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    We Demand: The University and Student Protests
    We Demand: The University and Student Protests
    We Demand: The University and Student Protests
    Ebook141 pages1 hour

    We Demand: The University and Student Protests

    By Roderick A. Ferguson

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    “Puts campus activism in a radical historic context.”—New York Review of Books
    In the post–World War II period, students rebelled against the university establishment. In student-led movements, women, minorities, immigrants, and indigenous people demanded that universities adapt to better serve the increasingly heterogeneous public and student bodies. The success of these movements had a profound impact on the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century: out of these efforts were born ethnic studies, women’s studies, and American studies.
     
    In We Demand, Roderick A. Ferguson demonstrates that less than fifty years since this pivotal shift in the academy, the university is moving away from “the people” in all their diversity. Today the university is refortifying its commitment to the defense of the status quo off campus and the regulation of students, faculty, and staff on campus. The progressive forms of knowledge that the student-led movements demanded and helped to produce are being attacked on every front. Not only is this a reactionary move against the social advances since the ’60s and ’70s—it is part of the larger threat of anti-intellectualism in the United States. 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of California Press
    Release dateApr 25, 2017
    ISBN9780520966284
    We Demand: The University and Student Protests
    Author

    Roderick A. Ferguson

    Roderick A. Ferguson is Professor of American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and African American Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He was Associate Editor of American Quarterly from 2007 to 2010.

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      Book preview

      We Demand - Roderick A. Ferguson

      We Demand

      The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Atkinson Family Imprint in Higher Education of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from the Atkinson Family Foundation.

      AMERICAN STUDIES NOW: CRITICAL HISTORIES OF THE PRESENT

      Edited by Lisa Duggan and Curtis Marez

      Much of the most exciting contemporary work in American Studies refuses the distinction between politics and culture, focusing on historical cultures of power and protest on the one hand or the political meanings and consequences of cultural practices on the other. American Studies Now offers concise, accessible, authoritative, e-first books on significant political debates, personalities, and popular cultural phenomena quickly, while such teachable moments are at the forefront of public consciousness.

      1. We Demand: The University and Student Protests, by Roderick A. Ferguson

      2. The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit, by Scott Kurashige

      We Demand

      The University and Student Protests

      Roderick A. Ferguson

      UC Logo

      UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

      University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

      University of California Press

      Oakland, California

      © 2017 by Roderick A. Ferguson

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Ferguson, Roderick A., author.

      Title: We demand : the university and student protests / Roderick A. Ferguson.

      Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2017005611 (print) | LCCN 2017009354 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520292994 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520293007 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520966284 (epub and ePDF)

      Subjects: LCSH: Student movements—United States. | Minorities—Education (Higher)—United States—History. | Kent State Shootings, Kent, Ohio, 1970. | Public universities and colleges—Curricula—United States—History. | Universities and colleges—Curricula—United States—History. | Educational equalization—United States—History.

      Classification: LCC LA229 .F465 2017 (print) | LCC LA229 (ebook) | DDC 371.8/1—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005611

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17

      10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

      For Cece

      CONTENTS

      Overview

      Introduction

      1. The Usable Past of Kent State and Jackson State

      2. The Powell Memorandum and the Comeback of the Economic Machinery

      3. Student Movements and Post-World War II Minority Communities

      4. Neoliberalism and the Demeaning of Student Movements

      Conclusion

      Acknowledgments

      Notes

      Glossary

      Key Figures

      Selected Bibliography

      OVERVIEW

      INTRODUCTION

      Demands by students are part of historic calls for social transformations inside and outside the American academy. In addition to being sources of inspiration, those demands have provoked social regulations.

      Activism  •  The Progressive Demand  •  Student Movements

      CHAPTER 1. THE USABLE PAST OF KENT STATE AND JACKSON STATE

      Dominant discourses of diversity arose alongside efforts to expand the university’s police powers. Both were attempts to regulate student demands for social redistribution and reorganization.

      Kent State  •  Jackson State  •  The President’s Commission on Campus Unrest

      CHAPTER 2. THE POWELL MEMORANDUM AND THE COMEBACK OF THE ECONOMIC MACHINERY

      The confidential Powell Memorandum, written by the soon-to-be Supreme Court justice Louis F. Powell, was a blueprint for the replacement of the social ideals promoted by progressive student activists with market ideals favorable to US capitalism.

      Free Enterprise System  •  US Chamber of Commerce  •  Powell Memorandum

      CHAPTER 3. STUDENT MOVEMENTS AND POST–WORLD WAR II MINORITY COMMUNITIES

      The increased visibility of minoritized communities was both the basis and the product of new intellectual, cultural, and political formations within and outside American colleges and universities.

