Anyone who preaches unquestioned obedience to authority will be troubled by sociology. This is well-evidenced by the fact that in the twentieth century, whenever a dictator came into power, one of his first acts was to reassign or fire all the sociologists—anything to keep them from making trouble by asking questions. –Lisa McIntyre, The Practical Skeptic
According to a recent report from NPR, at least thirty-five states have proposed various laws aimed at restricting the teaching of history, slavery, race, racism, sexism, gender, and sexual orientation. To the best of my knowledge, fourteen of these states have successfully imposed various bans. While governors DeSantis (Florida), Abbott (Texas), and Youngkin (Virginia) have garnered most of the national headlines about these assaults on academic freedom, there is a growing legion of Republican state lawmakers who are proposing similar policies and adopting this same political strategy. Governor Youngkin has gone so far as to establish a “tip line” to report teachers who are teaching “divisive” concepts. Additionally, there is a resurgence in efforts to ban books that address “divisive” issues or that make people “uncomfortable.” This is the modern rendition of McCarthyism and a prime example of what pedagogical theorist Henry Giroux refers to as efforts to “manufacture ignorance.” To be blunt, keeping people ignorant is the most effective way to keep people under your control, and this is precisely why this strategy has been a favorite among autocrats throughout history.
As the President of Johns Hopkins University, Ronald Daniels, argues in his new book, What Universities Owe Democracy, “Attacking universities is a time-worn page in the authoritarian’s playbook, from Benito Mussolini’s extraction of loyalty oaths from university faculty to expulsion of Jews from campuses…to Adolf Hitler’s shuttering of Czechoslovakian universities…to the Communist government of Poland’s crackdown on academic freedom in the 1970s.” These same patterns are repeating themselves today. Prime Minister Orban in Hungary, President Erdogan in Turkey, President Putin in Russia, President Xi Jinping in China who has explicitly called for China to “build universities into strongholds that adhere to Party leadership,” and in Brazil, where President Bolsonaro has slashed university budgets and is targeting programs deemed “too leftist.”
Meanwhile in the United States, our previous President is campaigning, three years in advance, peddling the same nonsense as these autocrats, recently going so far as to suggest that if he were elected President again, he would pardon the Capital insurrectionists of January 6, 2021. The Republican Party itself is attempting to reframe the domestic terrorism of January 6th as “legitimate political discourse.” As the threat to academic freedom, education, and voting rights grows more ominous, our fascist slide is coming into greater focus. If the Republican nominee for President in 2024 is Trump, Governor DeSantis, Governor Noem, Senator Cotton, or any of their ilk, the choice on the Presidential ballot in 2024 will not be between a Republican and a Democratic candidate but rather a referendum on whether we will be an aspiring democracy or move several steps closer to China, Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and Brazil.
The simultaneous efforts to delegitimize journalism and education, the implementation of voter suppression laws, and racial gerrymandering is ultimately an effort to usurp democracy, and the United States is being swept up into a global trend toward autocracy. According to the Varieties of Democracy Project, “In 1996 more than a quarter of the world’s population lived in countries that were democratizing. By 2020, that number had plummeted to almost 5 percent, while nearly 30 percent—or 2.6 billion people—live in countries that are becoming more autocratic.” In a sense, this global recession of democracy is not all that surprising as unregulated, casino capitalism grows more volatile and begins to crumble under the pressures of excessive economic inequality, population growth, the inevitable demise of fossil fuel energy infrastructure, and the impacts of climate change on a planet that can no longer sustain uninhibited production, distribution, consumption, and waste.
In this context, people are highly susceptible to the appeals of political strongmen who scapegoat racial, sexual, and all minority peoples as the sources of their problems rather than focusing on the systemic failures that are colliding with the limitations of the natural world and the planet. Efforts to delegitimize journalism, education, and science in particular, exacerbate this problem. In the United States, the political impact of this trend has been particularly acute within the last several years. As Daniels notes in his book, “In 2015, Pew reported that 54 percent of Republicans and 70 percent of Democrats viewed universities and colleges as having a positive impact on the country. Four years later, in 2019, the portion of Democrats who believed the same remain almost unchanged, while Republicans who viewed universities positively had collapsed to 33 percent.” While not solely responsible, it’s difficult to ignore the impact the former President had on this trend during his term.
The history of the United States is, in part, a history of democratization as various segments of the population gained voting rights and access to public education: poor white men, men of color, white women, and women of color. As access to public education expanded, so too did the promise of democracy. While it is no longer politically expedient to deny people access to an education based on class, race, or sex, it is possible to strip education of any purpose or meaning by removing or restricting portions of the curriculum that cause people to think and ask questions, intimidate teachers with threats to their jobs, eliminate or weaken teacher tenure, and essentially turn educational institutions into worker training sites. To be clear, I am not opposed to educational institutions offering vocational training. What I am opposed to is the systemic and deliberate undermining of the liberal arts curriculum in order to depoliticize people and obstruct the responsibility of schools and universities to democratize this nation. The contemporary crisis of American democracy is at root a crisis of American education. As philosopher and educational theorist John Dewey once proclaimed, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation and education is its midwife.”
Teachers and education represent the firewall of democracy. If the current undermining of the curriculum continues unabated, eventually, this firewall may not hold. Teaching has become unnecessarily challenging. However, if teachers fail to adopt pedagogies of militant hope, then we cease being a part of the solution. I do not seek hope from my students; it is my responsibility as an educator to provide hope, to teach hope, and to persist during times that seem hopeless. I am not interested in “converting” or “reaching” anyone who supports policies that restrict the curriculum and that undermine academic freedom. I am not a miracle worker or a magician. Instead, I choose to focus my time and energy on future generations. This is where hope exists. I am not confident that this strategy will succeed. I am only confident that this is our best and perhaps only option. It is worth remembering that the era of McCarthyism was followed by one of the most active, engaged, and politicized eras of higher education. Higher education, and college students in the 1960s and 1970s in particular, were the driving force behind many and varied venerated pieces of legislation that more fully democratized the United States. It can happen again.
As I finished writing the last line, a student emailed me to ask if it was okay for her to exceed my minimum expectations for essay length. I told her, “Write as much as you feel/think is necessary. I will read every word.” Her work is exceptional. I choose to place my efforts and my hope for the future of this nation in her hands.
The Sociological Post 