Campus Protests and the Corporate University

 

This blog originally appeared in Counterpunch.

The murder of the four students who protested the Vietnam War at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, was a tragedy.  The suppression of student protests on campuses across the United States in the spring of 2024 is a farce. The latter points to how little college administrators and politicians have learned when it comes to students’ speech, thinking that repression is the solution for dissent and disagreement.

The student protests of the 1960s were born of political anger. Students were unable to vote. They lacked a political voice in American elections and politics, and they lacked a voice in the governance of their schools. They demanded a seat at the table, the right to be heard and some control over the institutions that literally dictated their lives. Their demands for a voice were met with force and repression much in the same way that the civil rights demonstrators who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge  were.

College administrators first ignored student demands.  Then they sought to break up the demonstrations with campus police.  Politicians such as Governor Reagan in California, and Governor Rhodes in Ohio responded even more forcefully. They, along with President Richard Nixon, sought to capitalize on the protests politically and personally. They made political careers by running against challenges to authority, campaigning  as law and order candidates, claiming to speak for the silent majority, and labeling those who dissented as un-American.

A show of force was their solution across college campuses in America.  Eventually they called out the National Guard. The tragic result culminated in Kent State. Four Dead in Ohio as sung by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

Colleges and politicians should have learned the lessons of this mistake.  The lesson should have been that student voices matter, that students have a right to express their views, and  force is not a way to stifle or to address differences of opinion.

They should have also learned that universities are supposed to be socially responsible. They are or have become political institutions, not private corporations. They are socially responsible in the sense that they have responsibility to act ethically and act consistent with their values. Their values include free and open inquiry, disagreement, and debate.  They need to be responsible to their stakeholders, including their students, and they need to live up to the democratic ideals and values that they are supposed to be fostering.

But what we learned in the 1960s was that schools were also hotbeds of hypocrisy. That was the source of much of the campus unrest and protest in the 1960s.  Instead of fixing the hypocrisy, living  up to their values, and respecting student demands, higher education turned corporate.  Over a fifty year period schools thought they had learned how to address the dissent on campus. They adopted even more of a corporate structure, seeking a top down mechanism for trying to control curriculum, faculty, and students. They adopted speech and civility codes as a way not to encourage debate but as a tool to discourage views that they do not want to hear.

The corporate university turned itself into a  private good, forcing students to borrow tens of thousands of dollars and thereby discipline their behavior by the demands of the economic marketplace.  Moreover, the corporate university  created its own problem by not being neutral when it came to a diversity of viewpoints, favoring some as opposed to others. It created not a tolerance but an intolerance of certain types of speech. Moreover, as universities have become even more corporate they have built lofty endowments whose investments are oftentimes questionable and which gives donors  outsized influence upon  what administrators and professors can do.

Much in the same way that the students of the 60s criticized universities for the defense contracts they took and how universities furthered the Vietnam War, students today criticize endowments for supporting causes and issues of which they do not support.  They have legitimate grievances against both the US government’s support for a war they do not endorse, and also against universities  whom they see as complicit. They demand a voice, call for disinvestment, or simply want to express their disagreement.

Yet again politicians such as Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson are denouncing the protests, calling for the National Guard to quell student  speech.  Yet again a sitting president seems unable or unwilling to  listen to the students.  Yet again another war will impact a presidential campaign.

This is more than a tragedy.  It is a farce.

The Lesson of Afghanistan is the Lesson of Vietnam We Forgot

 

            Philosopher Georg Hegel declared the only lesson of history is that we do not learn from history.

As the US prepares for the final pullout from Afghanistan and what will soon follow as the fall of the country to the Taliban an entire generation of us wonder if this is not Deja vu all over again and that what we thought we had learned from the Vietnam War proved to be a fleeting lesson.                         For those of my generation who grew up during or served in the Vietnam War a thousand images cross our mind.  A naked girl scurrying away from Napalm, the execution of Nguy n Văn Lém, American flags draped on caskets in rows,  a woman next to a dead body at Kent State University. But for many it is helicopters evacuating the US embassy in Saigon in 1975 as the city and South Vietnam fell to the Vietcong.  The domino we fought so hard to prevent from falling, costing America 58,200 lost military lives hundreds of thousands wounded, and tens of billions of dollars, fell, nonetheless.

            In college we read Francis FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake  and supposedly learned that we never were going to win the Vietnam War with guns alone.  Napalming a nation to death was not going to win over the hearts and minds of a people from a different culture we never understood.  David Halberstram’s The Best and the Brightest pointed to the arrogance of the Kennedy Administration in failing to understand that Vietnam was more about colonial independence than it was about communism and Cold War rivalry. And the Pentagon Papers documented the mistakes, misinformation, and lies surrounding the US involvement there, with the realization we could not win, no matter what the North Vietnamese body count was that week as announced by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.  We stayed up late at night after watching Apocalypse Now, haunted by Richard Wagner’s Ride Of The Valkyries accompanying helicopters at dawn attacking a village, or the appearance of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in a scene after Captain Willard travels up the Nung River enroute to assignment to kill Captain Kurtz.  The message some of us took from the movie and War was that it was a seduction into evil—we as a country turned into what we most despised.US

            Supposedly we learned something from the Vietnam War about the futility of starting a battle with no clear objectives or end game.  We supposedly learned that brute force did not prevail, the need to align military power with soft power and our national interests, and that we needed to understand other cultures and history if we wished to be more successful in our foreign policy goals.  Yet by 1980 Ronald Reagan declared Vietnam a “noble cause,” suggesting memories were short, hubris tall.

            While General Colin Powell’s doctrine sought to reteach the lessons of Vietnam as we prepared for the first Gulf War in 1900-1991, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.  Merely seven days after 9/11 Congress issues the Authorization to Use Military Force, giving President Bush  as much carte blanche authority to use military force against the Taliban and Afghanistan as did the Gulf of Tonkin did for Lyndon Johnson.  We sent in the Marines and bombers and took Kabul quickly.  Soon after that lies about weapons of mass destruction took us into Iraq, and soon we were in Bagdad with another resolution and capitulation to presidential lies.   In both cases America reacted reflexively with military solutions, with no game plans for goals and objectives, what constituted victory, and no idea about the culture and people of these countries.  We repeated the arrogance of Vietnam, thinking somehow we could turn them into western democracies, and make those people like us.  All while bombing their villages and killing their people.

            Now as America is ready to leave Afghanistan after 20 years and the media pundits screech that we are abandoning our allies and simply giving up as cowards, these reflections miss the deeper meaning of this war.  We should have never been there to start with.  We made the wrong choices in 2001, and like Vietnam even after we knew it was a lost cost we stayed on, hoping that one more military surge would be the “light at the end of the tunnel” that would finally win the war.  I have no idea what we should do, but I do know that we should have learned from Vietnam that what we did in 2001 and are doing now is wrong and that it was never going to work.

            To appease critics Biden has said that we will evacuate those in Afghanistan who assisted us.  Already I can see the helicopters at the US embassy in Kabul.

            Karl Marx once declared: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”  Vietnam was the tragedy, Afghanistan the farce.