home: Political Essays (London: Virago, 1989), 21–22. 9. Silvia Rivera, “Queens in Exile: The Forgotten Ones,” in Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries: Survival, Revolt and Queer Antagonist Struggle, ed. Ehn Nothing, (n.p.: Untorelli Press, [2013]), 52, available at https://untorellipress.noblogs.org/post/2013/03/12/street-transvestiteaction-revolutionaries-survival-revolt-and-queer-antagonist-struggle/. 10. Maggie Schreiner, “An Army of Lovers Cannot Lose: The Occupation of NYU’s Weinstein Hall,” Researching Greenwich Village History (blog), December 14, 2011, http://greenwichvillagehistory.wordpress .com/2011/12/14/an-army-of-lovers-cannot-lose-the-occupation-of-nyusweinstein-hall. 11. Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 7. 12. Powell Memorandum, 10. 13. Ibid., 17. 14. Jeffrey Clements, “The Real History of ‘Corporate Personhood’: Meet the Man to Blame for Corporations Having More Rights Than You,” Alternet, December 6, 2011, www.alternet.org/story/153345/the_ real_history_of_%27corporate_personhood%27%3A_meet_the_man_ to_blame_for_corporations_having_more_rights_than_you. 15. Powell Memorandum, 12–13. 16. Ibid., 13. 17. Ibid., 17. 18. Ibid., 17, 18. 19. Ibid., 19. 20. Clements, “Real History of ‘Corporate Personhood.’ ” 21. Powell Memorandum, 24–25. 22. Ibid., 25.

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23. Anders Walker, “Diversity’s Strange Career: Recovering the Racial Pluralism of Lewis F. Powell, Jr,” Santa Clara Law Review 50, no. 3 (2010): 648. 24. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 US 265 (1978), 292. 25. Walker, “Diversity’s Strange Career,” 648–49. 26. Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The FortyYear Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 112. 27. Powell Memorandum, 25. 28. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties (Der Streit der Fakultäten), trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 51. 29. Powell Memorandum, 15. 30. Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 11. 31. James Kent, An Address Delivered at New Haven, before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, September 13, 1831 (New Haven, CT: Hezekiah Howe, 1831), 15, 14, quoted in ibid., 7. 32. Wilder, Ebony and Ivy, 25. 33. As Rome states, “The environmentalism of the young . . . owed much to ‘the bomb.’ Many baby-boom children had nightmares about atomic war.” Rome, “ ‘Give Earth a Chance’: The Environmental Movement and the Sixties,” Journal of American History 90, no. 2 (2003): 542. 34. Ibid., 541. 35. David Horowitz, foreword to Eco-Catastrophe, by the Editors of Ramparts (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), v, quoted in ibid., 545. 36. Rome, “ ‘Give Earth a Chance,’ ” 547. 37. Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 203, quoted in ibid. 38. David Naguib Pellow, Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 38. 39. Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 1. 40. Ibid., 6.

Notes to Pages 53–59 / 107 41. Teresa Córdova, “The Neoliberal Policy Regime and Implications for Latino Studies Scholarship,” Azlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 41, no. 1 (2016): 65.

chapter three. student movements and post–world war ii minority communities 1. Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 6. 2. Slavoj Žižek, “The Lesson of Rancière,” in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, ed. and trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2006), 70. 3. Jacques Rancière, “The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics,” in Reading Rancière, ed. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (London: Continuum, 2011), 1–17. 4. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 3–4, 51. 5. “Angela Davis: Reflections on Race, Class, and Gender in the USA,” interview with Lisa Lowe, in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 314. 6. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 1. 7. Ibid., 6. 8. Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 115. 9. “Lumumba/Zapata College (Third) Planning Materials 1969,” 3, box 11, folder 12, Robert Elliott Papers, MSS 0127, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California at San Diego. 10. “Faculty for Action: Statement of the Five Demands,” Five Demands Confl ict Collection, City College Archives, City College of New York. 11. M. Jacqui Alexander, “Remembering This Bridge, Remembering Ourselves: Yearning, Memory, and Desire,” in This Bridge We Call

