Ward Churchill and Hans-Hermann Hoppe might not enjoy coffee together very much. I can clearly see the meeting ending in blows. But they do have some things in common, sure: both are radical critics of the State and the social status quo; both are tenured professors at state Universities in the West; and both have recently found themselves in administrative hot water for making controversial public statements.

Churchill’s case, so far, has been more widely reported. Thanks to the heroic efforts of a student journalist using Google, the Know-Nothing blowhard brigade finally discovered that Ward Churchill wrote an essay called Some People Push Back–which has been distributed on the Internet since 2001, and was expanded into a book-length treatment in 2003–in which he described the September 11 attacks as chickens coming home to roost, pointed out that the plane flown into the Pentagon was striking a military target, and that As to those in the World Trade Center … Well, really. Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. You’re hearing about all this now because Churchill, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, was scheduled to speak on a panel at Hamilton College in New York on The Limits of Dissent (because God is an ironist, I guess), and after a journalist at the student newspaper dug up Churchill’s essay and wrote a story on it, the Right-wing commentariat saw something they’ve been salivating over for a long time: a perfect opportunity to sink their teeth, hard, into the (allegedly Left-dominated) world of academia. So they deployed a predictable combination of media hue-and-cry and outright threats of violence, and managed to mau-mau Hamilton into cancelling the panel. Now, in hopes of a second victory for silence, they are pushing for University of Colorado at Boulder to follow it up by firing Churchill from his (tenured) professorship. The University’s Chancellor has so far agreed to bring a thorough examination of Churchill’s opinions before the Holy Inquisition:

And Colorado’s DiStefano, after an angry grilling from the university’s Board of Regents — an elected body dominated by conservatives — reversed himself and announced a 30-day investigation of all of Churchill’s lectures and publications. This is the first step, the chancellor said, in the legal process required to fire a tenured professor.

Meanwhile, there have been Web site calls for the resignation of Stewart for allowing Churchill to be invited in the first place.

— Washington Post 2005-02-05

Just a few days later, in Las Vegas, because–again–God is an ironist, anarcho-capitalist economics Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe found himself brought before a disciplinary hearing by the administration at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Hoppe had a formal complaint filed against him by a student for his comments in a lecture on the economic concept of time preference, in which he decided to illustrate the concept by examples, and claimed that homosexuals, as a group, tend to have higher time preferences than heterosexuals–that is to say, that homos tend to prefer immediate gratification over deferred rewards more strongly than straights. He went on to insinuate that the emphasis on short-run effects over long-run equilibria in J.M. Keynes’s economic theories might be explained by Lord Keynes’s fondness for gay liasons. In response to the student’s complaint, UNLV is demanding Hoppe accept a letter of reprimand and a dock in pay in response to a formal complaint filed by a student in one of his economics classes; Hoppe is striking back with a letter-writing campaign and legal assistance from the ACLU.

The anarcho-capitalists who are coming out for Hoppe and the lefty anarchists who are coming out for Churchill might not want very much to do with each other. But both camps are right to point out that both of these cases represent dangerous threats to academic freedom. (Note: threats to academic freedom, not freedom of speech. The two are importantly different concepts, although both are valuable.) Unfortunately, both camps have also developed a maddening tendency to smother the point about academic freedom (or open debate more broadly) in a bunch of rally-’round-the-black-flag nonsense.

Hoppe and Churchill should not be punished by academic Inquisitors for the contents of their arguments. Academic freedom is absolutely vital to the functioning of a University (as a place of education rather than an indoctrination camp), and it’s absolutely vital to maintain a climate of vigorous, open debate in our culture. But it’s important to note that the reasons for protecting academic freedom apply to bad arguments as well as to good ones: defending Hoppe’s and Churchill’s freedom to make arguments without fear of professional reprisals doesn’t require defending the arguments they make. And that’s a good thing, because Ward Churchill is a dick, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a homophobic bigot. Their arguments shouldn’t be defended, because those arguments are indefensible.

