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Rethinking Dissent: Learning From the Mistakes of the ‘60s
Thursday, October 01, 2009 (18:47:27)
Posted by alvinjohnson
by Neil Gordon
(originally published in the New School Free Press, April 27 2009. Reprinted here by permission of the author.)
The 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention was a seminal moment in the history of the American Left, but we tend to forget the actual party politics behind the protest. Eugene McCarthy had galvanized anti-War Americans against the Democratic establishment that had so committed us to Vietnam and represented, to many, real opportunity for change. But Humphrey won the nomination and Nixon the election. SDS would be destroyed the following year by the tiny radical minority of Weatherman, whose intransigent politics proceeded to turn, perhaps permanently, the ideals of the 60s counterculture into the stuff of which right wing parodies are made. The war in Vietnam continued for five more years. And the question of how we fight for political change remains unanswered to this day.
Lately it feels to me that we’re at the 1968 of New School history. The comparisons are fun to play with. Tim Marshall as Gene McCarthy? The deans would be the activists who had cut their hair and put on suits to get, as they said in the day, “Clean for Gene.” SDS? Faculty and Student Senate. And then there’s Weatherman.
Okay – let’s not go too far with that joke. My support for the right to dissent is radical and unconditional. But somehow, I no longer recognize ourselves in debate about the New School Crisis.
The problems we know and have been grappling with -- centralization of the university, corporatization of American education, lack of space – are real. But where in the manifestos and pamphlets is our Lang program for inmates at Arthur Kill Correctional Facility? Where is our Institute for Urban Education, our students’ work in Cambodian orphanages, or New Orleans? Is there any mention of the classes we offer throughout our university by full- and part-time faculty – whether economists, scientists, artists, or writers – which approach our disciplines by way of activist, politically astute, anti-sexist and anti-racist analyses?
Continued in Read More link below...
The problems we know and have been grappling with -- centralization of the university, corporatization of American education, lack of space – are real. But where in the manifestos and pamphlets is our Lang program for inmates at Arthur Kill Correctional Facility? Where is our Institute for Urban Education, our students’ work in Cambodian orphanages, or New Orleans? Is there any mention of the classes we offer throughout our university by full- and part-time faculty – whether economists, scientists, artists, or writers – which approach our disciplines by way of activist, politically astute, anti-sexist and anti-racist analyses?
I name only a few examples. Lang, the division I know best, is many things. It is a young institution growing in its understanding of how to deliver a transformative, rigorous education. It is a citizen in the New School Community of divisions struggling to achieve academic identity and self determination. It is an administration that gets many things wrong and some things right, but where the former shrink as the latter grow. And Lang is a college where thousands of students have found refuge from childhoods that were oppressive to their difference and professors whose dedication and expertise can not be called anything other than galvanizing, enlightened, and radical.
Little of this complexity is reflected in our current debate about the crisis in the New School.
Well, perhaps my anxiety is a question of age. The internationalist hope of my parents’ generation was defeated by Stalinism, and this disappointment became ingrained in me from early on. Vietnam was massive, for people like me, and the ensuing forty years of watching angry, self-righteous American leftists who, even though they were right, still destroyed the chance to organize for change while the conservative machine – unified, disciplined, in control of its message – rolled right over us: those decades take their toll.
Now, when our country enjoys the greatest possibility in decades for progressive change, is The New School, instead of getting involved, repeating this sad history of leftist failure? I hope not. There’s no reason to. The students, faculty, deans, and provost of this university have made unprecedented progress in realizing, since last December, the conditions in which we can attain the reforms of our institution which we all know to be necessary. We stand on the verge of real opportunity to take on the work of moving into the next stage of a beautiful narrative that is much longer than the present crisis.
But 1968 and its aftermath showed us that it is easier for a radical moment to sabotage the fragile possibility of a progressive movement than for it to join in the hard work of effecting change. A few student activists have made one choice. I wonder if we’ll hear from those who are making another.
Neil Gordon is a Professor of Writing and Dean of Eugene Lang College |