108 / Notes to Pages 59–68 Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, ed. Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2002), 92. 12. Susan Schweik, “Lomax’s Matrix: Disability, Solidarity and the Black Power of 504,” Disability Studies Quarterly 31, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 11. 13. Ibid. 14. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 8. 15. Max Weber, “Bureacracy,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 225. 16. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (London: Earthscan, 1974), 156. 17. Ibid., 158. 18. Judith Butler, “An Affirmative View,” in Race and Representation: Affirmative Action, ed. Robert Post and Michael Rogin (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 158. 19. Barbara Smith, “A Press of Our Own—Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 10, no. 3 (1989): 11. 20. Žižek, “Lesson of Rancière,” 70. 21. Smith, “Press of Our Own,” 12. 22. Kathy Emery, Sylvia Braselmann, and Linda Gold, “Freedom School Curriculum: Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964” (2004), 5, www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCpdf/CurrTextOnlyAll.pdf. 23. Howard Zinn, “Freedom Schools,” in The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997), 539, in ibid., 24.

chapter four. neoliberalism and the demeaning of student movements 1. Howard Zinn, “Freedom Schools,” in The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997), 539, in Kathy Emery, Sylvia Braselmann, and Linda Gold, “Freedom School Curriculum: Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964” (2004), 24, www .educationanddemocracy.org/FSCpdf/CurrTextOnlyAll.pdf.

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2. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2004), 3. 3. Todd Gitlin, “Why Are Student Protesters So Fearful?,” New York Times, November 21, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/opinion /sunday/why-are-student-protesters-so-fearful.html. 4. David Davenport, “A New Era of Student Protests,” Forbes, November 14, 2015, www.forbes.com/sites/daviddavenport/2015/11/14 /a-new-era-of-student-protests/. 5. Emma Pierson and Leah Pierson, “What Do Campus Protesters Really Want?,” On the Ground (blog), New York Times, December 9, 2105, http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/what-do-campus-protestersreally-want/. 6. Vladimir Lenin, “What Is to Be Done?,” in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 18. 7. Requiem for the American Dream, directed by Peter D. Hutchinson, P. Nyks, and Jared P. Scott (PF Pictures, 2015). 8. Michael Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Jōji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 1973), 6–7. 9. Ibid., 7. 10. Jeanne Theoharis, “ ‘A Life History of Being Rebellious’: The Radicalism of Rosa Parks,” in Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, ed. Dayo F. Gore, Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 128. 11. Third World Gay Revolution, “The Oppressed Shall Not Become the Oppressor / Los oprimidos no se convertiran en opresores” (flyer, 1970), http://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/gay-liberationin-new-york-cit/item/1956. 12. Rebecca C. Cory, Julia M. White, and Zosha Stuckey, “Using Disability Studies Theory to Change Disability Services: A Case Study in Student Activism,” Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability 23, no. 1 (2010): 30. 13. Beyond Compliance Coordinating Committee, Beyond Compliance: An Information Package on the Inclusion of People with Disabilities in Postsecondary Education, ed. Rebecca Cory, Steve Taylor, Pamela Walker, and Julia White (National Resource Center on Supported

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Living and Choice, Center on Human Policy, Syracuse University, September 2003), https://bcccsyracuse.wordpress.com/info-package/. 14. Cory, White, and Stuckey, “Using Disability Studies,” 31. 15. Beyond Compliance Coordinating Committee, Beyond Compliance. 16. Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 42. 17. Oxy United for Black Liberation, “Oxy United for Black Liberation” (2014), http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/OxyDemands.png. 18. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 80. 19. Ibid., 81. 20. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 137. 21. Queers United in Radical Rethinking at Northeastern Law, “Statement of Support: US Campaign to End the Occupation” (2014), Northeastern Students for Justice in Palestine, www.northeasternsjp .org/statements-of-support.html. 22. Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 139. 23. Black Liberation Collective, “Our Demands” (2014), www .blackliberationcollective.org/our-demands/. 24. #BlackLivesMatter and Ecology Study, “Statement of Support for the Sit-In for Fossil Fuel Divestment from Black Student Alliance at Yale Board” (April 10, 2015), http://dsn-poc.tumblr.com/post/116066384011 /statement-of-support-for-the-sit-in-for-fossil. 25. Next Yale, “Yale Demands” (letter to President Peter Salovey, Dean Jonathan Holloway, and senior members of the Yale administration, November 13, 2015), https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-Fn4Kf TrABO8ol6dXlwqw6oj0KdE2CwkhUf1pC4fOWc/mobilebasic?pli=1.

conclusion 1. Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1971), 3.