It ought to be transparent why Hoppe’s claims are offensive–and I’m frankly tired of seeing libertarians play innocent on the matter. Hoppe’s latest comments are only the latest in a long record, and I’m frankly baffled that Ilana Mercer or anyone else would take seriously the notion that describing the comments as only a generalization about how homos usually prefer immediate gratification more strongly than breeders is supposed to make it less offensive. Does anyone think that Hoppe’s left-field ad hominem argument–insinuations that poofery might explain errors in Lord Keynes’s economic thought that Hoppe finds particularly grave–is really a vital teaching tool? Or that it doesn’t make his other comments on homosexuality and gratification seem just a little, well, bigoted?

Churchill’s essay, for its part, is a farrago of confusions, logical fallacies, and flat-out lies. Most of the nits aren’t worth picking here; what is worth pointing out is that the central theme of the essay depends entirely on the claim that when America–that is, the American government–goes on a rampage around the world, we are acting like bullies, and so we have no grounds for complaint when we are ruthlessly slaughtered by people [who] push back. The problem here is that the people picked out by the we changes with every use: the people who did the rampaging and bullying are the government and its agents; the people who are complaining are, I guess, ordinary Americans; the people who were ruthlessly slaughtered were a couple of thousand workers, the overwhelming majority of them neither involved with the military nor holding any foreign policy position in the U.S. government, who happened to commit the terrible crime of going to work one Tuesday. But the people are not the government, and they are not owned by the government. They are mostly–we’re anarchists here, remember?–the victims of the government. We didn’t attack Iraq; we rarely if ever have meaningful control over the war-policy machine that has wrought so much misery in the Muslim world. The crimes of the United States government do not license crimes against civilians who happen to be in the United States; any more than the crimes of Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein license crimes against civilians who happen to be in Afghanistan, Iraq, or whatever other part of the Muslim world the Leviathan is planning to stomp through next.

Churchill’s critics have repeatedly been accused of misunderstanding his arguments and taking his words out of context. Now, I have read the whole essay through several times, but you never know. So perhaps one of Churchill’s defenders could explain to me exactly what the proper, contextual understanding of this is:

In sum one can discern a certain optimism — it might even be call humanitarianism — imbedded in the thinking of those who presided over the very limited actions conducted on September 11.

Their logic seems to have devolved upon the notion that the American people have condoned what has been/is being done in their name — indeed, are to a significant extent actively complicit in it — mainly because they have no idea what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

Or, while we’re at it, this:

And when they do, when they launch these airstrikes abroad — or may a little later; it will be at a time conforming to the “terrorists”‘ own schedule, and at a place of their choosing — the next more intensive dose of medicine administered here at home.

Of what will it consist this time? Anthrax? Mustard gas? Sarin? A tactical nuclear device?

That, too, is their choice to make.

During the HUAC era, many people in the U.S. were drummed out and blacklisted from teaching because they were genuinely associated with Stalinist parties in the United States. That was wrong; but you shouldn’t have to act like Stalinists were anything other than dupes or bloody-minded opportunists to make the case that the blacklisting and the anti-Communist witch hunts were wrong. The case for their academic freedom shouldn’t have been contingent on their having the right beliefs. And the same is true for both Churchill and Hoppe: the fact that they are wrong does not mean that they should be fired.

I’ll be writing a letter on behalf of both of them; defending both Churchill and Hoppe from the administrative goon squad is important. But we shouldn’t let a siege mentality dull critical thought. The reason Churchill and Hoppe are in hot water is that they made controversial statements which are rationally indefensible and deeply offensive. The problem is the administrative response to the controversy, not the controversy itself; the way to respond to terrible arguments, among rational adults, is with other arguments, not with politically-driven intimidation.

Let’s begin.

So, it’s official. I’m a Bachelor.