      Dēmos  •  Minoritized Communities  •  Social Reproduction  •  Social Transformation  •  Reorganization of Knowledge  •  Freedom Schools

      CHAPTER 4. NEOLIBERALISM AND THE DEMEANING OF STUDENT MOVEMENTS

      The demeaning and discrediting of student insurgencies, a historic strategy of dominant forms of power, is a present-day strategy of neoliberalism.

      Trilateral Commission  •  Crisis of Democracy  •  Neoliberalism

      CONCLUSION

      This book’s take on Saul Alinsky’s 1971 Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals offers rules meant for both inspiration and revision—that is, to inspire readers to revise them for the needs and goals of their own contexts.

      Saul Alinsky  •  Radicalism

      Introduction

      This book is written for you, the student who believes that we can or should do better than the world that we’ve inherited—the scholarship kid, the activist, the one who works on campus or off, and the student who is not an activist at all. It’s a world in which you will more than likely graduate with not only a degree but a financial debt that will probably follow you for years to come. It’s an environment in which you will encounter not only new texts and theories but racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, xenophobia, and classism as well. It’s a society in which people are thrown into a chasm full of dangers, cruelties, and inequalities.

      Much of the news of those perils comes from the university itself, not as an institution removed from these dangers but as one deeply implicated in the crises before us. In fact, most of us who are in the American academy received the news of these current-day jeopardies because of recent campus struggles.

      In 2012, Maine’s Unity College became the first college or university in the United States to financially divest from companies that exploit fossil fuels, and in doing so it helped to shed light on how, to quote from a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, some of the world’s largest carbon producers—including BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy, and Shell—developed or participated in campaigns to deliberately sow confusion and block policies designed to reduce the heat-trapping emissions that cause global warming.¹

      In 2013, the Dream 9—a group of young, undocumented Mexican nationals who were brought to the United States as kids and have lived most of their lives as Americans—self-deported to Mexico and attempted to gain reentry to the States. Once denied reentry, the Dream 9 staged a hunger strike, calling attention to the uncertainty that other young undocumented folks in the United States face, and to the Obama administration’s record-breaking deportations (438,421 in 2013, according to the Pew Research Center).²

      In 2015, a coalition of University of California students made up of members of the United Auto Workers union, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Students for Justice in Palestine wrote letters to UC president Janet Napolitano opposing the UC Board of Regents’ proposed adoption of the US State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism.³ This definition associates anti-Semitism with any critique of Israeli state polices or practices, particularly with regard to Palestinians. Before the regents’ vote, the UC Berkeley professor and philosopher Judith Butler distinguished between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, writing,

      Anti-Zionism names a political viewpoint that individuals have a right to express under the First Amendment and to debate according to the principles of academic freedom. . . . Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, is a despicable form of discrimination, and it has no place on college campuses, and must be clearly opposed as we would oppose any and all forms of racial discrimination.⁴

      The board, however, unanimously adopted the definition, effectively making critiques of Israeli state policies and practices by scholars, students, and activists equivalent to hate speech. After the vote, the Palestinian American student and activist Omar Zahzah argued, like Butler,

      We all agree that anti-Semitism and racism must be combated on campus. Where we disagree is in the claim that anti-Zionism is bigotry. Palestinian and Jewish students alike should have the right to say that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 was morally wrong and that Palestinian refugees should have the right to return home to a state where Palestinians and Jews live in equality rather than in a discriminatory Jewish state.⁵

      As Zahzah suggests, conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism makes the history of Israeli occupation and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians unspeakable.

      Also in 2015, by the first week of December, student protesters from eighty campuses throughout the nation had issued demands for racial justice. They were inspired largely by protests at the University of Missouri. Soon thereafter, students at other schools, such as Claremont McKenna, Ithaca, Oberlin, Princeton, Purdue, the University of Alabama, Yale, and the University of Minnesota, held protests and issued demands of their own. They pointed to institutional racism in faculty hiring and student admissions, racially themed fraternity parties, and racial profiling on campuses.

      This is a moment of renewed activism on college campuses, a renewal that contradicts taken-for-granted arguments about young people’s apathy. Each of the movements mentioned above has worked to challenge the ways that the university obscures its own social relations, how it—as my mother used to say—throws rocks but hides its hands. Like governments and corporations, the university turns real concerns and real people—ones that student activists spend their days and nights worrying about and fighting for—into abstractions, turning them into mere pieces that can be moved from here to there on the chessboards of the powerful. These students have effectively said that ensuring the well-being of the earth, people of color, immigrants, and other minoritized peoples and communities are not abstract concerns that can be separated from the operations and responsibilities of the university. Their demands represent an insistence on a new social order, a fundamental change in social relations, an attempt to guarantee that social practices within the university both account for the livelihoods of communities that are disfranchised and guarantee the safety of an ecological environment that is in terrible jeopardy. Their demands say, in sum, to the powers-that-be that who and what they take

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