Thread by @TomLevenson

Just read an @radioopensource email on their "cancel culture" program in which Yale professor David Bromwich displayed a level of historical illiteracy that made me wonder if Clio herself appeared to whomp him upside the head.

Quote and exegesis to follow 1/

2/ Here's the quote: "Bromwich says...that universities are on the way to becoming much less free than they were 'let’s say from 1945 to 1995 or 2000 or so. Universities were the freest part of American life for all those years . . . places like U. of Chicago, Yale, UCLA, U MI."

3/ Lemme tell you (and Professor Bromwich) a story. In 1951, UC Berkeley wanted to hire my father, Joseph R. Levenson, w. his new Ph.D. in Chinese history. His name had to be hidden from the CA legislature. Why? Because he'd been one of John Fairbank's students...

4/ Why was that a problem? Because Fairbank was one of the "three Johns who lost China," and was facing McCarthyite scrutiny. The UCB history department feared trying to justify bringing any intellectual contagion from that association, and so hid the appointment...

5/ PS: it was not just the association that had the California contingent worried. A professor at Berkeley wrote to Fairbank to make sure that dad didn't employ any Marxist theory in his historiography...

6/ So, to avoid arousing the CA legislature, the UCB budget for AY 1951 was prepared with the line "Provision for an Assistant Professor of History." The dept. contact trying to reassure dad that there really was a job waiting for him wrote this:...

"You know, the University administration knows , the [faculty] Senate Budget Committee knows, Dean Davis knows, and I know that 'Provision 4' means you...

As he put it in a letter to Fairbank in June 1951 the UC regents and legislature had to be "duped" into dad's appointment..

8/ Fairbank himself wld spend 1951-2 "diverted to a year of self-investigation in preparation for defensive testimony" to the McCarthy-era Reds Under The Bed investigating committees. Dad had to swear a loyalty oath to get his UCB job--sworn before the consul in Hong Kong...

9/ Y'all get the point, even if Bromwich doesn't: the 1950s were hardly a golden age of free inquiry and speech on US campuses. There were informal, self-imposed no-go areas, and an explicit challenge to "pointy-headed intellectuals" backed by real, coercive state power.

10/ And, of course, speech on campus in the 40s-80s at least largely excluded any people of color and women in faculty ranks. &, via others, (not dad, who died when I was 10) anti-Semitism in elite-faculty ranks was another constraint that persisted well into the post-war era...

11/ All of which is to say that David Bromwich's claim that campuses are now clearly less free as centers of inquiry/speech than from '45-75 is simply wrong. Obviously, simply, easily recognizably wrong. What's changed is what speech is most sharply targeted...and that's the nub.

12/ We are in a moment when long-standing paradigms are being called into question, from the role of race and slavery as drivers of US history, and not unfortunate exceptions, to the nature of gender, to the role of laissez faire capitalism in social harm and much more besides...

13/ The centrality of environmental justice and economics to well being...the list goes on.

Such lines of inquiry challenge all kinds of things, including academic priorities. And yeah, sure, there are probably cases of stupid or excessive claims and demands...

14/ But even if the aggrieved tenurocracy (of whom I'm a dyspeptic member, to be sure) can point to a couple of exemplary outrages, the fundamental issue is who gets to speak about what on campus. And it is here that Bromwich's ahistoricity is most troubling to me...

15/ Emphasizing an alleged cancel culture over the real, and state-backed threats to inquiry on campus is a softer-gentler echo or resonance of the McCarthyism my father faced. By which I mean the policing of tone and even the focus appropriate for campus discussion...

16/ Bromwich et al., seem to me to be channeling that senior professor in Berkeley who needed to be reassured that dad hadn't been infected by Marxism.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is trying to defund universities defending their students: nytimes.com/2020/07/10/us/…...

17/ And to me that's the ultimate indictment of "The Letter", and its signatories, like Bromwich, and their hangers-on: there are real threats to speech, the free expression of political views on campus and everywhere in America, even to the full and free exercise of democracy...

18/ Yet the "cancel culture" rhetorical warriors focus on what (letter signatory) Noam Chomsky acknowledges is "a little trivial thing."

/fin.