Saturday I graduated from Auburn University, with a B.A. in Philosophy (with a Computer Science minor tacked on for good measure). After the past few years of wandering the halls of learning (or, at least, the halls of Haley Center), I finally have to figure out a new gig. Usually at this point, someone makes some remark or another about leaving the bubble of the academy and being thrown out into the terrible freedom of the real world. You won’t hear it from me, though, for a couple of reasons.

First, I’ve been inhabiting the real world all along. I mean this in the truistic sense–Auburn University campus is no more illusory and no less material than the rest of the world–but I mean it in a deeper sense too. When people talk about school as not being part of the real world, they seem to have one of two things in mind (or, more likely, both). On the one hand, there is a particular picture of what academics do and how it relates to the world. The idea is that you’re dealing with the fabric of reality only when you’re in the midst of an active, practical life–that academics aren’t worldly wise enough to hack it in such a life–that the world of the academy doesn’t (and can’t) deal in experiential reality, because its whole purpose is to think rather than to do. On the other hand, there is a particular attitude towards school: it’s not part of the real world because it bears no deep relationship to what you intend to do with your life. At best, it’s a preparatory means, valuable purely instrumentally–it’s something that you do in order to get into a socio-economic position where you can strike off and do whatever it is that constitutes your real life–a career, a family, or what have you. At worst, it’s merely a holding pen where you wait around until you’re ready to go off the parental dole and get started on the real part of your life. The second picture is usually a direct result of the first. Going to school isn’t part of the real part of your life because the real part of your life consists of doing things, not of thinking about them.

I don’t want to deny that the second picture is an accurate empirical theory about how most people think of college in this day and age. But I think it is a pernicious picture if it is taken as a guide for how ought to spend your school years; those who act on a picture like that have basically been wasting their time and money for the past 4 years. It’s by no means necessary (however often it may be actual) for school to be cut off from the serious part of your life; such a dichotomy rests, I think, on a notion of the academic life that is completely false.

What I mean is this: in most other civilized times, we would hardly feel any need to defend the validity of the vita contemplativa, or the value of the way I’ve spent the past four years–learning and wrestling with important problems, for the sake of nothing except thought itself and knowledge of the truth. That is no small part of what I want to do with my life and to contribute to the world. The relationship between doing and thinking isn’t antagonism, or parasitism. Humans are rational animals; the very essence of how we live our lives is that we put thought into action, that thinking and doing are (for us) two sides of one coin. (Doing without thinking, in any literal and sustained sense, is a form of madness–indeed, a form of inhumanity.) So while I’m done being an undergraduate, my life for the past four years hasn’t been mere preparation for what is to follow. I’ve been doing what I want to do all along.

And I intend to keep on doing what I have been doing. But I’m out of school for the next year, and being a freelance academic doesn’t pay very well. So, I will be looking for a job, and working on graduate school applications for the academic year after the upcoming one. (If graduate school doesn’t work out, I might have to become a monk.)

In the meantime, however, I am on vacation. Right now I am reporting from Berea, Kentucky, where I’m visiting my old friend S. with the rest of my gang of friends from high school. S. pulls us into these fascinating conversations about sustainability and renewable energy and culture; we wander around the campus as if it were a swampy May night in Auburn again.

From there, it is a mere 12 hours by Greyhound bus to Detroit, where I will meet with my sweetheart. I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to this–to the theological inside jokes, to talking again about philosophy and movies and the Middle Ages; to just having quiet time together to spend with absolutely nothing else eating time away. We’re heading out on a trans-continental road trip out to California, where the plan is (I think) to sit on the beach, C and talk and read and do as close to absolutely nothing as possible for a few days–then to meander around a few sites in Monterey and San Fransisco. My hope is that I won’t be heading back home until early June.

In any case, the plan from there is: (1) summer work, (2) break, (3) move, and (4) fall work. (1) will consist in serving as a T.A. in Philosophy of Mind for Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth (except I won’t actually be at JHU; I’ll be at a program site in Loudonville, New York). After that I am moving to Ypsilanti, MI, and looking around to find out in what (4) will consist. Wish me luck!

