The Washington Post has an excellent story by Mary Ilyushina today about the Ukraine war’s ideological effects on Russian universities. I doubt the many opinioneers attacking recent American campus activism will acknowledge any parallels. This snippet struck me as particularly relevant:
Programs specializing in the liberal arts and sciences are primary targets because they are viewed as breeding grounds for dissent. Major universities have cut the hours spent studying Western governments, human rights and international law, and even the English language. “We were destroyed,” said Denis Skopin, a philosophy professor at Smolny College who was fired for criticizing the war. “Because the last thing people who run universities need are unreliable actors who do the ‘wrong’ thing, think in a different way, and teach their students to do the same.”
As a military veteran who sometimes comments on the relative effectiveness of anti-imperial rhetorical forms, I’ve had my politics occasionally and unfortunately mistaken for those of the commentators above. Yet it’s quite clear to many of us working in higher ed that Ilyushina’s description in the Post, stripped of the Ukraine war context, applies equally well to what’s happening in American higher education through different processes, as Clausewitz famously suggested: “War is a mere continuation of policy by other means.”
In the advanced rhetoric courses I teach, students with left-leaning politics often most want to connect with stories of principled resistance to imperial power: Cicero’s Philippics against Mark Antony are more enjoyable than the nuanced rhetorical compromises of the Pro Roscio Amerino. Such nuanced rhetorical compromises, however, can offer more relevant insights into the actual workings of imperial power. But nuance tends to be the first casualty in debates over higher education: consider, for example, the well-deserved mockery received by the NYPD for holding up textbooks on terrorism as evidence of “outside agitators” at Columbia, when Columbia publishes one of the most well-respected series of scholarly books on terrorism. One is reminded of Raymond Williams being stopped by the police and questioned about the dangerously subversive copy of Matthew Arnold’s 1869 Culture and Anarchy he was carrying.
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