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Overview
In the post–World War II period, students rebelled against the university establishment. In student-led movements, women, minorities, immigrants, and indigenous people demanded that universities adapt to better serve the increasingly heterogeneous public and student bodies. The success of these movements had a profound impact on the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century: out of these efforts were born ethnic studies, women’s studies, and American studies.
In We Demand, Roderick A. Ferguson demonstrates that less than fifty years since this pivotal shift in the academy, the university is moving away from “the people” in all their diversity. Today the university is refortifying its commitment to the defense of the status quo off campus and the regulation of students, faculty, and staff on campus. The progressive forms of knowledge that the student-led movements demanded and helped to produce are being attacked on every front. Not only is this a reactionary move against the social advances since the ’60s and ’70s—it is part of the larger threat of anti-intellectualism in the United States.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520966284 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 04/25/2017 |
| Series: | American Studies Now: Critical Histories of the Present , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 136 |
| Sales rank: | 820,635 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
We Demand
The University and Student Protests
By Roderick A. Ferguson
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Roderick A. FergusonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-29300-7
CHAPTER 1
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 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.
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.
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 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. 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." 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 histories 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 Commission on Campus Unrest, begins by arguing, "The crisis on American campuses has no parallel in the history of our nation." 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."
While the report claims that the commission was formed in "the wake of the great tragedies" 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. Referring 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). 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 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.
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. 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." 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 said he would 'not attempt to administer under intimidation, violence or coercion of any kind.'"
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. 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."
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).
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." 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 many, one. Out of our divisions, we must now recreate understanding and respect for those different from ourselves.
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." 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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from We Demand by Roderick A. Ferguson. Copyright © 2017 Roderick A. Ferguson. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
OverviewIntroduction
1. The Usable Past of Kent State and Jackson State
2. The Powell Memorandum and the Comeback of the Economic Machinery
3. Student Movements and Post–World War II Minority Communities
4. Neoliberalism and the Demeaning of Student Movements
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Glossary
Key Figures
Selected Bibliography