Posting will be sporadic, but I fear that you are more than used to that already, gentle reader. I’ll try and drop a line from time to time, though, and when I get back some changes and updates the the site are in the works.

Ciao!

You know, you’d think that after blackface party costumes at an Auburn fraternity became a scandal in the national newsmedia, frat boys would learn that blackface is not all that good of an idea as a prank costume.

If you did, you thought wrong. In what seems to have been a conscious decision to further shatter my faith in the basic human capacity to learn from past experience, Aaron Levine, a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, went on his fraternity bar-hopping party dressed in blackface [Syracuse Daily Orange], in what he claims was a Tiger Woods costume.

After student protests, the case was referred to the Office of Judicial Affairs. Levine faces possible expulsion from the school for violation of the Code of Student Conduct and the fraternity faces possible suspension.

The protesting students also demanded structural changes to school policy to improve the institutional racial environment, including new policies for reporting and punishing similar incidents, diversity training for students and employees, and reinstatement of the Black Student Union Building and Black Panhellenic House.

Meanwhile, Levine has said the following in his defense:

• The my one black friend thought it was O.K. excuse — According to Levine, he asked a Black fraternity brother (SAE is predominantly white) whether the costume was offensive, and he said it was not. Whenever there’s a scandal over a blackface costume I see this same excuse and I still can’t figure out why anyone even bothers offering it. So your one Black friend thought it was O.K. Fine — but your one Black friend does not think or speak for all Black people in the world. This is mind-numbingly obvious and yet they go on using this excuse as if it meant something. I have to wonder whether it’s really just a way of saying Hey, man, some of my best friends are black rather than actually responding to the person offended.

• The you’re taking this way too far excuse — Everything’s being blown out of proportion, Levine said. It’s hard to please the mob. I’ll talk to any individual. This excuse is useful to Levine — it lets him pretend that he is the martyr of an irrational mob rather than actually personally engaging with the people who are confronting him. Well, look, I understand the feeling that this has gone way further than you ever meant it to go. But that’s the nature of the beast. When you offend someone, you don’t get to choose just how much s/he is supposed to be offended. If you’ve offended someone, your job is to take accountability for what you’ve done, to personally engage with them and understand where they are coming from.

  This seems to come from a general misunderstanding of what it means when a person’s speech or actions are offensive. Now, people can certainly be intentionally offensive–think of the average grade school bully. But most of life is not like this. If it was only what people intended that could be offensive, then a lot fewer people would be offended, because most of the time people don’t intend to piss each other off. But most of the time, what’s offensive has nothing to do with what the person intended; it has to do with what s/he was willing to ignore. In dressing up in blackface for shits and giggles, Levine surely didn’t intend to piss everyone off, but he was ignoring a long and bloody history of brutal racism behind blackface. And that is offensive, not just to people of color, but to anyone with a sense of history and a hope for racial justice. Which brings us to…

• The I am too stupid to take responsibility for my actions excuse — Levine said he had no knowledge of the history of blackface. Well, I guess that’s obvious. But rather than getting defensive and protesting his innocence, Levine ought to take this as an opportunity to educate himself about why the hell people are so pissed off at him. There is a history to these images. They are not just obsolete ephemera flashing across a History Channel documentary. For more on blackface humor and the history of white supremacy behind it, I recommend Bryan Thomas’s column Bamboozled: A True Story [Bryan Thomas. Talk.], and Spike Lee’s spectacular film Bamboozled.

How much longer is it going to take before Universities start getting serious about promoting diversity and undermining institutional racism in their campus culture? We shouldn’t have to wait for scandalous incidents like this one to realize that, in a culture where white privilege deeply shapes the composition and direction of most campus cultures, we need to take some serious steps to open up the University as a space in which students of color can participate. Students of color need spaces such as multicultural center buildings, where they can come together to build their voice and strength for participation in the campus community. Administrators and faculty need to prioritize programs which educate students about the history of race in American culture and politics, and which facilitate greater understanding and openness across racial/ethnic lines. Given the relationship between race and economic class, they also need to talk seriously about making college more affordable and a better experience for low-income students. Administrators need to get serious in holding the organizations and individuals responsible for hate images responsible, but what’s far more important than that is that they also work towards creating and maintaining a campus environment in which people actually understand something about race and white students don’t just think that throwing around casual racism is O.K.

