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Two Takes
Writing at Phi Beta Cons, David French deplores the American Historical Association's activities at its annual convention. The business meeting, French notes, focussed in part on two proposed resolutions: one calling for an end to campus speech codes (which did not pass) and one calling for a speedy conclusion to the Iraq War, which did. Noting the "absurdity of historians opposing the war without dissent then opposing a resolution that protects the right of dissent itself," French goes on to parse the illogic of the anti-war resolution:
...the Iraq War resolution was drafted by Historians Against the War, which called the war's practices "inimical to the values of the historical profession." Which values are those? Are American soldiers plagiarizing or writing unoriginal theses in the Anbar province? Are they ignoring primary documents in favor of secondary sources? Are they advocating against tenure and reduced teaching loads? Not really.
Writing at Easily Distracted about his own frustrated experience at the very meeting where these resolutions passed, Timothy Burke offers thoughts that dovetail nicely with French's. Burke notes that he attended the meeting largely because he hoped to help forward the resolution against speech codes; he notes, too, that he tried--and failed--to make his colleagues see that their wish to issue a statement about the Iraq War was way out of bounds:
The end was a resolution against the Iraq war. James Sheehan offered the objection that I ended up echoing, namely, that an organization like the AHA has a limited amount of political capital to expend (Sheehan said "moral capital", I said "political capital") and that this is best expended on matters directly proximate to the professional interests of the organization.Let's get real here: the attempt to make the resolution relevant to the direct professional interests of historians was pretty thin once we got to the part that urged members to support a speedy end to the Iraq war. If that's directly relevant to an umbrella organization of historians, then next year we ought to consider a full battery of resolutions on global warming, urban poverty, globalization, CEO salaries, abortion rights, the minimum wage and so on. I could construct very similar and sincere arguments about how these are urgent and important matters for historians to take a position on as a profession.
I added that it seems to me that the AHA ought to be a very "big tent" in political terms, which means not committing it to political positions that are not directly relevant to professionalism that even a small proportion of its membership might find objectionable.
Burke is dead right here. But he was talking to the wrong crowd. What follows is his description of how academics sandbag one another, or, as he puts it, how the "left-wing circular firing squad" goes about its business. It's a revealing account of how routinized the mechanisms for imposing intellectual conformity--or, perhaps, for denying or discrediting moments of dissent--are in academic circles:
... the one moment where I went from being basically bemused by the meeting to engaged irritation was when two defenders of the Iraq war resolution spoke against what Sheehan had said and I had seconded.The first scholar's rambling objections included, as I understood it, a blanket objection to the entire concept of limits in terms of available time, institutional resources and labor to moral or political energies. That's a fantastically efficient route to ceaseless political defeat, if so.
The second objection annoyed me more: it was a classic assembling of the left-wing circular firing squad. Here you've got a room where every single person is an opponent of the war, and endorses the specific complaints in the preamble of the resolution, where probably everybody sitting there would come to a protest, and many would support an organization like Historians Against the War. So what do you do? Misrepresent the modest objections of the few who question the specific form of a resolution based on a specific understanding of the specific institution of the AHA. In this case, what the scholar defending the resolution said (I think it was Warren Goldstein, but I'm not sure) was that those of us opposed to the resolution were claiming that all professional activities must be completely divorced from any expression of citizen activism. Look, you want to march at a demonstration under a banner that says, "Historians Against the War", that's completely and utterly ok. I'm writing here at this blog as a historian and scholar against the war: my professionalism and my arguments against the war are intertwined in all sorts of ways.
I'm just saying that if an umbrella organization intended to speak for everyone in a given discipline takes this position, then I don't see why it should not take a hundred similar positions on matters of urgent public concern. Except, of course, that the AHA really doesn't have any influence to speak of on such matters (a specific organization like Historians Against the War has far more, in my view, precisely because it is focused around a particular issue), and becomes all the more irrelevant for every such position it takes. It seems to me that this is just a reprise of where academic activism went wrong in the 1970s and 1980s: when the real targets of politics become too remote and well-protected from the relatively comfortable precincts that academic intellectuals inhabit, then turn to the institutions most closely at hand (universities and professional institutions) as proxy targets. It's easy enough to mobilize them as a paper army, particularly through a meeting that only the perverse and the committed attend, but the only real consequence of said mobilization is a bleeding out of any professional particularity to such an organization and a loss of the ability to credibly claim to be a big tent that welcomes all possible configurations of practice and principle.
Burke writes in another post of the temptations to give up blogging--of the frustrations involved in maintaining a genuinely vibrant, intellectually expansive site, as opposed to allowing the site to devolve into a set of endlessly repeated position statements on a stock set of pet issues. He's right about those difficulties. But his post on the AHA is also a strong argument for why academic blogging like his is important. Until the establishment behaves itself better, and responds more honestly to debate and critique both from within and beyond its ranks, blogs such as Burke's pose a crucial and important counterpoint.
Posted by acta online on January 09, 2007 at January 9, 2007 08:32 PM
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