The good years for the
American academy are over. The 60-year era of relative freedom since the Red
Scare, however imperfect, has ended. My generation of boomer academics never
had to face such a threat to our work and identity.
Our long-term problems, like
falling numbers of high school graduates and their decreasing literacy, will
have no solutions that aren’t painful. But the very freedom for our countless
faculties and administrations to decide for ourselves how to act is up for
public debate, as if that freedom were a national political problem. The Trump state openly threatens our finances, our faculty, our tax status, our
morality, our students, and our minds. The stance of negotiation adopted early
on by some prominent targets, attacked by many as cowardice, has proven to be
simply useless.
The “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” offered to American higher education as a whole
makes the maximum demand in plainly partisan language. The word “conservative”
appears once, in what I found to be the most threatening paragraph of the
document:
A
vibrant marketplace of ideas requires an intellectually open campus
environment, with a broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints present and no
single ideology dominant, both along political and other relevant lines.
Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to
create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or
abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even
spark violence against conservative ideas.
Arguments about what it would
mean to have a limit on foreign students or whether it would be immoral to
accept the bribe of easier access to government grants are distractions from
the crucial point for academics. The Trump regime says that the “broad
spectrum” of acceptable ideas does not include opposition to “conservative
ideas”, whose range is now galloping rightward.
The Compact declares that
they are not trying to make one ideology dominant, but that our own disciplinary consensus is illegal. Vice President J. D. Vance called his
2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference “Universities Are the Enemy”. The Compact implicitly accused our profession of
purposefully “supporting violence”, echoed in Republican commentary at the
highest level after Charlie Kirk’s shooting. I am especially worried, because I
believe that the “institutional unit” in greatest danger of abolition is the
History Department.
Nobody is safe. I have rarely
heard a faculty historian describe the history they know best in a way which
would be secure from attack by the most fanatical defenders of “conservative
ideas”. Imagine teaching about modern European political history and the
repeated rise of neo-fascist political formations. Imagine teaching about the
military spread of white European civilization across America and its treatment
of Native Americans. Imagine teaching about the democratic and socialist
projects that opposed and then overthrew the antisemitic Russian Tsar Nicholas
II. Imagine teaching the Holocaust and the varied reactions to it inside and
outside Europe. Imagine teaching contemporary American history silenced from
saying that the American justice system found more than 1000 pro-Trump rioters
criminally guilty for their actions on January 6, 2021.
Your own classes, your own
writings, your own statements in department meetings could be perused by Kristi
Noem, Tom Homan, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel and their militarized formations of
ideological purists. You might have to discuss your subject and your historical
methods with Stephen Miller. Or better, before a tribunal led by Stephen
Miller, where you have to explain why they are wrong that your description of
the unpleasant facts of slavery or of government oppression of unfavored groups
or of dictatorial regimes around the world is not “belittling”.
Imagine that we would have to
invite the editors at the Institute for Historical Review, led by David
Irving, to explain how to teach the
Holocaust. Imagine being forced to parrot David Barton’s ideas about religion and the state in an American government class.
How would we explain
conventional historical methods to irate Republican political figures anxious
to make their MAGA reputation? Republican politicians are loudly redefining
words familiar to us, putting us in dangerous categories. House Speaker Mike Johnson
and Majority Whip Thomas Emmer from Minnesota labelled the peaceful millions of
protesters on No Kings Day
(October 18) “terrorists” who “hate America”. How might that seep into
Republican political evaluations of how we teach the ubiquitous revolutions in
modern history, including the two that ushered in modernity, in America and
France? Would historians doing their jobs become supporters of “domestic terrorists”?
The sanctification of the
late Charlie Kirk, seeking to make him a martyr for his proclaimed beliefs in
antisemitism and women’s subordination, demonstrates the rapid redefinition of
“conservative” to now include ideas we believed were beyond the pale. How could
any historian speak and write without describing, and thereby belittling the
antisemitism pushed by Kirk, and more venomously by Candace
Owens? Or offer facts about, and
thereby disparage, the Holocaust denial that Nick Fuentes was invited to bring
into the White House and now brings to right-wing podcasts?
Scrubbing the hard-won
history of social, racial, and gender conflict in America from our national
parks was not about countering a too-liberal historical interpretation – it was
intended to stop all discussion by declaring that such history should not exist.
We postwar scholars created that history against the sanitized and thus
misleading version that predominated until the 1960s. We are the targets of the
Compact, just one of the many Republican creations for attacking us.
