FNL
HomePage
Editorial Board
E-mail FNL
FNL Archives
MIT HomePage

McCarthyism Redux

Richard J. Samuels

There she goes again. Lynne Cheney, who once chaired and attempted to eviscerate the National Endowment for the Humanities, has now married her crusade for Western Civilization to the tragedy of 9.11. And her allies at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) include Joseph Lieberman. A still smoldering Ground Zero has been moved to the killing fields of the culture wars.

ACTA’s McCarthyite screed, "How our Universities are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It," (Available at http://www.goacta.org/Reports/defciv.pdf) is a call to arms in the clash of civilizations. 9.11 provided ACTA a convenient vehicle to reassert its campaign for more courses on American history and Western Civilization and fewer on Islamic and Asian culture. The report is a polemical pastiche, listing more than 100 remarks, including those of several MIT faculty, quoted out of context. (The direct attributions were retracted last month after considerable protest and media attention.) The list mixes antiwar sloganeering and blunt criticism of U.S. foreign policy with cautions by academics worried about indiscriminate retaliation for the 11 September attacks.

It all adds up, in ACTA’s view, as evidence that U.S. colleges and universities empathize with America's enemies. Selective quotes make it appear that post-9.11 conversations on U.S. campuses have been one-sided, dominated by guilt-ridden, self-loathing tenured professors – defenders of a “dominant campus ideology” that suppresses dissent. The irony of course is that ACTA proclaims itself dedicated to preservation of academic freedom. (See its Web page: http://www.goacta.org/.) The report claims that reactions on U.S. campuses after 9.11 pitted patriotic students against professors whose teach-ins and public forums “typically ranged from moral equivocation to explicit condemnations of America.”

Its authors were not at events we organized at MIT, first convened the day after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. ACTA’s characterization of campus debate notwithstanding – and precisely because we are a university community – we saw it as our responsibility to address the three most fundamental questions raised by the attacks: Who? Why? and What Now? Our premise was that if the United States could not answer the first two with assurance, its response to the third could be dangerously misguided. And unlike ACTA, with its claims it is “committed to academic freedom, excellence and accountability at America's colleges and universities,” we think that knowing why is as important as knowing who and what now. The ACTA screed can be read as an extended condemnation of those who ask why 9.11 happened.

We sustained an open and frank public conversation about the newly escalated dangers in the international security environment and about U.S. foreign policy responses. We treated all three questions in equal measure. Faculty and attendees debated the reasons for the attack. They engaged both sides of arguments about retaliation against Al-Qaeda, about U.S. support for Israel, about the use of American force, and even about the elimination of the U.S. government’s self-imposed ban on political assassination. Some insisted that the attack must not go unanswered; some cautioned against American unilateralism; others warned that “collateral damage” was an expected and regrettably acceptable cost of war; still others argued that this was not even America’s fight. (View digital video of these public forums at: http://web.mit.edu/cis/spotlight-webcasts.html.)

Many of us became academics because we believed there are no easy answers to the most important questions. Many of us are suspect of those who “know” the answers because, like ACTA and some of its antagonists, they resist asking the right questions.

Sometimes it is easy to know what the right thing to do is. Protesting the chilling ACTA blacklist is a no-brainer. You can reach them at info@goacta.org. Lieberman can be reached at http://www.senate.gov/~lieberman/newsite/contact.cfm.

FNL
HomePage
Editorial Board
E-mail FNL
FNL Archives
MIT HomePage