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2. Angela Y. Davis, “Facing Our Common Foe: Women and the Struggle against Racism,” in Women, Culture, and Politics (New York: Vintage, 1990), 14. 3. Immanuel Kant, “On National Characteristics, So Far As They Depend upon the Distinct Feeling of the Sublime and the Beautiful,” in Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997), 55. 4. Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 10. 5. Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2012), 202. 6. Robin D. G. Kelly, “Black Study, Black Struggle: Opening the Debate,” Boston Review, March 7, 2016, http://bostonreview.net/forum /robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle. 7. John Calhoun, quoted in Rayford W. Logan, Howard University: The First Hundred Years (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 4. 8. Ibid., 3. 9. Henry Giroux, America at War with Itself (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2016), 86. 10. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 641. 11. Ibid. 12. Richard P. Hallowell, Why the Negro Was Enfranchised: Negro Suffrage Justified (Boston: Geo. H. Ellis, 1903), 33, quoted in ibid., 677. 13. David Roediger, Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All (London: Verso, 2014), 9. 14. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Vintage, 1994), 67. 15. Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 47–48. 16. Vincent Harding, “Responsibilities of the Black Scholar to the Community,” in The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and

112 / Notes to Pages 93–97 Future, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 279. 17. Ibid., 280. 18. Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 236. 19. E. P. Thompson, “Through the Smoke of Budapest,” in E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics, ed. Cal Winslow (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014), 44. 20. Grace Lee Boggs, “The Beloved Community of Martin Luther King,” Yes! Magazine, May 20, 2004, www.yesmagazine.org/issues/aconspiracy-of-hope/the-beloved-community-of-martin-luther-king. 21. James Baldwin, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity,” in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Keenan (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), 41. 22. Avery Gordon, “The Future of Radical Scholarship,” Race and Class 47, no. 2 (2005): 85. 23. Gloria Anzaldúa, “Haciendo caras, una entrada: An Introduction,” in Making Face, Making Soul / Haciendo caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, ed. Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990), xxiv. 24. Susan Schweik, “Lomax’s Matrix: Disability, Solidarity and the Black Power of 504,” Disability Studies Quarterly 31, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 11. 25. Louis Powell, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System” (1971), 2. 26. Gwendolyn Brooks, “Paul Robeson” (1971), in Freedomways Reader: Prophets in Their Own Country, ed. Esther Cooper Jackson (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), 299. 27. “I have said it before, and I want you to understand, that it is no use talking about black studies unless you make it perfectly clear that the wealth which enabled the bourgeoisie to challenge those who were in charge of society and institute the power-building industrial regime came from slavery, the slave trade, and the industries which were based upon that. . . . Now to talk to me about black studies as if it’s something that concerned black people is an utter denial. This is the history of Western Civilization.” C. L. R. James, “Black Studies and

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the Contemporary Student,” in The C. L. R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 397. 28. Tav Nyong’o, “The Student Demand,” Bully Bloggers, November 17, 2015, http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2015/11/17/the-studentdemand. 29. June Jordan, Moving Towards Home: Political Essays (London: Virago, 1989), 24–25. 30. Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea (Boston: Tuttle, 1956), 17. 31. Toni Cade Bambara, “How She Came by Her Name: An Interview with Louis Massiah,” in Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 201.

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glossa ry

capitalism A social system (and not simply an economic one) in which production and wealth are owned privately by individuals or corporations. Its social character derives partly from the fact that it is shaped by and shapes differences of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class. The social nature of capitalism refers as well to how it evolves through its relationships with political forces such as nation-states and educational institutions like colleges and universities. As a social system, it has been both supported and challenged by forces within the university. culture The social practices, traditions, arts, and ideals that make up communities of people. These elements account for the heterogeneity within and among those communities. Culture is understood in this book as offering both resources for dominant forms of power—as expressed by big business, academic institutions, and governments—and challenges to those forms. dēmos Greek for the “citizens,” the “plebeians,” and the “people.” It also identifies the communities that are thought not to “measure up,” the ones who are excluded politically and economically, the ones whose cultural production (in the way of histories, ideas, stories, and art) does not matter. The communities that make up