The Trump administration
poses existential questions from a position of unlimited, at least as they see
it, power. Trump himself wrote that the Compact is designed for “Those Institutions that want to
quickly return to the pursuit of Truth and Achievement”. In that dystopian
world, Truth is delivered by the government and Achievement depends on its
acceptance. But not signing the Compact will not be sufficient to stop the
Trump-MAGA war against academic work. The Education Department won’t have to
abolish History Departments itself or demand that universities get rid of us.
The targeted investigations, the threats to funding, and the harassment of
faculty and administrators are changing our work forever.
The purging has already
begun. State- and local-level Republican officials are already at work
abolishing unfavorable discussion of “conservative ideas”. Jessica Adams, of
the Indiana University School of Social Work, was removed from a class after she clumsily dared to consider the elements of white supremacy
in the MAGA movement. Her abolition involved Republican Sen. Jim Banks, only
too happy to enforce “intellectual diversity”, pressuring the IU
administration, whose board of governors is entirely appointed by the
Republican Governor. A University of Oklahoma psychology instructor was placed on leave
for failing an inappropriate essay that called the idea of multiple genders
“demonic”; the Governor involved himself in the controversy.
Experts on authoritarianism
have developed revealing ideas, such as the concept of “working toward the
Führer”, a bureaucratic response down the chain of power to imagine what else
Hitler might want, what might please or appease him. Since working against the
Führer was deadly, this natural social response led to some of the worst
Holocaust atrocities, as ambitious men carried out vague instructions with
extremes of violence.
I don’t think we have seen
this yet in the Trump administration. Trump still seems to leave his most
fanatic ministers behind. But the arrogant DOGE tech bros were the first wave
of an ambitious younger generation of careerists willing to probe the limits of
vague concepts like “conservative” and “belittle” by attacking us.
We faculty must not leave it
to our beleaguered administrations to fight this political battle. As
intellectuals, we must counter the Compact with our consensus that we know how
to do research, we know how to teach and write, and we know the meaning of academic
freedom. We have come to these understandings through very hard work, linking
our personal professional success to abstract notions of truth, transparency,
and evidence. Trump’s Compact denies our experiences, our legitimacy, our
sincerity, and our professionalism.
The idea of sending the
Compact with its blatant bribery, written by a hedge-fund billionaire over the signature of a wrestling billionaire, around
to nine, then to all universities, may seem unserious. That would be a fatal
misjudgment. We can’t wait around to see if this right-ward rush toward an
authoritarian culture stops. It has already gone too far. Our freedom to pursue
academic inquiry is being challenged as un-American by fanatics who are already
remaking American higher education, based on their violent objection to the
existence of most of us. We must fight the powers behind the Compact for the
future of the American academy.
Our collective explanation of
our endless fascination with the search for intellectual rigor is not likely to
sway committed ideological enforcers. We must offer it anyway. We must
explicitly defend our profession and its ideals. We must say loudly that conservative
ideas, like all other ideas, will be examined and critiqued in our classrooms
and writings to the best of our abilities.
We can use our historical
understanding to analyze contemporary American political history and to
consider our future. We can just do our job, to examine the Compact as a
document developed over time by particular people and promulgated at a
particular moment and in a particular way by this administration. We will
better understand those who attack us through careful analysis of their
behavior.
We must continue our
disciplinary work everywhere we do it, staying late in labs and visiting
archives, immersing ourselves in data and documents, amassing long
bibliographies, and arguing with publishers about footnotes. We need to keep
writing our specialized works. But we also must move beyond the academy.
We must make public arguments
about what our work adds up to. Our profession is often criticized for being
unable, even unwilling to communicate effectively to the public. I don’t think
a lecture on “Working Toward Trump” would work well outside a conference panel.
To gain public support for academic inquiry and for all scientific enterprises,
I offer my academic colleagues a suggestion. We must become more welcoming to
good scholars outside the academy, for example, historians who create fictions
and fictionalized narratives for a wide readership and historians who quietly
research their families and communities. I believe they overwhelmingly share
our reverence for facts and logic. In my field and in all fields, we could
benefit from their local contacts, marketing skills and general advice in the
war that has been declared on us.
Steve Hochstadt, Professor of History
Emeritus, Illinois College
Brown University ‘71 BA in mathematics,
‘83 PhD in modern European history
Bates College History
Department 1979-2006
Illinois College History and
Political Science Department 2006-2016