(In related news, Auburn may be faltering or even failing in this regard, despite the bold promises administration made after our own blackface scandal hit the national airwaves. But that is another story entirely; watch this space for the upcoming story on developments in Auburn.)

And for God’s sake, how much longer is it going to take historically white fraternities to realize how much it hurts them, as people and as an organization, to allow this kind of institutionalized racism to fester in their houses? Every few months another incident like this happens. It hits the news, people yell, the frat boys get punished, and then it happens again at another frat house somewhere else in the country. Or it even happens again at another frat house on the same campus, as if no-one in the historically white Greek system had ever figured out that this might just not be cool with other people. I mean, Christ, even amoebas can learn through operant conditioning. Can’t we expect at least that much cognitive functioning from frat boys?

For further reading:

• GT 11/14/2001 Auburn chapter of Delta Sigma Phi dissolved, and how anti-Southern prejudice undermines the struggle for change in the North and South
• GT 11/14/2001 Auburn chapter of Beta Theta Pi dissolved, and commentary on the moral crippling of laid-back liberalism
• GT 11/9/01 the broader context of racism in Auburn
• GT 11/6/2001, the original report on the Halloween blackface incident

The national board of Beta Theta Pi has announced that it will be suspending and indefinitely dissolving its Auburn chapter [link courtesy of the ever-awesome Max] in response to the fracas over racist hate imagery at the local chapter’s Halloween party. Delta Sigma Phi’s Auburn chapter remains under investigation for possible further action by their national board. In addition, individual members and both chapters may face disciplinary proceedings by the University for discriminatory harassment and violation of alcohol policies.

I should say this. I have been really sharply rhetorical so far in my stories and discussions of this most recent incident. I think the callous, racist cruelty and the horrifying nature of the images demands it. But I do want to say that I am not blind to the human element of this whole event, and it saddens me that many young men’s lives may be permanently knocked back, as a result of what they surely thought of not as racism or any kind of conscious malice, but just a lark, a stupid good time.

I don’t just say this because I know people in the Auburn fraternity system who are not the sloped-brow, amoral, reactionary meatheads that the Greeks’ history on Auburn’s campus might lead you to believe they would have to be–although this is definitely true; I have friends in the fraternity system who neither have nor want any part of that mindset. I also say it because I really regret that the meatheads that were directly involved will probably never understand just what they did wrong. They will understand that they did some dumb things that got them caught. And they may look back and grumble at the P.C. Thought Police Bastards who ruined their college career. But will they ever understand that there really was a very deep cut of wilful cruelty in what they did? They didn’t put on those costumes in order to be malicious racists (although I believe that there was certainly some overt malice involved). They put them on to have a roguish bit of fun, that old irreverant frat boy panache. Meaningless images of MTV gangstas and some documentary on the Klan they saw in school or on the History channel–trivial, ultimately, like the whole flux of images across our consciousness. Anything can be funny, right? If you don’t really go out and attack Black people, the images don’t mean anything, do they?

But words, images, costumes, historical scripts do mean something; they mean a hell of a lot. The images and rituals, the signs of white supremacist brutality in this country have a meaning, a meaning they are rooted to by centuries of blood and chains. But we live in an age in which the detached image and the spectacle is omnipresent, and yet the prevailing laid-back liberal ideology tells us that we have no reason to care, indeed, that if we do care it’s a sign of pretentiousness, humorlessness, a general need to lighten the hell up. And it’s slowly, surely killing our conscience, eating away at the possibility of being moral agents. Which has what to do with frat boys in Klan robes? I really fear that this soul-killing laid-back liberalism, the impetus behind the costumes in the first place, will also cripple the boys at Beta and Delta Sig from ever understanding what they did wrong, the cutting cruelty that they were willing to ignore in order to have a laugh. Just as much as their hate party outrages me against them, what it means also saddens me for them.