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the dēmos, therefore, stand as the living critique of social inequalities and the given social order. As such, they also act as the point of inspiration for conceiving and producing alternative social orders. This book understands US communities disfranchised by race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, and so on as examples and members of the dēmos. diversity Not simply a term used to identify offices within academic institutions or a category that expresses their presumed ideals of inclusion and tolerance; also not the same thing as what the student activists of the 1960s and ’70s were demanding. It is an ideological system that was born out of collaborations between government and administration to mitigate student activism and to protect a given social order. Designed as such, diversity was also part of the emergence of police forces on university campuses. Given this history, diversity exists in tension with student activism around and demands for racial, gender, sexual, and class justice. minoritization A name for the process by which people and communities are disfranchised by differences and histories of race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability. In addition to naming the conditions of disfranchisement, minoritized connotes the kinds of knowledge and political formations that arise out of those conditions of disfranchisement, ones that often challenge the normative ideals of knowledge production and political practice. neoliberalism Denotes the upward rather than the downward redistribution of resources and wealth. In terms of universities and colleges, this has meant the expansion of administrative authorities and powers and the curtailment of the powers of faculty, staff, and students. To achieve itself, neoliberalism has had to rely on an ideological offensive against the redistributive demands of progressive student movements, demands for a downward redistribution of social resources. It is, hence, not simply an economic and political formation. university This is not the ivory tower removed from the social urgencies of society. Indeed, since its inception the university has

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been a flash point for issues concerning labor and environmental exploitations, as well as struggles over disfranchisements around race, gender, sexuality, class, and so on. Rather than simply being an educational entity, it is also an administrative, economic, and security apparatus whose aspects are tied to the administrative, economic, and security urgencies that run throughout its society. As such, the university has been a site of struggle for the issues raised by its various features.

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k ey figur es

james f. ahern The chief of police of New Haven, Connecticut, from 1968 to 1970 and a member of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest. saul alinsky The author of the 1971 book Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals. james e. cheek The president of Howard University from 1968 to 1989 and a member of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest. noam chomsky A political theorist and activist who has been an outspoken critic of US imperialism and assaults on democratic formations within the US and abroad. angela davis A theorist, activist, and Lumumba-Zapata Coalition alumna who has written extensively and spoken widely about prison abolition, antiracism, feminism, coalitional politics, and socialism. chuck johnson A Black Panther, a disability rights activist, and Bradley Lomax’s personal assistant, he helped to occupy San Francisco’s Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Office in 1977. june jordan A black queer and feminist poet and essayist who participated in and wrote about the open admissions movement at City College of New York.

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Key Figures

immanuel kant A German philosopher who argued that the guiding principle of the modern university should be reason. bradley lomax A Black Panther and disability rights activist who participated in the independent living movement and the 1977 occupation of San Francisco’s Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Office. audre lorde A black lesbian feminist poet and essayist who theorized about the regulation of forms of social difference and the potential that those forms might have for emancipation. richard nixon The thirty-seventh president of the United States (1969–74), he established the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest in 1970, ostensibly in response to the killings at Jackson State and Kent State. louis powell The author of the confidential “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” also known as the Powell Memorandum, and later a Supreme Court justice. jacques rancière A French theorist who has written about the concept of the dēmos. u.s. chamber of commerce A private organization of US business owners, whose education committee chair commissioned the Powell Memorandum.

selected bibliogr a phy

Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Anzaldúa, Gloria. “Haciendo caras, una entrada: An Introduction.” In Making Face, Making Soul / Haciendo caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, ed. Anzaldúa, xv–xxviii. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990. Bambara, Toni Cade. “Language and the Writer.” In Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fictions, Essays, and Conversations, ed. Toni Morrison, 139–45. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996. Bousquet, Marc. How the University Works: Higher Education and the LowWage Nation. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Chatterjee, Piya, and Sunaina Maira, eds. Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2014. Davis, Angela. “Angela Davis: Reflections on Race, Class, and Gender in the USA.” Interview with Lisa Lowe. In The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. Lowe and David Lloyd, 303–23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880. New York: Atheneum, 1992.

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Selected Bibliography

Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon, 2004. Ferguson, Roderick A. The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2012. Giroux, Henry. America at War with Itself. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2016. Jordan, June. Moving towards Home: Political Essays. London: Virago, 1989. Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon, 2003. Newfield, Christopher. Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Pellow, David Naguib. Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Roediger, David. Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All. London: Verso, 2014. Said, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. New York: Vintage, 1994. Salaita, Steven. Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom. Chicago: Haymarket, 2015. Schweik, Susan. “Lomax’s Matrix: Disability, Solidarity and the Black Power of 504.” Disability Studies Quarterly 31, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 11. Wilder, Craig Steven. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.