The Task Before Us

I don’t know what Columbia University is doing. I do know this: they bowed to the demands of the Trump administration and have helped unleash what I can only imagine as a torrent of forces designed to dismantle American higher education as we know it.

MAGA Republicans, and some conservatives in general, believe that American universities and colleges have been captured by the so-called radical left. That the place where I have spent nearly thirty years of my life is a cesspool of intolerance and “wokeism” (the latest catch word for white American angst). They want these places to look like they did in the early part of the 20^th century, and they want knowledge production to reflect the world they long for, where people like me know our place and elite colleges and universities are bone white. (The real antisemites will soon rear their ugly heads once again.)

Lies fuel their efforts. And the administration at Columbia University knows this, or they willfully ignore the lies because they are afraid, or they simply agree with the basic aims of what the Trump administration is doing. No matter the reason the storm has swept into the hallowed halls of American higher education, and it is a Category 5.

We have seen this before, even as we experience the current efforts as wholly unprecedented. I was thinking about the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) by Arthur O. Lovejoy and John Dewey in 1915. It was a response, in part, to attempts to fire faculty, to define more clearly faculty shared governance, and standards of academic freedom. That effort would become even more important with the passage of the Espionage Act in 1917, the Sedition Act in 1918, and with the “red scare” that trampled American civil liberties. All of which was framed by nativist hatred as the Ku Klux Klan and other organizations embraced the idea of 100 percent Americanism.

In the full light of the past, we cannot separate what is happening at Columbia and the assault on American higher education from what has happened to Mahmoud Khalil, or the invocation of the Aliens Enemies Act to justify the deportation of two hundred Venezuelans, or the dismantling of the Department of Education, or the ongoing efforts to undo the social revolutions of the 1960s in pursuit of the idea that America must be for “white people only.”

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Thinking about the AAUP led me back to a brief speech John Dewey, who taught at Columbia, wrote in 1939 for a celebration of his 80th birthday in New York entitled “Creative Democracy — The Task Before Us.” He opens by contrasting the circumstances under which the founders “gathered to take stock of conditions and to create the political structure of a self-governing society.” And he contrasts that beginning with the challenges the country now faced.

Dewey warned that “the crisis that one hundred and fifty years ago called out social and political inventiveness is with us in a form which puts a heavier demand on human creativeness. It is a challenge to do for the critical and complex conditions of today what the men of an earlier day did for simple conditions."

White Americans had come to take democracy for granted, believing that democracy itself did not require much other than participating in the political mechanisms that elected representatives. And so, as Dewey noted, “we have lived for a long time upon the heritage that came to us from the happy conjunction of men and events in an earlier day.” Americans act "as if our democracy were something that perpetuated itself automatically; as if our ancestors had succeeded in setting up a machine that solved the problem of perpetual motion in politics."

Democracy requires something more of us. It demands that we think of it as a way of life. That to embrace democracy involves taking up certain attitudes, developing a particular character and disposition that shapes our relations with others. We are NOT moved about by institutions as they are, but those institutions ought to reflect our own values and commitments.

The enemies of democracy can best be met by “the creation of personal attitudes in individual human beings; that we must get over our tendency to think that its defense can be found in any external means whatever, whether military or civil, if they are separated from individual attitudes so deep-seated as to constitute personal character.” We must become the kinds of people democracy requires. But our hatreds get in the way.

Here is a passage that I repeatedly return to:

Democracy is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature. Belief in the Common Man is a familiar article in the democratic creed. That belief is without basis and significance save as it means faith in the potentialities of human nature as that nature is exhibited in every human being irrespective of race, color, sex, birth and family, of material or cultural wealth. This faith may be enacted in statutes, but it is only on paper unless it is put in force in the attitudes which human beings display to one another in all the incidents and relations of daily life.

He goes on to say that,

To denounce Naziism for intolerance, cruelty and stimulation of hatred amounts to fostering insincerity if, in our personal relations to other persons, if, in our daily walk and conversation, we are moved by racial, color or other class prejudice; indeed, by anything save a generous belief in their possibilities as human beings, a belief which brings with it the need for providing conditions which will enable these capacities to reach fulfillment.

A democratic faith must not break under the weight of crass prejudices, racial and otherwise. Such views not only distort and disfigure the operations of institutions; they deform who we take ourselves to be.

Democracy as a way of life proceeds from the assumption that every human being no matter their race, color, gender, class position, etc. has the capacity for intelligent judgment if the proper conditions are provided. And, for Dewey, (remember, this is 1939) “Intolerance, abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about religion or politics or business, as well as because of differences of race, color, wealth or degree of culture are treason to the democratic way of life. For everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects and factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life.”

James Baldwin wrote in “In Search of a Majority,” that “I conceive of my own life as a journey toward something I do not understand, which in the going toward, makes me better.” It is “in the going toward” that the power of the university – of a genuine liberal arts education – is felt. Old assumptions that narrow our vision are unsettled and our minds are, ideally, opened to the vast diversity of the world. The unknown comes to us not to make us afraid but to occasion an imaginative leap into a new way of being.

That imaginative leap allows us to see beyond ourselves and to reach for another. Here we come to understand, as Dewey wrote in 1939, that “for every way of life that fails in its democracy limits [its] contacts, the exchanges, the communications, the interactions by which experience is steadied [and] enlarged and enriched…. [T]he task of democracy is forever that of creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute.”

The assault on American higher education, to my mind, is an attack on this powerful and democratic insight. If we are to resist the undemocratic forces that are raging throughout the country, much more is required than the crass capitulation of Columbia University. More is demanded than the exercise of civility that hides monsters or the sentimentality that masks cruelty. True fight requires that we enter the battlefield, fortified by the values we cherish and our ongoing commitment to the power found “in the going toward” – a kind of vulnerability and imagination desperately needed in these baffling and cruel times.