Nevertheless, I don’t hesitate to say that they must receive the harshest sanctions from the University, and I maintain that the fraternity system as a whole must be re-examined and challenged for the rather disgusting and reactionary culture that it helps maintain. I firmly believe that every time a frat house is bulldozed, an angel gets its wings.

For further reading:

• GT 11/9/2001 on the broader context of racism in Auburn
• GT 11/6/2001, the original report on the Halloween blackface incident

An Auburn fraternity brother dresses as a member of the Ku Klux Klan for Halloween

[The incident of AU fraternity members wearing Ku Klux Klan costumes for Halloween] could portray Auburn as a racist community. I do not believe Auburn is a racist community.

–Grant Davis, secretary to the Auburn University Board of Trustees

Funny that it keeps happening, then. Davis’s comments were made two years ago in 1999, when members of Pi Kappa Alpha dressed as Klansmen for Halloween and were mildly punished once it came to the eyes of the administration. The hate images put on display this Halloween 2001 by two all-white Auburn fraternities are shocking and horrifying in their own right, but they are not anything new to the Auburn community. Just in the past few years, the Auburn community has seen repeated incidents of racial hate and remains deeply engaged in institutional racism on many levels.

• As previously mentioned, two years ago there was a parallel incident where Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity members dressed as Klansmen for Halloween.

• Auburn’s historically white fraternities are, and have always been, almost completely racially segregated against Blacks.

• Among Auburn’s registered student organizations is a campus chapter of The League of the South, a neo-Confederate group that is tracked as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

• Numerous complaints of racial discrimination by Bourbon Street Bar managers in downtown Auburn, including managers inventing phoney dress codes on the spot and lying about city ordinances in order to exclude Black patrons from the bar.

• Pervasive racism in hiring, promotion, and benefits in the Facilities Division (whose workers are overwhelmingly Black, managers overwhelmingly white) has prompted marches, demonstrations, and finally a federal civil rights lawsuit against the University. In response, Auburn dealt with the problem by… ignoring worker complaints and shifting building service workers to a night shift of 4:00pm to 12:30am, which will result in many of them having to quit in order to keep family commitments.

• The Auburn University Board of Trustees consists of twelve white men, one white woman, and one Black man. The senior administration is almost exclusively white (one exception, of course, is the director of Multicultural Affairs). Auburn remains under a court desegregation order to increase hiring of Black administration and faculty and to increase Black student enrollment, but the much-vaunted 24% increase in Black enrollment still leaves Black students at Auburn as only 7.2% of the entire student population.

And there’s a lot more that I couldn’t put together for this hastily-compiled list. Of course, none of this was mentioned or responded to in the administration’s white-washing diversity rally media event. Instead there was everything I had hoped for in a serious, harsh response to the individuals who committed the most recent acts–and everything I had feared in distancing, disavowal, and refusal to deal with the larger environment that nutured the kind of moral obliviousness that would allow frat boys to think that their vicious re-enactments of hatred and genocide were all just a big stupid lark. Look, this is a serious problem in the Auburn community, and one that we’d better get damned serious about dealing with. If we fail, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, I fear that very shortly we will learn that racism is a sickness unto death.

Take action!

Please send polite and carefully-considered e-mails to Vice President for Student Affairs Wes Williams and Interim President William F. Walker urging them to take this hate incident seriously by ensuring that the individuals who committed it and the fraternities who hosted it are severely punished, urging them to permanently dissolve the local chapters of Beta Theta Pi and Delta Sigma Phi. Further, politely but firmly ask them to make sure that their response to this incident include a careful look at the broader racial environment at Auburn and that concrete new programs be implemented to address racism in the Auburn University community.